06-01-2007, 10:59 PM

My friend has a first generation powermac G5 (bought in 2003), he just got a 20” WS LCD (Benq) and when he tries to run it at max resolution (1680x1050) he gets horizontal muti colored lines that run though the display, looks like video card artifacting, this does not happen if he goes to a lower res. This is using the DVI connecter, other than that he only has some proprietary connector on the card (ADC I think). I have the same LCD and have no issues, so we tried it on my PC and it was fine, I have an EVGA 7900GS video card. It seems that his video card is not up to par or defective, it is an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro with only 64MB memory (I can’t believe they would put a card this cheap in the G5). It also appears to be AGP, but the slots look a bit different than the AGP slots on a pc, if he wants to get a replacement card can he just get a regular AGP card, or does it need to be some special standard (2x, 4x ect)? We want to order a replacement on newegg but are not sure which one will work correctly. Thanks.

06-02-2007, 05:43 AM

My quick search at newegg, don't believe any card there will work. You will have to find one that has drivers for OS X.

Only found 2 sites that claim to have them in stock and neither one is cheap. Have noticed that about video cards for Macs, they retain their original list price for quite a long time compared to the same card for windows. Must boil down to just supply vs demand.

OWC
welovemacs - don't know anything about this site, personally would purchase from OWC unless you can get some feedback about this one

06-03-2007, 06:50 PM

Thanks for the links, wow those are expensive, I never knew you had to use a special card in a Mac, I thought they used standard AGP cards.

06-03-2007, 09:37 PM

You could use any standard AGP card if ATI and NVidia would write drivers for the Mac.
And havn't seen anyone trying to reverse engineer these like you have on the Linux side.

And you're right, those same cards with windows drivers are about $80 now instead of $250.

Here is a link for the cards that ATI does have Mac drivers for.
Just scroll down and select your version of the OS, then select Radeon.

10-22-2007, 01:59 PM

I, too, have a pretty puny factory-standard graphics card in my G5 PowerMac (GeForce FX 5200, 64MB VRAM) (1.8 GHz, running OS X 10.4.10). I am finishing off a 24p short movie that I've been editing in Final Cut and I need to upgrade, I believe, to at least 121 MB VRAM to run Apple Color. I was told the Radeon 9600 Pro (256 MB VRAM) would work, but I have read elsewhere that it will not:

Radeon 9600 Pro at Pricegrabber
http://tinyurl.com/3y9ccc

The video card that Apple recommends (ATI Radeon X1900 XT) is about twice the price of the 9600 Pro ($400). I don't know much about graphics cards, and I am not a gamer, but I've managed to struggle by so far with four and five hour renders on my short movie. I have to bite the bullet now and upgrade to work in Color.

Can anyone advise?

10-22-2007, 05:01 PM

I have the 9600 Pro in my G4 and it is fine plus is AGP. As for drivers, find what you can then surf the vendor site for drivers and see if they have a Mac option. I have tried some PC and the screen stays black so there is something specific in the driver I guess.

One thing to be aware of is that AGP is getting hard to find as they new standard is PCI-e and they do not work in the older machines I think.