New Graphics card = better online video playback?

Hi,

I have a powermac G4 AGP dual 450MHz (OS X 10.4.11) with 1.5gb ram and an ATI RADEON 9000 PRO 64MB MAC video card. For some time now watching online videos has been annoying since most of them are choppy (youtube for instance). It's not the internet connection, nor my home network (tested that thoroughly).
Would putting in a better graphics card solve this problem for sure?
Is my old G4 still worth the upgrade since a new 9800 card costs about $200?
If so, will my (original) power supply hold, knowing that I have 2 IDE drives in there and a 5-port USB2.0 pci-card (+ 2 external LCD screens with usb2.0 hubs and drives attached to them) ?

All these questions

Thanks for any and all help,
Vincent

youtube is always choppy... is it like, laggy or something? My old computer used to do that. I do think a better video card will help.. Unless you are complaining about the "quality" because youtube takes quality off videos like no other.

It's not the graphics card.

Video choppiness is usually caused by slow hard drive reading and/or a slow CPU.

Your dual G4 should be up to the job, so I expect it's the slowness of the hard drive interface.

My dad's 1.3Ghz machine was choppy with its slow 10Gb ATA 66 hard drive. Popping in a 40Gb 100 ATA drive fixed it.

He has a very old graphics card - a 16Mb ATI Rage.

Alexis said:

It's not the graphics card.

Video choppiness is usually caused by slow hard drive reading and/or a slow CPU.

Your dual G4 should be up to the job, so I expect it's the slowness of the hard drive interface.

My dad's 1.3Ghz machine was choppy with its slow 10Gb ATA 66 hard drive. Popping in a 40Gb 100 ATA drive fixed it.

He has a very old graphics card - a 16Mb ATI Rage.

Click to expand...

I have a powerbook 1.25 ghz 512 ram with an 80 gig harddrive. My video playback is choppy with big files like movies off itunes. I think a new harddrive is probably going to fix it.

Youtube uses Flash for video, and a 450MHz G4 is pretty minimal. Flash Player is not dual-CPU aware, and the requirements for Flash 9 are for a 500MHz G3.