Video Card Question

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47ronin

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Ive got a blue and white powermac G3....the videos stopped...its not the card or the display...i think its the slot that the card goes into...which is smaller than the other pci slots...sorry for the lack of technical jargon here...id like to try to use one of the other free pci slots i have rather than have to take the thing in to get fixed somewhere....can i get a new video card that will fit into the same size slot as my delta 66....?

thanks for any help

47ronin
 
Your vide card is in an AGP slot and the other slots are PCI. I thought all japanese people were experts at this stuff? ;)

It would be best to use that AGP slot. Using the PCI slot will be slower and may put a lot of extra strain on the PCI buss and processor. But I could be wrong on that last part.

I would get another AGP card and try it out to see if your AGP port or old card is the problem. If it's the port that is busted than return the AGP card and get the PCI card as a last resort.
 
im not japanese...im an american english teacher out in the middle of nowhere in rural japan.....

how long has apple used the AGP slot...ive got an ancient powermac that uses the same size slot...the card works in that so i think it is not the card...

id really like to be able to get this figured out as ive got a lot of music on that damn computer

but thanks though

47ronin
 
Cards that come in both AGP and PCI flavors perform almost exactly the same either way.

Apple only went to AGP fairly recently, when they started making the blue G3s. The old G3s just have PCI slots.

I don't know what kind of video card you currently have, but if you really want to use a PCI slot, your best bet is probably a $50-ish Voodoo5.

If all you want is to get a display, crappy GeForce2MX cards are probably about $25 at this point. They come in AGP flavors.
 
I'm not really so sure the G3s can work with x86 hardware :). OK basically you're looking for a PCI video card but I dunno how many come with Mac support....

Anyway PCI video cards are really sad. you'll lose a lot of data bandwidth of the PCI bus, which is limited in the first place itself. That could also cause problems with the Delta, but again I'm not sure...
 
Sangram...

There's no difference between "IBM" and "Mac" hardware. If there are Mac drivers for a specific piece, then it has Mac support. During the PCI days, 3dfx cards were THE items to have if you were a Mac owner.

AGP is a specification that, for the most part, was created to sell more hardware. Only recently did video cards actually begin to take advantage of it. A Geforce3, Geforce4 (NOT GF4MX), or Radeon8500 will, which is why you don't see PCI versions of those cards.

But if you're talking about the Voodoo3/4/5, Geforce2 generation of video cards, you're getting the same card, and the same performance, whether you buy PCI or AGP.

If you must have a PCI video card, you can't do better than a Voodoo5.
 
Thanks for your help...so you think i should go for a voodoo 5 rather than....getting the AGP port fixed? I dont need any fancy video for games or anything....

47ronin
 
Well...

Not necessarily. Your AGP port can't be fixed if there's something wrong with it, but I've never seen JUST the AGP port go bad on a motherboard before. Have you tried using any other video card, to see if you can get it to display anything? It might be helpful to borrow an AGP and a PCI video card from somebody, try them both in your computer, and see what happens.

Just throwing stuff out... I'm not sure what steps you took to determine that your AGP slot was bad.

But if the slot IS bad, to be honest, a Voodoo5 might be a bit much for you. I just brought it up because no other PCI video card has that same combination of 3D performance and 2D image quality. But hey, if you're not going to play games, it may not matter what you pick. You could always just go with any old 2MB/4MB SVGA card, with no 3D. You could probably talk somebody into giving you one for free. Or you could get a Voodoo3. That would cost you around $20-25. If you don't play games, don't run in a high resolution (Say, above 1024x768), don't run your desktop in 32 bit color, don't have dual displays... basically if you don't run any really demanding applications video-wise, almost anything is going to be just fine for you. Matrox makes a good video card, but they have a lot of 2D muscle that, again, you may not need.
 
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