[G4] Video upgrades for PowerMac G4 dual

[Richard Klein]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 2:34 AM, David Gardner <thorjansen at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a PowerMac G4 dual 500mhz with the standard ATI Rage 128 AGP card
> with a measly 16mb video RAM, which is pretty inadequate. The recommended
> upgrade is to the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro Mac Edition, but those prices seem
> pretty high, as well as it being pretty rare, especially the 128mb version.
>
> Is it possible to forget the AGP slot completely and run a primary video
> card in one of the PCI slots instead, and if so, which higher end card would
> work best in this system?

It's possible on PCs, and probably on G4 PowerMacs, but I don't know.

AGP is faster than PCI.  I don't know, but I doubt that a faster video
card would compensate for the slower bus.  You can see a comparison of
PCI and AGP bus (among other) speeds here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths#Computer_buses

-- 
Rich
Sent from Marlborough, MA, United States