[G4] Dual monitor support, Sawtooth 450 AGP

[Doug McNutt]

At 10:49 -0500 10/2/05, Dennis Moser wrote:
>First question: will this card actually support dual monitors? (My gut
>says no...)

Your gut is correct.

>Third question(a): If not the above card, any suggestions for an
>inexpensive AGP card that will work, or do I need to look at a PCI
>version? And if so, WHICH PCI cards would be a "best buy?"

I have three older PCI-based ATI cards on my G4 sawtooth with its original AGP card. All four monitors suit my needs.

But. . . I did try to replace one of my old 21 inch Apple grayscale monitors with a color job from NCD. I discovered that the ATI cards will drive the NCD monitor just fine from a Mac 8500 running OS 9.1 but they simply are not recognized by the same ATI card in the G4 under OS 10.3.9. Booting the G4 into 9.1 makes all OK. It appears that it's support for VGA style that fails. Nothing shows up to set scan rates and resolution in the control panels for PCI or for AGP.

I believe that there never has been an update to the ATI firmware or software to support OS 10.

So. . . be careful with ATI cards for your G4 if they come from the likes of e-bay.

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