[X4U] Salvaging Sawtooth G4

[Jim Robertson]

I left a message a few days ago asking whether it made economic or practical
sense to buy a 160 GByte drive to salvage my son's Sawtooth 450 MHz G4 (I
can get the drive for $40). He'd told me his hard drive was making a raucous
noise, and I assumed it was the hard drive bearings.

The machine is at his mom's house. I had him bring the CPU to my house
today, and after I cleared out 2 years' accumulation of dust, I powered it
up with no monitor attached, and sure enough, there was a noisy whine, but
it sounded like a fan, not bad hard drive bearings. When I opened the case,
I discovered the noise came from the fan on the video card (an ATI Nexus 128
card I'd purchased for him in 2001 so that he could play games better).

I could just disconnect the fan to make the noise go away, but I suspect
that would hasten the death of the video card.

I tried to plug the computer into one of the 17" Apple Studio Displays I
have here so that I could boot the box and run some diagnostics (he says
it's slowed down so much he can't use it for anything other than web
browsing), but it turns out the monitor connectors are not compatible with
the ATI Nexus card. My son's computer at MY house is a mirrored doors dual
G4.

My questions:

1. Is the video card in the mirrored doors G4 compatible with the 2X AGP
slot in the Sawtooth G4; i.e., can I put the new video card in the old box
so that I can boot the Sawtooth, run diagnostics, and see if there are OTHER
problems that would make me want not to bother trying to update the video
card?

2. Are there adaptors from VGA to the connector for the Studio Display? I'm
guessing there may not be, since the cable carries both video signal and
electric power between CPU and monitor.

As always, thanks for any/all suggestions.

Jim Robertson
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