[Mac Hammer Fan]

A friend of mine has an old G3 Beige Revision 1 with a G4 ZIF@450 Mhz.
Unfortunatley the video RAM DIMM slot is broken so that there is only 2 MB VRAM installed.
There are already two PCI-cards (firewire & USB) installed. So there is only one slot left.
What would be the best buy: an ATI Radeon 9200 or a Sonnet Tempo ATA PCI 133 card?
He is running Panther 10.3.9 with XPOstfacto. He doesn't play games, uses the Mac for internet and wordprocessing in AppleWorks and database in Filemaker Pro,
TIA

[soUwannaBeacrackHead]

for internet and wordprocessing in AppleWorks and database in Filemaker Pro

For these uses, the ATA card would be a better investment, assumming that you have a HD that can take advantage of it.

A 9200 would be way under-utilized and overpriced for your machine, but perhaps you should consider a way cheaper Radeon 7000 instead.

Although the 7k isnt that great of a card by todays standards, it WOULD be a huge upgrade from the built-in 2mb video you have now and would get you some more snappiness in GUI ops and screen redraws too !

[outsourced]

Replace the existing TWO cards with one Sonnet Tempo Trio.

You'll get USB/Firewire/ATA133

[soUwannaBeacrackHead]

Thats normally an excellent idea, but NOT in a machine thats already bandwidth-challenged as it is Running all of those connections/devices thru 1 pci slot will work, but with slower/less performance from all 3....

[outsourced]

We *could* say the same about that G4 ZIF upgrade too.

I should have just responded with my original thought: Replace the entire system. But, it sounds like money is the factor here. Not only that: this machine has limited requirements. (web, word processing)

But, you did bring up a good point anyway. USB devices are normally going to be mice, keyboards, graphic tablets, camera, scanner (slow one) anyway. Those aren't going to need much bandwidth. The firewire port would probably have a hard drive or three connected to it. But, firewire is going to dynamically adjust its bandwidth for the maximum possible speed anyway.

The only thing left is the ATA connection: This is only going to need bandwidth when disk i/o is necessary. Plenty of memory will reduce disk thrashing with OS X. So what's left? Copying files or opening very large files (images) -- none of which are being done on this system. FileMaker? How often does one sort or import/export data?

Hmm. Only 2MB of VRAM. Been there. Done that. Haven't most of us? This is indeed a dilemma. But considering the use. ATA would still be the best buy. (Besides a new computer, of course.)

[Mac Hammer Fan]

Thanks for your advice!