[Krypton]

If I were to invest in a faster graphics card, would that speed up interface responsiveness at all? I'm thinking scrolling here mainly.

I've been building a cheap-ish Mac for University recently, and have so far got a B&W G3 with a 500Mhz G4 chip in it, 576Mb RAM and the original Rage 128 - as Radeon 7000s seem to be very cheap these days, I was thinking of going with that.

Obviously I'm not looking for the fastest card available, but it would be nice to make things more acceptable for the sake of not very much money. Scrolling Safari windows with the arrow keys on a 1280x1024 screen is very choppy at best.

Barefeats shows that I could expect twice the fps in games, not that I have any modern games anyway (had an iMac DV 400 previously)

[Dr. Smoke]

A faster graphics card might help, but I'd double-check compatibility of any card you are considering with the specific Mac model you have.

Have you tried a mouse with a scroll wheel?

[Krypton]

Originally posted by Dr. Smoke:
A faster graphics card might help, but I'd double-check compatibility of any card you are considering with the specific Mac model you have.

Have you tried a mouse with a scroll wheel?

I have a Wacom scroll mouse, but arrow keys are a force of habit.

The B&W has a PCI graphics slot, thus I'm limited to the 7000 (very cheap on eBay), the 9200 (costs more than I paid for the computer) or the original Radeon which someone made me a fairly good offer on, but was more than I had to spend. The 7000 is the slowest, and 9200 fastest.

[Hippy_Skinplant]

I've been upgrading an old B&W I got a while back and I get the slow scrolling too. I recently replaced my Rage with a flashed PC Radeon 7000, and also installed PCI Extreme which sped things up overall, although scroll speeds are still a bit slower than I'd expect. I did notice that it only really does it in Safari. Anything else seems ok.

[Big Mac]

I don't think a faster graphics card will make mouse scrolling that much faster. I usually use either the thumb or page up, page down now, which probably is accelerated because it is quite fast.

[Krypton]

Ok, so it won't alter my arrow key scrolling speed

I think I'm suffering from a need to play the numbers game, e.g. 32Mb looks more meaty than 16Mb.

[Big Mac]

If your arrow key scroll is slow, make sure your key repeat rate isn't set too low. I was wondering why my G5 arrow key scrolled so slowly until I realized the key repeat rate was (partially) to blame.

[Krypton]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
If your arrow key scroll is slow, make sure your key repeat rate isn't set too low. I was wondering why my G5 arrow key scrolled so slowly until I realized the key repeat rate was (partially) to blame.

I can get it to scroll smoothly if I set the repeat to max, but the page carries on scrolling after I let go of the key.

[Cadaver]

Going to a Radeon-based (7000, 7200 aka Original, 9200) PCI graphics card will help a bit if you apply the PCI Quartz Extreme hack. This will enable Quartz Extreme acceleration over the PCI bus. It wont be too much of a problem if you don't have other high-bandwidth-requiring PCI cards (video capture, hard drive RAID, etc).

I've read that 10.3.7 disables the standard hack, but there are ways around it.

I have an original Radeon PCI (aka Radeon 7200) in my 900MHz Blue & White G3, and it works quite well. Make sure to keep the video card in the 66MHz PCI slot (roughly same bandwidth as 1x AGP).

After this, a faster processor will be necessary to eek anymore GUI speed out of the machine.

[Cadaver]

Oh, and make sure you turn off Smooth Scrolling in the Appearance preference pane. Smooth Scrolling isn't even very smooth on my 1.4GHz GigE G4 (though its just fine on my DP2.0GHz G5. Go figure).