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Ivan · Feb 6, 2002, 03:37 AM

I'm wanting to get a PM 9500,9600, or even a 85,8600. Question is, what is the best video card that I can get to put in it. Is it possible to get one good enough to play quake III or UT? My iMac DV plays UT on it's 8mb video card pretty good, can a 9600 do better with a good card?
BTW: If anyone has one that they are intersted in getting rid of or maybe trade for a powerbook, look at my ad in the BUY/SELL section in here.
Thanks

Feb 6, 2002, 05:58 AM

I have a heavily modified 7600 that runs Wolfenstein pretty well...it's not as smooth as my roommate's 1GHz P3, but the 7600 is 5-1/2 years old. I have a G4/450, IDE drives (big help!), and a Radeon PCI (not the 7000). The difference between the Radeon and the Rage Pro it replaced is very noticeable - everything is much smoother, and I can run at higher resolutions. I've seen framerates in the UT demo over 50; average is about 35 with most of the goodies turned on. The PCI bus seems to be the bottleneck in this system; 50Mhz is pretty slow these days. Even so, games are amazingly playable, and the price is right (about $150 for a 7500/7600, a bit more for an 85/86/95/9600). The IDE card and G3/4 upgrades are a must; you can find used ones on ebay for a few bucks each.

HOWEVER....you might want to consider a beige G3 or a low-end B&W: if you're going to pour money into a 7x/8x/9x class machine, you'll wind up paying about as much as you would for a B&W G3. The beige G3s have a bus that will run at up to 83Mhz, and the B&W's run at 100Mhz - which makes a big difference. In addition, they have IDE drives; recent IDE drives are a LOT faster than the 10MB SCSI drives in the 7x/8x/9x class machines.

Captain Obvious · Feb 6, 2002, 06:25 AM

How much do you want to spend?
If you get an older PowerMac you prob want to upgrade it to a G3. So that is about $125 then for a video card you have some options: I got a VooDoo3 3000 for about $50 , you can get a ATI Rage Pro, or any number of other cards ranging from $75 to $150.

If you paid nothing for your Powermac that might be the best way to go. But if fyou are paying for the mac as well then you might as well just buy a Beige G3 or a B/W G3.

I run Quake 3 and UT very well on my upgraded 7500.

zac4mac · Feb 6, 2002, 09:12 PM

I have an old 8500 with an 8MB iX Micro card in it. I took the ATi Orion (16MB Rage128) out and use it for my second monitor in my G4.
iX Micro Ult Rez 3D is cheap($40) but has little acceleration.(got new drivers with OS9.1 and is very stable now)
ATi Orion is a good card but too expensive(IMO).
Pretty sure you can run a Radeon(32MB Rage6)

I used to play Unreal(not UT) on the 8500 and Orion and it worked very well.

Zack

Ivan · Feb 6, 2002, 11:05 PM

So you guys are saying that it WILL perform alot better than my iMac DV, once it (85 or 9500) has a decent video card? That's good news, cause I was told that the older Macs couldn't recognise anything over what they come with, i.e. 1mb, 2mb video. So I can get a 85, or 9500 and throw in a 32mb card and a G3 chip and do some smokin'. Wonder how many FPS that will pull on Quake III?

Feb 7, 2002, 06:22 AM

Power Mac 8500 - 384MB of RAM - PCI Radeon - 400MHz G3.

I get 28 fps in Quake 3 Arena (demo) @ 800 x 600

Quake 2 @ 1,024 x 768 gets 37 fps

Ivan · Feb 8, 2002, 12:29 AM

Man, I get that and better on my iMac DV. Maybe getting one want be the way to go. I was hoping that they get get better fps than that.

Feb 8, 2002, 08:22 AM

The older Power Macs are hindered by their slower bus speeds. In my case 50MHz. Also my memory only runs @ 48MB/sec which is pretty slow.

I'm not a hard core gamer, so the specs suite me fine.

himself · Feb 8, 2002, 09:30 AM

Originally posted by <TriPhaze>:
<STRONG>The older Power Macs are hindered by their slower bus speeds. In my case 50MHz. Also my memory only runs @ 48MB/sec which is pretty slow.

I'm not a hard core gamer, so the specs suite me fine.</STRONG>

I have an 8500 w/256MB ram that I upgraded to a 400Mhz G3. I added the new Raedeon 7000 (32 MB DDR ram), and my experience improved much in UT and Q3A. I get up to 50 fps in UT (average is 35fps or so). Q3A is even better (i've tweked the game settings to get good performace with good effects, without overdoing it).

However, the game performance doesn't hold a candle to my PB G4 667... very impressive performance. I assume the slow bus speed, slow PCI bus, and slower processor add up to significant performance losses on the 8500.

The 7000 is very usable, though. And cheap ($112 from macmall). I assume that the full fledged Raedeon would do better, if you want to pay extra for that.

Beatheavy · Feb 9, 2002, 04:29 AM

If you want to play UT get a Voodoo3 hads down it will our perform a radeon and costs much less. yes it will better an imac provided you have a G3 even a 233(get at least a 400) should do it and 196M+Ram.

Beatheavy · Feb 9, 2002, 04:31 AM

BTW- radeon 7000 is crap for gameing. you have to pay the extra 20$ for a real radeon. real radeons have 3 redering pipelines the 7000 has 1.

seanyepez · Feb 9, 2002, 08:36 AM

You shouldn't buy an older Power Mac to upgrade it. Just get something that suits your needs, and should you need to upgrade it later, upgrade it.

Big Mac · Feb 11, 2002, 05:15 AM

I wasn't aware that the Radeon 7000 is a PCI card rather than AGP. It's really nice to know that ATi is paying attention to the Mac market again and that they're giving us options at the low end. Maybe they can get the price of the 7000 down to $75 in the coming months.

I love my 8600/300 - it is a wonderful machine, with the only major deficiency being native graphics performance. I bought the IXMicro card from OWC but have yet to install it. I couldn't justify spending so much money on the Radeon.