[Jodar]

I have a PowerMac 7500 that has been upgraded with a PowerLogix G4 450mhz card and a second Seagate18.2 GB HD. Additionally, I've installed 512MBs of RAM (interleaved) for a total of 588MBs of physical RAM. The machine rocks. I'm interested in upgrading the VRAM to do some graphics work but am hestitant about buying a graphics card. Will an additional 2 MBs of VRAM (at about $40) be worth it, or should I just go for the $100+ for a PCI graphics card? If so, what is a good card to recommend(and cheapest place to buy). Is there a CD-RW or DVD-RAM drive that I can buy to replace the old 4xCD Apple drive? Lowendmac says to make sure that the new drive (it mentions only Sony) has boot capability. I'm also looking into a PCI card for a combo Firewire/USB (2.0) combo card. Any suggestions and credible opinions are welcome. Thanks.

[ 10-03-2001: Message edited by: Jodar ]

I also have a PM 7500, which I bought the first day they went on sale. It's been a great machine over the years. I upgraded it to a 300 MHz G3, brought the ram to 128M and added a second drive. It's been a reliable friend and one that got me through hell and back during my Ph.D.

Do not bother with added VRAM. It will add colors but not speed things up. In fact, it will go noticably slower if you use more colors. I tried it and took the extra ram back out since it was useless to me for that reason. Do go for even a modest PCI graphics card. A 16MB ATI Rage Pro or something like that will be a great improvement. Look for a used one. I can't advise what else get since I haven't tried any of them on my 7500, and anything below a Radeon seems hard to find new. There is a new Radeon (VR?) that is supposed to be about $150 that is worth a look. It will have impressive performance, I'm sure.

On combo cards, probably any inexpensive one will be o.k. Make sure it's 2.0, not 2.1 as you noted. I think MacAlley has one of the cheaper ones.

For a dvdram/cdrw, I strongly suggest going with an external firewire model. That way, you get to keep your old one and can take the new one over to a newer machine one day. And you can make your choice without worries about compatibility.

Good luck.

P.S., rather than more upgrades I just bought a discontinued cube, which is great. But I'm keeping my first love, my dear old 7500.

-Ph.D.

[mattyrug]

How's about getting a cheap Voodoo like a 3 2000 PCI, or 3 3000PCI. Get a PC version, they can be had for about $30, flash the BIOS on the card to the Mac version, and u got a pretty kick butt Video Card.
You can find out how to do it just about anywhere on the web. The first place that comes to mind is xlr8yourmac I did this for my old 7200 when I got tired of the Video being the bottleneck in the system.
And when it finally died, I flashed the card back to the PC version, and i've got a killer 2nd display in my P3 Rig!

[Jodar]

I saw some very inexpensive Voodoo cards but was told that the company went out of business. So, there would be no support. Is this true?

[bluedog]

Originally posted by Jodar:
<STRONG>I saw some very inexpensive Voodoo cards but was told that the company went out of business. So, there would be no support. Is this true?</STRONG>

That's why they are so cheap. They are still great cards for your vintage of machine. If you want to try and shoehorn OSX onto your machine (which it should be capable of) then stay away from an unsupported card though. Otherwise those would be great 2d card upgrades, and decent for 3d for your machine.