[Taipan]

Hi!

I'm thinking about upgrading my PowerMac G4 MDD/1250 (single CPU) with a Radeon 9800 to get some more frames/details in 3D games, but I wonder if it will be so limited by the CPU power that it's not worth it. Does anybody have any experience with such a combination? Thanks!

[Kenneth]

Actually, BareFeats.com did a couple tests on that.
It does improve, but not a significant one.

[JohnM15141]

I just installed the 9800 Pro in my DP1.25PM. It is a big improvement over the Stock Radeon 9000 Pro you can tell right away. My XBench numbers improved quite a bit. I don't have the actual numbers with me but I can post them later if you like.

When I play HALO with all the settings maxed out the game stumbles. Its not the Radeon 9800 but the CPU/System Bus that can't keep up. You'll never be able to push the Radeon 9800 Pro to its limit with a DP1.25 PM. But it will definately make your Mac look good.

ATI was handing out Radeon 9800 Pro Demo Disks at Macworld SF, I got one but haven't been able to see it until I swapped out my Stock 9000 Pro. The demos are incredible and run great with my PM now that it has the 9800 installed.

I highly reccomend the upgrade, your stock Radeon 9000 Pro has a lot of resale value too. I'm going to squeeze my now surplus Radeon 9000 Pro into my G4 Cube....somehow?

[Kenneth]

Does the 9800 card feature an ADC port? If not, I am not getting it.

[JohnM15141]

Originally posted by Kenneth:
Does the 9800 card feature an ADC port? If not, I am not getting it.

The Retail version(The one you can buy) has no ADC port. I just happened to have the adapter cause I was running dual displays off my 9000Pro but found I didn't really need to.

[Link]

The OEM version won't work on the MDD either.

If you want ADC then get the radeon 9700. They're much cheaper ($260 at welovemacs.com) and have ADC + DVI

[Taipan]

Thanks for your answers, but the critical point in my question is the single CPU. I couldn't find any tests with that machine on barefeats. I'm not sure how much the difference between Radeon 9000 and 9800 will differ in a single vs. dual CPU machine. Most games will only use one CPU anyway, but on the other hand I guess OpenGL itself does benefit from a second CPU.

[Kenneth]

Frankly speaking, I don't have the card to test it out.
JohnM15141 can test it if he has the time to.
He can use CHUD tool from Apple to disable one of the CPU and test the HALO or other games.

Computer Hardware Understanding Development Tools (CHUD Tools)

I believed it requires xCode installed in the system first.

After the installation of CHUD, you will find a Hardware icon in the system preference and a set of apps inside the Developer/Applications/Performance Tools folder. You can use either the Hardware or the CPU.menu to dis/enable the CPU and/or cache.

[JohnM15141]

Here is XBench for Dual Processor using the Radeon 9800 Pro. I'll post a test of the Single Processor if I can find, install, and use CHUD?

Results 167.50
System Info
Xbench Version 1.0
System Version 10.3.2
Physical RAM 1280 MB
Model PowerMac3,6
Processor PowerPC G4x2 @ 1.25 GHz
Version 7455 (Apollo) v3.3
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 256K @ 1250 MHz
L3 Cache 1024K @ 250 MHz
Bus Frequency 167 MHz
Video Card ATY,R350
Drive Type ST380024A
CPU Test 155.98
GCD Recursion 157.51 6.15 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 158.05 532.77 Mflop/sec
AltiVec Basic 157.94 8.57 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 150.68 6.77 Mops/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 180.85
Line 151.53 3.86 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 170.92 12.02 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 180.08 4.15 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 173.98 1.89 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 256.66 4.18 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 114.36
Spinning Squares 114.36 80.03 frames/sec

[iamnotmad]

Originally posted by Link:
The OEM version won't work on the MDD either.

If you want ADC then get the radeon 9700. They're much cheaper ($260 at welovemacs.com) and have ADC + DVI

Hey link will that 9700 work in a QSDP800 (2001 quicksilver?) And a 9700 is way better than a gforce4 Ti right?

[MindFad]

Yes, a 9700 performs better than the GF4Ti.

And, if anyone knows *for absolutely certain* that a 9700 will work in a dual 800 (ADC port and all), I might look into one myself.

[Taipan]

Thanks for your efforts, JohnM15141. In case you are going to post results for a single cpu, could you please use a more recent version of XBench? The latest version (1.1.3) gives me results that are only slightly below yours, those for OpenGL are even above yours (on a single 1,25GHz with Radeon 9000), so I assume that there have been severe changes in the XBench testing methods. Thanks again!

edit: Maybe it's not worth spending any more time on this. I found two test results from a single 1,25GHz CPU and a Radeon 9800 on the XBench homepage, and both had OpenGL results of about 113, while I had 130 in my first test, then 59 in the second, and 118 in all subsequent test runs. I'm not even going to try to find an explanation for the first two (my machine is generally very stable with no problems whatsoever, not f***ed up at all), so I will just ignore these. I expect the cpu to limit the Radeon 9800, but I won't believe that there's no improvement at all compared to the Radeon 9000. So I assume that XBench doesn't give very accurate results. In case you are interested, here are my results (when running XBench again to get these, I found out that I get the low result of 59 for OpenGL when I have a Safari window open in the background, and higher ones when minimized into the dock):

Results 169.16
System Info
Xbench Version 1.1.3
System Version 10.3.2 (7D24)
Physical RAM 768 MB
Model PowerMac3,6
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.25 GHz
Version 7455 (Apollo) v3.3
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 256K @ 1.25 GHz
L3 Cache 1024K @ 4.15 GHz
Bus Frequency 167 MHz
Video Card ATY,RV250
Drive Type SAMSUNG SP1614N
CPU Test 137.08
GCD Loop 143.23 5.59 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 99.67 360.44 Mflop/sec
AltiVec Basic 154.02 4.47 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 157.91 2.45 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 150.69 6.03 Mops/sec
Thread Test 109.33
Computation 78.76 1.06 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 178.68 2.24 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 153.85
System 188.97
Allocate 773.82 504.76 Kalloc/sec
Fill 241.99 1926.23 MB/sec
Copy 95.69 478.44 MB/sec
Stream 129.73
Copy 127.58 932.59 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale 127.10 937.98 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 124.35 795.82 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad 141.17 862.53 MB/sec [altivec]
Quartz Graphics Test 175.18
Line 145.01 3.69 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 161.85 11.39 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 167.17 3.85 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 163.77 1.78 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 295.98 4.82 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 122.40
Spinning Squares 122.40 85.66 frames/sec
User Interface Test 220.06
Elements 220.06 70.78 refresh/sec
Disk Test 124.65
Sequential 142.27
Uncached Write 169.16 70.51 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 123.29 50.49 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 140.26 22.20 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 143.60 58.02 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 110.91
Uncached Write 99.62 1.49 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 147.14 33.18 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 91.21 0.60 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 120.96 24.89 MB/sec [256K blocks]

[JohnM15141]

Originally posted by Taipan:
Thanks for your efforts, JohnM15141. In case you are going to post results for a single cpu, could you please use a more recent version of XBench? The latest version (1.1.3) gives me results that are only slightly below yours, those for OpenGL are even above yours (on a single 1,25GHz with Radeon 9000), so I assume that there have been severe changes in the XBench testing methods. Thanks again!

I'll try it tonight, I ran Xbench with two other user accounts running in the background and one communicating through an AirPort Extreme Connection. I'll update to the new XBench and run a clean test. I still haven't figured out how to test with a single CPU. I have the Developer Tools installed but I don't know which App will turn off the 2nd CPU.

[Link]

Originally posted by iamnotmad:
Hey link will that 9700 work in a QSDP800 (2001 quicksilver?) And a 9700 is way better than a gforce4 Ti right?

I dunno. The 9700 is better than the 4ti but I doubt it's THAT much better (if you have a 4ti don't bother BUT 4tis usually cost more to get than 9700s do)

That makes 3 of us now lol. I never knew they made so many dual 800 quicksilvers o_O

[iamnotmad]

Originally posted by Link:
I dunno. The 9700 is better than the 4ti but I doubt it's THAT much better (if you have a 4ti don't bother BUT 4tis usually cost more to get than 9700s do)

That makes 3 of us now lol. I never knew they made so many dual 800 quicksilvers o_O

Yeah I've got a gf3. I've not done anything to my machine really since I got it (at intro). I'm due for an overhaul. Gonna up the procs, max the ram and get a new graphics card. I'd like to go ATI with the 9700 but I can't get a difinitive answer on whether or not it'll work in my dp800.

[Taipan]

@JohnM15141:
Just in case you haven't noticed, I have edited my post above yours (apparently) while you were typing your answer.