The OEM Radeon 9800 Pro card came in today and I didn't waste any time in replacing the Radeon 9600 that was in the G5.
The OEM Radeon 9600 Pro is a fanless AGP 8X solution built on a blue PCB. The card itself is otherwise identical to the PC version, but with an ADC and a DVI connector on it.
The OEM Radeon 9800 Pro is built on a similar blue PCB but it has a fan, which inherently makes it louder than the OEM 9600 Pro. The 9800 is an AGP Pro card, which is how ATI avoids using an external power source for the card itself. The internals of the G5 are pretty neatly organized and there's no spare power cable dangling around where the AGP slot is, so going with AGP Pro was almost necessary.
The installation process is simple; you don't uninstall any drivers, you just shut the machine down, remove the 9600 Pro and install the 9800 Pro. The Mac drivers seem to be based off of an ATI Radeon 9700 driver and are built into the OS; newer drivers weren't necessary for the 9800 install. I turned the machine on but before I get to what happened next let me explain a little bit about my display setup.
I'm running two Cinema Displays: a 23" and a 22" Cinema Display. The 23" display is directly connected to the G5 using an ADC cable and nothing more. Since no graphics cards currently support dual-ADC, the 22" display has to go through an ADC-to-DVI converter that strips out the power, USB and DVI signals from the ADC cable. The 22" display runs through this converter and then plugs into the DVI connector on the card. With this setup in mind let's get to what happened next.
The OS started up, I got the initial grey screen and then click - the computer shut off. I checked to make sure that the card was seated properly and tried again, same result. Next I disconnected the 22" display - the system booted fine with only one monitor. I then tried switching the two displays, using the 22" on the ADC port and the 23" through the converter on the DVI port. Click, shutdown - no luck there. Finally I tried a newer ADC-to-DVI converter that I bought when I got the 23" Cinema Display, luckily that worked. I'm not exactly sure what caused the problems but I'm going to be talking to ATI about them. It could be the DVI converter, the card or a combination of the two.
As far as performance improvements go, Exposé is *a lot* smoother with 128MB of memory on the 9800 Pro. I haven't played with it enough to see where I start saturating 128MB but so far there's definitely a performance improvement.
More on this later...
The OEM Radeon 9600 Pro is a fanless AGP 8X solution built on a blue PCB. The card itself is otherwise identical to the PC version, but with an ADC and a DVI connector on it.
The OEM Radeon 9800 Pro is built on a similar blue PCB but it has a fan, which inherently makes it louder than the OEM 9600 Pro. The 9800 is an AGP Pro card, which is how ATI avoids using an external power source for the card itself. The internals of the G5 are pretty neatly organized and there's no spare power cable dangling around where the AGP slot is, so going with AGP Pro was almost necessary.
The installation process is simple; you don't uninstall any drivers, you just shut the machine down, remove the 9600 Pro and install the 9800 Pro. The Mac drivers seem to be based off of an ATI Radeon 9700 driver and are built into the OS; newer drivers weren't necessary for the 9800 install. I turned the machine on but before I get to what happened next let me explain a little bit about my display setup.
I'm running two Cinema Displays: a 23" and a 22" Cinema Display. The 23" display is directly connected to the G5 using an ADC cable and nothing more. Since no graphics cards currently support dual-ADC, the 22" display has to go through an ADC-to-DVI converter that strips out the power, USB and DVI signals from the ADC cable. The 22" display runs through this converter and then plugs into the DVI connector on the card. With this setup in mind let's get to what happened next.
The OS started up, I got the initial grey screen and then click - the computer shut off. I checked to make sure that the card was seated properly and tried again, same result. Next I disconnected the 22" display - the system booted fine with only one monitor. I then tried switching the two displays, using the 22" on the ADC port and the 23" through the converter on the DVI port. Click, shutdown - no luck there. Finally I tried a newer ADC-to-DVI converter that I bought when I got the 23" Cinema Display, luckily that worked. I'm not exactly sure what caused the problems but I'm going to be talking to ATI about them. It could be the DVI converter, the card or a combination of the two.
As far as performance improvements go, Exposé is *a lot* smoother with 128MB of memory on the 9800 Pro. I haven't played with it enough to see where I start saturating 128MB but so far there's definitely a performance improvement.
More on this later...
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Evan Lieb - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link
We work behind the scenes too you know. Not all our contributions are articles. :)MaDMaXX - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link
A lot of staff members would only be background and support staff for the website, which Anand has mentioned on occasion. so, although there may be a few that no longer contribute, most i would guess don't do articles or news posting, its not their role.Lucian - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link
Dr. Jay said:"...but if you want full features and performance, you'll probably want to hunt down the drivers specific for your 9800."
This is not quite true. Although ATI does release driver updates for it's retail cards on occasion, the newest video card drivers are usually found in the latest OS X update, so the "full features and performance" of Anand's OEM 9800 Pro are already being utilized. If Anand had a retail 9800 Pro, he would want to install the driver update containing the ATI Control Panel.
Anonymous - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link
#6, I don't think they update their "About" section very often. All work I see now on AT is from Derek Wilson, Anand (not much), Wesley Fink, and Kristopher.Why are there so many staff members if they never contribute to AT? If they don't work for AT anymore then I think you should remove them from your "About."
Jojo7 - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link
Hey Anand. On a completely different subject, why isn't your right hand man, Derek Wilson, listed in Anandtech Staff?Dr. Jay - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link
About OS-X and hardware drivers:OS-X's default install includes drivers for all their supported hardware (as well as a few 3rd party's). This way, if your machine gets hosed, you can simply put the hard drive in a different machine and basically have your regular work environment in place. It was a great help when my wife dropped her powerbook...
In addition, the drivers are written in a subset of C++ that allows subclassing. What this means is that you could have a generic AGP driver which works (poorly) with many cards. ATI can subclass it to make a generic ATI driver, that works slightly better by using features in all their cards. They can then subclass that to make card-specific drivers that take advantage of specific features. The OS does hardware-driver matching in a way that will use the best possible match, but drop down to lower matching drivers when that doesn't exist.
The net result of this is that most hardware plugged into an OS-X system will work on some level, but if you want full features and performance, you'll probably want to hunt down the drivers specific for your 9800.
Cheers,
JT
Eug - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link
Re: System memory.I've seen several reports out there about the picky-ness of the G5s for RAM. Certain sticks will not run, while other ones will, and it doesn't seem to be associated just with the speed ratings.
Furthermore, some have posted that memory A will work and so will memory B, but not if you put A and B together. I dunno why. However, it sounds like you may be able to use faster RAM of a different brand, since many Mac users do not use 3338 RAM. Whether or not the Power Mac actually will run at faster timings or if it just drops down to a slower time even with fast RAM I dunno, but it will still run.
It'd be interesting for one of your Mac articles if you could speak with Apple and OCZ or Crucial or whatever to tell us why the different RAMs will or will not work. I've never seen a good explanation on any of the Mac sites.
Eug - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link
I smell some gamer benches coming... ;)Paul - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link
I can't wait for the mac section to see some serious testing on Expose performance and other technical stuff you rarely see. First Ars starts doing mac stuff, and now you! My two favorite sites for computer related news and discussion. :Dbiggiesmooth - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link
hey, good to hear that the graphics card helps improve performance greatly. after this you would think Apple may stick a 128mb card in stock, at least on the dual 2.0s for optimum performance.seems anand is really getting into it.