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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river-wind - Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - link
hm. odd problem with the video card. It would be one thing for the machine to start up, but with no video (assuming some adaptor conlict mentioned above). But for the machine to shutdown because of it? that's strange.Damien Sorresso - Tuesday, February 24, 2004 - link
Anand must have tried mounting a Samba share in OS X and gotten the spinning beachball ... :)Flatlyna - Tuesday, February 24, 2004 - link
Chances are Anand has discovered that time-machine named Garageband which explains why we havent had an update for a while ;-)The damn program is too much fun!!
Joe - Monday, February 23, 2004 - link
Request for Anand,Compose a song for us and post it to
http://www.macjams.com/
Let's see what you can do. If engineering does not work out, maybe you can be a musician.
Marc - Monday, February 23, 2004 - link
Anand,He is either busy with school and/or having fun playing with his new Mac.
Adam K - Monday, February 23, 2004 - link
Where is Anand?joe - Saturday, February 21, 2004 - link
Say,The IPOD mini was offically released Friday at 6 PM.
jasonsRX7 - Friday, February 20, 2004 - link
Anand,Are you using the Dr. Botts DVIator that you got with your 22" Cinema? I have read that it won't work with the 23's. I wouldn't have thought it would affect a dual display setup, but apparently it can.
Jigga - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link
All I gotta say is: 69.93.26.90password: at38
Play some UT2k4 on the *OFFICIAL* AnandTech game server *CONFIRMED* We know you're busy but you have time for a lil' fraggin now and then! We wanna see if your sweet G5 gives you any advantage!
Anonymous - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link
I guess next we'll see a sound round up of the Mac as well. Come to think of it, we havent seen a Intel High Definition Audio article on Anadtech yet either, Im sure many will be interested in that to since it replaces AC'97 (Bout damn time). Lets hope Non-Intel vendors can take advantage of it...they should be.