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eMac Video Upgrade 81

Posted by pudge from the solitaire-works-fine-for-me-on-that-thing dept.
Bri3D writes "I've got an eMac G4/700, with a GeForce2 220 32MB video card. The video card is great for everyday use, but woefully slow for gaming. I looked for a method to replace the video card, and found these pages about eMac disassembly, but no information on if the video is upgradeable or even seperate from the motherboard. Does anyone have information on replacing the video card on an eMac?"
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eMac Video Upgrade More

eMac Video Upgrade

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  • Nope... (Score:5, Informative)

    by PrimeWaveZ ( 513534 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @04:13PM (#6418739)
    I'm looking right now, and short of a soldering iron and God's good graces, it is definitely a no go.

  • Here it is (Score:5, Funny)

    by BoomerSooner ( 308737 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @04:13PM (#6418743) Homepage Journal
    Upgrade [apple.com]

    Unfortunately this is the easiest path. BTW What games? I play NWN on my iBook 900 w/32MB FX card and it runs great, not to mention Quake III.

  • you're stuck (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bizzarobot ( 442358 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @04:18PM (#6418781) Homepage
    Apple Discussion Board [apple.com] says the only mac you can replace the video card on is a tower.
      • I own a cube and would love to upgrade the video. However, no-one sells officially sanctioned cards for the cube anymore. Sure, you can get a normal card and shoehorn it in, but this often involves moving the power PCB and taking a dremel to the chassis. Another problem is the heat build-up, as the cube is cooled passively. Still, it is a great quiet computer and fast enough for most things.

  • Good news or the bad news? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Friday July 11, 2003 @04:20PM (#6418799) Journal
    Short answer: No

    Long answer: No

    In summary: No

  • Pudge - Pull this? (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by LookSharp ( 3864 )
    I think the article was a PC troll trying to point out that all-in-one Macs of the past 5 years are not video-upgradable.

    • Re:Pudge - Pull this? (Score:4, Funny)

      by dead_penguin ( 31325 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @04:31PM (#6418938)
      I think the article was a PC troll trying to point out that all-in-one Macs of the past 5 years are not video-upgradable.

      And he was consipiring with other trolls, setting them up to use the "There are no games for the Mac!" line.

      • MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Bri3D ( 584578 )
        The writer of this comment was not informed, as Slashdot does not pull stories. Additionaly, I do own an eMac G4 and am very happy with it besides its unacceptable Warcraft III performance. There are games for the mac(LOTS!). As a note, newer eMacs [apple.com] have a better graphics card (ATI Radeon 7500) anyway.

        • Re:MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I own an eMac with GeForce gfx, and I get excellent performance with Warcraft III - did you actually add more System ram to your computer - most consumer macs come terribly under endowed with system ram
          • I have an eMac 800 with 1GB RAM, and Warcraft III is only just OK single player... if you try to play against multiple human opponents it will lag badly during battle (just when you need to select your hero you can't!).

            I have seen the same effect with a Duron or Athlon systems (Duron 900, Athlon 1000/133), so I suspect it's just that the game needs more CPU power.

            When you say excellent performance, do you mean single player, or multi player? If multi player, how did you achieve this???

    • Re:Pudge - Pull this? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 )
      The first iMac could have a Voodoo 2 card put in the seriously unsupported expansion slot.

      The G3 All-In-One box (education and government only) which I have has 3 PCI slots and works great with a Radeon card for a second display.
      • The first iMac's expansion was called the Mezzanine Port, and was not suppported by Apple in any way("For development use only," they claimed). The Voodoo card is not sold anymore, but Griffin still makes a device called the iPort that gives the iMac a serial port, etc. In this comment iMac means the first generation of the non flat-panel iMac. This version can be identified by the tray-loading CD-ROM drive and an IR port on the left speaker.
    • I run the website that was linked in the story, and I did receive an email with the same question around the same time as the story went up. I cannot confirm whether my correspondant and Bri3D are one and the same, but to me it looks genuine.
    • I have a g3 allinone, the beige jobby. I used to run 2 monitors while I was borrowing a nice 128mb video card from school..and the built in monitor runs off another pci video card... so you can upgrade some allinone macs. just not imacs/emac... maybe try dreamware's firewire to agp converter. (i made that one up, it's not a real product)

  • Specs (Score:3, Informative)

    by pagercam2 ( 533686 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @04:32PM (#6418946)
    Spec's don't list PCI or AGP slot so doesn't look like upgrading is an option. Have you tried changing settings??? Often there are some compatability controls that can make things better. The graphics processor is realatively recent so it should be decent but not great at games, often more memory is more of a issue try increasing ram, it makes everything faster and so even if it doesn't improve game play the machine will be more fun to use.

  • Woefully slow? (Score:5, Funny)

    by MalleusEBHC ( 597600 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @04:49PM (#6419129)
    What games are you playing where your computer is "woefully slow"? I game regularly on my Cube (450 MHz G4 with a stock Rage 128 and 1 GB RAM), and I'm still able to play everything, save UT2k3 which is just a little too slow. Ghost Recon, Jedi Knight II, and Warcraft 3 run just fine on it. Admittedly, it is not a speed demon, but it gets the job done with low settings.

    If you bought an eMac you shouldn't have expected that it would be awesome for gaming or upgradeable. Try upping your RAM, as I noticed a nice speed burst when I brought my Cube up to 1 GB. Other than that, you are more likely to harm your eMac by opening it then you are likely to help it by soldering on a new video card (if that is even possible).

    • Re:Woefully slow? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Bri3D ( 584578 )
      I play Warcraft III at 640x480x16 with all Video settings at low on my eMac, and it gets about 6fps while battling small Creeps with about 5 units without using spells. The eMac has 640MB of RAM. This speed is totally unaccetable to me(maybe you are fine with it). Maybe there is a compatability problem between WcIII and the GeForce 2 220?
  • If it is an old game like quake 3, your emac should be ok. My PowerBook does a decent job with ati rage 128. However, for anything recent , you will have to look to spend more than what the emac costs. For gaming, I decided against the mac and went with a Dell for $1500. Its ok but even this doesn't do the games I play justice not to mention it crashes alot. Forget about emac, save your pennies for a G5 or high end PC.

  • What I am thinking?!!! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Enrique1218 ( 603187 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @06:00PM (#6419993) Journal
    Just get an Xbox
  • You're discovering the main problem with eMacs:

    it's monolithic.

    Ba-dum *bum*

  • Directions (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11, 2003 @06:28PM (#6420202)
    Step 1) Unplug all peripherals
    Step 2) Replace eMac

    I have done this before, and it is a proven and time-tested method that works.

  • Replacement Impossible (Score:5, Informative)

    by JM Apocalypse ( 630055 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @06:32PM (#6420231)
    You may be able to replace the video card, depending on which eMac generation you have. The eMac LAN that I manage is what I would call first-generation, because when Apple released the eMac, they first fulfilled all the orders to educational institutions. Not until this was complete did they start shipping to the public. There is only one problem with this: The first-generation eMacs actually had on-board video acceleration, which made it impossible to replace. This was something that was on the original iMac, until Apple realized that it caused display problems and such, and moved this off-board. Of course, they brought this back on the first-generation eMacs, (arg!). You may not have the option. The only way to find out is to actually open up the eMac and look.
    • Actually, even the iMacs don't have replaceable video. The very first generation (233MHz) had an undocumented/unsupported 'mezzanine' slot that an enterprising company managed to use as an interface for a VooDoo card, but that was really a video add-on, not an upgrade. (Only an external monitor was accelerated, and only accelerated video appeared on the external monitor; so the OS was internal, games were external.)

  • Gaming experience? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MaxQuordlepleen ( 236397 ) <el_duggio@hotmail.com> on Friday July 11, 2003 @07:10PM (#6420519) Homepage

    OK, I get that the "can I upgrade video" question is dead, but I thought I'd ask another somewhat related question.

    Just what is gaming like on either eMac (the GeForce 2 and Radeon versions) ? I have a CRT iMac (600 Mhz G3 with the ATI Rage Pro) and I wonder if the upgrade would be worthwhile.. On the iMac, you can play Ghost Recon, Quake 3, Myth 2, with reasonable frame rates but UT (the original) is brutal and UT2K3 is a slide show.

    Anybody want to share their eMac gaming experiences?

    • Re:Gaming experience? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Shishio ( 540577 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @09:54PM (#6421488)
      Unreal Tournament and UT2K3 are both heavily processor based. Turning off textures and world complexity do very little to increase frame rates on my machines. I would recommend getting the best processor model of eMac you can, or getting a used PowerMac. A GeForce 2 or Geforce 4MX are both fine for those games. I don't have much experience with the Radeon cards, but I imagine that ones with 32 or more MB of ram on them would be fine.
    • Running on an 800 MHz eMac with 512 megs of RAM and a GeForce 2, here are my thoughts on some of the higher end games currently available on the Mac...

      JKII: Runs fine at 1024 x 768 (although you may get some slowdown at that resolution when you are a) swarmed by enemies or b) playing on Yavin 4 where the rain effects REALLY slow things down)

      WC3: Nothing bad to say here. Runs perfectly smooth at high resolution without slowdown.

      UT2K3 (demo, don't have full version yet): It's pretty...serioiusly,
  • I just got an ATI 9800 Pro for a PC and thought I'd give it a shot on a G4 tower.

    No dice - machine refused to boot. What gives?

    • I believe that Macs need a different BIOS on the vid card in order to boot. So theoretically, it should be possible to just flash a PC card with the Mac BIOS and ta-da.

      Here's a quick link [coffeehaus.com] I found Googling for Mac BIOS flashing on the R8500 -- I guess the PCB is actually sometimes different on the Mac too.

      I was looking into this awhile ago, trying to sell my r8500 to a friend with a G4 Cube, but it seemed too risky.

    • Just because they both have PCI doesn't mean that i386 and PPC are the same in every respect. This is obvious to anybody who has sat down and thought about this for a minute.
      • Just because they both have PCI doesn't mean that i386 and PPC are the same in every respect. This is obvious to anybody who has sat down and thought about this for a minute.

        Yeah, I was crazy to think this ATI AGP vid card would work with a Mac - which often uses ATI AGP vid cards.

        What was I thinking!?!?

        Oh, and a nit: I don't think i386's ever shipped with PCI slots, did they?
        • Just because it comes from the same manufacturer does not mean it will work across architectures. It's kind of like expecting a IBM BladeCenter HS20 [ibm.com] to work in a Mac because IBM makes the PowerPC processors [ibm.com]. Totally different architectures, same manufacturer.

          Nit picked: i386 was the first architecture to support PCI.

        • Mac video cards have always required a ROM on board to describe the capabilities of the card. In addition, I think they also require a big-endian access mode in either the PCI interface or video chipset.

          You could probably use a Mac video card in a PC, but (apparently) not the other way around.

          • The difference in the ROM between Macintosh boards and PC boards is for Open Firmware enumeration. Without that, no operating system that relies on Open Firmware to provide the list of hardware will work. Linux can access a lot of hardware (once it's booted) that isn't normally useable in a Mac ( Promise RAID cards, 3com NICs, etc.), but it won't be available until linux has booted from hardware that Open Firmware supports.

  • Well, it can be done, sorta (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The original eMac has an nVidia NV11 soldered on the motherboard. This is pin compatible with the nVidia NV17b. If you can get one of these chips and don't mind working with surface mount components you should be OK as far the hardware is concerned.

    One problem, the Apple ROM on the eMac contains the Open Firmware driver for the NV11 which definitely will not work with an NV17 - it wasn't in production when the eMac ROMs were first released. However, current Apple motherboard ROMs still support the eMac

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