Upgrading video card on G4 Mac Pro

[jrhalfo]

Not sure if anyone will be able to help me. I'm relatively new to Macs. I just bought my first off of ebay about 4 months ago to kind of try one out. I bought a Mac Pro G4, 450 Mhz, AGP graphics. Anyway, I've been doing some updates periodically as I can afford them, mainly upgrading the processor to a Newer Technology MAXPower 1.8 GHZ 7448, which has made it run a lot smoother. However, I mainly use Macromedia Flash and although it runs a lot faster now, Flash is still pretty choppy, enough that I still can't really use this Mac for that kind of work. I was considering upgrading the video card to the Radeon 9800 PRO card, but I wasn't sure if this would help with that issue or not or if the problem is unrelated to that. I'd hate to keep pouring money into a machine that will never be capable enough for me to use.

 

[jmgalvin]

That's a pretty old machine. No matter what you add you'll still have problems by system architecture, bus speeds, slower ram, slower hard drive configuration, etc.

Before I spent anything, I'd check to see how much of your RAM you're using for your work. If you're close to max, the machine is going to hit the hard drive for virtual memory, and that will really slow things down. I don't know how much vram your machine has now.

As a point of reference I use a Powermac G4 1.25 single processor (mirrored drive doors) with 64 megs on the video card & 1.25 gigs of RAM. I have no video problems at all - generall running the normal Creative Suite apps, browser, email, Word and one or two other apps concurrently.



Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4