Hey all, I just got a B&W. I like how they look and so that is what I got. Anyways, I am going to be upgrading it, and I am wondering about video cards. I looked on ebay, and I can get an ATI Radeon 7000 with 64 mb for 40 bucks. The ATI Radeon 9600 with 128 MB is about double that at 85 bucks. My question is this, what is the fastest video card I can put in the PCI slot before the PCI slot slows it down? If that makes sense?
Thanks for your help!

Hey Speedmike.  Welcome to macmod!

The fastest PCI vid card for mac these days is the Radeon 9200 128MB.  Here are a few on ebay: http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll...;amp;category0=

The radeon 7000 is almost as good though so it all depends on what you need.  The B&W's use a 66mhz PCI slot for graphics which is essentially AGP 1x so even if you could get a better card it would be wasted only being able to feed through a 66mhz bus.

Forgot to add..  I have a B&W also with a G4 600MHz upgrade.  Very decent machine and with the upgrade would be a fine system for everyday computing.

I use mine as a bit torrent machine.  Mine has a radeon 7000 32mb BTW..  I also have quartz extreme enabled through a hack called PCI extreme.

Thanks for the reply! I have to see how much PC 100 ram I can find before I decide on which card to get. I'm going to shoot for the 9600 but We'll see if the budget allows.

I have never heard of a Radeon 9600 PCI.  Even if there really is one a GPU like that would be wasted on a 66mhz bus.  Even the 9200 will be wasted on a bus like that.

The 7000 is a good card for these machines.  Cheap, easy to find and you won't be wasting money on gpu power that the graphics bus will not be able to utilize. 

Yes I meant the 9200. I was just thinking that I wrote the wrong number when I was looking ebay. I must have misread the pci-express, I know totally different slot. So, between the 64 mb versions of the 7000 and the 9200 do you think there is much of a difference?

Thanks for your opinion!

I answered my own question. After reading this:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5158633
I found out that I'm probably looking at PC cards that were flashed to Mac. I rather buy something that was made for mac and so I am going to go with the 7000.

Thanks a lot zenstate!

There was a 9200 made for Mac, but you are correct, alot of the  ones on eBay are flashed ones.

As that Apple discussion says its very important to have at least 64MB these days.  When I used to have a G4 mac mini with only a 9200 32MB I ran it with a 20" widescreen (1680x1050) and sometimes when I would put video in full screen mode the screen just went black.  This was because there simply wasn't enough vram to drive that high a resolution.

As long as you get a 7000 with 64MB you're golden for running any screen at any resolution.

You have three decent options for the B&W G3.

1. Mac Edition Radeon 32MB - better than the 7000 Radeon

2. Radeon 7000 Mac Edition 32MB - Works ok

3. Radeon 9200 PCI Mac Edition 128MB - best you can get but is it worth the money ?

I have B&W's with both the original Radeon and the 9200. There is not much difference in average computing. The 9200 is better at gaming obviously but the 32MB Radeon will do the about anything else just fine.

The 9200 PCI Radeon was designed for the B&W so it does not suffer from lack of PCI speeds or anything like that in the 66MHZ video slot.

All of the 64MB Radeon cards are PC cards flashed with Mac ROMs and I would avoid them.