The Sapphire Video cards are OEM (original equipment manufacture) which means they are the ones that make the ATI 7000 cards. (which seems odd since the ATI cards say built by ATI on them) They are a german company but the cards are made in China. It seems the 32mb card is the ATI Mac Edition 7000 card once flashed and the 64mb card as well but doubles the available video ram. There are also ATI PC 7000 cards 32 and 64 mb versions. They however are 1VGA port only while the Sapphire includes the DVI and TV out ports just like the Mac card. HIS makes PCI PC 7000 cards also but the the ram is SDR and the flasher doesn't work so don't bother trying.ATI and Sapphire also have 7000 with SDR ram won't work. You need the Sapphire PCI DDR PC 7000 32 or 64mb card. Powercolour also makes ATI clone cards but not the 7000 model and they are said to be cheaply made just for the record. Flashing is easy if you have a PC handy and know how to run DOS on it. This step really shows all the weaknesses of the darkside. So it may or may not be easy.
I used an ATI 32mb 7000 Mac flashed card with the 1 vga port for 2 weeks or so then got my Sapphire 64mb card from list member Pete in the UK. I've been running it for a week now. My previous card was the ATI 128 16mb Orion. Both the ATI and Sapphire flashed cards worked well. The big difference over my older card was movie playing. Apple DVD plays really well for the first time on my machine. Also playing high quality DivX files works well. Quicktime is better as well. Movies play smoothly with few if any dropped frames or audio problems. My machine has( knock on wood) never had audio problems in either SCSI or with the ACard/Sonnet ATA PCi card and IDE drives. The machine UMAX J700 desktop version of S900 has always been a great machine and is even better with this new card. Yes, I've had plenty of problems to solve over the years and I'm sure many of you have already heard enough about them ;-) I ran X-Bench for testing and it does show an improvement over the ATI 128 card. The differences between the 32 and 64mb card are harder to tell. Either with testing or real world use. With my setup and the programs i run I've not seen much differences between the two. I can say i never see the need to close windows because things are slowing down, never happens with the new card. Rendering and screen redraws are very quick .Photoshop and other graphic program users are likely to see a difference. People who are game players or who run 2 monitors at a time will likely notice the extra Video ram more then other users. Running two monitors each screen get 32mb so like having two cards! I'm really happy with the Sapphire 64mb video card. It cost less then the ATI MAC 7000 card and has twice the Video ram. Many list members would be happy with the Sapphire 32mb card which sells for $44.00 including shipping! The ATI mac 7000 sells for $129.00 and is sometimes discounted some but not a lot. I have found no issues with the Sapphire flashed card that aren't also present with the ATI Mac 7000 card. In short they are one and the same. A scrambled screen after waking from sleep is the only real issue. The current fix is to set the hard drive to never sleep. Display/monitor sleeping isn't a problem. This is an OSX issue only. Doesn't affect OS 9.x and as mentioned above it is an ATI mac 7000 card issue. Not just flashed cards. Everyone's machine may not have this problem maybe a hardware combo that causes it. ATI is said to be working on it. Supermac list member Peter from the UK at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] was kind enough to ship me one and has at least a few left. Talk to him about price if you are interested. He is selling the cards already flashed to Mac ROM. www.allstarshop.com and www.newegg.com both have the Sapphire PC ATI 7000 DDR PCI 32mb card for $44.00 including shipping. The Sapphire 64mb card is not known to be available in the USA. There is a German company which ships to the USA & world wide. http://www.computeruniverse.net/products/e90065234.asp This is an english page. They are now showing 10 day backorder on the card. They sell the card for 61 Euro's + 25 Euros shipping to USA apox= 86 Euro's = apox $91.51 USA today as this varies from day to day. PayPal let you buy in 5 currency's and is free if you have a personal account. My only connection to the above named places to buy the card is with Peter. He was kind enough to pick one up and ship/sell to me. For which I am very grateful. The german forum is at: http://www.falkemedia.com/cgi-bin/forum/ forum.cgi?board=hardware;action=display;num=1045243482 There is currently a lot of reading there 23 pages and counting. You really should try reading all of it before trying to flash a card. I maybe willing to provide a short version of the important stuff if people would like. Keep in mind the cards do need to have the Mac ROM flashed on them which needs to be done on a PC running Dos. This isn't hard for one who already knows how to run dos and has a PC or a friend with a PC. But if that sounds like greek to you your not likely going to be able to learn how to do it over email. Well not at all a professional review with a lot of numbers. But if I don't send this now it will be old news ;-) I continue to be amazed at how well this old machine of mine continues to serve me well. I'm well aware of the pluses and minuses of continuing to upgrade what is now an old machine ;-) I'm happy with it so why not! Will S -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... 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