> From: "Dan Stewart" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2003 19:16:53 -0500 > > Well, the good news is that the flashing itself turns out to be dead > easy. Boot to DOS, run flashrom once to save the current PC ROM to a > file, then run it again to install the Mac ROM. That's it. I've done > this sort of thing before - I've flashed motherboard BIOSes 2 or 3 > times in the past.
Glad this part was easy for you. My fairly new PC refused to boot with the PC ATI card installed in the machine. The fix was to replace the ATI AGP video card with an old PCI card i had laying around in the junk pile. Also machines with built in motherboard ATI video chips are giving people a lot of trouble. The fix for that is to install and boot from the new ATI card and flash it while running it. Strange to me but it continues to work fine after flashing. > The not-so-good news is that I'm pretty underwhelmed at the > performance improvement. Things are a little faster, but not as much > as I had expected. Window re-draws still lag behind the mouse cursor > when re-sizing, etc. Scolling is definitely faster in IE, however. I > just downloaded and installed Quicktime 6.1, so I'll give that a try. > Quicktime on the old card was un-useable. Video is where the new card shines. Apple DVD player runs great , Quicktime is the way it should be and even high Quality DivX files play well for the first time for me using the wonderful MPlayer. Which plays nearly all video files including WMV&asf. Have you tried using Quartz Extreme to turn on the Quartz rendering engine? It transfers a lot of the video off the cpu . It's running over the PCi bus so not as fast as AGP but does give a speed boost. I'm not yet sure which I prefer Quartz on or off. There are a few odd video artifacts at the beginning of Videos and when ever you use controls on Video apps but only for a quick flash. It is also possible to play the high end games that failed to play well before. I'm told Photoshop and other graphic programs also render things really quickly. I too have always been surprised at the very small gains when adding a new Video card. The only really noticeable difference when going from the ATI 8mb to the ATI 16 mb card was the ability to use the Apple DVD player. I could of course open more full screen Videos in Quicktime at the same time but not a lot of use to me. I suppose cpu speed also plays a factor in all this. For the record I'm running a G3 at 550 with 1mb of cache running at 275mhz (2:1) > > I'll give it a couple more days. I may end up flashing it back with > the PC ROM (that's why you save it first!) and re-install it in my > wife's machine. It made a *huge* improvement there. Of course, it > currently has an ancient 2 meg S3 card. Or I may just buy another one > - for $40 it's hard to beat! > > The card is an ATI Radeon 7000 DDR 32 meg, brand new from CompUSA for > $40 after mail-in rebate. It has -36 speed RAM, so speed is not an > issue. Different cards have different Video ram. I bought one of the ATI 32mb cards at CompUSA 3 weeks ago and it had -40 ns ram. Worked fine and has been sold . Since I no longer needed since I have the Sapphire 64mb card.Ram speed seems to run between -36 and some people have gotten -60ns ram. The Sapphire 32mb cards seem to have the widest ram speed range from sample to sample. The Sapphire 64mb cards seem to be mostly -50ns ram which is also fine. The -60ns ram cards have there own slower speed Flash Rom file. > The only file you need to download is the Flash7000PCI.sit. It has > everything you need including decent instructions. > > Dan Are you running OSX 10.2.4 ? if not you aren't running the fastest ATI files. People running 10.15 or OS 9 can use the ATI 210 driver files later Will S -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
