G5 upgrade goodness: Radeon 9800 Pro

One of the frustrating things about owning a PowerMac G5 is that you most likely have a shitty video card in it. For reasons that always escaped me, Apple, for basically the entire product life of the G5, equipped the base config with a craptastic 64MB video card and typically only offered one insanely expensive upgrade option. Which of course very few people ever bought… Given their direction with Quartz Extreme and the trend towards larger displays when the G5 PowerMac launched, I thought this was very short sighted of Apple. By the time I bought my Dual 1.8GHz G5 for home a year and a half ago, I thought it was simply insulting.

Fast forward to today, and I’m bitten by Apple’s VRAM aversion twice over. First, I’m going to replace my 17″ LCD with a 24″ one. That’s a lot more pixels, and 64MB of VRAM just isn’t going to cut it. Anyone who’s used Expose on a 23″ Cinema Display with a stock card knows what I’m talking about… Second, I want to start using Aperture, and it just plain out won’t even run on the crap video card Apple put in my G5. The G5 I bought *a year and a half ago*. Fuck you, Apple.

Since I otherwise love my G5, I started looking at my options. As it turns out, I have two! But one of them is practically criminal. I.e. I could buy one of ATI’s “Mac Edition” aftermarket cards. For about $500. Yeah. Right. Or, I could do what anybody who’s not afraid of a DOS prompt should do: Buy a PC version of something like a Radeon 9800 from Craigslist for about $20 and flash the firmware with a Mac ROM!

Check it out. Before:

After:

Weee! Everything you need to know before attempting this is documented at strangedogs. Be prepared to spend a couple hours reading and doing your research. Check out their buying guide. I flashed my card using a PC and the ATIFLASH utility. There’s a bunch of cards that are flashable, but in all cases you need to pay close attention to the board layout, type of chips, how big the ROM chip is, and so on to be sure you’re buying one that’s proven to be flashable. The basic “problem”, btw, is that the PC BIOS fits in 64KB of flash ROM, whereas the Mac ROMs need 128KB. The PC cards often have 128KB ROMs on them, but they’re “locked” to look like 64KB chips… Ideally, you want to find a card that has a 128KB flash ROM, and let the flashing software conveniently work around the flash lock so you can load a big phat Mac ROM on the sucker.

A 9800 Pro (128MB or 256MB) is a really good bet because there are 128KB and 64KB “reduced” versions of the Mac ROMS available, and also because the 9000 series cards are basically two entire generations out of date in the PC world, which means there are tons available for mega cheap.

My buddy Bernard just gave me his old one that he had kicking about. Even better.

As it turns out, Bernard has the 256MB version of the 9800 Pro and his, like most of these late-model 256MB 9800s, was actually a 9800 XT (faster) in disguise. I wasn’t sure what this meant in terms of which (if any) Mac ROM I was supposed to load (the XT version used the “R360″ GPU whereas the Pro version uses the “R350″ GPU) but after some research I determined that I should indeed treat the card like a “real” 9800 Pro and load Arti’s modified 256MB ROM. So I did, and while both the part number on the ROM chip and the atiflash utility reported the ROM as only 64KB, it took the 128KB Mac ROM no problemo and here I am happily typing away with the card in my box. I recommend checking out the rojakpot.com guide which is about the Pro -> XT flash (aimed at PC users) simply because it has pictures of a bunch more cards to help you identify which one you’re looking at.

The next step for me is probably going to be an better heatsink / fan shroud for the card. The 9800 Pro puts out a lot of heat, and while the fan noise on the default crappy heatsink is actually not bad, a good aftermarket solution would cut the noise and keep things a lot cooler in there. My generation of G5 is lacking much airflow across the PCI bay, so I’ll probably be looking at a “double height” solution that uses the slot above the card to directly exhaust the heat.

The moral of this story? Beats me, but I’m one happy camper that won’t be replacing his beloved PowerMac G5 anytime soon, now that I’ve got some GPU power at my disposal. My hat’s off to the amazing people who figure all this shit out and make life for us PowerPC owners a lot more pleasant. Suddenly, I love my G5 again!