Just bought a Mac, which video card?

[PainTed]

Just bought an older Power Mac G5 1.6ghz. Comes standard with Geforce FX 5200 64MB Ram. I believe the slot is AGP 8x. What is the best card I can replace it with? I plan on using Motion 2 so I will upgrade the Ram but also want a good video card. I've seen some Radeon 9800 Pro Special editions for < $200. Any other ideas? Thanks.

 

[CineAlta]

I've heard that the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition (256) is a good card. What about one of these?

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3321&page=http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3321&page=

 

[oneinfiniteloop]

The Radeon is nice, and I think close to the best you can get with AGP 8x. Get lots of RAM for Motion...it needs it!

 

[PainTed]

I will probably max it out with 4GB. Combined with the Radeon is about the most I will probably get out of the machine.

 

[imgentertainment@mac]

I put the radeon in mine love it good card

 

[PainTed]

It also comes with a SATA drive 80GB. Is it possible to upgrade this to something with 16mb cache? Is it a standard drive or does it have to be specifically for Mac? Sorry for basic questions, this is my first Mac.

 

[CineAlta]

It's probably possible to upgrade the internal drive, but I wouldn't. Invest in something you'll be able to use with the next generation Macs, as well. An external Firewire-800 drive (eg G-Tech, Lacie etc) would work, and not become obsolete so fast.

 

[PainTed]

http://www.ati.com/products/radeon9800/radeon9800proseme/specs.html

Under resolutions, there is not one listed for 1680 x 1050 which is the resolution of the Dell 20" I was thinking about buying. Is this a problem? Does anyone else run this configuration?