Goodbye ATI Radeon 7000 PCI?

mac hammer fanmac hammer fan
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
I have an old G3 Beige Tower with a G4 500 ZIF from Sonnet and a PCI Sonnet Tempo ATA 66 card (2 hard disks) and 1 Apple SCSI-wide card (1 harddisk) . 768 MB OWC Ram. Running OS 9.2 and OSX 10.2.

I also installed a DVD writer Pioneer 107.

The troubles started after I installed the ATI radeon PCI 7000.

The computer hanged while I booted under OS9. I removed one hard disk and 1 PCI card(scsi) and then I was able to boot under OS9.

But after six months of several lockups and system hangs under OS9 I doubt if I will keep this Radeon 7000 PCI card. I think this card is also the culprit of hard disk damage.

When I use Mozilla in OS9 and I visit sites as e.g. www.cami.be the Mac always crashes. The only way is to reboot. The culprit is the ATI Radeon acceleration extension.

The only advantages of the Radeon vs onboard video were the capability of DVD playback, crisp and clear images and acceleration under OSX.

Under OS9, due to a copybits related problem, 2D acceleration is really slow, even slower than the onboard video.

Does anyone know if the same problem (lockups in OS9) occurs with the new ATI Radeon 9200 PCI?



TIA

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    slugheadslughead Posts: 1,169member
    make sure you have all the necessary drivers installed



    the radeon 7000 works well in OS X, the 9200 is better though
  • Reply 2 of 5
    mac hammer fanmac hammer fan Posts: 101member
    I installed that last drivers drom ATI's website and also the last firmware update.

    I admit that there are no crashes under OSX, but OS9 is a real nightmare. Frequent lockups and system freezes, especially with Mozilla, but also sometimes with Internet Explorer.

    I continue to use OS9 most of the time because it is faster than OSX and my scsi scanner doesn't work under OSX.

    And the hard disk damage also occurs under OS9.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    mac hammer fanmac hammer fan Posts: 101member
    This is the reason why I won't buy an ATI Radeon 9200 PCI



    http://www.applefritter.com/node/view/4681
  • Reply 4 of 5
    ebbyebby Posts: 3,110member
    There is a documented Beige G3 bug when using that card and I think the latest firmware fixes it. I searched ATI's website and found a lot of problems with that card and Beige G3's.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    guarthoguartho Posts: 1,208member
    I used to have a B&W G3 with a Radeon 7000 in it. I would experience periodic freezes and I eventually figured out that the Radeon was not getting enough airflow. I did some creative internal ducting with cardboard and stabilized my machine. It sounds like you have more problems than that, but I'd check out how hot the card is getting anyway just to eliminate all possibilites.
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