Radeon 9800 on the G5

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/18/2004 3:07 PM EST
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  • river-wind - Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - link

    hm. odd problem with the video card. It would be one thing for the machine to start up, but with no video (assuming some adaptor conlict mentioned above). But for the machine to shutdown because of it? that's strange.
  • Damien Sorresso - Tuesday, February 24, 2004 - link

    Anand must have tried mounting a Samba share in OS X and gotten the spinning beachball ... :)
  • Flatlyna - Tuesday, February 24, 2004 - link

    Chances are Anand has discovered that time-machine named Garageband which explains why we havent had an update for a while ;-)
    The damn program is too much fun!!
  • Joe - Monday, February 23, 2004 - link

    Request for Anand,

    Compose a song for us and post it to
    http://www.macjams.com/

    Let's see what you can do. If engineering does not work out, maybe you can be a musician.
  • Marc - Monday, February 23, 2004 - link

    Anand,
    He is either busy with school and/or having fun playing with his new Mac.
  • Adam K - Monday, February 23, 2004 - link

    Where is Anand?
  • joe - Saturday, February 21, 2004 - link

    Say,
    The IPOD mini was offically released Friday at 6 PM.
  • jasonsRX7 - Friday, February 20, 2004 - link

    Anand,

    Are you using the Dr. Botts DVIator that you got with your 22" Cinema? I have read that it won't work with the 23's. I wouldn't have thought it would affect a dual display setup, but apparently it can.
  • Jigga - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link

    All I gotta say is: 69.93.26.90
    password: at38

    Play some UT2k4 on the *OFFICIAL* AnandTech game server *CONFIRMED* We know you're busy but you have time for a lil' fraggin now and then! We wanna see if your sweet G5 gives you any advantage!
  • Anonymous - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link

    I guess next we'll see a sound round up of the Mac as well. Come to think of it, we havent seen a Intel High Definition Audio article on Anadtech yet either, Im sure many will be interested in that to since it replaces AC'97 (Bout damn time). Lets hope Non-Intel vendors can take advantage of it...they should be.
  • Evan Lieb - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link

    We work behind the scenes too you know. Not all our contributions are articles. :)
  • MaDMaXX - Thursday, February 19, 2004 - link

    A lot of staff members would only be background and support staff for the website, which Anand has mentioned on occasion. so, although there may be a few that no longer contribute, most i would guess don't do articles or news posting, its not their role.
  • Lucian - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link

    Dr. Jay said:

    "...but if you want full features and performance, you'll probably want to hunt down the drivers specific for your 9800."

    This is not quite true. Although ATI does release driver updates for it's retail cards on occasion, the newest video card drivers are usually found in the latest OS X update, so the "full features and performance" of Anand's OEM 9800 Pro are already being utilized. If Anand had a retail 9800 Pro, he would want to install the driver update containing the ATI Control Panel.
  • Anonymous - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link

    #6, I don't think they update their "About" section very often. All work I see now on AT is from Derek Wilson, Anand (not much), Wesley Fink, and Kristopher.

    Why are there so many staff members if they never contribute to AT? If they don't work for AT anymore then I think you should remove them from your "About."
  • Jojo7 - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link

    Hey Anand. On a completely different subject, why isn't your right hand man, Derek Wilson, listed in Anandtech Staff?
  • Dr. Jay - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link

    About OS-X and hardware drivers:

    OS-X's default install includes drivers for all their supported hardware (as well as a few 3rd party's). This way, if your machine gets hosed, you can simply put the hard drive in a different machine and basically have your regular work environment in place. It was a great help when my wife dropped her powerbook...

    In addition, the drivers are written in a subset of C++ that allows subclassing. What this means is that you could have a generic AGP driver which works (poorly) with many cards. ATI can subclass it to make a generic ATI driver, that works slightly better by using features in all their cards. They can then subclass that to make card-specific drivers that take advantage of specific features. The OS does hardware-driver matching in a way that will use the best possible match, but drop down to lower matching drivers when that doesn't exist.

    The net result of this is that most hardware plugged into an OS-X system will work on some level, but if you want full features and performance, you'll probably want to hunt down the drivers specific for your 9800.

    Cheers,

    JT
  • Eug - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link

    Re: System memory.

    I've seen several reports out there about the picky-ness of the G5s for RAM. Certain sticks will not run, while other ones will, and it doesn't seem to be associated just with the speed ratings.

    Furthermore, some have posted that memory A will work and so will memory B, but not if you put A and B together. I dunno why. However, it sounds like you may be able to use faster RAM of a different brand, since many Mac users do not use 3338 RAM. Whether or not the Power Mac actually will run at faster timings or if it just drops down to a slower time even with fast RAM I dunno, but it will still run.

    It'd be interesting for one of your Mac articles if you could speak with Apple and OCZ or Crucial or whatever to tell us why the different RAMs will or will not work. I've never seen a good explanation on any of the Mac sites.
  • Eug - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link

    I smell some gamer benches coming... ;)
  • Paul - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link

    I can't wait for the mac section to see some serious testing on Expose performance and other technical stuff you rarely see. First Ars starts doing mac stuff, and now you! My two favorite sites for computer related news and discussion. :D
  • biggiesmooth - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - link

    hey, good to hear that the graphics card helps improve performance greatly. after this you would think Apple may stick a 128mb card in stock, at least on the dual 2.0s for optimum performance.
    seems anand is really getting into it.

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