Radeon 7000 Deal @ Office Depot

Trevor... · May 30th, 2004, 08:14 PM

Office Depot has the 32mb retail boxed ATI PCI Radeon 7000 that can be flashed for Mac for $49, no rebate.

Edit: They also have a PC nvidia 440MX for the same price, but those aren't worth flashing.

But a reasonable card for light gaming on a PC.

[ May 30, 2004, 08:26 PM: Message edited by: Trevor 10.2 ]

capitalK · May 30th, 2004, 08:20 PM

That's a pretty sweet deal, I should pick one up for my parents B&W.

Do you have the specific part #?

Trevor... · May 30th, 2004, 08:24 PM

424204

Elemenopee · May 30th, 2004, 09:01 PM

Errrr, that's $49 USD. It's actually $99.87 at officedepot.ca

http://www.officedepot.ca/txtSearchD...archTxt=424204

Still a pretty good deal.

Trevor... · May 30th, 2004, 09:17 PM

The deal isn't online, it in store.

And the one on the Canadian website is AGP

jamied · May 31st, 2004, 10:03 AM

For those of us not in the know, how does one "flash" a video card for the Mac?

I'm looking for a way to add a second monitor to my sawtooth AGP G4 - would this card work after being flashed?

Thx-

iGeeK · May 31st, 2004, 11:46 AM

	Quote:
	jamied wrote: For those of us not in the know, how does one "flash" a video card for the Mac?

You get a piece of software (updater/flasher) which talks to the firmware on the card.

Many hardware products have an EPROM (Erasable Programmable ROM) so that their drivers can be upgraded/fixed/adjusted even after being installed.

Any hints where the flash program can be found, Trevor 10.2? I can't seem to find it on the ATI site.

Cheers,

G/<

andreww · May 31st, 2004, 11:56 AM

try at your own risk

[link removed] - ehMax (sorry)

BTW you need to do this on a PC.

[ May 31, 2004, 12:18 PM: Message edited by: ehMax ]

ehMax · May 31st, 2004, 12:14 PM

You won't find the ROM's on ATI's site. Taking a PC Video card and flashing it to make it a Mac card does involve piracy issues, therefore posting directions how to do so are not permitted on ehMac. The act of flashing a card is not piracy, but to do so, you need to have the Mac ROM's for the ATI card, and to get a hold of those without buying a Mac ATI 7000 is infringing on the software's license agreement.

It cost money for ATI to write drivers for the proportionally smaller Mac market. They chose to recoup their costs buy charging more money for the Mac version of their cards and the special ROMs for the Mac version of the cards are kind of like the gate-keepers to their plans.

Regardless if you agree with it or not, it *is* illegal, via ATI's software license to obtain the ROM's to flash a PC card.

If one is determined to do this, by all means, google is your friend. Just please don't post the process on ehMac.

Just FYI as another solution for a 2nd graphics card for lots of Mac models, Sonnet has announced the new Sonata SD PCI graphics card that will sell for $139. Still quite a bit of money and actually not as good as the ATI 7000, but alas, another option. It does have some unique features... support for VGA monitors but also Apple RGB monitors with DB-15 port. Good if you just want a 2nd palette monitor and you got an old Mac monitor lying around. Also has a funky screen doubler feature.

andreww · May 31st, 2004, 01:11 PM

I did see something recently stating that ATI was getting wise to the mac flashing problem. Apparantly they have started putting 64k rom chips in the PC version instaead of the 128k that is required for the mac firmware. Don't know how true that is but you might want to take it into consideration.