[btw, why is there no icon of someone banging there head against a wall? That seems to fit so well here...]
Some of you may remember me asking a while ago about getting my hands on a PC Radeon 7000 to flash into a Mac Radeon 7000. Well, I wound up getting one off of eBay, and two nights ago took the plunge, and preformed what turned out to be an easy 10 minute operation. (btw, anyony interested in preforming a simailr operation can download
this file, it comes complete with everything you need to flash a PC Radeon 7000 in a Mac Radeon 7000)
Well, the last 10 minutes were easy. The first 2 hours wanted to make me pull my hair out, and reminded me why I chose to use a Mac in the first place.
Assuming that we would just be able to drop the card into the PC, run the Flash updater, and walk away, we were rather confused when nothing came up on the monitor when we booted up the machine. In fact,we didn't even get nothing when we tried to boot with the monitor attached to the onboar video, and the PCI card sitting nicely in its PCI card slot, we got a nastly little red LED light on the monitor instead of the normal green one.
After trying everything under the sun to get it to work, we took the card down to my brother's machine. (One w/o ISA ports and onboard video) in an attempt to get it to work down there.
Same problem. For the life of us, we could not get the PC to do anything but want to send it's video to the Radeon PCI card. Even when his AGP card was set as 'default' under windows. We even tried flashing the card while the monitor was plugged into it. (Let me tell you, *that* didn't work. 8)
The solution came when we were playing around in the bios. Apparently there is an option to switch the 'search' order, if it were, between PCI first, and then AGP and AGP first, and then PCI when looking for the 'main' video card. As soon as Bios hits a card, it deems that one to be th main monitor, whether there's a monitor attached it it or not. First come First serve.
Once the bios was made to look for an AGP card first, and it stopped trying to send video to a card with no monitor attached to it, everything worked just dandy. After that was figured out, the rest of the process took under 10 minutes.
Once I got it home and plopped it into my 7600, it worked just fine. No problems with video playback so far. I haven't had a chance to test it out with UT or QIII to see how it compares to my Voodoo3, but I'm sure I'll notice a marked difference.
Stay tuned to find out what happens after I tried to install Jaguar onto my G3 upgraded 7600 8)...
Linear Mode
