Xserve G5 2.3Ghz , Video Card

[emmab2006]

Hiya all , not very often that i post here , but i wanted to ask some advice from your great knowledge of information ! , i have just brought a XSERVE G5 , Dual 2.3Ghz , for £99 , which is a bargain in my eyes , now I'm a little confused as to video card upgrades , as part of the web says PCI only , but lowendmac.com states it is AGP 4X , so naturally i don't know which to purchase , i was thinking of buying a 7800GS and flashing it my self , any advice would be great fully appreciated ! , thank you


xxxEmmaxxx

 

[mBox]

Hiya all , not very often that i post here , but i wanted to ask some advice from your great knowledge of information ! , i have just brought a XSERVE G5 , Dual 2.3Ghz , for £99 , which is a bargain in my eyes , now I'm a little confused as to video card upgrades , as part of the web says PCI only , but lowendmac.com states it is AGP 4X , so naturally i don't know which to purchase , i was thinking of buying a 7800GS and flashing it my self , any advice would be great fully appreciated ! , thank you


xxxEmmaxxx

We upgraded ours years ago before adding an Intel XServe. I will check when I get in and see which video card we upgraded our old XServe G5 too.

 

[chillywilly]

The specs I have for the Xserve G5 I inherited (from a friend's company upgrading their servers to Intel Xserve) says it has a PCI-X slot for video cards, which also take regular PCI video cards. I've not fired this server up yet, but plan to use a regular PCI video card until I can find a PCI-X card for a decent price (eBay shows several around $40 USD, not sure what they would be in £)

 

[orestes1984]

The specs I have for the Xserve G5 I inherited (from a friend's company upgrading their servers to Intel Xserve) says it has a PCI-X slot for video cards, which also take regular PCI video cards. I've not fired this server up yet, but plan to use a regular PCI video card until I can find a PCI-X card for a decent price (eBay shows several around $40 USD, not sure what they would be in £)

PCI-X just means it can take a full length 64bit PCI card as opposed to a half length 32bit PCI card you find on most motherboards, it doesn't add any extra performance boost other than the fact that the PCI bus is 133mhz compliant where as most 32bit PCI slots are 66mhz, or the slower 33mhz. This is good for pumping more data through the bus with high end RAID and Fibre Channel controllers.

You'll struggle to find any video cards that take advantage of the faster bus though as it was ignored for the most part but on server/workstation class motherboards. Everybody else in the consumer market went to the AGP bus for performance video cards shortly after the bus was released, which even at AGP 1x is twice as fast as PCI at 266mhz.

Your standard 64 bit PCI-X bus is effectively equivalent to what would be AGP 0.5x and AGP went as far as 8x with octuple pumping which is a magnitude of about 16x faster than PCI and PCI-E is a magnitude of order faster again.

The video card that was offered with these computers, as opposed to buying it without one as a headless server, was the "ATi Radeon VGA" although I believe it is actually pretty much an ATi Radeon 7000 which is a cut down 7500. The common upgrade path people take for headless Xserves is to buy the Radeon 9200 Mac Edition which is a some what cut down 8500. Another common PCI card as mentioned here is the Nvidia Geforce 5200.

There is one other path that I have not fully investigated myself and that is flashing a Radeon 6200, the ROM for the 6200 is floating around here http://themacelite.wikidot.com/nvidia-general-flashing. I have heard that people have successfully flashed the PCI edition with the available ROM but haven't tested it yet. The 6200 is a cut down 6800GT so the Mac ROM works on it.

The 6200 is the highest performance PCI card that was made that is Mac compatible. The ATI X1300 PCI edition despite being faster, is not Mac compatible.