personal experiences Archives

The Ultimate PowerMac G4 Project – Part II – Geforce 4 Ti 4600 and Benchmarks

April 4, 2021 by chikorita157

The first attempt to get the Geforce 4 Ti 4600 was a flop. However, I am not letting the second try go in vain. I want to give a special thanks to the owner of Mac OS 9 Lives, DieHard for selling me his spare Ti 4600 and making this second part possible. This was the final piece of the puzzle. With that, it’s time to share my first impressions of the card and some benchmarks.

…

The Retro Pentium III Reverse Sleeper Build

April 2, 2021 by chikorita157

While building my Ultimate PowerMac G4, the Pentium III build wasn’t supposed to happen. However, it did when I decided to buy a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 PC version to flash. As you know, that didn’t quite work out as I shared in my previous post.

Thankfully, I managed to buy a Mac version of the Geforce 4 Ti 4600, which are not only rare, but usually go for over $200 on Ebay. While there are Mac part stores claim to have them, they don’t have any in stock. I managed to snag a working one for $150 plus $20 shipping from the owner of Mac OS 9 Lives. I will be sharing benchmarks once it arrives in the mail, and I get the chance to install it.

With that, since I needed a computer with an AGP port, I decided to build a retro gaming computer. As expected, my father threw out the Windows 98 computer from my childhood. Even if I have it, it doesn’t have an AGP port and it’s slow, so I needed to build a better one anyway. This computer is named after Haru Urara, a character from Uma Musume and the Japanese racing horse of the same name.

…

The Ultimate PowerMac G4 Project – Part I

March 30, 2021 by chikorita157

As expected, as the pandemic continues, although it’s starting to show some sign that it’s finally getting under control thanks to vaccines, I don’t plan to go back to the office anytime soon. Also, I don’t plan to attend any conventions or any meets until the pandemic is really under control. This means very low transmission.

With that, I decided to focus on technology projects with vintage computers since they are the rage these days. After all, you can’t get a Ryzen 5000 series or any good graphics cards because of the mining boom and the semiconductor shortage. After playing with Mac OS 9 on the Mac mini G4, it had limitations. The sound volume control doesn’t work, and some games just don’t launch.

…

Goodbye Nvidia, Hello AMD Radeon

August 1, 2018 by chikorita157

It’s official. I have went over to the red team for video cards. It doesn’t come at a surprise given Nvidia’s anti-competitive behavior with the whole Geforce Partner Program fiasco, which they ended up killing after massive opposition. Aside from dealing with terrible Nvidia Web Drivers on macOS High Sierra and overall glitches with my eGPU with a Geforce GTX 980 Ti, it was the last straw. I eventually sold my EVGA Geforce GTX 1070 Hybrid and got back 86% (excluding shipping costs) I originally paid for it back in early June.

Given that Apple have a strong bias for AMD Radeon graphics cards since they don’t seem to like Nvidia either, I had to go to the Red team. However, it’s going to be expensive because of those stupid Cryptominers buying up all the AMD Radeon GPUs to mine fake digital currency that probably doesn’t worth anything. Thankfully, I managed to get these two cards pictured above close or below MSRP thanks to Crypto crashing. They are:

MSI Amor Radeon RX 580 8GB – Bought this in mid April 2018 for $280, which this particular model originally retailed for $240. It’s an impulse buy since I didn’t want to deal with the Nvidia Web Driver issues anymore. It was apparently used for mining for Ethereum for at least 3 months, before the person realized they will never make the money back. It’s his loss. I simply re-flashed the original BIOS and it worked nicely on macOS and plays all the games I usually play well. There is one problem. Trying to use any application that uses Apple H264 encoder like Final Cut Pro X would lock up the machine since it relies on the iGPU, which the Intel X99 platform doesn’t have. Since the hardware encoder on the RX 580 isn’t compatible, it just causes issues for those programs. So, it’s back to the drawing board.
PowerColor AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 – It’s a known fact that Vega cards are a laughing-stock of the gaming community due to its disappointing performance to watt compared to Nvidia’s offerings. The RX Vega 56 almost takes as much energy as a Nvidia Maxwell Geforce card only producing slightly above GTX 1070 performance. However, those darn miners bought up all the cards, making them insanely expensive (over $700) when it supposed to retail for $399 (currently, it goes for $500). Thankfully, I got mine for $385 and it was only used for mining for only a few weeks apparently. Given how clean the card is and that the BIOS is not modified, it’s believable.

So how is it like to go to the Red Team? The Vega 56 works flawlessly on my computer as H264 hardware accelerated encoding and decoding works flawlessly. Video exports a lot quicker on the Vega 56 opposed to the RX 580. As for gaming performance, it pretty much matches the GTX 1070 or slightly better. I haven’t fully benchmarked the card in 3DMark, but it’s definitely fast. However, I notice the card’s fans runs a bit louder, thanks to the reference cooler.

As for the RX 580, I only needed to upgrade to the latest macOS and run the script to make it work with Thunderbolt 1. For the most part, it works better than the 980 Ti as the computer no longer freezes up after several hours along with other glitches. This should be enough to keep my non-retina MacBook Pro 2012 15 inch running a bit longer until I can afford a new MacBook Pro.

In short, is it worth it to ditch Nvidia? Definitely given how nasty Nvidia’s business practices have been lately. Hopefully AMD will build a more competitive card with Navi that can actually compete so Nvidia can’t abuse their large market share.