ATI Radeon 7000 AGP: It is possible, with some effort

mcCoy contributed the following:

why would someone like to have the Radeon 7000 in a cube, you might ask. well, it is the only card that runs *COOL* AND supports QuartzExtreme. plus it has S-Video out. i took the rom from the radeom 7000 PCI and flashed it to a PC Radeon 7000 AGP (Radeon 7000 was never available for AGP-slots in macintoshes). i'm not finished testing it, but it looks promising at the moment, no problems in OS9 so far. oh, and it is necessary to move the DC-DC in order to install the Radeon 7000 AGP.

update: it seems to run fine in OSX as well. huge list of possible resolutions. the modifications needed are the same as for the Radeon 8500. and did i mention that this card runs COOOL?

on special request, here's the step by step manual:

1. get a pc with an agp-slot and floppy-drive and a graphics-card installed on board or in a PCI- slot
2. get the radeon 7000 agp that looks like this or has the same chip and ram on it: http://www.sapphiretech.com/media/7000/18c-4433-34-F.gif
3. the files needed are downloadable at the bottom of this page (PC7000.BIN.zip), unpack the files and copy them to a dos-formattet diskette.
(Jan 31, 2004 - thanks to jesse aka vanillacoke for sending me the ROM for use in the FAQ -laurie)
4. put the card you want to flash in the agp-slot
5. boot the pc into DOS, then insert the floppy-disk you made.
6. on the prompt, type "flashrom -pm 0 rad70mac.rom" ENTER
7. wait for the flash-program to finish. if dou don't have the right
card, then the flasher will tell it to you.
8. shut down the PC, pull the card out and put in into your mac.

75Vega (aka Jamie) added the following:

The files I used to flash my 7000 are still available at:

http://people.freenet.de/amichalak/flashrm2new.sit

I ran the flash utility first on the PC and then used the ATI Mac utility to flash it again on the Mac

The ATI Mac firmware update is available at:

http://www.ati.com/support/products/mac/radeon7000/...

I found that I needed both steps to make it work.

I wanted to post that I had success with flashing a Radeon 7000 and getting it to work in my cube- the GF2 I flashed and installed worked, but got awfully hot, which is a major liability here in Chicago with the heat index at 102 and me with no A/C. It also didn't have DVI, which I'd like to have so I can use my dual-input monitor to work on other machines while leaving the Cube on digital. I don't game, and I'm sitting on 10.1.5 waiting for 10.3, so I can't say whether this works 100% on 10.2x.

Anyway, here's what I did, I'm pleased to say that it was relatively simple.

The card I chose was the Transcend Radeon 7k. It has DVI and S-Video, with 32mb of DDR. I'm not sure about the speed of the memory, but things turned out OK on the flash so I think things are within spec for the program below. Decent heatsink, nothing extraordinary, and certainly no sink on the RAM. $35 at Newegg, $6 shipping. Easily fits in the Cube- in fact, if it were a little bigger it could hit the screw-hole in the upper-left hand corner that holds the Rage128 securely. Right now it's just hanging out in the case b/c I haven't crafted a decent bezel for it.

The flash process:

Grab the flash package at http://people.freenet.de/amichalak/flashrm2new.sit. I unpacked it on my PC at work and followed the instructions in the "install" text file- put the 7k in a PC with a PCI video card, flash it to 2.08 and you're done. The specifics:

Create a bootable floppy on the PC and copy the unpacked flash files there.

Install 7k in the AGP slot in a PC, with a PCI video card in another slot, preferably a non-ATI card. I used an NVidia TNT2.

Boot the PC and set the video to PCI in the BIOS. While you're there, make sure the boot order starts with the floppy.

Reboot off of the floppy and bypass any startup files you may have on the disk.

Run flashrom -i. This will let you know that you can indeed see the ATI card in your system and tell you what device # it is, most likely 0.

Run flashrom -s (device #) (PC ATI ROM to save) 128. So for me it was

flashrom -s 0 PC7000.bin 128

Run flashrom -pm (device #) (Mac ROM file) For me this was

flashrom -pm 0 m208full.bin

That was it. I yanked the Radeon, dropped the original AGP card back in, set it to boot to AGP video again, brought the 7k home, shut down my Cube, took off the 7k bezel, installed the 7k, hooked up my 191T on analog, and started up. The Cube froze up for about 20 seconds, then booted straight in. I set the resolution to the native 1280x1024, made sure there weren't any artifacts straight off the bat, and shut down again. I switched over to DVI and restarted. This took a while to detect, maybe 10 seconds, but once it did all I had to do was switch to 75hz(like that matters with an LCD) and here I sit. All in all, the process, from flash to now, took a combined 15 minutes.

It could be that the BIOS could be further flashed past 208, but I don't really need to wring out every ounce of performance, and things look fine. The nice thing about the package above is that you can use the flasher on a PC to go straight from PC to Mac, without any need to flash on the Cube.

There are some interesting other ROMs in that package that might interest people, one of which clocks the chip down to 166/166 rather than 183/183. I read a post somewhere that suggested that this probably wouldn't make a difference in heat output, so I didn't bother, but if that information is wrong, this might be a further way to cool things off, which is part of the point of using a 7k in a cube in the first place.

I haven't tested the S-Video because I don't have a suitable TV.

I unfortunately don't have any temp monitoring software right now. I can tell you my cube is getting hella hot on a day like today, but I don't think it has much to do with the 7k at present.

I haven't installed any special ATI software/drivers on my system.

The System Profiler reports that the card is an ATY, RV100, with ROM 113-855012-208.

Though I don't have QE and I don't game(hellloooooo 450mhz, I love you so), I will say that the difference in image quality and window speed is noticeable in normal use.

When it cools off a bit and I have some time I'll hook up my 15" LCD to see if dual monitors work. I'll also post if the heat builds to a point where I get artifacts.

All in all, a great upgrade on the cheap.

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