AGP Woes (or Maxine gets new Eyes!)

In February, I received my bonus for teaching extra classes for the fall and spring semester. I put the cash to several upgrades. Maxine (My G4 Mac at home) received a new CPU going from 400 Mhz to 2 Ghz. I also order a new graphics card. I was told the card was back order. In reality they didn’t even make a production run of the card. Welcome to the world of Vaporware! I along with 300 plus Mac users were on a wait list. That was just one mail order house. So I wait.

And wait…
And wait…

Finally, four months later I get a package on my doorstep. My Video board is here. Hot Damn.

Let me say a few words about Video Boards. Any board can do a decent static image. At 16 MB the original board that came with Maxine does a great job with simple games and photographic picture. However if you want to play cool games you need something with a little more power. The new board would be 256 MB of video memory and be so fast fire would shoot out of the video ports.

I cut Maxine’s power and put her on the table. I open her up and remove the shrinkwrap from my new toy. I’m so excited! (OMG, it sounds like porn!) I pull the old Video Card and get the new one out of the box. I get the card to the Motherboard and… WTF! It doesn’t fit. The pins are all wrong! WTF! I was assured this board would work and I did extensive research on it. After doing some more checking. I see almost all my fellow wait members have complaints. Even if the board did fit, there was a great chance it wouldn’t work. I call my mail order company and chew them a new one! After a couple a calls I get a RMA number. Next Day, I ship the board back.

So, now I’m pissed, but it’s Tuesday and I decide to head to the University Surplus store. They have all kinds of cool stuff. Last week, I brought 70 Zip Disk for one dollars. One man’s trash is someone’s treasure. I ask about Mac AGP board and get shown a couple. I buy one for TEN DOLLARS! (By the way the PC AGP Boards were one dollar a piece! AGP cards are quickly disappearing as everyone switches to PCI-Express).

I take it home and lay Maxine back on the table. On power up she auto recognizes the new board. It’s an Nvidia GForce4 with 64 MB! It’s an old board about 5 years old, but an upgrade for Maxine by 2 or 3 years. Yippee! It’s not great, but I’ll take what I can get. (It’s kind of like getting a new girlfriend that’s 20 pounds heavier, but she has a nice rack and does oral. LOL – I had to stick that in because I found it funny. Normally, I’m not a sexist pig. Well, maybe I’m just a DAWG!)

Anyway the proved is in the pudding. Here is a set of before and after shot taken from Homeworld2.