Can Mac ATI 7000 Radeon GFX cards work in PCs

Archived from groups: comp.sys.mac.hardware.video,comp.sys.mac.system,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.video (More info?)

L.S <neworder7@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Can anyone tell me if the Mac version of the ATI 7000 Radon card
> will work in a PC or any mac ATI cards work in PCs at all..

x86 PCs (Windows, linux) and PowerPC PCs (Macintosh) use different CPUs,
therefore their bus-based peripherals require different BIOSes, so
usually, the answer is no. You can't just whip out a video card from one
platform, pop it into the other, and expect it to work.

ATi have often gone out of their way to ensure that the PC and Mac
versions of their product are not interchangable, usually by having the
onboard ROM chip (that holds the card's BIOS) for PC versions smaller
than the Mac version. They then turn around and charge Mac people more
for essentially the same card.

That said, whist many Mac people have experimented with re-flashing PC
video cards with Mac BIOSes (with varying amounts of success), I haven't
heard of anyone going the other way.


Geoffrey

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