PC bios for Rage 128

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

by **Cherax** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 8:24 pm

Hi, hopefully somebody can help me!

I know the question has been asked before, but I've not seen anything that helps me.

I have a 12 year old PC and have been given a Rage 128 from a Mac G3. I would like to install the card to release the CPU from doing the graphics work as well (it is a 466 MHz celeron with integrated graphics). Currently the device manager says the card cannot be started, I assume I need the correct bios.

Does anyone have a copy of the bios or know of a link that I can download it from.

Thanks for any replies.

by **edwin** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 10:39 pm

I think you need drivers, not a bios for this card.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

by **Cherax** » Wed Aug 25, 2010 11:34 pm

Thanks for the reply. I followed the link and installed the Rage 128 driver but it came up with the response that the driver was not compatible with the adapter installed in the system.

Do I need to disable the integrated graphics first or should I try a different Rage driver?

by **Denniss** » Thu Aug 26, 2010 7:50 pm

Those VGA cards for MAC usually had a special MAC Bios. I don't think it's flashable.

by **Cherax** » Fri Aug 27, 2010 9:20 am

Thanks again for the advice. I've tried several different drivers and moving PCI slots all to no avail. I think I shall give it up as a lost cause.

I may look for a cheap PC dedicated one.

Am I actually thinking along the right lines that a graphics card will help my PC by freeing up the CPU from doing graphics? At the moment I can't watch things like youtube because the picture freezes but the sound carries on?

by **Denniss** » Fri Aug 27, 2010 7:57 pm

I don't think your system will be powerful enough to play youtube videos in acceptable speed, even if switching from integrated VGA to discrete VGA. CPU is very slow, probably not really lots of memory. Several older ATI Radeon should be available for cheap, look for Radeon 7200 and above.

by **Th3_uN1Qu3** » Mon Aug 30, 2010 4:54 am

A Radeon 7200 won't do anything... Flash *isn't* GPU accelerated, no matter what Adobe says. It just isn't. Some HD flash is... but you can't even dream about running HD content on a Cel 466. You need a faster CPU. Think 1GHz+. Sorry, but that's the way it is. The plain 240p/360p vids will work on a PIII-500, but anything higher than that (like 480p, which is mandatory for you to get sound that doesn't seem like it's coming from a toilet), needs at least 700MHz. I'm talking from my own experience here.

Too bad that streaming DivX didn't go mainstream. It was tons better than Flash. Nowadays your average cellphone can play DivX just fine, but you don't see Youtube on many of them, do you?

by cp » Tue Aug 31, 2010 8:49 pm

get your legacy vga bios files here:

http://82.114.193.227/vga/rservice.php? ... 2004070301

this is quite an impressive collection. don't forget to say 'thank you'.