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Power Macintosh Graphite G4 – PCI Cards

This thing has a lot of room for expandability, so I went rummaging through my spares box for PCI cards that might fit. Actually, I managed to find a FireWire card on the same day I bought the ATI 9250 AGP Graphics Card, so I had that to test also. This Apple failed to come with an AirPort PCMCIA card, so I also wanted to get wireless working without paying for premium Apple devices.

ASUS WL-138G V2

I had a TP-Link something-something box in my stash and googled to see if there were any drivers. Nothing good came up and I thought I was out of luck. I had actually bought this from the markets years ago and never used it... in fact, I never even opened the box. You can imagine my surprise when I found this inside instead!

Haha... winner... this sure isn't a TP-Link!

The best point is this... the bloody thing just worked! At first, I hardly got any signal... but then I realised I didn't have the antenna screwed on :)

Done... does wonders for my limited supply of Ethernet ports.

No-Name FireWire Card KWE582

And again, from the category of 'just works'... this FireWire card happily let my iSight Camera function as expected.

Totally no-name... can't even find a brand.

I actually don't even need the ports... but hey, there are spare PCI slots to fill! The last shot above shows my iSight looking towards the machine working perfectly in iChat. Will need to find if Photo Booth is available for 10.4.6?

Adaptec AIC-7880P

This SCSI card will let me use more internal and external drives, but I really don't need them. Despite this, I think it'll still be fun to test. I've a hunch that it's actually a fake card as the only identifier is the chipset number. Adaptec doesn't name their cards after their chipsets... their cards all have individual codes!

Everything, again, just worked perfectly! My external SyQuest removable HDD worked perfectly showing my FAT32 drive in all its glory.

Unknown VIA Chipset 'USB 1394'

This dual USB/Firewire card looked promising... but prevented the entire machine from even booting. It seems to also need an auxiliary power connector in the form of a floppy drive power cable. I wasn't overly fussed to hack up a power cable to test this out, so I wrote the whole card off... don't bother with them! (Or.. tell me if your version actually works?)

Swann 3-port Firewire (Lucent FW232)

This card worked perfectly. The iSight had no issues with it and OSX just used it as expected. I really didn't need 3 more firewire ports, but what the heck?

I'll add more as I find more cards to test...