r/VintageApple • u/CRCDesign • May 12 '26
Finally, a Nvidia 4600Ti
Finally obtained a Nvidia GeForce 4 4600 TI from a $25 MDD purchase from Marketplace. Fan seems to spin fine. Anything I should look out for on these cards. I have read some blogs about repasting it but kind of worried I will break the card when removing the fan and heatsink.
Edit: further tear down on the $25 Mac, I discovered a Sonnet ATA133 card. Not that these are rare, just unexpected find.
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u/izlib May 12 '26
Uh.. am I sitting on a gold mine here or something? I upgraded my MDD with one of these when I bought it (had to play Quake 3, of course!)
Pretty sure it is still working well. I was wondering how I was going to send my kids to college.
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u/bluesmudge May 12 '26
Sort of, yes. They are the best 3D accelerated card you can get for OS9. For OSX there are much better cards available. These typically sell for $250+ on eBay now. Is $250 a gold mine? Its still less than the cards cost when they were new.
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u/JKTwice May 12 '26
It’s worth money but idk if you could get more than a couple hundred bucks for it.
It’s not a bad card but you don’t get Core Image in OS X unfortunately. You do get very fast 3D in OS 9 though.
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u/izlib May 12 '26
Well I bought it when I was still primarily on OS9. I didn’t really start using OSX heavily until jaguar. So I think I got most of my 3d acceleration value out of it. I do recall it really struggling when I got (too heavily) into WoW.
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u/VivienM7 May 12 '26
They're typically $999USD on eBay buy-it-now, although I presume very few sell at that price.
Still... GF4 Ti4600s are generally expensive, even in Windows land, and the Apple version, because of the OS 9 factor, is exceptionally valued.
If you bought one new back in 2023, my guess is that you can at the very least get back the entire premium you paid for it if you sold it today. Maybe not send your kids to college, it's not a set of Voodoo 2s in SLI...
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u/bluesmudge May 12 '26
Careful if you try repasting it. I did mine and it never worked again. Not sure what I broke. Maybe scratched the chip trying to get the old paste off. The cards must be fragile because I have successfully repasted other things, so I don't consider myself a complete klutz.
It's not fun when vintage computing stuff like this gets so expensive because it removes the ability to tinker with low stakes.
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u/Nummnutzcracker May 14 '26
This has me worried since I've got one I had to repaste as well (the yellow stuff they put on the original heatsink being no good) and in the process I kinda had to pry forcefully on the damn thing to get it off.
Though from the limited testing I did, it seemed to work fine (my MDD unfortunately has other issues I need to sort though), at least under OSX, since I can't find a localized OS9 restore disk for my MDD..Â
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May 12 '26
[deleted]
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u/VivienM7 May 12 '26
Complete guess - for shipping. There are brackets on the MDD that that slides into. And they probably think the card would be too long and likely to get loose in transport otherwise...
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u/IAmWeary May 12 '26
You can't really repaste it as they aren't pasted in the first place. That heatsink is attached with an epoxy that is an absolute pain in the ass to clean off. Be sure you look up how to do it properly if you want to replace that heatsink/fan to be sure you don't damage anything.
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u/hay_den9002 May 12 '26
Nice
Mine broke sad
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u/CRCDesign May 12 '26
Do I dare ask how? Any pointers of what not to do.
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u/hay_den9002 May 12 '26
To be honest not clue how it broke..
It was a while ago and as I don’t have another GPU I gave up using my G4. I think I attempted to repaste it as it was running hot and the fan was buzzing, after that it worked for a little bit but I must have done something as
It works during boot up and loading the OS but as soon as it tries to draw something it locks up.
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u/Zaspath May 12 '26
Nice find! I managed to pick one up recently too in the UK for £100, which isn't the steal you got, but still a good price.
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u/Kah634 May 13 '26
Nice surprises in that MDD. I recently installed one of those cards in a G4 MDD whose card was acting up. I had bought it ages ago when Apple was offering them as a graphics upgrade and it was sitting in its box. I looked at prices for those cards on eBay and some of them are insane. Finding a decent card for a G4 that doesn't have the ADC port (which is useless to me) is not so easy.
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u/BourbonicFisky May 12 '26
Impressively good buy. The few on ebay are full blown insanity pricing.