Use an ATI Radeon 9600 XT with Apple's 30" Cinema Display? -- Yes Sir!

A Thanksgiving Day posting by The Clearance Store France claims that they inadvertantly tried it and it worked in their dual 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5:

25/11/04 Apple Cinema Display 30" marche avec une vulgaire Radeon 9600 ?????

Je viens juste de brancher le 30" sur un G5 2.5 Bipro et comme un idiot je n' ai pas mis la Nvidia spéciale 30", et la surprise le logo Mac Os X apparait !! Je me pince, ouvre le G5 oui c' est bien une Radeon 9600 ... Hum, je check Halo :P et il tourne parfaitement en 1280 x 800. Moralité on peut acheter un Apple 30" Cinema Display et le faire tourner avec une carte classique en attendant les nouvelles ATI X800 et X850 !!

TCS's English page is a week behind their French posts. Our French is just good enough to figure out that the note says you have to set the screen to a resolution of 1280x800 rather than the 30" display's native resolution of 2560x1600 and that they ran Halo with no problem.

Apple has maintained that an Nvidia 6800, Ultra or GT, is needed to run the new 30" Cinema Display. According to the TCS note, this is not completely true. A resolution of 1280x800 approximates the native resolution of many 17" monitors. We tried 1280x800 on our 30" Cinema to see what it would look like. If we have trouble reading our 30" screen at the native resolution, we wouldn't any longer--1280x800 makes everything huge.

We tried switching out our Nvidia 6800 Ultra card for the stock 9600 XT to confirm that it works--it does. We set our G5 to a resolution of 1280x800, shut down, switched the cards and started up just fine. The Displays preference pane shows resolutions of 640x480 up to 1280x800, which may be the maximum that the ATI Radeon 9600 XT with 128 MB VRAM can handle with the number of pixels in the 30" Cinema. It is possible that an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition with 256 MB VRAM can do better but we don't have a card to try. If someone does, please let us know the results. [Bill Fox]