If you have an X-Fi, 4+GB RAM and a non-functioning Mic jack look h

Question

If your X-Fi mic jack doesn't work and you have 4+ GB of RAM it is likely due to a bug in the X-Fi driver set related to this hardware combination. In order to test it, simply remove memory modules until you have less then 4GB of RAM see if your mic works.
I found the issued described in?a random forum after my seventh bout with?Creative customer support over the span of a month. It does not seem that Creative?customer support is aware of this so if you are affected by it please do as I did and drop customer support an email tactfully describing the issue and ask them to have the driver dev team look into it. A flaming tirade to support via email/phone/forum will likely not help get us any assistance (sorry for stating the obvious, some people just don't understand that). There is a modified driver set from a third party available?on the net?that you can find if you search for it. I am using?them and?they fixed the issue for me, but I am not going to post?the link?here as I am unsure if that will get this post deleted or not. You should be able to find it pretty easily if you search for it. If you do decide to find it and use it until Creative fixes the issue I'd suggest you use a virus scanner prior to installing. It checked out fine to me but you can never be too careful. Cheers!

Answer 1

Hi Jaegar,
To my knowledge, there are no PCI-X or PCI Extended graphics cards for Macs. There are PCIe or PCI Express graphics cards for Macs, but those only work in the PCIe Power Mac G5s.
If you go with a PCI graphics card, you'll be limited to 133MBps @ 33MHz, 32-bit. This is quite a bottleneck for 3D graphics.
The Power Mac G5 never shipped with the Radeon 9200 Mac Edition (PCI) standard. The least powerful card they came with was a GeForce FX 5200 Ultra or Radeon 9600. If you're indeed using a Radeon 9200, I recommend attaching your main monitors that need 3D graphics power to the AGP primary card and monitors that only hold palettes and other 2D stuff to your Radeon 9200 secondary card.
If you're unsure what you have for graphics cards, go to Apple Menu > About This Mac > More Info... That will open up System Profiler. Go to the Graphics/Displays section and your graphics cards should be listed.
Video editing in Final Cut Pro is CPU bound. A faster GPU may or may not help. The same goes for Photoshop as it is a 2D app that can generate images with 3D effects.
If you do get a faster graphics card, aim for more GPU muscle before thinking about video RAM. Without enough GPU power, large amounts of video RAM won't help.
I'm still a Photoshop newbie, but my understanding is that Photoshop is a raster app. That is, each pixel is painted on a page. That's responsible for jaggies. In vector apps, lines are drawn with calculations, so you see perfectly smooth lines even if you zoom in. One way to partially get around this is to draw antialiased lines.