Have you tried reseating the RAM? I recently had issues with getting an iMac G3 to turn on and the problem turned out to be bad RAM (no beeps or anything, just the startup chimes and a black screen with no response to a caps lock, might be what's going on with your system).

If you have and it really is the video card causing this problem, did you try using the ATI Rage 128 GL card in a PC to see if it really is a PC card? if you did try that and it doesn't work there either then I would imagine the video card is dead. I'd flash a spare PCI video card (such as your Geforce4 MX4000) and see if that works at that point, or maybe find another Mac compatible PCI video card for sale on eBay or similar sites.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Any monitor should work with any Apple PowerMac G3 or equivalent, right?

Yes, any VGA monitor will work on Macs that have a regular VGA port, only the older (Beige) Macs needed a DB-15 adapter in order to use a VGA monitor, yours shouldn't need that since it's the Blue & White model which should be new enough to have regular VGA.

My advice is to get a proper card which for that era mac shouldn't be hard as there are still plenty of them around if all else go ahead and flash a known to be working card. As with the advice above always check the ram first.

The HDD spins up and boots into the OS that's on there, but the video card isn't putting out a display
whatsoever (maybe a bad BIOS, or the original owners must've flashed the card with the PC BIOS, or it's the PC card (BIOS)

Hi, did you press the inernal reset button for the NVRAM already ?
Some Macs require this to come back to life once the battery has failed or hardware was changed.

Also, flashing a PC card for Mac use isn't that hard. Depending on your model, a Geforce 2 to 4 is fine.
I was using a Geforce2MX and Geforce4MX AGP with a socketed EEPROM each and wrote a
Mac-compatible firmware onto it using my G540 EPROM programmer.

The tricky part is to get the right firmware (with the correct or slightly lower memory timings;
google "PC GeForce MX ---> Mac GeForce MX" or "The Mac Elite Software Downloads"), since these no-name cards have slow memory.
Once the card works in the Mac, you can re-program memory timings using some tools (Graphiccelerator 1.3.4 ?).
Oh, and please be careful if using something like NVFlash on the PC side. It caused me nothing but trouble.
Also, GF 5200 and higher are more dfficult to flash, since their firmware does addtional checks (board ID, etc).

If you're afraid of flashing, you can also try this old trick mentioned in "Use a PC GeForce card in your Mac " first.
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2 … 020712084851928

In either case, I really suggest to get a card with a socketed ROM chip.
It makes things much easier (also, make a backup first)..

Edit: I forgot, some PCI PowerMacs run their first PCI slot ar 66MHz (just like AGP, but without AGP features).
It could be well possible that only a special Macintosh card works in there. So if you're using a PC card, try a different slot also.

Your mac may have limited built in support for a GeForce 2MX in the system ROM - some PC cards will work without flashing at least enough to check that the rest of the system works. I have flashed a PC card with Mac ROM from the site mentioned above. I did use NVflash on the PC to do the flashing. The card worked perfectly for a while, but did die. Did it die because I used the wrong timings, or would it have died anyway running in PC? I'll never know. I'd still do it anyway on a cheap card I didn't care about, but I wouldn't want to fry another Geforce 4Ti (at the time I wasn't into retro PC and considered the card too old for any PC I was running, but better than any Mac card I had).

Jo22 wrote:

Hi, did you press the inernal reset button for the NVRAM already ?
Some Macs require this to come back to life once the battery has failed or hardware was changed.

Wouldn't this be the reset button for the NVRAM?

Source: How to Reset Mac PMU: Simple Steps for Resetting the PRAM, NVRAM and PMU

bjwil1991 wrote:

Wouldn't this be the reset button for the NVRAM?

I believe so, but I haven't used/opened my G3 B/W for a while (a G4 is currently on my desk), so I'm not 100% certain. 😅