Yea I think there's not that many of them around. They were superceded by the GeForce2 quite quickly after introduction.
They're also impossible to search for, because 'GeForce256' gives you lots of hits on whatever random GeForce cards that happen to have 256MB or a 256-bit memory bus or whatever.

They're not common to find indeed but almost any cards today before the 2000 begin to be hard to find or expensive.

Phew. Good. Ive been trying to a long time to search for a 256. Ever so often ill see if ones up. Good to know. Thanks. Maybe one day ill come across one.

Yeah, they're not easy to find. Many of them aren't well identified. It's good to try the various branded model names: Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator, ASUS AGP-V6600, V6800, Guillemot 3D Prophet, Elsa Erazor X, X2, etc.

Heh just searched V6600. Damn thing is 100+ dollars. Out of my reach. First 256 ive seen on ebay though. Thanks. Totally didnt think about searching by the brand names.

I only ever found ONE in the wild and regretfully I couldn't afford it at the time 😢

In The Netherlands, GF2 always seemed to be way more common, even Rendition 2x00 was more common in NL than GF, so I regretfully don't even have a single one.

But GF2MX is roughly the same in performance, so I can still kinda emulate it.

I got Lucky and scored one last year in the Netherlands. An Asus V6600 deluxe 😀

I would love to test it against a V6800 but in the last year only two poppop up and both where over €100,- 😒

Definitely not rare cards. They show up pretty often. Tip is to search for the brand name as mentioned in this thread. Also many of them on Yahoo Auctions in Japan.

Like this Canopus Spectra 7400 Geforce 256 SDR:
http://ord.yahoo.co.jp/o/auction/RV=1/RU=aHR0 … xFYUSUAhxlAPDh8

You use buyee or other service to ship it to your country.

Why do you want a GF256 specifically? Is there anything it can do that a GF4 card can't? The latter is both easy to find and way more powerful.

Replaced the GF256 in my PIII/W98 rig with a Ti4200 a while ago, haven't run into any problems so far anyways. Also, the GF4 series card are compatible with less noisy and easy to source cooling solutions. Using a Zalman VF900Cu with mine, it's virtually inaudible. Seen Zalman VF700 clones for like $5 on Ebay recently, which probably does the job just as well.

Isn't having to look at Japanese auction sites the definition of "hard to find"? 🤣

I just paid a premium and got it over and done with. But that was a while ago 😀

Nvm1 wrote:

I got Lucky and scored one last year in the Netherlands. An Asus V6600 deluxe 😀

I've got the exact same card as you one or two month ago, but mine seems to have issues ...

As I was answered, the few errors that I had with half life were just incompatibilities with my version, but as I said after, mine is corrupting the DOS command prompt after a while ...
Not sure why (VRAM dead ? GPU dead ? Another incompatibility ?)

Do you have any of these issues with yours ?

I might try to reflow every pins of the ram, maybe heat it a little bit with a heat gun and see what it does (if I don't fry it ...)

It would be neat if there was some kind of memtest for video cards imo.
However I don't know how could I find a replacement video memory chip if one appeared to be dead

kaputnik wrote:

Why do you want a GF256 specifically? Is there anything it can do that a GF4 card can't? The latter is both easy to find and way more powerful.

I wouldnt ever replace my 4400. Its just the first Geforce card. Sort of a cool thing. Also its the last nvidia card to not have the texel issue. Though i believe you can fix the texel alignment with Geforce 2. I guess i just love the idea of owning the first Geforce.

I have never though of using yahoo auction. I should maybe pop in that website more. Thats digging deep though. Its not like i REALLY NEED a GF256, but i will buy one. I really want one for a build.

That is odd, I didn't notice any problems with the card so far.
Are you sure there is nothing other triggers this problem? IDE controller problem?

If you want to test the ram of the vga card try the tools on this page:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/having-problems-w … est-its-memory/

Not all of them work on the older cards unfortunatly but it is worth a try. 😀

I had a chance to get a 256 and a Geforce 2 GTS for cheap not long ago but the person selling them wanted $20 to throw them in box and drop them off at the post office or to meet me half way to sell them in person... and I only live an hour and a half away from him. Out of principle, I had to decline. In the end, it'd be a neat addition to my collection of stuff, but such cards really don't do anything different than others that I already have. As mentioned by others, the Geforce 2 MX was a fantastic card for the money and is probably more representative of what people were using at the time as it wasn't released too long after the first Geforce.

Not to say I wouldn't mind having all of the hard to find cards from that era anyway... I have a decent collection, but I don't own a Geforce 256 (SDR or DDR), Geforce 2 GTS, Pro or Ultra, or a standard Geforce 3 (not Ti series). I have several Geforce 4 MX cards that easily replicate the experience of using a Geforce 2 though. They're a lot easier to find. And a Geforce 4 Ti will, I believe, do all of the things previous cards can do with higher performance. I'm not sure if their compatibility with older (pre-2000 and DOS) titles is any different though.

For the sake of collecting cards, however, if you want a Geforce 256 you definitely want to search for either very specific models (as mentioned earlier in this thread) or search for very generic things (AGP card). These cards generally predate the time of putting fancy stickers and labels on video cards, and they rarely had anything related to "Geforce 256" printed on them because Geforce was a new name at the time and had no advertising value. Companies instead would have used crazy new names (Annihilator!), obscure numbers higher than previous products' numbers (V6600) or names previously used on their Voodoo or TNT products.

Nvm1 wrote:

That is odd, I didn't notice any problems with the card so far. Are you sure there is nothing other triggers this problem? IDE c […]
Show full quote

That is odd, I didn't notice any problems with the card so far.
Are you sure there is nothing other triggers this problem? IDE controller problem?

If you want to test the ram of the vga card try the tools on this page:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/having-problems-w … est-its-memory/

Not all of them work on the older cards unfortunatly but it is worth a try. 😀

Is that a response to the texel thing? Its not the card being broken or anything its an issue with the chip itself. Like for Geforce4 games like FF7 have a garbled UI and text. Same thing for XWA. (Though XWA had an official fix).

But i believe in the Geforce2 drivers you can actually use the texel alignment tab to fix that. When the Geforce3 came out for some reason nvidia decided to keep the feature in the drivers but it wont change anything. Not a big issue but just one of those annoying things.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

I had a chance to get a 256 and a Geforce 2 GTS for cheap not long ago but the person selling them wanted $20 to throw them in box and drop them off at the post office or to meet me half way to sell them in person... and I only live an hour and a half away from him. Out of principle, I had to decline. In the end, it'd be a neat addition to my collection of stuff, but such cards really don't do anything different than others that I already have. As mentioned by others, the Geforce 2 MX was a fantastic card for the money and is probably more representative of what people were using at the time as it wasn't released too long after the first Geforce.

Not to say I wouldn't mind having all of the hard to find cards from that era anyway... I have a decent collection, but I don't own a Geforce 256 (SDR or DDR), Geforce 2 GTS, Pro or Ultra, or a standard Geforce 3 (not Ti series). I have several Geforce 4 MX cards that easily replicate the experience of using a Geforce 2 though. They're a lot easier to find.

Yeah exactly, its like owning an original Voodoo. Sort of a cool thing to collect.

I have to agree with Vetz - they are around if you know how/where to search for them. As he and others above mentioned, it's sometimes easier to search for the exact model instead of just "Geforce256" - I.e. "Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator." I stumbled across a lot of 5 x Creative Geforce256 DDR cards a while back for super cheap and grabbed them all for less than $50 shipped. Just make sure you know what type of memory the cards have as well. Remember the earlier SDR cards were much slower than the DDR variants that were released afterward.

Nvm1 wrote:

That is odd, I didn't notice any problems with the card so far. Are you sure there is nothing other triggers this problem? IDE c […]
Show full quote

That is odd, I didn't notice any problems with the card so far.
Are you sure there is nothing other triggers this problem? IDE controller problem?

If you want to test the ram of the vga card try the tools on this page:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/having-problems-w … est-its-memory/

Not all of them work on the older cards unfortunatly but it is worth a try. 😀

Thanks ! I will try that

I tried my card with at least two different setups (one athlon based vith VIA chipset and one pentium 2 with the good old i440BX chipset) and I had the exact same issues so I don't think it's related to an issue with my motherboard.

To me it's probably a RAM issue, but since I could'nt test it (until your answer ^^) I can't really say that it IS really that issue or not

Edit : my god ! The test is still at the begining and the program already found 60 THOUSANDS errors ...

Edit 2 : So I let the computer sit for a while in order to let it finish but when I came back, the screen was completely messy and the computer was frozen ...

I think that one memory chip is dead or at least it doesn't work as intended but as I said, how can I replace such specific thing ...
Also by looking a the card, I discovered that it's not a V6600 but a V6800 PURE ...
Too bad it doesn't work 😢
Like I said, the only thing left to do is to reflow the pins of the VRAM chips and if it doesn't work either, I'll have to take out the heat gun and hope it will come back to life ...