well since no one has any answers, would someone mind doing me a solid and maybe taking a picture of their card with a measuring tape to show the distance of the short end to the vga standoff screw ? At least then i could maybe make one from a spare block off plate with a dremel.

I'll take one of mine out and take pictures and measure it. Not sure if it will be tonight though.

I'll also see if I can find another card that has the same bracket positioning as I have a massive number of video cards.

Edit: That was quicker than expected.

Found 6 different cards that have brackets that will work.

Click pics for full size.

EXACT matches including the bracket mounting holes on the cards:
From top to bottom:
ATI Mach64
ATI Rage 128 full height - probably the easiest and cheapest card to get
ATI RAGE II + DVD

Matches from top to bottom:
ATI Rage XL - probably also super easy and cheap to get - you would need to cut the mounting tab off of the bracket though.
ExpertColor branded S3 Trio/Virge - no mounting tabs
Matrox Millennium 2 - No mounting tab and you would have the hole from the MAC style 15-pin connector - going to be the most flimsy

Voodoo 3 3000 PCI:

Voodoo 3 3000 PCI bracket measurement:

Tha kyou you are a life saver.

so i just realized after i bought the card that my voodoo 3 is not like yours.

Attached is my card. any other ideas?

I have some cards that look like the backplate MIGHT work, but if you could provide some measurements, say from the edge of the pcb to the vga connector, we might be able to help you.

This is a surprisingly difficult problem to solve. Cards with their VGA ports sort of arbitrarily placed in the middle of the board are going to be very tough to find replacements for.

Because I shop scrap I have a lot of nice cards with missing back plates. I'd love to figure out a solution to this that doesn't involve having to buy a CNC machine capable of cutting steel.

My wife has a Brother Scan'N Cut die cutting machine that is really awesome and I've been trying to think of a way to use it to make parts like this. Obviously it isn't going to cut pieces of steel, but if I could find a material that it could cut that could maybe be layered for strength, it could work. Anything would be better than having to dig through piles of junk cards for replacements, trying 20 of them and having no matches. I've done that so many times and it is very frustrating.

I think it'd be helpful if we could figure out a standard measurement to determine where the VGA port is in relation to the PCI connector. Maybe measuring from the bottom left corner of the PCI connector to the spot where the VGA connector meets the back of the PCB (on this card, where the blue plastic edge would meet the back plate) could be standard... since the connector will always be the same size and have to be the same distance from the card front-to-back. This way, we could say "I need a back plate with the VGA connector 58mm from the PCI connector"... which I do. 😉

It might even be worth it to just measure all our cards and put it into a spreadsheet. This is going to be more and more of a problem as more cards come from scrap lots and have been stripped.

Sound cards are even worse... I can't imagine that'd be easy to do without just having pictures.

i agree that it is trivial. For the time being I ended up taking the support off the card i bought and tracing the vga on it with a sharpie. Took a dremel to it. Not the prettiest but decently effective. Its a little off on the bracket length for the slot. Probably about half and inch but i can just buy a longer mount screw. At least now I have some form of support and it is usable with out worry of damage.

Gixxxer wrote:

Attached is my card. any other ideas?

Your photo is actually pretty close to the VGA connector placement of a Voodoo3 AGP card as opposed to PCI. Some photos of one of my Voodoo3 AGP cards follow:

one thing i have noticed that is weird is that everyone elses heatsink seems to have screw holes and mine does not.