Have you tried more beefy motherboard? Like something based on i875P or even workstation Xeon.

I'm pretty sure that my dual Tualatin boards (based on HEsl chipset), Tyan Thunder S2567 and SuperMicro P3TDE6, are the only boards I have which sport an AGP PRO slot. I have an Intel S875WP1-E motherboard, but it only contains a regular AGP slot.

One other interesting factor about the second pair of FirePro cards is that they both came with a 4" cable connected to that small white PCB-bound connector you see in the photo. The other end was left dangling. I'm not sure what the other end is supposed to connect do. Do you know? The first two cards didn't have this cable, and the first two cards appeared to sort of work, albeit with artifacts.

I'm not sure what the other end is supposed to connect do. Do you know?

Most likely external TV in/out support. DIN connector on the card is reserved for 3D stereo glasses.

Without another motherboard it's hard to tell. But it's possible that all cards are in zombie state. Unfortunately all R300/R350 based cards were very prone to suddenly die or malfunction. Some are victims of the Samsung BGA memory (Radeon 9700 and FX5800 series notoriosly) and some just died due to problems with early GPU BGA flip-chip design.

I suspect all cards also came with horrible yellow rubberlike thermal padding under the cooler? This may explain why 2 cards just freeze from the start - they overheat.

Serpent Rider, I appreciate your valuable insight. My gut tells me its not a motherboard issue (I realise that is not very scientific). I suspect both conditions you mention may be at play. The first pair of cards have fairly common memory related artifact issues. The second pair of cards may be the same, or also the heatsink issue you describe. I will remove the heatsinks and inspect the thermal padding.

I have a ATI FireGL Z1 128M APGpro card working fine with a MSI E7505 Master-LS2 (MS-9121). I also have ATI FireGL X1 128M AGP also woks fine with any motherboard.

They just dying, same here. Had one working in collection. After 1 year i took it out to retest it - dead, screen artefacts.
So i got 2 more cards, of them one dead too, second working (so far). They are just bad made. I tried to push by my fingers memory modules when card was working and found out, that it changes style of screen artefacts. So i guess that memory modules are dying.....
At last one nice video....
https://youtu.be/tQEhWCc45Ko

This is useful information, thanks guys. I was unable to remove the heatsink without risking damage. I intend to return the two cards, so I didn't want to push it.

Sounds like these cards in particular have passed their shelf life. This is unfortunate. I really hoped to get a fairly high-end AGP PRO card in this system that can also do games. I'm aware that there are Wildcats, but those don't game. I guess I'll have to be content with my Quadro FX3000 in my dual Tualatin w/dual channel U320 SCSI RAID and dual channel memory. I fear that even if I found a working FireGL X1 256M AGP PRO that it would stop functioning in the coming years.

feipoa wrote:

I was unable to remove the heatsink without risking damage. I intend to return the two cards, so I didn't want to push it.

I tried to remove it on first dead card in try to reflow main chip. At the end i removed it, but with small resistors around gpu that was glued on orange something supposed to be thermal paste....it was rock solid glued to chip.....
Dont try, youll end with damaged gpu like i did. Just try push each memory chip from both sides at once to pcb by fingers and watch if artefacts on screen changes, if yes, youve got your bad memory.....

The pair of cards which had artifacts have been returned. When I had them in possession, I did try pressing the memory chips, but nothing changed with the artifacts.

The second pair of cards I currently have in possession do not contain artifacts. The screens stay blank.

Received refund for the two cards. Seller didn't want them sent back. Is there any salvageable parts on these? Maybe the DVI connector? They are pretty bulky to store in my broken PCB box, so might be headed to e-waste.