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Diamond Viper V330 lost half its memory

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First post, by Theodinator

Posted on 
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Hi!

A few weeks ago I've bought this card for my Compaq Deskpro 2000 5200:

IMG_20201207_204509.jpg
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IMG_20201207_142612.jpg
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IMG_20201207_142612.jpg
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It was working fine alongside a Diamond Monster 3D PCI 4MB but recently the VGA BIOS only shows 2MB of RAM instead of 4MB:

IMG_20201215_085011.jpg
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628.64 KiB
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Fair use/fair dealing exception

In Windows 95 dxdiag detects the card as 2MB as well and I can no longer configure the same resolutions/color depth. I've tested the card in another computer but it's the same there.

This seems like a hardware defect.. Any ideas what has broken on the card? Maybe some bad capacitors?

Reply 1 of 1, by SSTV2

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Had exact problem with a 8MB version of Elsa Erazor II card (TNT), the culprit was a damaged SMD resistor near one of the RAM ICs. RAM amount and RAM bus width were halved at that point, but card worked flawlessly, though slower.

If you can't find missing or damaged resistors on PCB, check RAM ICs for broken solder joints.

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