Hi,

I finally came around to unpack some old hardware I had stored for years and decided on trying to do a SS7-build. I first got a little scared in my first test as I only got a black screen with my Rage 128 Ultra (AGP 2.0) I knew to be working with my Asus P2B-S which also has an AGP 1.0-slot. Three other cards I tried afterwards worked well, though. Matrox Millennium G450 (also AGP 2.0), Voodoo 3 2000 and Rage XL (both AGP 1.0).

The boards with these issues are two Asus P5A, one rev 1.04 with the E-Northbridge and one rev 1.06 with the G-Northbridge.

I have read about difficult AGP-compatibility with these boards, but I didn't expect the screen to stay completely turned off when starting the board. I have AGP-Turbo-Mode (AGP 2x) disabled.
I would expect graphics cards to at least deliver some kind of signal when they get supplied with power so my monitor would turn on (even if it might stay black) but there was just nothing. So is this assumption just wrong? Or is there maybe some power supply line missing that a) these cards need, b) other AGP 2.0 cards do not need and c) other AGP 1.0 boards have?

I read about some early AGP-Boards not providing enough power for the more demanding graphics cards. Could this be my issue? However I suspect my V3 to be more power hungry than the Rage 128 Ultra because of the bigger heat-sink but I could be wrong. How would I detect such an issue? Would the card just not work? Would the board overheat and get damaged over time? I even saw a modification on a SS7-board for the AGP power supply shortly mentioned at this The Retro Web-article : https://blog.theretroweb.com/2022/12/19/ali-a … ga-5ax-rev-4-1/

I am not really dependant on getting these exact cards to work on these boards, but I was planning do to some benchmarks with different cards, driver versions and CPUs and try to find out what changed over time. I am also hoping to to compare K6-2, K6-III+, Pentium II and Pentium III all at the same clock 😀. So maybe there are some drivers that get faster from SSE when not using HW-T&L? In the end I will probably settle for the V3 in the P5A anyways, though. Still I would like to know if you have any hints on what I could try to at least get some signal from the cards on the P5A.

Also a slightly related question: Many old VGAs display their name on the very first image when starting, even before showing the POST-screen. I had no luck searching in the internet for this, but when and why did this stop? Do you know how this screen is even called?

Thanks for reading all my text, I hope it is not too long.