Probably somewhat common issue. Can't boot mine on KT333 no matter what I do. Works fine on i850 motherboard though.

Upon closer inspection (and using the Macro camera on my phone) I think I may have found the issue:

Yeah, that doesn't look so great. Fixing this is way beyond my soldering level, so I'll put the card in storage for now. Maybe one day I can find someone who is skilled enough to mend those traces and the card might work again.

Did some more troubleshooting on this card yesterday. I carefully checked the damaged traces with a multimeter, and to my surprise, all of them appear to have continuity! I guess those scratches aren't as deep as they look.

The card still doesn't post though, giving one long beep and three short ones as the error code. From what I gather, that means the BIOS is unable to initialize the card. As of right now, I have tested this card in four different systems with various chipsets (Intel, VIA, SIS) and it fails in each one. I took a high resolution photo of the card and compared it to the one at VGA Museum, just to check if all SMD components are still in place, and everything seems fine.

At this point, I'm thinking either the Rendition chip is dead or the VBios is corrupted. I tried flashing several different BIOS versions from here, but the tool simply hangs after detecting the Verite. I guess the next step would be to desolder the BIOS chip and flash it with a programmer, but I don't have the proper tools for that. Anyway, this is the last line that I see on the screen before everything freezes:

1VeriteIOBASE = e400, VeriteMEMBASE = d8000000

Does anyone else have any ideas as to what could be wrong? As mentioned above, the card appears to have been stored improperly by the previous owner, and it's entirely possible that there's some additional hardware damage that I missed.

Interesting, this corresponds with what I've seen with trace damage as well. I've seen trace damage that I was sure was causing problems, but continuity was fine and the problem turned out to be something else. I think traces are much harder to damage than most people think.

Razer357 wrote on 2023-04-17, 00:43:

Interesting, this corresponds with what I've seen with trace damage as well. I've seen trace damage that I was sure was causing problems, but continuity was fine and the problem turned out to be something else. I think traces are much harder to damage than most people think.

Yeah, when I first saw the results of the continuity tests, I was really surprised. I then repeated them a few more times, just to make sure, and every damaged trace still tested fine.

Anyway, I don't suppose Rendition cards have a nice debug utility like 3DFX's MOJO.EXE by any chance? That would at least give me a hint what to look for.

I have the exact same problem with mine. I put up a Windows XP system and i can "see" the card is there, I can get its info with HWInfo or Everest, but when I want to boot with it or use it, it won't post, or it will post but I'll get no video output.

I also tried updating the bios and same thing, I get to that line "VeritasIOBASE / VeritasMEMBASE" and it hangs forever...

Card looks in pristine condition, no scratches, no nothing. I also suspect it's either a damaged bios or a bad contact in one of the solder balls of the bga package? But just it being there as a secondary card, I see no problems with it.