There was more battery corrosion on that motherboard than I thought! My desoldering tip! What have I done to you?

Just when I think I'm starting to understand memory configurations on old video cards, I get something like this...

I have an ASUS TNT2 Vanta, just like the one in this listing.

It is a 16MB card, and like any other TNT2 M64 or Vanta, it has a 64bit memory bus.

So, how does that work with eight of these memory chips?
https://www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/vi … 48LC1M16A1.html

Is there a way to tell based on this datasheet that eight of these 16bit chips would only provide a 64bit total bus width, or is this just due to the way to card is wired (since the Vanta chip itself only has connections for a 64bit bus)? Does the "2 banks" part of the chip's configuration have anything to do with it? It says it is either a 512K x 16bit x 2 banks or a 1M x 16bit part.

Looking at the VGA Museum, I see lots of this 8-chip TNT2 Vanta and M64 cards.
https://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/cpu/item … 34-nvidia-vanta
https://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/cpu/item … a-riva-tnt2-m64

... so the configuration isn't that rare. I think the rest of the 64bit TNT2 cards I own all have 4 memory chips though, so it struck me as odd.

Is there any benefit to using a PCB design with eight chips for a low cost card like this? Is it just that they could choose to use 8 of these or 4 higher density chips on the same PCB depending on what was available?

The performance is as dismal as one would expect, of course.

Some of these have 4 chips using 32 bits chips (two chips each), with 8 chips solder pads. No mystery about this for grouping for 16 bits ICs forming two groups of 4 chips each. Either way.

Cheers,