VOGONS

Strange card I have humoured buying

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First post, by Logistics

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At my local surplus shop, while going through the boxes of loose cards, I keep running across a random video card (some sort of radeon with dvi and VGA outputs) which has two lines of gold-plated text etched into the backside of the board, which reads on the upper line "How could I dance with another" and on the lower line "When I saw her standing there".

Could this perhaps be a preproduction card, and one of the engineers was goofing around? Should I buy it? It's just $4 random agp card.

Reply 2 of 8, by Stiletto

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It's definitely a Number Nine Visual Technology card, they always put Beatles quotes on their video card PCBs, video BIOSes and their boot screens, names of the cards themselves, possibly even etched into the silicon when they were making their own GPUs, and of course the name of the company. 😀 I myself had the Imagine 128 Series II (named after the song Imagine).

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 3 of 8, by gdjacobs

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Stiletto wrote:

I myself had the Imagine 128 Series II (named after the song Imagine).

But Imagine isn't a Beatles song! It's a Lennon song!

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 4 of 8, by Imperious

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Number Nine also is a Lennon track on the White Album if I'm not mistaken.

It must be a bit of a Beatles day for me as the radio was playing "Back in the USSR" on the way to work.

Atari 2600, TI994a, Vic20, c64, ZX Spectrum 128, Amstrad CPC464, Atari 65XE, Commodore Plus/4, Amiga 500
PC's from XT 8088, 486, Pentium MMX, K6, Athlon, P3, P4, 775, to current Ryzen 5600x.

Reply 5 of 8, by snorg

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I'm not 100% sure if this was that company or another, but there was some chip company (graphics or maybe cpu) that had a fabrication facility specifically named Fab 4 as a Beetles reference.

Reply 6 of 8, by keenerb

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Definitely Number Nine. I have a few laying around somewhere, one is a VESA local bus card. I lusted after them mightily back in the 90's when I worked at Office Depot...

Reply 7 of 8, by idspispopd

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If it's a Number Nine this should be written clearly on the board.
#9 didn't make any Radeon cards to my knowledge. The latest cards they made had Savage4 or TNT2-M64 chips. Those were the only #9 cards that might have DVI connectors.

Reply 8 of 8, by Stiletto

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idspispopd wrote:

If it's a Number Nine this should be written clearly on the board.
#9 didn't make any Radeon cards to my knowledge. The latest cards they made had Savage4 or TNT2-M64 chips. Those were the only #9 cards that might have DVI connectors.

Yeah, that's the only weird bit to me too. So yeah, I figure it isn't actually a Radeon under the heatsink and is instead a last-gen #9 card with Savage4 or TNT2-M64 as you say. 😀

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

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