VOGONS


First post, by slaynmage

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I bought an ATI Mach32 EISA from a seller on ebay. It came in today and is pretty much a $260 dollar paperweight. I'm in the process of initiating a return with the Glasgow seller I bought it from but I doubt I'll have any luck considering my past experience with used part dealers on ebay.

It won't display a full character set and constantly displays character artifacts flashing about all over the screen. The seller included a disk with a EISA config file. I know the EISA configuration menu by heart so I managed to install the cfg file in hopes that it would remedy the problem. Nope. it's just a bad card.

Anyway I was curious as to whether any of you guys have seen anything like this before and is there any chance of me fixing this card.

Reply 1 of 10, by slaynmage

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oops...forgot to add the other pics.

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Reply 2 of 10, by treeman

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memory corruption is what comes to mind first, could be any hardware related problem. damaged trace, knocked off capacitor memory chips cracked solder joint or worst scenario the actual memory chip shorted inside

Post some pics of the card back and front of good resolution maybye it will be something obvious

Reply 3 of 10, by Anonymous Coward

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You paid $260 for a Mach32 EISA?

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 5 of 10, by slaynmage

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The seller accepted the return. I'm going to ship it back monday. Seller was of course convinced that my hardware was to blame but accepted the return anyway. Just to humor the guy I tried the card with different ram, different cpu board, every single combination of hardware removed. The card is just bad.

Yeah I paid waaaaay too much but I had been looking for any 2mb EISA video card for nearly a year and haven't come across one until I bought this bad card. The thing popped up on ebay and I won it and put it on my credit card. I know it was kind of dumb to pay that much but the starting bid was 150 pounds after one or two other guys bid once each it was up to what equalled to $230 dollars plus the international shipping. Been hoping to find a Mach32, Winner 1000, Qvision 1280/E or even the 2mb 1024/E any 2mb EISA card really. The EISA cards are just really hard to find and when they do come up it's always a mad bidding war.

Reply 6 of 10, by Kingpin

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I think this kind of thing comes down to compatibility with motherboards. Not every piece of hardware can be assumed to work and be compatible with every other piece of hardware, especially before the days of "plug and play", and most importantly with OEM's i.e. IBM, Compaq to name a couple. These OEM's were renowned for other off the shelf hardware for not working in their systems, Compaq especially! Which gave rise to most people opting to build custom systems, to allow the user to have greater flexibility and less hardware conflicts.

An example below shows an Elsa EISA graphics card on one motherboard seen as "dysfunctional", but then miraculously working in another motherboard. Makes you wonder why a card works fine in one system but then not in another.

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Have you tried the card in question on other motherboards, or has it only been tested on this Compaq system?

Reply 7 of 10, by liqmat

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slaynmage wrote:

The seller accepted the return. I'm going to ship it back monday. Seller was of course convinced that my hardware was to blame but accepted the return anyway. Just to humor the guy I tried the card with different ram, different cpu board, every single combination of hardware removed. The card is just bad.

Yeah I paid waaaaay too much but I had been looking for any 2mb EISA video card for nearly a year and haven't come across one until I bought this bad card. The thing popped up on ebay and I won it and put it on my credit card. I know it was kind of dumb to pay that much but the starting bid was 150 pounds after one or two other guys bid once each it was up to what equalled to $230 dollars plus the international shipping. Been hoping to find a Mach32, Winner 1000, Qvision 1280/E or even the 2mb 1024/E any 2mb EISA card really. The EISA cards are just really hard to find and when they do come up it's always a mad bidding war.

Don't feel bad. I have a Mach64 VLB card that has very similar problems. Haven't really made any attempt to pinpoint the issue, but my best guess is some memory has gone bad. Probably going to gift it to someone who has shown interest in attempting to repair it as I have zero time right now.

Reply 8 of 10, by slaynmage

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No king pin I don't have another EISA motherboard to test with. I can't spend another several hundred dollars to buy or build another EISA based system just to test the card. By then it'll be past the time allotted for me to be able to send it back to you. I shipped it back this morning to the address you gave me. Thanks for letting me ship it back.

Reply 9 of 10, by Kingpin

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slaynmage wrote:

Seller was of course convinced that my hardware was to blame but accepted the return anyway. The card is just bad.

Tested on four boards, all POST ok.

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Last edited by Kingpin on 2019-05-24, 17:19. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 10 of 10, by Kingpin

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slaynmage wrote:

I can't spend another several hundred dollars to buy or build another EISA based system just to test the card.

I've seen a couple of EISA based motherboards sell recently for between $30 and $50. I didn't buy them, I own too many but they are out there.