VOGONS


First post, by WR3ND

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I ordered this just yesterday from eBay, but on closer inspection, it looks like the two expansion memory chips are 256KB each, or maybe I'm not interpreting them correctly.

eBay Listing Link → https://www.ebay.com/itm/2MB-Vintage-S3-Visio … T-/183796202568

MXHsHox.jpg

The seller seems to be very forward with the card's memory capacity and showing off the chips on the board.

Is this really a 2MB card? And if not, do you guys know if it's able to be upgraded to at least 2MB by using different chips?

Thanks!

Last edited by WR3ND on 2019-09-09, 21:47. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 8, by cyclone3d

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It is indeed a 2MB card.

The socketed RAM chips are 256kb x 16, so each chip is 512kB

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Reply 2 of 8, by WR3ND

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cyclone3d wrote:

It is indeed a 2MB card.

The socketed RAM chips are 256kb x 16, so each chip is 512kB

Oh good. Thanks!

Seems I was getting my bits and bytes mixed up, for starters... 😊

Cheers.

Reply 3 of 8, by WR3ND

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Well, with that sorted (thanks again), it's curious that I'm not seeing much of any make and model branding on this card beyond the chips themselves. You guys have any ideas who made this card or whether or not it's an OEM component and if it is what machine it might have been used in?

Just curious. It seems like a decent card that should fit my ~1994 i486DX4 100, DOS 6.22 Windows 3.11 classic computer home office and DOS gaming build rather well.

Cheers.

Reply 4 of 8, by blurks

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There are no markings that give a clue. The only way to find out about the vendor is to analyze the Video BIOS string that contains information about vendor and model.

WR3ND wrote:

Just curious. It seems like a decent card that should fit my ~1994 i486DX4 100, DOS 6.22 Windows 3.11 classic computer home office and DOS gaming build rather well.

The card is perfectly suited for that kind of system.

Reply 5 of 8, by dionb

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It's more than a decent card, the S3 864 was one of the very last generation of chips used in VLB form factor, with good DOS performance and quite a bit of GUI acceleration for Windows. Add 2MB of video memory to that and this is the sort of thing you could run Windows 95 with at 1024x768x16b - and Win3.11 should fly.

I ran Win 3.11 well past its sell-by date (up to 1999) on my P60 with a PCI S3 868 1MB. It positively flew, only downside was low resolution/colour depth due to low RAM. Your DX4-100 should equal my P60 in ALU tasks, and the only advantage of 868 vs 864 is some video playback stuff (zoom and RGB<->YUV conversion), so in desktop work the 864 will be just as fast and 2MB removes biggest drawback of my card.

No idea as to brand either for that matter, but the analog circuitry looks solid. That's the only really relevant thing - can it give you wobble-free hi-res? One way to find out...

Reply 6 of 8, by WR3ND

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Good to hear that it should be more than capable enough for my uses of it and I look forward to testing it out and using it. I'll report back if I find out anything more about it and maybe provide some benchmarks run on it, or I might start a build log and link to it here.

Thanks for the responses and additional information about similar cards.

Cheers. 😎

Reply 8 of 8, by WR3ND

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Miro Crystal 20SD VLB – you're right, it is very similar to that. Likely a variant of it then. Designed in Germany, apparently. Pretty cool. I got my Sound Blaster 16 CT2230 from France, so it's a global effort building this 486 computer. 😁

Thanks for mentioning it.