I found this 8900D with this very strange memory on it. The memory is in metal cans and have no marking and are square shape.
The card arrived damaged and the video output is garbled, likely due to one of the ram chips being bad. It also only comes up as a 512k board.
Anyone seen this type of memory before? Its befuddling. I thought it might be some weird exotic vram or something but clearly not.
here is a pic of said card
IBM PS2 80 uses similar memory chips. Note sure of the specifications but I can have a look at them some day.
i'd love to find out more, if you ever get the chance to look it up.
So weird!
I've also seen such chips in IBM PS/2 boxes...
Anyway, safe bet those chips on that Trident card are regular DRAM, 256K * 4.
Żywotwór planetarny, jego gnijące błoto, jest świtem egzystencji, fazą wstępną, i wyłoni się z krwawych ciastomózgowych miedź miłująca...
I've seen Trident-based cards with 12 DRAM chips on sale - the photos weren't all that good but I think the RAMs were 256x4 connected as 3 bits+3 bits+2 bits. Why? To be able to use rejected dies that had bad cells or even more major issues. So it would seem some VGA manufacturers tried extreme cost cutting measures - I wouldn't be surprised if those weird RAM chips were some old tech that nobody wanted so ended up on these "anything goes" cards. That would also explain high failure rates - but then again, DRAMs do fail on their own and the older the tech, the more likely it is.
IBM do sell memory chips to anyone as well. I had seen their black plastic package chips appear in anything even video cards but this is first for me especially on video card.
These aluminum can memory chips by IBM do exist and the design have not changed for nearly 40 years as IBM was one of earliest flip chip micro BGA on white ceramic substance capped by aluminum can and sealed in green epoxy in LSI and TTL in these package of any package size. Even IBM made 386 cpus in that package licensed by intel.
Cheers,
Great Northern aka Canada.
Wow, that appears to be some interesting packaging on those RAM chips! Anybody catch the part number on them? I'm curious to see a datasheet!
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Links:
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Cheers,
Great Northern aka Canada.
on my particular card, there’s 0 numbers on the cans. they’re totally blank. since the card is not working correctly, i’m half tempted to unsolder one and see if there’s anything written anywhere else
Sev80 wrote on 2020-01-30, 20:08:i'd love to find out more, if you ever get the chance to look it up.
So weird!
I had a look at my IBM motherboard that I have on my wall today. It has the same kind of IBM memory
