sliderider wrote:

I am currently seeking high and low for a 3d Prophet 4500 that doesn't cost a mint just to see for myself if any of the raves it was getting back in the day were really true.

spoilers: it isn't! predictably (like the rest of the series), it's even worse in slow machines compared to competitors, so it's definitely no recommendation for the comp on the budget either, nor is it even suitable for high-end due to agp fitziness and cpu requirements to make up for the lack of T&L, and by that point you'd be using a Geforce3ti anyway (if it were 2001 and you're loaded with the ghz).

TheLazy1 wrote:

I remember it having very nice image quality.

...in HELL! I occassionally upload bad D3D shots from the PCX-2 in a certain "PowerVR Fun Thread". It's a challenge to find a game that looks good on the card.

TheLazy1 wrote:

PCX2: SGL (or OpenGL wrapper when I want higher visual quality)

SGL is the native API. It's not related to OpenGL, and the only wrappers for it suck and aren't very futureproof for anything beyond 1998-era quake2 (id tech2) games. It certainly doesn't look any better and the SGL exclusives...are very few, and often only sold in certain regions (England and Japan)

sliderider wrote:

Yes, picture time. I want to see this rare 486 class chip that you never saw before.

So big enough picture? 😀
http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/486SX2-66.jpg

Still running fine in a system.

leileilol wrote:

I occassionally upload bad D3D shots from the PCX-2 in a certain "PowerVR Fun Thread". It's a challenge to find a game that looks good on the card.

A Fun Thread, indeed. The status quo for the PowerVR chips appears to be "it works mostly, sometimes". 😁

Awww, but I don't remember having that many problems with mine.
I was excited because it was a unique card and my first 3d accelerator. (S3 Virge does not count 🤣)

I guess I'll just play around and find out what feels right.

[Edit]
I used the Apocalypse 3DX drivers instead, I remembered hearing that they were better than Matrox's.

From a few benchmarks I looked at (hard to find now) the G200 completely blows the Rage Pro out of the water.

On the other hand, the Rage Pro I have has a TV tuner and memory upgrade.
But I probably won't end up using it, maybe to play around with and do comparisons.

TheLazy1 wrote:

From a few benchmarks I looked at (hard to find now) the G200 completely blows the Rage Pro out of the water.

Which Rage Pro you mean? Mine benchmarks tells me that G200 8MB have in glquake 640x480x16 52fps. Now about your rage pro cards.

Rage LT Pro 8MB agp - 23,4fps
3D Rage Pro PCI 4MB SGR - 26,8fps
Rage 128 Pro 32MB AGP - 130,8fps

Unreal D3D - matrox g200 - 37,26fps
Rage LT Pro 8MB agp - 23,66fps
3D Rage Pro PCI 4MB SGR - 15,07fps
Rage 128 Pro 32MB AGP - 84,27fps

Oh, it's not a rage 128 that's for sure.
It does have a memory stick populated though, would that work if I popped it into my Matrox Millennium G200?

I don't know if the Rage Pro's memory upgrade would work or not. The Millennium G200 uses SGRAM while most of the other G200 cards used SDRAM.

Also, it's likely that the G200 will automatically underclock if a RAM upgrade is installed. This was done because the SODIMM slot apparently causes signal degradation. This means that the card will be slower unless you specifically need the extra RAM (probably for higher 2D resolutions). You can read more if you do a search over on the MURC forum.

Wow, I had no idea.
That's okay though since I'm mostly planning on using DOS 😀

Here's my Intel i740. Sealed forever in captivity. The video card inside must be fast and dangerous, cause well, it has a cheetah on the front of the box.

Ok, thats it! I'm going to my attic now and make some pics even though it is dark.

brb...

Edit2:Posted the wrong cards here 🤣.

Heres the Intel ones:

The smaller one has 2 more RAM chips on the other side of the PCB

Edit3: The board with the SX2:
The board is just so totally cool! It has 3 VLB slots, a coincell battery, 2 different kinds of RAM and has a sticker on the chipset so when I replace the sticker I can have any chipset I want!! 😁 😁 😁
On top of that, the cache chips are all write back as it sais so on the chips themselves! I'm teh lucky ahaha!! 😜

Please check with ctcm7 is this cache chips are just fake. (Even if BIOS reports any size)

I have 2 boards like that with fake cache, except both have PCI and only 72pin ram.
I think their model numbers are M919 or something.

elianda wrote:

Please check with ctcm7 is this cache chips are just fake. (Even if BIOS reports any size)

I've gotten the board just a couple days ago and I'm fairly sure the cache is fake anyway 😜
When building a new 486 I'll just pick one of my other 486 boards 😉
From what I've read on the net, these boards tended to be horribly unstable so I'm not keen to actually try the board out. Someone I knew told me he wanted to get rid of all his computerstuff and he told me he had a 486 board but he had no idea what it was. Ofcourse I accepted! All was for free anyway 😀

If anyone has a PCI i740, some high-res photos would be sweet. 😁 Those cards are a bit...different.

swaaye wrote:

If anyone has a PCI i740, some high-res photos would be sweet. 😁 Those cards are a bit...different.

I have a total of 5 i740 cards, but they are all AGP. One of them is the popular Real3D StarFighter, complete with box and all the goodies inside. Been looking for the PCI version of it for some time, but they are hard to come by and/or pricey.

And yes, they are a bit more interesting then their AGP counterparts.

I heard the i740 cards were only electrically compatible with AGP but didn't actually use any AGP features which is why they are so horrible. Is that right?

No they heavily use AGP for texture storage. Instead of the way later AGP cards would use AGP texture memory as overflow storage, the i740 uses it as the only texture storage. Oops. 😁 Voodoo2 and RivaTNT cleaned house.

Some info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740 .

The PCI card emulates AGP texture memory on the card.

@Tetrium

Sure smells like a fake cache board 😉

* Cache chips are soldered directly on the board, not socketed = smells like PC Chips fake boards.

* The chipset manafacturer name, model etc is on a sticker on the chipset =
smells like PC Chips fake boards.

I've been wondering: why would a hardware manufacturer put fake cache on their board? Doesn't the additional chip and soldering works translate to additional costs?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

I've been wondering: why would a hardware manufacturer put fake cache on their board? Doesn't the additional chip and soldering works translate to additional costs?

It was the cache chips themselves that was worth their weight in gold
L2 cache was apparently very innovative and hightech back in the "crap-pc-low-budget" days