Hello all,

Recently, I came across this weird S3 805i VLB card.

I have not messed with it yet, as my office is in a state of disarray while I repair my main computer, but I figured I’d post this here in the likes that either someone has seen something like this before or someone knows who made this?

It appears to be pretty unique; the 110MHz RAMDAC is standard, sure, but there’s a bunch of nonstandard things about this card that I am curious about: namely, the memory clock (I presume that’s what “MCLK” refers to in the silkscreening below the VGA port) is adjustable in hardware; the board uses an off-the-shelf Chrontel clock gen; and there’s silkscreening for apparently other types (or a second?) RAMDAC?

Regarding that first point, with respect to adjustable MCLK, has anyone seen this before on a VLB card? I’m thinking this is the first I’ve seen this on any VLB card, and, aside from using the MCLK DOS program to edit memory clocks, I’ve never seen end user access to such a feature. I’m even more intrigued by the prospect that some company would’ve sold a card with such a feature.

Also, why the Chrontel clock gen? Most ISA/VLB cards I’ve seen, especially those with S3 805-derivatives, aren’t nearly this sophisticated.

I suppose I’m really just baffled because it seems odd to offer these features on an S3 805i, which is objectively not the greatest graphics chip and, frankly, a weird one. The 805i’s memory interleaving is nice in Windows, but it’s still stuck with a 16-bit host bus, afaik (feel free to correct me on that, but I thought it’d be the same since the S3 805 and 805-Q/P variants are all 16-bit host bus only).

I’ve got an ELSA Winner1000 ISA with this chip and it seems pretty fast, but I’ve never been bothered to check the clocks on it. Does anyone know how their S3 805 cards (ISA/VLB/PCI) are clocked memory-wise?

I am going to add another mb of RAM to this card and see what it can do. Hopefully those 70ns NEC modules play nice. I’ll report back with my findings. I am considering a thread in System Specs as, soon, I plan to do some more testing of various hardware I’ve accumulated over the years.

Thanks for your insight and thoughts! As always, I appreciate it greatly!