That's one ugly looking mobo.

bushwack wrote:

That's one ugly looking mobo.

yeah, it looks like crap

This is the forth AST PC I own and they all have hardware that looks like shit...but my experience with these machines so far is that they are rock solid and well built

Amigaz wrote:

bushwack wrote:

That's one ugly looking mobo.

yeah, it looks like crap

This is the forth AST PC I own and they all have hardware that looks like shit...but my experience with these machines so far is that they are rock solid and well built

Hehe

But really, I've never even heard of upgradable mobo videos that took DRAM chips. Does anyone even know where to get SOJ EDO chips for video upgrades? I could use some.

The SOJs must be common in AST boxes. I had an AST Advantage! 486SX/33 Model No. 273W that used a 256 X 16, 70 ns SOJ to upgrade the 512 KB onboard video memory to 1 MB. I got it here in 1995 (but they are probably out of business):

L.A. Trade
22825 Lockness Ave.
Torrance, CA 90501-5103

You may have better luck looking for scrap AST machines than graphics cards for your chips.

Hi Amigaz, there is a seller on ebay that I have bought these chips from recently. I added 2MB of RAM to my Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 with them successfully. Let me see if I can possibly get you an item number if he still has some.

OK, try ebay item# 300362056812 , as these are what worked in my Stealth. These are 256k x 16 EDO, but I believe the seller has others too. Maybe a lead towards finding some anyways! Good luck!

There is also ebay item# 230373049770. This is probably them, but they are 80ns and you need 70ns....would these work??

386DX40 wrote:

Hi Amigaz, there is a seller on ebay that I have bought these chips from recently. I added 2MB of RAM to my Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 with them successfully. Let me see if I can possibly get you an item number if he still has some.

OK, try ebay item# 300362056812 , as these are what worked in my Stealth. These are 256k x 16 EDO, but I believe the seller has others too. Maybe a lead towards finding some anyways! Good luck!

There is also ebay item# 230373049770. This is probably them, but they are 80ns and you need 70ns....would these work??

The chips you are refering to are the larger, more common version

akula65 wrote:

The SOJs must be common in AST boxes. I had an AST Advantage! 486SX/33 Model No. 273W that used a 256 X 16, 70 ns SOJ to upgrad […]
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The SOJs must be common in AST boxes. I had an AST Advantage! 486SX/33 Model No. 273W that used a 256 X 16, 70 ns SOJ to upgrade the 512 KB onboard video memory to 1 MB. I got it here in 1995 (but they are probably out of business):

L.A. Trade
22825 Lockness Ave.
Torrance, CA 90501-5103

You may have better luck looking for scrap AST machines than graphics cards for your chips.

Finding a scrap machine in this country is virtually impossible...recycling has been too efficient here.....it's like everything pre pentium III has vanished from the face of the earth 😜

It didn't vanish from the face of the earth. It's all sitting in landfills in China.

Something looks funny about those SOJ sockets on your motherboard. They don't look long enough to be the same ones used on most of the PCI videocards I've seen. How much memory is installed currently? Is it 2mb upgradable to 4, or 1mb upgradable to 2mb?

Is this the chip you need?

http://cgi.ebay.com/DRAM-V53C8256HK45-MOSEL-S … =item5ad4c9876f

I suggest finding a cheap PCI or VLB card that has these chips soldered on, and carefully remove them with a sharp tool. I did this one time to upgrade a diamond stealth64 card.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

It didn't vanish from the face of the earth. It's all sitting in landfills in China.

Something looks funny about those SOJ sockets on your motherboard. They don't look long enough to be the same ones used on most of the PCI videocards I've seen. How much memory is installed currently? Is it 2mb upgradable to 4, or 1mb upgradable to 2mb?

Yeah, or we sent them to some underdeveloped country to be used again 😜

These sockets are much smaller than your ordinary soj sockets found for example on your ordinary, crappy Virge gfx card from mid to late 90's

The upgrade is 1mb --> 2mb

"welcome to the non standard world of Dell, AST, ALR, Compaq etc etc" 😵 😜 😳 😒 😖 🙁 😢

It's probably cheaper to just not bother with this motherboard.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

It's probably cheaper to just not bother with this motherboard.

Yep, at least I upgraded the cpu and memory so it can run some more games 😉

As far as I can remember those tiny memory chips can be found in a IBM PC-730.
Update: it is even more weird. There are regular size SOJs for the S3 864 and small size SOJs for cache - probably the hardest cache to find.