Sure, you are welcome to take a look at the Intel SAI2 BIOS. It is the first or second link on Google Search and downloadable from Intel. It would add quite a bit of cool factor to get a PCI-X graphic card working on a dual Tualatin box. This particular motherboard is very stable, will take 4 GB of memory (resource-dependent), and has two PCI-X slots. The motherboard is also very inexpensive and plentiful, but the lack of an AGP slot hurts. If it had dual channel memory and no AGP, it might have been more popular. If the PCI-X Parhelia does work out, it means I'll need to sacrifice either a PCI-X Ultra320 SCSI controller, or a PCI-X 1000 mbit network card. I think that is a no brainer! Network/HDD throughput is the major practicality of the PCI-X slots, but I still only have a 100 mbit router.

I don't have any problem web browsing on my dual Tualatin computers, although Chrome has become about twice as slow in the past 3 months. For Flash and youtube videos, Firefox 3.6.24 works without any skips. Chrome seems to be able to use both CPUs simultaneously, but I fear as Chrome continues to inflate, it might be the end of the road in the next 1-2 years for the Tualatins. All my CAD and engineering-related programs work like a champ on the Tualatin, albiet they are not all the very latest versions. Even LabVIEW 2010 worked fine on my Dual PIII-850. The only issue these days seems to be web-related.

I really have not performed an in depth comparison of what the upper-limit is for graphics cards on dual Tualatin computers for web browsing. All I know is that a Matrox G450 32 MB displays web pages a lot slower than an NVIDIA GeForce 6200/6600 or Parhelia and that the Parhelia has a marginally crisper display than the GeForce 6xxx series.

2GB will pass for Win7, but it gets eaten up pretty quickly. I'll need to track down those low density 1 GB DDR, CL2 sticks when the time is right.

@feipoa, you wrote that your motherboard posted fine with the parhelia card. i need a clarification whether you got the display from the parhelia during boot. i'm asking this because i have a workaround only when the discrete card behind the pci reverse bridge is not initialized at boot due to pci bridge spec compliance. In that case there is a easy temporary solution before going for a permanent bios mod.
aside, i dowloaded the intel bios and started analysing it. mine was a award bios 6.00 whereas the intel one is that of phoenix. though award was later taken over by phoenix, there is a difference in the bios structures between the two. i'm trying to figure out the structure and also get the phoenix bios utilities. the cbrom version i tried didn't work and later will try with different versions. the phoenix bios editor(windows) was able to open your bios but with some errors.

Indeed, those BIOS editors are quite selective as to which revisions they will work on.

I do not quite follow what clarification you need. I had only one video card in the computer at the time of testing and it was the Parhelia. With just the Parhelia installed, I am able to enter the CMOS settings, POST, and boot into Windows XP provided the graphics card drivers are not installed.

i thought that it had some onboard video which the system will get defaulted to if the discrete card doesn't get detected automatically even if set to boot from it primarily. In your case, as the system is booting fine with the parhelia, my workaround is not applicable.

can you recall the error code you got in windows xp device management panel? since there was only one graphics card, definitely it will not be a resource conflict. In my case, i was getting a code12 error(not enough resources).

In the PCI-X slot, error code 12. See images.

In PCI slot, Windows disables the serial ATA controller, for whatever reason.

This is going back a few years, but I recall that the Matrox card didn't work right in the regular PCI slot. Even routine desktop work was really bogged down. Even though there are no longer any Matrox-related errors in Windows, something was amiss.

Can you boot to dos with a floppy containing the attached files, run the tool and send the pci dump? the cmd is "pcitool /DA:pcidump" and it saves the result in txt format. Also could you run the msinfo32 tool in windows and send the .nfo file?

missed the attachment.

Under which conditions do you want the PCI dump? Can I do this with the existing Quadro FX600 installed?

Ideally without the Quadro FX600. I'm not sure how the system bios will react to 02 PCI graphics cards as you cannot choose one over the other in the CMOS setup options. The PCI dump will give a snapshot of the Graphics card as well as the onboard PCI reverse bridge's requirements(Memory and IO space) and the ranges assigned by the BIOS. If these ranges are not assigned then i guess a code 12 error results once windows loads. The workaround is to manually assign these ranges through the pcitool by first booting to DOS and then chainload to boot Windows for which i use Grub.

Unfortunately I am not in a situation where I can disassemble my wife's computer to test out the Parhelia 256 PCI at this time. To uninstall the Quadro FX600 and its drivers for running msinfo32 will be difficult. If you think the DOS pcitool will be sufficient, I can probably do this within the next few days or sooner.

EDIT1: Those attached Parhelia screenshots are from years past. I may already have the msinfo shots you need. Which ones are you looking for?

EDIT2: Is the following attached image of any value?

i can understand, output of dos pcitool is sufficient for preliminary troubleshooting. Do you only have the snapshots of msinfo and not the complete .nfo file? If not, you can run the cmd "pcitool /DB:pcidump" in DOS which will save the result in a proprietary format. I can then use it to get the complete picture in windows from the software.

I only have some select screenshots with my digicam. I'll try to run the DOS pcitool as soon as convenient. I'm glad to see that others have some interest in this unique PCI-X graphics card.

It's OK, i will wait. I won't lie, my interest is mainly in that of a pci graphics card with an onboard pci bridge and not this rare card in particular. I guess, people who are interested, if any, will be in minority too as it is useful only for those with no AGP slot. I also want to know the impact of PCI slot limitations in comparison with AGP for old games.

I am also interested to see how this PCI-X card compares to its AGP counterpart. The AGP card at 4x should have double the throughput of this PCI-X card. 66 MHz, 64-bit PCI-X should have similar throughput to an AGP 2x slot. I've read that people didn't see a large jump from 2x AGP to 4x, so perhaps there won't be much difference in the PCI-X Parhelia and the AGP Parhelia.

I think what you said is correct especially for old games where the needed transfer rates may not be high necessarily more so with enough onboard vram. I'm finding interesting & strange results benching the gt 520 pci card with 3 different systems (P3 850, Celeron 700, Core2Duo), the relationship between different parameters and actual gaming performance in dos. I will share the results later today.
feipoa, when you find time, can you throw in the quadro fx600 benchmark(phil's vga) too so that we can later compare it with parhelia pci-x if it works.

A round of benching(Phil's VGA & others) with GT520 PCI in friend's Core2Duo vs my P3(in brackets) to identify the differences, bottleneck, gpu's max potential:

3DBench2: 110.3 (104.6)

PCPBench: 157.9 (102.5)

Doom: 2074 (2072) realtics

Quake: 128.1 (79.3) FPS

Vesatest(Bank Switch, LFB, Bank Switch & WC, LFB & WC): (8,21,8,21) (8,54,8,80) FPS

Speedsys Vesa Memory Bandwidth: 9.2 (9.2) MB/s

Vspeed(DRAM to Banked VGA, LFB): 11.06, 26.91 (11.06, 66.13) MB/s

Windows 2D bench with Core2Duo Integrated Graphics vs P3 with GT520(in brackets):

BENCHMARK: DIRECT DRAWING TO VISIBLE DEVICE

Text: 35186 (25088)chars/sec
Line: 45956 (7867)lines/sec
Polygon: 9975 (6058)polygons/sec
Rectangle: 2978 (4611)rects/sec
Arc/Ellipse: 9972 (2591)ellipses/sec
Blitting: 6338 (13793)operations/sec
Stretching: 532 (30)operations/sec
Splines/Bézier: 26560 (4771)splines/sec
Score: 1475(811)

Ideally a benchmark should assess the performance of the system as a whole as well as identify the bottlenecks of individual components in parts. I'm afraid that I'm veering into mindless benchmarking because of the inability to identify the bottleneck with the help of these benchmarks or atleast to derive a pattern out of it.

Does DOOM use banked VGA, which might explain its poor performance in both the Core2Duo and P3 systems with GT520 PCI.

Not sure I can help you out with that DOOM question.

I will have to pick this work up at a later point. I am currently involved with a renovation fiasco.

I came across this in another forum where the OP had a P3 600 MHz system with PCI graphics card(6200, HD2400, 8400gs) and he mentions,

As for games, well around March 2008 i upgraded to WinXP home Edition to try it out, bad idea. My computer was holding me back, […]
Show full quote

As for games, well around March 2008 i upgraded to WinXP home Edition to try it out, bad idea. My computer was holding me back, also XP is terrible with playing old games. Thus going back to win98se, the same games which i played on XP, plays a million times better on win9x.
(WINXP) Far Cry - 1024x768 everything to low to high - 8-15fps.
(WIN9X) Far Cry - 1280x104 everything to medium to highest w/AAX2 - 30-87fps.

(WINXP) Quake 4 - Any settings i have tried using various PCI cards, unplayable.
(WIN9X) Quake 4 - 1280X1024 , everything on High, Shadows off, AAX2 - 30-80fps.
Those are just 2 examples. Seems like my computer couldn't handle XP, but also if you want to enjoy your older games( NFS games, Turok 2, Blood 2, etc ) in peace, its wise to keep win9x.

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/new … gs-512mb.74848/
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/fil … e-on-gpu.72480/
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/my-b ... 7/[b](LOL)[/b]

Is win XP that bad when it comes to gaming as i don't have a win9x to compare it with? I sympathize with this guy that he didn't come across vogons(where he belongs) or probably already here under an alias.

@feipoa, which OS you were running when you tried the Parhelia and found the performance to be unsatisfactory? Good luck with the renovation.

"unsatisfactory" is an understatement. Any ISA Trident graphics card worked far better.

I was, and still am, using WinXP Pro in that computer.