Reply 23280 of 27549, by dionb
- Rank
- l33t++
Ugh, not my best day today...
Got a lot of 6 early VLB cards with obscure IIT/Xtec AGX016A chips on them. Reputedly slow XGA-clones, but actually support higher graphics modes with >1MB RAM, so interesting nonetheless - and 6 VLB cards that didn't cost me at least a single kidney isn't at all bad in any case. Assuming they work of course.
So I dusted off my VLB test bench (Cyrix 5x86-100 on a UMC-based board) and - nothing, not even with the original Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 in it. Bugger. Test system died on me. Tested my early PCI tet bench (Cyrix 5x86-100 on a UMC PCI-based board, for nice 1:1 comparisons) which fortunately did work without issues. Swapped out PSUs and RAM: nope, both work in the PCI set, not VLB. So swapped CPU. Good news: both CPUs still fine. Bad news: must be the motherboard then.
Worse news: broke the little plastic clips holding the heatsink onto one of the 5x86s while doing that. So now have a board to fix and a new clip to source or bodge. And I still don't know if these VLB cards do anything.
Fortunately I do have alternatives, another VLB-based 486 system running my old sound cards and a Pentium VLB system, but both are built into irritting AT minitowers with cables out the back that are hard to reach. Oh, and there's my Alaris Leopard 2, which is in a NOS case (generic, not IBM) in its original packaging at the back of the cupboard waiting for suitable display options. Come to think of it, that would be the ideal pairing with an early, oddball card. It would however require the card to run happily in 16b VLB mode. Oh well, time to get digging and testing.