so this is just a guess but: 430fx is a pci 2.0 (and its an early one i think), the 440lx is pci 2.1 compliant, while i cannot find any specific info for the m64, one specific card was pci 2.2;
i may be entirely wrong here though... i can't find any strict information saying the 2 versions of pci are not compatible

Newer PCI versions are know not to work on 486 boards. I haven't tested with Socket 7 boards.

Hi Clueless,

I've been there done that so many times, trying to stuff a brand new video card into an ancient system, lot of hair-pulling....😮)

Is that TNT2 a dual output card? Also, how do you disable the onboard video, via jumper, BIOS, or auto? If the onboard video disables automatically, then as a test, plug in the TNT2, but connect your monitor to the onboard video. If you then still get video via the onboard, the TNT2 isn't compatible, and you'll have to try another card.

My reasoning is, sometimes a video card is just "too new", and/or it's a System BIOS issue. I believe, depending on the machine vintage / BIOS version / BIOS brand etc, sometimes a new video card is not identified as a video card, not seen by the system BIOS as a video card, and then is basically treated as a non-video add-on board, sound lan etc.

The system then either doesn't POST, outputs a beep code saying No Video Present, or on systems that automatically disable onboard video when an add-on card is installed, continues to output video from the onboard chip, and the add-on card is simply ignored.

I once bought a Geforce 9800 PCI card, and tried plugging it into a Tyan PIII VIA chipset board with Award BIOS, no joy. I then tried it in an even older DEC 200i PPro 200Mhz 440FX with Phoenix BIOS, it worked!

I think it can also depend on how well the BIOS is written. You might try a BIOS update, otherwise it's back to finding another suitable replacement. I hope this is informative Clueless!

Bellarmine

bellarmine wrote:

Hi Clueless, […]
Show full quote

Hi Clueless,

I've been there done that so many times, trying to stuff a brand new video card into an ancient system, lot of hair-pulling....😮)

Is that TNT2 a dual output card? Also, how do you disable the onboard video, via jumper, BIOS, or auto? If the onboard video disables automatically, then as a test, plug in the TNT2, but connect your monitor to the onboard video. If you then still get video via the onboard, the TNT2 isn't compatible, and you'll have to try another card.

My reasoning is, sometimes a video card is just "too new", and/or it's a System BIOS issue. I believe, depending on the machine vintage / BIOS version / BIOS brand etc, sometimes a new video card is not identified as a video card, not seen by the system BIOS as a video card, and then is basically treated as a non-video add-on board, sound lan etc.

The system then either doesn't POST, outputs a beep code saying No Video Present, or on systems that automatically disable onboard video when an add-on card is installed, continues to output video from the onboard chip, and the add-on card is simply ignored.

I once bought a Geforce 9800 PCI card, and tried plugging it into a Tyan PIII VIA chipset board with Award BIOS, no joy. I then tried it in an even older DEC 200i PPro 200Mhz 440FX with Phoenix BIOS, it worked!

I think it can also depend on how well the BIOS is written. You might try a BIOS update, otherwise it's back to finding another suitable replacement. I hope this is informative Clueless!

Bellarmine

no onboard video in a 430TX

Thank you guys. It does appear that the PCI spec is not compatible with my 430FX board. One thing I never noticed in the original listing until now is the "Dell 9629U" part. It looks like this came out of a Dell OptiPlex GX110:
http://www.serverworlds.com/dell-9629u-nvidia … pci-video-card/

It's not the end of the world. 😀 It will probably work very well in my K6-2 system that only has PCI slots.

candle_86 wrote:

no onboard video in a 430TX

Thread starter clearly wrote onboard Cirrus Logic. Back in the days me and a friend tried to get a Nvidia Riva128 to work in his Packard Bell Legend with a Pentium 133, he ended up with a Voodoo 2 instead.

mrau wrote:

so this is just a guess but: 430fx is a pci 2.0 (and its an early one i think), the 440lx is pci 2.1 compliant, while i cannot find any specific info for the m64, one specific card was pci 2.2;
i may be entirely wrong here though... i can't find any strict information saying the 2 versions of pci are not compatible

I think you're onto something. According to the first reply in this thread, this card is PCI 2.3 spec:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/d … 3514/t/19604232

I recently experience a similar issue where two known-good PCI cards failed to work in an old Socket 7 machine, but a Trio64 worked fine. I assumed it was a PCI spec issue at the time, I never investigated further though.

I recently purchased a brand new PCI TNT2m64 from Aliexpress, works perfectly in my Epox Ep58 mvp3 motherboard, but nothing at all in
my 486. Then I got a cheap one from an ebay seller here, and that worked in my 486 perfectly.

It can be a "Luck of the Draw" type of thing.

Imperious wrote:

I recently purchased a brand new PCI TNT2m64 from Aliexpress, works perfectly in my Epox Ep58 mvp3 motherboard, but nothing at all in
my 486. Then I got a cheap one from an ebay seller here, and that worked in my 486 perfectly.

It can be a "Luck of the Draw" type of thing.

Any idea on the brand, model # of the "cheap one from an ebay seller"?

clueless1 wrote on 2016-03-31, 14:22:

Imperious wrote:

I recently purchased a brand new PCI TNT2m64 from Aliexpress, works perfectly in my Epox Ep58 mvp3 motherboard, but nothing at all in
my 486. Then I got a cheap one from an ebay seller here, and that worked in my 486 perfectly.

It can be a "Luck of the Draw" type of thing.

Any idea on the brand, model # of the "cheap one from an ebay seller"?

Hey Buddy

I naively bought this card as well for cheap, thinking it would work in a mid 90s Packard Bell (a non-mmx P166), and much like you discovered it wasn't recognized for whatever reason, despite working fine in another machine. Which I found odd because the PCI revisions matched what the boards chipset supported, and an old trident card worked as expected in this PB. I chalked it up to a crappy / buggy BIOS and wasted a lot of time trying to find a replacement (e.g. a mrbios) to no avail.

Anyway I was disassembling, cleaning, and upgrading for use as a DOS/Win9x box when I discovered it would recognize a mid-2000s wireless G PCI card without a problem (in win95 to boot).

Fast forward a day or two later when I had the idea - what if I put in the VGA card now, alongside the networking card? Lo and behold, the machine recognized it and disabled on board video. Win95 booted and asked for drivers. Bingo!

So, maybe this will help you. FYI my 430VX-based Packard Bell has a riser card as it's a desktop model, not a tower. I placed the networking card in the top-most PCI slot (farthest from the mobo), and the VGA card in the next one down.

Hope this helps you, or someone else.

Good luck!

That's curious. I wonder why would that work.

Typing out loud, here, but if I remember right, Plug-n-play goes through three phases: enumeration, arbitration, and then configuration.

Hard to see how adding the extra card would affecting the enumeration or configuration phases, so by process of elimination, it must alter the resource arbitration, yes?

So in that case, the additional card's resource requests causes the resources assigned to the video card to change, and somehow that must make the combination functional.

Does that make sense?

drosse1meyer wrote on 2020-11-21, 23:45:

[...] Hey Buddy […]
Show full quote

[...]
Hey Buddy

I naively bought this card as well for cheap, thinking it would work in a mid 90s Packard Bell (a non-mmx P166), and much like you discovered it wasn't recognized for whatever reason, despite working fine in another machine. Which I found odd because the PCI revisions matched what the boards chipset supported, and an old trident card worked as expected in this PB. I chalked it up to a crappy / buggy BIOS and wasted a lot of time trying to find a replacement (e.g. a mrbios) to no avail.

Anyway I was disassembling, cleaning, and upgrading for use as a DOS/Win9x box when I discovered it would recognize a mid-2000s wireless G PCI card without a problem (in win95 to boot).

Fast forward a day or two later when I had the idea - what if I put in the VGA card now, alongside the networking card? Lo and behold, the machine recognized it and disabled on board video. Win95 booted and asked for drivers. Bingo!

So, maybe this will help you. FYI my 430VX-based Packard Bell has a riser card as it's a desktop model, not a tower. I placed the networking card in the top-most PCI slot (farthest from the mobo), and the VGA card in the next one down.

Hope this helps you, or someone else.

Good luck!

Good hunch 😀

For what it's worth, that motherboard is almost certainly a Intel NV430VX (PB used multiple versions of it, with single and split voltage, with and without L2 cache and with onboard S3 Trio and Virge)

douglar wrote on 2020-11-22, 18:09:

That's curious. I wonder why would that work. […]
Show full quote

That's curious. I wonder why would that work.

Typing out loud, here, but if I remember right, Plug-n-play goes through three phases: enumeration, arbitration, and then configuration.

Hard to see how adding the extra card would affecting the enumeration or configuration phases, so by process of elimination, it must alter the resource arbitration, yes?

So in that case, the additional card's resource requests causes the resources assigned to the video card to change, and somehow that must make the combination functional.

Does that make sense?

Incidentally I was playing around with this some more today and the 'trick' only works with the Motorola WPCI810.

When matching the vid card with two different NICs and a sound card, onboard video remains active with no output from the new card. Oh well.

Also it makes the machine a little wonky, for example, win95 reports a problem with the mpu sound device, and a few times the machine hung when exiting games. OpenGL 'stars' test reports 20 FPS, regardless of resolution, so I imagine its largely CPU bound (p-166), or possibly something messed up with drivers, or directx, or what have you (windows from this era can be a pita). I may install win98 to see what happens as it should have better all around device support.

The downside to all of this is the Motorola driver set and tools work don't work on win 95, so unless I change OSes, I'm using all my PCI slots 🤣. Honestly I think this machine would be better for DOS gaming, and maybe 2d windows stuff (Diablo, myst, etc.)

Since one of these ethernet cards supports PXE, I spent about half of today trying to set up a Clonezilla PXE boot server to make an image of this hard disk for later restoration/safekeeping. I eventually got it working (bit of a pain), but it was a waste of time as none of their linux images have support for such an old CPU / chipset? Has anyone done this before, or know of a better method? Linux boots but seems to kernel panic and scrolls too fast.

In the end, I set up an XP VM, installed ghostcast server, and made ghost boot disks. I was then able to finally capture a disk image over ethernet. The disk read and network performance was quite good IMO for such an old machine.

dionb wrote on 2020-11-22, 19:17:

drosse1meyer wrote on 2020-11-21, 23:45:

[...] Hey Buddy […]
Show full quote

[...]
Hey Buddy

I naively bought this card as well for cheap, thinking it would work in a mid 90s Packard Bell (a non-mmx P166), and much like you discovered it wasn't recognized for whatever reason, despite working fine in another machine. Which I found odd because the PCI revisions matched what the boards chipset supported, and an old trident card worked as expected in this PB. I chalked it up to a crappy / buggy BIOS and wasted a lot of time trying to find a replacement (e.g. a mrbios) to no avail.

Anyway I was disassembling, cleaning, and upgrading for use as a DOS/Win9x box when I discovered it would recognize a mid-2000s wireless G PCI card without a problem (in win95 to boot).

Fast forward a day or two later when I had the idea - what if I put in the VGA card now, alongside the networking card? Lo and behold, the machine recognized it and disabled on board video. Win95 booted and asked for drivers. Bingo!

So, maybe this will help you. FYI my 430VX-based Packard Bell has a riser card as it's a desktop model, not a tower. I placed the networking card in the top-most PCI slot (farthest from the mobo), and the VGA card in the next one down.

Hope this helps you, or someone else.

Good luck!

Good hunch 😀

For what it's worth, that motherboard is almost certainly a Intel NV430VX (PB used multiple versions of it, with single and split voltage, with and without L2 cache and with onboard S3 Trio and Virge)

Yea it's a PB "Synera", 430vx, single voltage, L2, and Virge 325. I upgraded the RAM to 64 mb.

I may post some pics and other stuff. It's a nice little machine which can run the gamut of DOS, 3.1, 95, and 98.

However I also bought a 440bx - based Pentium II system, which I think will be much better for late 90s type 3d games, so I may have some more stuff to share 😀 Still waiting for it to come in the mail though.

I've had the same problem with an Rage XL PCI bought new from ebay.No post in a 430VX board and working fine in a 430TX, I also suspect that the problem is the PCI spec like with later VIA USB cards.

I'd guess the problem is not PCI spec but rather the lack of 3.3v supply on older boards (Remember AT does not have a native 3.3V rail). Many newer graphics work off (at least partly) the 3v3 rail, I know for a fact the ubiquitous ebay Rage XL does.
I have a 430TX board whose PCI slot only supply 5 and 12V, to fix it i just wired a DC-DC stepdown converter going from 5 to 3V3 to the PCI slot pins that are supposed to carry 3.3V.

Interesting, I had not thought about that possibility, and it was just this case I suppose, since the board with the 430vx was AT and the one with the 430TX was ATX. So I'm sure has PCI 3volts support. But if I was to make a mod, I prefer to mod the graphics card instead of the motherboard.

andrea wrote on 2020-11-26, 13:32:

I have a 430TX board whose PCI slot only supply 5 and 12V, to fix it i just wired a DC-DC stepdown converter going from 5 to 3V3 to the PCI slot pins that are supposed to carry 3.3V.

Can you post a picture of your mod? I'd like to see how it looks.