Doesn't look like anything to me.

Could just be a broken PCI card. Got any memory on it?

firage wrote:

Doesn't look like anything to me.

Could just be a broken PCI card. Got any memory on it?

There's (2MB I believe.) of on-board memory just out of frame.

Plain old PCI card there. My S3 Savage PCI also has longer gold contacts.
The fact that you can't get it working doesn't mean it's not made for PCI, or does it?

sprcorreia wrote:

Plain old PCI card there. My S3 Savage PCI also has longer gold contacts.
The fact that you can't get it working doesn't mean it's not made for PCI, or does it?

I just put 2 and 2 together and decided I would ask before going to my 2nd guess (I've got a rare card, but it's broke)

That's standard pitch PCI. ISA terminals are much fatter, spaced more apart.

Idk, maybe try it in a PCI-X slot? It's possible they just don't work flat out.

Nothing ISA on that picture. I'd say it just a PCI card.

Plain old PCI.
Flip the upper card and align the pins and the cutaway, take another photo (smaller please).

Another reason it does not work in a normal PC might be that it was not meant for use in a regular PC, but rather in a system that uses PCI slots but not the usual implementation... (Mac, PC-98, probably a few others)

Although looking at your card, it seems to be missing components (C56 just below RAM socket, various stuff in the upper right corner).

They don't miss. They just weren't there in the first place.

But it's funny how the bracket was cut - looks like hand cut.

if you're going to attach a picture like that, do it by link, don't embed!

kixs wrote:

They don't miss. They just weren't there in the first place.

Yeah, that's what I thought at first, until I noticed how at resistor R8 (one of the missing ones) the solder pads were nice and clean while on some other places they look like something was attached and are dirty...

Agreed with the rest (obviously). The contact traces are a bit longer, but there isn't any special slot just for that.
If the cards don't work, have you tried cleaning the contact traces? This resurrected many cards.
Most people use either rubbing alcohol or a pencil eraser and reported success 😀

AbandonwareGuy, maybe your cards didn't work because the motherboard you tried them in, is of too recent make?
I can imagine some of the very old PCI cards may actually have trouble working correctly in some newer machine, even though it officially should work.

dude, that's a regular PCI card. I have a Cirrus CL-GD5xx that sports an identical PCI connector. It looks a little weird because it's a cheap early PCI card. I think I have an old trident PCI card with a similar looking PCI connector.

There's no way a PCI card will fit in a ISA slot because:

- ISA cotacts are spaced differently - 2 PCI contacts would touch one ISA contact and would probably make adjacent ISA contacts short creating magic smoke
- ISA contacts are longer (even longer then the ones of the card you posted)
- ISA cards fit in face up, while PCI cards fit face down on a motherboard, so the VGA connector would face towards the inside of the computer
- ISA connector is A LOT LONGER

^as such, it would be physically impossible for a card to be compatible with both PCI and ISA using the same connector. The only reason that PCI card won't work is because it's dead.

If a PCI / ISA combo card would exist, it would have a PCI connector on top and a ISA connector on the bottom. Something like this:

ISA / EISA combo card:

AGP / PCI-E Combo card:

Tetrium wrote:

Agreed with the rest (obviously). The contact traces are a bit longer, but there isn't any special slot just for that. If the ca […]
Show full quote

Agreed with the rest (obviously). The contact traces are a bit longer, but there isn't any special slot just for that.
If the cards don't work, have you tried cleaning the contact traces? This resurrected many cards.
Most people use either rubbing alcohol or a pencil eraser and reported success 😀

AbandonwareGuy, maybe your cards didn't work because the motherboard you tried them in, is of too recent make?
I can imagine some of the very old PCI cards may actually have trouble working correctly in some newer machine, even though it officially should work.

I tried it in my two oldest (oldest currently working anyways) machines.

A 1999 Compaq Deskpro EN933
and a 2003 Dell Dimension 4600

I have a Digital Celebris XL590 with PCI that also happens to be from 1999 but I messed up the CPU daughterboard on it (while trying to fix a "Check 512k address lines" beep code that started after I sat the PC down a bit too hard. Not like slamming it or anything, just slightly harder than normal) so naturally that doesn't presently boot (and I never could get my PCI video board that I had at the time to boot in it anyways, which makes me think it only accepts ISA based video adapters). Maybe this is reason to get around to trying to get that fixed since I need that machine for DOS and ISA based stuff anyways since I don't think I'm going to find another relatively high performance socket 5 machine anytime soon (at a reasonable price anyways).

I have a couple of other machines with PCI but there both using the newer forward keyed PCI and henceforth cannot accept this rear keyed card.

I'll post a better picture of the card (with the top present) when I get home and try cleaning the contacts. I really would like to get this card running but I don't have a working multimeter or soldering equipment at the moment so I'm stuck with a limited number of options.

Both machines gave the usual "VGA Failure/Absent" beeps no matter what slot the card was in. The card was hard to get into the slot and as I mentioned (and I check with a random board outside of a case to make sure this wasn't the case stopping it, the connector is too tall) the tops of the contacts stick out above the PCI slot. The Deskpro is an Intel i820 based machine, and the Dimension is an i865PE based machine so I would think them both to have reasonable compatibility with the PCI standard. The card looks to be in good shape unless I'm missing something or there actually are capacitors missing.

I see why you started to doubt if these were real PCI cards. I once had the same thing with some old SDRAM slots. It was so hard to either install or remove any DIMM into or from any SDRAM slot (was a P2B btw) that it had me worry about me doing something wrong also.
But right now the best you can do is try to see if cleaning the contacts will work or try them in another board (preferably an older one).

Yes, please do share some pics of the complete cards 😀

Tetrium wrote:

I see why you started to doubt if these were real PCI cards. I once had the same thing with some old SDRAM slots. It was so hard to either install or remove any DIMM into or from any SDRAM slot (was a P2B btw) that it had me worry about me doing something wrong also.
But right now the best you can do is try to see if cleaning the contacts will work or try them in another board (preferably an older one).

Yes, please do share some pics of the complete cards 😀

Here's full 4k pictures of the front and back

http://m.imgur.com/qV3BGKe,uFfE6mS

I'll try her in a few more boards tonight. I'll I've got left are an ECS Elitegroup 965 board and a G41 based Dell BTX board. I'm probably going to buy a Socket 7 or slot 1 board over the holidays as a little Christmas gift to my self so hopefully I'll have something more era correct to test with at some point this month.

If it's not PCI, is it possible that it's one of the pre-PCI local buses? Apparently before the VESA Local Bus standard came out, various motherboard manufacturers came up with their own proprietary buses to provide a faster alternative to ISA.

Here are a few photos of proprietary local buses.

It may not be that likely as this card looks like it uses the PCI slot connector (which itself seemed to originate in the VESA Local Bus standard) so it would be a bit odd for a proprietary local bus to use the VLB/PCI slot design when they could just use the whole VLB or PCI standard instead. But I guess stranger things have happened...

Would be interesting to install a second video card so you can see what you're doing, then run a utility to list installed PCI cards and see if it shows up in the list.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Here's full 4k pictures of the front and back

http://m.imgur.com/qV3BGKe,uFfE6mS

I only get one very unsharp image. Is that the correct link?

Maybe it's some strange abomination of an MCA card? There is no front dip in the board, and the bracket is wrong, but it's Trident, so who knows?