Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-19, 11:22:

gerry wrote on 2023-06-19, 11:11:

I would too, even at the 5,300 above its easily worth more than my entire computing collection (including any non PC devices!)

i'm ok with people collecting things because they like it and have money, but i don't really think this item is even that interesting or 'important' to be honest

Interesting and Important are both subjective 🤣

that is true 😀

The right people will find it both, a few will simply want it because of its rarity and for no other reason than to prevent others from having it, much like a trophy no one else has. (Not that this is true for this card but working late model V5 6k cards would be exceptionally rare)[

i hadn't thought about it as an purchase to deliberately exclude others (more than to own it for some intrinsic satisfaction) but that could indeed be the case!

Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-19, 14:55:

Being a reputable seller I'm willing to give them the benefit of doubt, its possible they could have had something serious happe […]
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Mandrew wrote on 2023-06-19, 12:41:

Agreed, I got burned a few times so my childlike innocence is completely gone. When I see scammers everywhere it's a good sign t […]
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Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-19, 10:00:

Not every seller on eBay is out to screw you over and there are a good number of good and reputable retro hardware guys on there just looking to shift their parts to other like minded people. Try not to be so jaded, sometimes just talking to the seller will quickly tell you which is which and can even lead to good deals.

Agreed, I got burned a few times so my childlike innocence is completely gone. When I see scammers everywhere it's a good sign to step back and take a little break from all this and do something else.
All that aside, I just got burned by a reputable seller with thousands of sales and a 100% feedback. The tracking didn't work, he didn't respond to my mail to check it out, he didn't respond when the ETA was 2 weeks overdue, didn't respond when I opened INR and asked again to check if it's lost or something and I had to ask Ebay to step in an give me the money back. Zero communication after almost 2 months of waiting for a $15 package shipped within the EU. I don't care about that $15, I wanted the product and never thought someone would risk a 100% rep over this, but I can't work with someone who doesn't communicate at all.
Whatever, I just wanted to rant about the fact that feedback score doesn't always mean the seller is reliable.

Being a reputable seller I'm willing to give them the benefit of doubt, its possible they could have had something serious happen to them, I remember a time I bought two 1400s Tualatins from a seller, took a month to get a reply even after eBay had refunded me, turns out the seller who was a top guy had died due to a car accident, his wife was the one to message me letting me know what had happened. I had talked to him a number of times previously about retro builds and hardware as he collected and repaired stuff as a hobby, really was a great seller.

Sellers are humans too and if you have no communication its possible something terrible has happened or real life has stepped in and caused them to be unable to manage the store. (Could be anything including natural disasters like floods and fires)

Just keep that in mind before you write a reputable seller off, to me it sounds like something has occurred to that seller .. even the scammers will respond once eBay/Paypal/Bank gets involved at least in my experience.

One seller I had bought a couple of things off, good price, exactly as described, shipped as quick and well as if they were urgent meds for his grandma, high number positive feedback, 3 months since I last bought from him, looking for something else, think I'll check out his store... account gone... look it up through prev purchase, last activity was a month after I bought. Then he gets 3 bad feedbacks saying items not shipped/no communication... and I guess eBay didn't get a response either.. gone. You wonder what happens.

Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-19, 14:55:

its possible they could have had something serious happen to them, I remember a time I bought two 1400s Tualatins from a seller, took a month to get a reply even after eBay had refunded me, turns out the seller who was a top guy had died due to a car accident

Perfectly understandable. But how come I still got a tracking number, a 'shipped' notice and an ETA?
Do sellers routinely send the customer shipping labels before handing the package over to the carrier? I'm genuinely interested because others left feedback after I left mine so it means that they must've got their packages.
I even have the tracking number still, UE689907121DE. Maybe someone can find it on some tracking website, I couldn't.
I have a different package with the same format and it showed up on parcelsapp immediately after it was marked as shipped on Ebay.
Okay, I stop hijacking the thread now, I consider the package lost.

hyoenmadan wrote on 2023-06-19, 15:25:

Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-19, 14:56:

wow its a small world, its a great article about how the SLI VSA cards work internally, the Fury MAXX communicates between each GPU via the AGP bus as it doesnt have a bridge chip or any interchip pci lanes, its a truly weird card hardware wise and quite amazing ATI even got it work as well as it does.

Which NT kernel (and Linux kernel it seems, XFree86 driver and its kernel mode DRM only seem to support only one chip of the card like NT) NEVER supported. That definitely sealed the fate of the MAXX and its technology when Windows XP became mainstream.

True but XP allowed SLI and Xfire to happen so the way ATI did it with the MAXX could be simply considered a stepping stone, IIRC they also had a dual RAGE6 MAXX DDR version planned, no idea if it ever saw the light of day but it was using a similar setup to the MAXX

Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-19, 14:55:

Being a reputable seller I'm willing to give them the benefit of doubt, its possible they could have had something serious happen to them, I remember a time I bought two 1400s Tualatins from a seller, took a month to get a reply even after eBay had refunded me, turns out the seller who was a top guy had died due to a car accident, his wife was the one to message me letting me know what had happened. I had talked to him a number of times previously about retro builds and hardware as he collected and repaired stuff as a hobby, really was a great seller.

This also happened to me. Eventually one of the guy's friends or relatives appeared and responded to the negative reps people were leaving, saying that he had died and that everybody would get their money back.

Errius wrote on 2023-06-20, 04:20:

Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-19, 14:55:

Being a reputable seller I'm willing to give them the benefit of doubt, its possible they could have had something serious happen to them, I remember a time I bought two 1400s Tualatins from a seller, took a month to get a reply even after eBay had refunded me, turns out the seller who was a top guy had died due to a car accident, his wife was the one to message me letting me know what had happened. I had talked to him a number of times previously about retro builds and hardware as he collected and repaired stuff as a hobby, really was a great seller.

This also happened to me. Eventually one of the guy's friends or relatives appeared and responded to the negative reps people were leaving, saying that he had died and that everybody would get their money back.

Yeah the anonymity of eBay and the internet in general tends to cause people to forget that there are people behind the stores and screens, people who deal with the same shit you as a buyer and user have to deal with. Sure there are scammers and assclowns on there but the vast majority are just people like ourselves trying to do the right thing.

Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-20, 01:41:

True but XP allowed SLI and Xfire to happen so the way ATI did it with the MAXX could be simply considered a stepping stone...

Ofc. It has nothing to do with the graphical subsystem (Win32k), DirectX, or the graphics driver per se... But with the specific part I quoted in bold font.
NT Kernel doesn't support multiple devices on the AGP bus, and seems neither does Linux kernel. I dunno the specifics why such hack is supported by Windows 98, but probably has to do with the way Win98 AGPGart VxD, the PCI VxD and the VMM kernel interact, most probably virtualizing and trapping tricks not available to non hypervisor kernels, who knows.

SLI and Crossfire are supported just fine because they were built on top of the PCIe bus, which just like its predecessor PCI, supports multiple devices by default. MAXX as it was would've been supported in XP if the card was bridged, or PCI so you could just tandem multiple cards. But ofc that would result in poor performance 'cause PCI bandwith limitations. The same is also applicable to AGP to PCI bridged devices just as ATI and Matrox did with their multimonitor cards, which are supported in XP too just fine. AGP bridged devices are limited to PCI speed, so it works for basic stuff, but you can't do SLI/MAXX with that.

Funnily enough Asrock got SLI working on AGP, they had a skunk Works board at a tech demo show displaying it working, it was AGP 8x only since that version did technically support multiple AGP devices as part of the paper standard. It never went anywhere as PCIe had just been released and AGP was pretty much DOA at that point, still I would have loved to see how Asrock got it working, it was for sure some engineering black magic likely involving multiple chipsets talking to each other to support multiple AGP slots.

I wish we had a Microsoft engineer here that could provide some insight on this, NT was a weird beast.

Trashbytes wrote on 2023-06-20, 04:50:

Funnily enough Asrock got SLI working on AGP, they had a skunk Works board at a tech demo show displaying it working, it was AGP 8x only since that version did technically support multiple AGP devices as part of the standard.

Unless this was done in the Intel 865 or the Nforce 2 chipset, I guess they were just bridging some PCIe lanes to AGP by using special HiNT bridges. Some of later HiNT AGP to PCIe "root complexes" were capable to enable internally the AGP fast modes, but you needed a filter to enable their special characteristics. They couldn't do some stuff real AGP does, like Sideband Addressing and other memory tricks. Dunno how fast them were.

Yeah I wish I could find more info on how they did it, Asrock is well known for doing some cool stuff with hardware .. like their true Hybrid AGP/PCIe boards or their Upgrade boards that could use a daughter board to upgrade the motherboard to a newer socket.

Here we go again...

Sooo... auction finished at "only" $10101. Seems like Linus' video, or the fact that it was sold as defective, turned off some of the previous high rollers this time.