rcarkk wrote:

Does this card work only with PCI connector for graphics card functionality, leaving the other connector unused for the sound card?

Yes, that is how it works. The GPU portion of the card is covered by the PCI connector and the sound portion by the additional proprietary connector pins.

Is it collectible? You find Media Bus stuff every now and then but not regularly. I would roughly compare it with EISA hardware which is also not crazy rare but very unusual and sometimes a little bit hard to source.

The timecodes on the chips say 9631 and 9626, so this card was probably sold in the 3rd or 4th quarter of 1996. That makes sense as the Mach64 was in production between 1994 and 1997 when ATI began the transition into Rage I which is basically a rebranded Mach64 with some very basic 3D acceleration features.

Thanks for the info.

I sold one of these a year or so ago for a very modest amount.

I'd gotten it in a large load of untested cards. I was able to test the Mach64 part (it worked fine), but not the SB Vibra as I didn't have the required motherboard. The 'proprietary' connector is simply an extension of the ISA bus via a different connector, so it's no different to separate PCI Mach64 and ISA SB16 Vibra cards. The only added value is to save a slot, which may have had marginal advantages at the time, but not big ones, as the MediaBus died out soon after.

This is MediaBus 1.0, as found on the Asus PCI/I-P55TPXE4 (and possibly a few others, but this is the only common board you'd see it on).

I think this card has it's collecting value tbh. I posted this card on Facebook groups and i had two users asking if i could sell it. In the mean time, i tested it on a PCI slot, and the graphics are working. Maybe it has its value. I bought it for collection, because its a nice uncommon card.