VOGONS


First post, by Zero_sugar

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MOZmHt3.jpg

emTE0Ld.jpg

It is clocked at 200 MHz Core and 279 MHz Memory. Die says NV20, not Geforce3.

This card confuses me. Very early, A3 core, and underclocked memory. Engineering BIOS. No ramsinks, and the card was found in the Seattle area.

Reply 4 of 8, by shamino

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I'm not familiar with the card you named in the title (I guess I should look it up), but I have a very similar card. Seems to carry the same part numbers, so it's likely the same card except the GPU revision, which is A2 on mine. Like yours, mine came with an "Engineering BIOS" and has date codes from 2000 which is early for a Geforce 3. Comparing the labels on our cards, looks like we have the same BIOS version.
Mine also doesn't have RAM heatsinks and the RAM is rated 4ns, which I think is slower than "normal" production Geforce3 RAM.

It's been a long time since I researched it but I have some notes from doing so. There was an article from sometime in Spring 2001 reviewing a pre-release Geforce3 which had the A3 revision, and which said the production cards would be an A5. The article said there was some OpenGL issue. Personally I never noticed the problem, but I don't remember if I ever used OpenGL with it either.

I don't think it can be a Ti200, it's too old to be a Ti-anything, and there's nothing in the boot ROM that calls it that. It has the standard Geforce3 PCI ID values and is detected that way by the nVidia drivers.

I got mine on eBay back in the mid-2000s, but I don't know where the seller was located. Whoever was selling it didn't present it as anything special, and I bought it simply because it was a good deal for a cheap gaming build. I remember the Geforce4 MX cards were more expensive because so many bidders were confused about which was better.
The kids who got this card had it for about 1-2 years and played Sims 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 mostly. No problems or complaints, so if A2 had any significant problem then it wasn't obvious.

I have some old pictures I took of the card so attaching them here. But it seems to be the same as yours.

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Reply 6 of 8, by shamino

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I don't know about the RAM clock on mine. I don't seem to have any notes about that, and unfortunately I'm not able to hook it up right now. It's buried, and I also don't have a system up and running to test it with.
All I can say is that back when I used it, it's performance seemed what I expected.

Reply 8 of 8, by Ozzuneoj

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I don't know anything about the Alpha towers, but a quick Google search came up with this picture. :
https://i.imgur.com/27Y7jd6.jpg

The back of the OP's card certainly matches up with what is visible in this picture. Pretty neat if this is a card out of an original Xbox development system.

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.