I looked in on some other cards while I was nearby their shelf, two more M64s, not Vantas though, they had 7ns on, and even a Radeon 7500 only had 5.5ns.

That is the advantage of late manufactured cards- by that time there might not be slower ram around.

Now I need to check all my junky cards like that.

Make for nice donor cards for nicer models with bad memory 😉

Benchmark crappy old Vanta16

That one is actually quite nice. I think it's based of Nvidia reference and has smooth and crispy VGA output. With 200 Mhz chips, it can easily beat any OG TNT card.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-05-31, 15:00:

Hey folks, […]
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Hey folks,

I've had this card years, but never really LOOKED at it, and when I did, I was somewhat amazed.... some madlad at the factory equipped it with 5 nanosecond RAM.

As far as I understand it, the Vanta is the cut down version of the cut down version, I see 133Mhz memclocks mentioned VS 143 for the "full fat" M64. That means it's got RAM not one speed grade, but two speed grades higher than it needs.

September 2001 date on the back of the thing, so a couple of years since release and probably the most budgety budget card to have Nvidia on it at the time. I wonder if it was even a 9/11 thing, nothing flying for a week after, so maybe they completed an order with higher spec? Or maybe there's more out there prior to this date and it was just more economical to bulk buy the 5ns to use on everything, rather than some small order of slow stuff.

If I currently had a decent AGP system running I'd whip it in there right smart and see how high it would go. I kinda feel mildly annoyed, like it's another thing on my to-do list now, "page 129 volume III, Item# 5763: Benchmark crappy old Vanta16 and push it to 3DMark record." 🤣 (Yeah I know, the core might really suck)

Here 'tis in all it's goofy glory...

That's a very nice find and indeed promising, but it needs to be tested to confirm if it can keep even just the nominal speed

I have a GeForce2 MX400 with 4ns EtronTech modules, rated at 250MHz but stable only at 223MHz; still well over the default 166MHz (or 183 for some models) but also far from the nominal speed of the chips
Also have a Voodoo3 2000 with usual 7ns 143MHz modules capable to run at 192MHz (or at least they were the last time I tried some years ago)
Another example is one of my Radeon X850XT PE that has the Samsung 1.6ns (625MHz) no more able to stay at 590MHz and had to down-clock them to 570.
And so on, I think you got what I mean 😀

If you happen to test it post the results, some of the most satisfying overclocks I done were with low end cards 😉

Yes, as the frequency goes up, things have to be designed more like transmission lines and the capacitance between traces becomes significant to the signal quality. Also quality and exact placement of other components will have an effect.

There's a lot of guessing when it comes to RAM speed grades, it's useful to know what speed grades were offered at the time. If for example it was binned as 6ns 5ns, 4ns, then you might get all the way up to just short of 4ns performance out of a 5ns, with average luck you get halfway there. If they were binning for 4.5ns at the time though, you might only do as good as 4.6, or hit 4.8 on average. The more DRAMs there are, the more you tend toward average, can only run as fast as the slowest part. Then there's how tightly they were binned, or the amount of tolerance, one manufacturer might test at the bottom of the voltage tolerance, 5 or 10% down from nominal, at Tmax, and only pass as 5ns those that met timings at 4.9, that means that there might be a lot of parts in the 6ns bin that do 5ns timings dead nuts on, with respectable voltage and kept cool. Whereas another might test theirs at nominal, dead on 5ns and at whatever the ambient temperature is around the test stand that day. However, if you voltage seems a little low, you can tease it up to the top end of nominal quite often when you find the right setting resistor on the voltage regulator to "help" with a little pencil graphite... or take it higher than tolerance if you're really trying to bully the last 20Mhz out of it.

Edit: Oh yes, just the tolerance variation of 2% on the voltage setting resistance might have you plus or minus 4% on the actual voltage on a given card. Say for example the manufacture intended 1.7v, but closest with standard resistor values was 1.68, you might see anything from 1.61 to 1.75 on a selection of cards.

I have a GeForce2 MX400 with 4ns EtronTech modules, rated at 250MHz but stable only at 223MHz; still well over the default 166MHz (or 183 for some models) but also far from the nominal speed of the chips
Also have a Voodoo3 2000 with usual 7ns 143MHz modules capable to run at 192MHz (or at least they were the last time I tried some years ago)
Another example is one of my Radeon X850XT PE that has the Samsung 1.6ns (625MHz) no more able to stay at 590MHz and had to down-clock them to 570.

Keep in mind that memory timings may also need to be increased for stable work at increased frequency.