First post, by kenabi
- Rank
- Newbie
i'm not asking for recommendations though, i'm aware of its legacy (infamy?).
what i _am_ asking for (help me oh vogons, my vogons), is a specific MSI agp vbios. or rather, two (though i'd settle for the one identical, if thats all thats to be had).
since it won't let me post links yet, if you head over to DDG and search for "msi 8919 5500", switch to images and follow the 3rd images link to the ebay listing for the 5500, the card i have is identical to that, save a few minor details. (or just refer to the images i attached as a contrast to that ebay listing, after i realized, 'hey maybe it will let me do that as a newbie. doy.')
1. no yellow socket on the corner.
2. the chip and the xtal between the green choke and the svideo/vga ports aren't there. and probably any passives related solely to the chip.
3. there's only 4 K4D551638F-TC's, making it a 128mb 64bit card. (as far as i can tell).
4. almost every 5200 i can find seems be either 128mb 8 chip/128bit, or 4 chip 64mb/64bit. i'm not finding any 128mb/64bit. the 5500 8919s also seem to have 110 yellow (small, round) stickers on them someplace, while the 5200's also seem to have 010 stickers. either on the back in the middle of the card near the top (mine has it under the n1996 box, see attached images), or between the yellow socket and the top ram chip near it. earlier board revisions do not have an electrolytic capacitor position in this area, later (ver:210) revisions do.
most of the hits i can find lean towards it being a 5500, but given how they may or may not have just bios'd it to either a 5200 or a 5500, who knows for sure. the heatsink is thermal glued on, so i can't check for an A on the chip itself.
what i'm trying to find; the bios chip on the board itself says 'n8919' (5200/5500 gpus, nvidia reference) and then below that, 'ms101', so its an MSI, with the 101 variant of the bios, whatever flavor that spec'd out.
the 5500 in the ebay link has a bios labeled ms104, and is 128bit, going by the chip spec.
i'd like to get my hands on a clean ripped 101 bios from an actual working card of this variant, and the 64bit known other variant (if this is a 5200 for sure, i'd like to also get a 5500, and vice versa)
as an aside, to answer the ever present questions; its in my collection of hardware, windows sees it, but no video at all. sometimes a bios flash fixes that with older hardware. i'd like to give it a rip before i toss it in the parts bin. if i can also maybe upgrade it to a 5500 (in the event its a 5200), well then sweet deal. if i can't, parts bin. and the bios roms i _can_ find (notably here on vogons) are from pci cards. not sure if that matters any, and there's not MSI specific, which i'd like if i can manage to get them.
and who knows, maybe with all the other cheap factors, these also possible suffer from bit rot as well? wouldn't surprise me any.
cheers, and TIA.
-T
