PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2020-05-04, 21:26:

Latest purchase - A Compaq QVision 1280/E

Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Had a PM requesting some box / contents pics, so...

Nice. Surprised there was even a box, etc.. I'd thought QVision being Compaq was OEM only card shipped only inside their PCs.

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2020-06-03, 20:28:

Had a PM requesting some box / contents pics, so... […]
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PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2020-05-04, 21:26:

Latest purchase - A Compaq QVision 1280/E

Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Had a PM requesting some box / contents pics, so...

QV1280E Box.zip
QV1280E Pkg.zip
QV1280E Card.zip

Thank you for obliging! It's so rare to see these materials nowadays that it seems important to share them for posterity 😀

Is the QVision 1280/E a 2MB card? I notice there's no onboard expansion as there is on my 1280/p PCI card and 1280/I integrated controller in one of my old Deskpros.

Yes, the card is 2MB

eisapc wrote on 2020-05-29, 12:54:

Looking for something else I stumbled across this beauty I allready forgot about. The before mentioned Matrox Magic. Anybody has […]
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Looking for something else I stumbled across this beauty I allready forgot about.
The before mentioned Matrox Magic.
Anybody has an idea what graphic chip is hiding under the heatsink?
Still not sure if it is a graphics board or a framegrabber due to the large number of asics.
I did not prove it working yet, but drivers are still availiable at matrox ftp.

The graphic chip under the heatsink is an S3 805... at least in the card I have. I am unsure if they used different chipsets for this product line or if maybe they only used the one chip throughout.

386_junkie wrote on 2016-01-28, 08:48:

A new addition to the family; -

Just found the exact same board in my stash.
The manual lists !MER2151.cfg as the matching cfg-file

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2020-06-03, 20:28:

Had a PM requesting some box / contents pics, so... […]
Show full quote

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2020-05-04, 21:26:

Latest purchase - A Compaq QVision 1280/E

Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Had a PM requesting some box / contents pics, so...

QV1280E Box.zip
QV1280E Pkg.zip
QV1280E Card.zip

Thank you for sharing.

It's great to see what the OEM packaging looked like... especially with the old Compaq logo!

eisapc wrote on 2020-10-20, 12:28:

386_junkie wrote on 2016-01-28, 08:48:

A new addition to the family; -

Just found the exact same board in my stash.
The manual lists !MER2151.cfg as the matching cfg-file

This is great to see... I think it will have an S3-924 graphics chip under the sticker.

Not sure I have drivers for my card... would you be able to upload the contents of those floppy disks to this thread?

Thanks

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2020-06-03, 20:28:

Had a PM requesting some box / contents pics, so... […]
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PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2020-05-04, 21:26:

Latest purchase - A Compaq QVision 1280/E

Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Had a PM requesting some box / contents pics, so...

QV1280E Box.zip
QV1280E Pkg.zip
QV1280E Card.zip

I have been looking for one those bad boys for a while! If you ever want to get rid of it let me know. In the mean time can you post images of any disks that came with the card (e.g. drivers, cfg files, etc.?) TIA!

Edit: Are you sure that is a QVision 1280/E? Checking on the part number silkscreened on the board (148867-001) it matches up to a 1024/E w/ the updated V32 chip.

Shadow Lord wrote on 2021-01-15, 21:50:

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2020-06-03, 20:28:

Had a PM requesting some box / contents pics, so... […]
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PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2020-05-04, 21:26:

Latest purchase - A Compaq QVision 1280/E

Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Had a PM requesting some box / contents pics, so...

QV1280E Box.zip
QV1280E Pkg.zip
QV1280E Card.zip

I have been looking for one those bad boys for a while! If you ever want to get rid of it let me know. In the mean time can you post images of any disks that came with the card (e.g. drivers, cfg files, etc.?) TIA!

Edit: Are you sure that is a QVision 1280/E? Checking on the part number silkscreened on the board (148867-001) it matches up to a 1024/E w/ the updated V32 chip.

I know you've also mentioned this previously on vgamuseum, but yes both my card and the one shown there are the QVision 1280/E.

If you reference the cards by their assembly (ASSY) #, shown in this extract sourced from an old Compaq document

you'll see the 1280/E is 002727 and the 2nd gen 1024/E with the newer V32 controller is 002930 as shown in the attached

I don't plan to open the sealed driver licence pack ATM as there are later SoftPaq updates for them all available online.

i have seen that document before. That is from an IBM support/service contract for Compaq computers. I have found them to have other errors so I am not holding my breath. Even with that document the part number on your card is from one card and the assembly number from another. Have you actually plugged in the card to see what it identifies itself as? That of course is the ultimate answer.

Shadow Lord wrote on 2021-01-16, 17:28:

i have seen that document before. That is from an IBM support/service contract for Compaq computers. I have found them to have other errors so I am not holding my breath. Even with that document the part number on your card is from one card and the assembly number from another. Have you actually plugged in the card to see what it identifies itself as? That of course is the ultimate answer.

Yes, it POSTs as a QVision 1280/E with 2MB, and it doesn't say it is 148867-001, but "REPLACE WITH SPARE NO. 148867-001". I'd guess that by mid-93, the v1 1280/E (which I don't think was ever produced with the V32 controller) was being phased out in favour of the V32-equipped v2 1024/E, with or without the optional VRAM upgrade board.

Also, here are a couple of references direct from Compaq - these come from their online TechRef Library

https://web.archive.org/web/19961226053450/ht … olume1/dpm.html

https://web.archive.org/web/19961226055120/ht … 2/appavide.html

That is excellent information there. I wonder why would Compaq be replacing the card w/ a lower caliber card (AFAIK the 1024 maxes out at 1024x768 and can not do 1280x1024).

That's an interesting backplate offset. I'm gonna have to dig around in my pile of slot covers pulled from various things over the decades to try to match that up.

Got mine in today - all configured (EISA - wise) - wonder what kind of drivers Win 3.1 needs. So far I played DOOM on it (486 DX at 33 MHz) and it was slightly choppy. Benchmarks are planned, when, hah, I haven't the slightest.

eBay description - Compaq QVision EISA Video Card 002340-001 Vintage Graphics ISA 14 Pin VGA

Seller pics:

So I ran some benchmarks between this and an ET4000

ET4000 DOOM realtics - 1284/3910
Compaq EISA realtics - 1284/3927

🤣.

Also, this computer doesn't like any sound card I put in it. Doom and Windows flat out crash, some other games are more tolerant. I wonder if there's some kind of resource conflict between it and the AHA-2740W?

Oh the joys of EISA.

Off to the CMOS to optimize.

*Edit turns out the OPLSAX I had was badly corroded and only played FM synthesis. A bath and a reflow caused it to stop working entirely, so there was the culprit. OPTI931 worked just fine out of the gate.

Jed118 wrote on 2021-09-21, 03:23:

So I ran some benchmarks between this and an ET4000

ET4000 DOOM realtics - 1284/3910
Compaq EISA realtics - 1284/3927

Is that an EISA ET4000 based board or an ISA one? If it is ISA it kind of makes sense given that the ET4000 claim to fame was "host interface throughput" I could imagine an EISA chip (even an unoptimized one) could perform as well just given the improved32bit interface of the EISA.

However, if it is an EISA based ET4000 then I am very surprised at the Compaq performance numbers.

Shadow Lord wrote on 2021-09-21, 04:51:

Jed118 wrote on 2021-09-21, 03:23:

So I ran some benchmarks between this and an ET4000

ET4000 DOOM realtics - 1284/3910
Compaq EISA realtics - 1284/3927

Is that an EISA ET4000 based board or an ISA one? If it is ISA it kind of makes sense given that the ET4000 claim to fame was "host interface throughput" I could imagine an EISA chip (even an unoptimized one) could perform as well just given the improved32bit interface of the EISA.

However, if it is an EISA based ET4000 then I am very surprised at the Compaq performance numbers.

The Compaq card is an EISA, the Tseng is a regular old ISA card. I played around a little with the settings in the CMOS and got slightly better performance out of both of them.

Trying to find 3.1x drivers for that Compaq now - this ridiculous machine is almost ready!

Jed118 wrote on 2021-09-21, 03:23:

So I ran some benchmarks between this and an ET4000 […]
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So I ran some benchmarks between this and an ET4000

ET4000 DOOM realtics - 1284/3910
Compaq EISA realtics - 1284/3927

🤣.

Doom cannot benefit from EISA bus, as it uses single 8-bit writes to the video card and the bus frequency it's exactly the same as the ISA bus. The only way to test if it's better it's using a Doom port that uses a backbuffer for rendering and transfers that backbuffer to the video card with 32-bit writes. FastDoom can do this with the 13h mode and VESA modes, maybe you can try that (I wish I had an EISA video card to try it myself).

386_junkie wrote on 2015-12-30, 09:28:

Nothing came up in the FCCID, a bit more extensive searching came up with this: - […]
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Anonymous Coward wrote:

My guess is that it is EISA, since it uses S3 911 chipset with VRAM. All of the OPTi local bus cards I've seen so far use ET4000AX with DRAM. However, this card is not in the TH99 database, so you're taking a gamble plugging into an EISA board unless you know for certain what it is. Did you look up the FCCID? You could also try loading the video BIOS into an editor and examining the header.

Nothing came up in the FCCID, a bit more extensive searching came up with this: -

http://xjman.dsl.gr.jp/XF311/AccelCards.html#S3 911/924

Confirming the 911 and 924 both come in ISA, EISA, and VLB varieties. Still, not a lot of information out there... not looking forward to the config / driver search.

I may yet have a look at the bios string though just to be just... i'll look to back it up and archive it at least in any case.

I can tell: S3 911 /924 hasn't native EISA Interface.
My S3 924 EISA (yet broken) , i have drawing principal schematic from him.
And i have dead Motherboard from DEC (Modell DEC DECpc 400 MT) with S3 924, it is connect direct to 486 CPU BUS.
Both has same resistor config strap-ID. Card manufactur has config 911 into local bus mode and added with few PAL for using on EISA.
EISA and local bus is more similar than ISA (Memory / IO and, Write/Read, Clock, Command/Data, Ready Pin)

My diamond stealth VRAM ISA(with S3 911 ) has other strap ID.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jutkD … dit?usp=sharing

regards
matt