VOGONS


First post, by Rikintosh

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Sometimes I found motherboards that had a cool and non-standard onboard graphics card, I don't remember the brand, but I once saw a motherboard that had 3DFX onboard, and in the core2duo era, there was a motherboard I think from MSI, which I had an 8600GT on the motherboard itself, I remembered that today, and I was curious to know if there are any more of these "special" motherboards, I googled but I didn't find anything.

Do you know any motherboard with cool integrated graphics for its time?

Note I'm not referring to standard, easy-to-find solutions like the Radeon 4250 from the am3 chipsets, I mean something really good, cool, that's hard to find. And I don't mean motherboards that look like a laptop card or something like that, the cards I saw had pci-e or agp slots, I believe I could disable the onboard video card through the bios and use any other card in its slot .

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Reply 1 of 19, by Horun

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Hmm reminds me of the special Packard Bell w/Voodoo (yes a MSI board): Ultimate Packard Bell P3 / Voodoo3
Back in the early mid 1990's some boards came with S3 Trio or ATI Rage. Yeah today that may seem standard but back then having it built in back then was actually a bit special.

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Reply 2 of 19, by wiretap

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Not super old, but 2009 - the Nvidia Ion (9400M) in small form factor builds was pretty cool. I did some Home Theater PC / emulation game builds with them.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/2718

Before that, the nForce (w/ GeForce2 MX igp) and nForce2 (w/ GeForce4 MX igp) were probably pretty notable around the AMD Athlon time.

Prior to all that, I can really only think of the onboard Voodoo you already mentioned.

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Reply 3 of 19, by BitWrangler

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Horun wrote on 2021-12-29, 02:10:

Back in the early mid 1990's some boards came with S3 Trio or ATI Rage. Yeah today that may seem standard but back then having it built in back then was actually a bit special.

Yeah I was thinking of those, Pentium boards I think mostly, when 3D was a bit of a novelty still, they were the solid 2D cards everyone wanted. Besides, the likes of voodoo back then were add ons, still needed 2D

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Reply 4 of 19, by Thandor

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The LifeTec MT29 (Pentium 3 500, 64MB in late 1999. Sold by Aldi in Germany and the Netherlands) had an MSI motherboard with Riva TNT2 M64 on-board. Not ‘really cool’ in 1999 but one could have worse 😉. The later models (667MHz in mid-2000) had 128MB and a Riva TNT2 AGP card (so not on-board anymore): in less than 6 months a far better choice 😀.

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Reply 6 of 19, by chinny22

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I'd say the MSI-Voodoo 3 board is the winner and first that came to my mind.
Followed by the Nforce boards.

OEM 486's that came with onboard VLB graphics typically had something pretty decent for the time.

Reply 8 of 19, by Rikintosh

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chinny22 wrote on 2021-12-29, 10:22:

I'd say the MSI-Voodoo 3 board is the winner and first that came to my mind.
Followed by the Nforce boards.

OEM 486's that came with onboard VLB graphics typically had something pretty decent for the time.

yes, I have a VLSI clone IBM ps/2 motherboard, socket 2, which has a great 1MB Cirrus onboard, the problem is that the motherboard has no brand or model, which makes it difficult to find the jumper manual

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Reply 9 of 19, by gex85

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Thandor wrote on 2021-12-29, 06:53:

The LifeTec MT29 (Pentium 3 500, 64MB in late 1999. Sold by Aldi in Germany and the Netherlands) had an MSI motherboard with Riva TNT2 M64 on-board. Not ‘really cool’ in 1999 but one could have worse 😉. The later models (667MHz in mid-2000) had 128MB and a Riva TNT2 AGP card (so not on-board anymore): in less than 6 months a far better choice 😀.

The early-1999 Medion MT4 Model (March 1999, Pentium II 400) used the already mentioned Intel SR440BX board with Riva TNT on-board. Its predecessor (Pentium II 350, late 1998) came with the Riva 128 on-board, but I don't know what motherboard they used.

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Reply 10 of 19, by BitWrangler

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For best graphics on a 20th Century PCChips board, I'd nominate the M717... because the main chipset is Intel 440LX, so the onboard SiS 6326 is not the chipset integrated version and has real graphics memory on the board. mid 98 it would have been a competitive board but it prolly didn't come out until mid 99.

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Reply 11 of 19, by cyclone3d

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My Socket 3 PCI/ISA SBC has Tseng Et4000 onboard.

I have a couple Socket 7 SBCs that have onboard video.
One with ATI Mach64 and the other with Trident 3d Image 9850.

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Reply 12 of 19, by rmay635703

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chinny22 wrote on 2021-12-29, 10:22:

OEM 486's that came with onboard VLB graphics typically had something pretty decent for the time.

Even before VLB many OEM Boards that appeared to be “ISA ONLY” had some sort of local bus graphics, even occasionally the IDE was local bus

My AST had “onboard OPTI local bus graphics”

Before VLB was common it was possible to include local bus graphics soldered right to the mainboard no slot needed.

Reply 13 of 19, by Con 2 botones

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BitWrangler wrote on 2021-12-29, 15:30:

For best graphics on a 20th Century PCChips board, I'd nominate the M717... because the main chipset is Intel 440LX, so the onboard SiS 6326 is not the chipset integrated version and has real graphics memory on the board. mid 98 it would have been a competitive board but it prolly didn't come out until mid 99.

Owned that one paired with a 333 Mendocino back in the day.
I remember having played Unreal with that setup...but with a resolution lower than 640x480 (most probably 512 x 384 or so)...

Not long ago, I tried the integrated GF2mx in the nForce 1 chipset...didn´t impress me.

Reply 14 of 19, by Rikintosh

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I did a lot of research, and I couldn't find the card that had an 8600gt anymore. The last nvidia "solution" I found were cards that had a 9400. As for ATI, I believe the last popular one was radeon 3200, and a few cards with radeon 4250. Since then, "onboard" graphics solutions have passed to be integrated into the processor.

I also saw a few times, desktop boards that had an mxm slot, I don't know why anyone would opt for a fancy mxm instead of the standard pci express.

Another factor worth remembering is that some cards not only had a decent graphics solution, but also offered a slot to increase the vram, I have an IBM with S3 graphics that can be expanded to 4 or 8MB I think. I also remember that the first generation imacs had an ati chip with memory expandable to 8mb. And in the mid-2000s, some cards from certain manufacturers had graphics solutions onboard + agp slot, so if you didn't have the money to buy an offboard card, you could just buy an "accessory" that fit the AGP slot, that was a board with dedicated vram for the integrated graphics, and improved overall performance a bit.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGP_Inline_Memory_Module

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Reply 15 of 19, by cyclone3d

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I have a new in package AIMM module. Bought it for the LOLs and because it was I think $8 shipped.. Hah.

A bunch of the OEM board that had things such as S3 Virge, Cirrus Logic, etc. you could either add video RAM by filling the SOJ sockets. Some even had special plug in cards that plugged in much like a waveblaster type card but with two rows of pins instead of just one.

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Reply 16 of 19, by chinny22

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rmay635703 wrote on 2021-12-29, 17:32:

Even before VLB many OEM Boards that appeared to be “ISA ONLY” had some sort of local bus graphics, even occasionally the IDE was local bus
My AST had “onboard OPTI local bus graphics”
Before VLB was common it was possible to include local bus graphics soldered right to the mainboard no slot needed.

Oh definitely! integration is as old as the PC itself, Advantage of VLB is as it never really featured on the budget end systems typically manufacturers wouldn't bother giving average component's a VLB variant.
ISA on the other hand (or indeed PCI and AGP) became common enough that you can find examples of both the good and the bad integrated.

Con 2 botones wrote on 2021-12-29, 18:44:

Not long ago, I tried the integrated GF2mx in the nForce 1 chipset...didn´t impress me.

In this day and age I don't think it would anyone. Back in the early 2000's though it still a very capable option.
Remember even the V3 2000 was falling out of favor when it was integrated into the MSI board

Reply 17 of 19, by waterbeesje

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My IBM PS valuepoint dx2-66 has an integrated S3 805 (VLB internally) and it's reasonably fast, it easily outruns any cirrus gd542x VLB card I have.

As for the Intel SR440BX with onboard TNT: agree, it's very cool!

I once had the MSI Voodoo 3 motherboard and I was unimpressed by it's performance. My dedicated v3 3000 ran circles around it.

Stuck at 10MHz...

Reply 18 of 19, by Rikintosh

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waterbeesje wrote on 2021-12-30, 13:47:

My IBM PS valuepoint dx2-66 has an integrated S3 805 (VLB internally) and it's reasonably fast, it easily outruns any cirrus gd542x VLB card I have.

As for the Intel SR440BX with onboard TNT: agree, it's very cool!

I once had the MSI Voodoo 3 motherboard and I was unimpressed by it's performance. My dedicated v3 3000 ran circles around it.

I've never had one, but I suspect this was all just a marketing ploy to attract shoppers... "Look, our computer has an onboard voodoo!" Then people do the math, and they see that it is cheaper to buy a computer with an onboard voodoo than to buy a machine and a dedicated board.

Maybe they used 3dfx chips that didn't pass the integrity test, and all the onboard chips are like the AMD Athlon/Phenon X2, X3, which were actually X4 that didn't pass the quality test, but would work if they were capped. Obs. I'm just theorizing, I'm not saying that this actually happened.


I know this is a little off topic, but this type of practice is relatively common in the market. Currently there are "new brands" of video cards, the high prices have made these Chinese people appear selling all kinds of crap and dishonesty, I don't know what happens right now in America, but here in Brazil, an enthusiastic guy who does hardware testing, recently found that some brands are selling used video cards as new, Afox brand for example, they are somehow acquiring cards that have been used by miners, so they unsolder the chipset from the GPU, and solder it to a new PCB, and sell to unsuspecting consumers, on other occasions lots of hard drives were discovered that were VERY used, so someone somehow managed to reset all smart attributes after a zerofill, and the hard drive looks brand new, sometimes even producing labels with recent dates. Be careful not to be victims of scams

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Reply 19 of 19, by zapbuzz

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awww can't mention am3 what about fm2+ then i gots an AMD A10 4 core with built in R7 thats got 7 cores and boy does it run cool with 1600mhz ddr3 it allows 2gb gpu ram.
I gots xp running dos box awesome playing tomcat flight simulator for dos, nascar, destruction derby, etc all the fav windows apps for video audio encoding fly like the wind i never thought divx encoding be so cool (v5)
can have up to 64gb ram on this but I think 32gb is cool enough.
I appologise but compared to intel even today AMD got something right earlier: bigger onboard GPU cache.
I gots A8 (cpu from Aldi desktop poo) on a Asus A88X Plus mobo and an a10 on AN MSI because threadripper came out just after i bought it ah well.
Everything runs as standard for xp and I have run it on 7, 10, and now I got the TPM module i can run 11 (on MSI.)
I have run 98se , millennium and 2000 with appropriate patches soon to have a 512mb nvidia PCI gpu (yes pci cheap new goodies) i can run these at full colour, disable the built in gpu, without emulation though stuc k with 1 core I may run virtualbox see if virtual cpu's can stack up with benching on 9x.
PCI gpu gotta be cool with a 4ghz cpu.