TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-24, 22:09:

Meatball wrote on 2022-02-24, 19:21:

There’s a seller on eBay with a pile of these. I had this exact, boxed, model a couple of years ago, but I sold it. I regretted it, of course. Fortunately, I was afforded a 2nd chance at a great price. (Don’t be afraid to make the seller an offer.)

Tested and works great. A solid performing PCI video card to keep on hand.

Such and odd card to see in PCI form, how does it stack against its AGP variant ?

does the PCI bus slow it down or does it still keep on trucking and put out great numbers ?

I couldn't tell you. Everything you wrote in your latest post I agree with 100%.

It's a simple, silent PCI video card, which is a reliable overachiever, and no one should be without it!

I finally was able to grab a RampAT! Plus that fit my budget.

The simms in the card look curious. 1MBx9 45ns?

45ns on an ISA RAM expansion? Yeah that seems like kind of a waste, it would probably work with 120ns 🤣

Meatball wrote on 2022-02-24, 22:51:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-24, 22:09:

Meatball wrote on 2022-02-24, 19:21:

There’s a seller on eBay with a pile of these. I had this exact, boxed, model a couple of years ago, but I sold it. I regretted it, of course. Fortunately, I was afforded a 2nd chance at a great price. (Don’t be afraid to make the seller an offer.)

Tested and works great. A solid performing PCI video card to keep on hand.

Such and odd card to see in PCI form, how does it stack against its AGP variant ?

does the PCI bus slow it down or does it still keep on trucking and put out great numbers ?

I couldn't tell you. Everything you wrote in your latest post I agree with 100%.

It's a simple, silent PCI video card, which is a reliable overachiever, and no one should be without it!

Thanks for the heads up. I bought a couple before they were gone.

The GeForce 6200 isn't much of a performer but they would be very useful for additionally displays when paired with any XP era video card. There's also nothing wrong with keeping a couple of PCI video cards around for boards that need them.

It's also worth pointing out that these will only be useful for 2000/XP+ due to NVIDIA driver issues with older CPUs and chipsets, and motherboards for these later OSs usually have AGP already. I would not pair these with anything less than a Pentium 4 running Windows 2000. It's niche but they are still pretty cool.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-19, 21:47:

Might be interesting to see if you can remove the blackout, possibly there might be details hidden by the blackout material, even a hint as to what it might be that you could follow up on with some google sleuthing. I do love a good mystery like an old safe that is locked or a hidden time capsule even a geo cache is fun.

If I were asked to take a guess, I'd suspect the two chips on the left are two GAL20V8 (or similar programmable logic devices), the lower one as address decoder, and the upper one implementing the actual "dongle logic". The right chip is a 74LS245 used as ISA data buffer. On a dongle card with everything painted black, I will strongly suspect all the GALs are readout-protected, so you would need to glitch them into a read-out mode if you really need to retrieve the contents. The address decoder one might be pure combinational logic and simple enough to be reverse engineered by just monitoring the outputs.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-02-24, 23:09:

The GeForce 6200 isn't much of a performer but they would be very useful for additionally displays when paired with any XP era video card. There's also nothing wrong with keeping a couple of PCI video cards around for boards that need them.

Depends what you're looking for, they give numbers like the midrange 5000s and highly pushed 4000s, at stock, then can be pushed themselves a bit to making the higher 5000s look like too much noise and heat for more or less the same result. It's more like the 5000s were not a decent step forward from the 4000s than the 6200 being super good, but it will mix it up with x600s, and trade the odd blow with x700s on the Radeon side, so it's a smidge faster than the 9700s, 9800s.. which is pretty decent. There is talk of some of them unlocking pipes to 6600, but that was a short run of early cores before they were lasered or something, which I expect these will be. Anyhoo, the higher 6000s are naturally much better, made full use of nVidias improved dx9 engine, but 6200s will put up a decent fight with any of nvidia's or Ati's previous two ranges. So you get superior performance on the previous few years, and maybe a year of clinging on to the coat tails of the faster cards before games bloated up and absorbed all the GPU power you could throw at them.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-25, 03:02:

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-02-24, 23:09:

The GeForce 6200 isn't much of a performer but they would be very useful for additionally displays when paired with any XP era video card. There's also nothing wrong with keeping a couple of PCI video cards around for boards that need them.

Depends what you're looking for, they give numbers like the midrange 5000s and highly pushed 4000s, at stock, then can be pushed themselves a bit to making the higher 5000s look like too much noise and heat for more or less the same result. It's more like the 5000s were not a decent step forward from the 4000s than the 6200 being super good, but it will mix it up with x600s, and trade the odd blow with x700s on the Radeon side, so it's a smidge faster than the 9700s, 9800s.. which is pretty decent. There is talk of some of them unlocking pipes to 6600, but that was a short run of early cores before they were lasered or something, which I expect these will be. Anyhoo, the higher 6000s are naturally much better, made full use of nVidias improved dx9 engine, but 6200s will put up a decent fight with any of nvidia's or Ati's previous two ranges. So you get superior performance on the previous few years, and maybe a year of clinging on to the coat tails of the faster cards before games bloated up and absorbed all the GPU power you could throw at them.

The 6000 series is great so long as you are not looking for DOS compatibility or compatibility with older DirectX titles, but for a quick and dirty test GPU .. its perfect.

I love the 6000 series. I'm just saying that since it's best paired with a Pentium 4 or later, there is a high chance that an AGP slot will already be present. This is why the 6200 as a PCI card is probably best suited for use as an additional display.

I think that when considering a PCI card as the primary video output, the class of hardware is probably going to be designed for Windows 98 or earlier, and exclusive to situations when AGP is absent or buggy. In the testing that I've done previously with NVIDIA, I've found that their drivers are unstable on older chipsets, such as the venerable 440BX. This is why I warn that pairing the 6200 pre-Pentium 4 is generally unreliable.

There is also a question as to whether this card requires 3.3V on the PCI slot to function, a feature which is also missing from many early motherboards.

All of these are important caveats to consider with this particular card.

lawyerpepper wrote on 2022-02-24, 21:24:

IBM-branded Plextor Ultraplex Wide for $25 shipped with a 1-year warranty (take that for whatever it's worth from an Ebay seller): https://www.ebay.com/itm/174643345507

NOS is going for $200+, so I'll take my chances for $25

Why are these so special ? 😅
And expensive ? ($200??)

bestemor wrote on 2022-02-25, 10:14:

lawyerpepper wrote on 2022-02-24, 21:24:

IBM-branded Plextor Ultraplex Wide for $25 shipped with a 1-year warranty (take that for whatever it's worth from an Ebay seller): https://www.ebay.com/itm/174643345507

NOS is going for $200+, so I'll take my chances for $25

Why are these so special ? 😅
And expensive ? ($200??)

Its an Ultra Wide SCSI drive, they are carrying the SCSI tax.

aaaah, SCSI ! Did not notice that.... 😆

bestemor wrote on 2022-02-25, 12:38:

aaaah, SCSI ! Did not notice that.... 😆

I dont think they are worth 200 USD but 50 - 100 seems reasonable for a uncommon NOS drive, 25 for a refurbished one is a steal if you have the setup to support one.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-24, 22:36:

They are not cards you would keep in a PC, more useful for testing and stress testing after OS install, then once you are happy you take it out and throw in the GPU you do want to keep in there . .then the 6200 moves back to the testing shelf.

This.
I have two 6200 (Zotac), one 5500 (Axle), two 5200 (Axle) and a MX2 440 (XFX). Sadly none of them works on a 430HX chipset.
I use them for stress testing PCI slots on recently acquired boards.
A good way to find these cheaply is to not search for PCI specifically. If they're marked as such, they usually have Buy Now tag of 50 bucks. On auctions they usually end at 20 or 30 bucks. If they're falsely branded as AGP you might be able to shot a bargain. That how I got mine.

RaiderOfLostVoodoo wrote on 2022-02-25, 13:27:

This. I have two 6200 (Zotac), one 5500 (Axle), two 5200 (Axle) and a MX2 440 (XFX). Sadly none of them works on a 430HX chipset […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-24, 22:36:

They are not cards you would keep in a PC, more useful for testing and stress testing after OS install, then once you are happy you take it out and throw in the GPU you do want to keep in there . .then the 6200 moves back to the testing shelf.

This.
I have two 6200 (Zotac), one 5500 (Axle), two 5200 (Axle) and a MX2 440 (XFX). Sadly none of them works on a 430HX chipset.
I use them for stress testing PCI slots on recently acquired boards.
A good way to find these cheaply is to not search for PCI specifically. If they're marked as such, they usually have Buy Now tag of 50 bucks. On auctions they usually end at 20 or 30 bucks. If they're falsely branded as AGP you might be able to shot a bargain. That how I got mine.

On a side note . .found two Quadro FX1800 cards for 45 AUD for both today, not sure if they are worth grabbing for such a low price but I guess it cant hurt to have a few spare PCIe throw away GPUs laying about. (They fall between a 9400gt and a 9600gt being closer to the 9600GT)

The PCI Geforce 6200 is amazing in pci only P4's. Some of the 865 chipset Intel Emachine and HP boards are really fun with one combined with 2gb of ram in XP 😀 better than the horrible Intel Extreme graphics at least.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-25, 12:58:

bestemor wrote on 2022-02-25, 12:38:

aaaah, SCSI ! Did not notice that.... 😆

I dont think they are worth 200 USD but 50 - 100 seems reasonable for a uncommon NOS drive, 25 for a refurbished one is a steal if you have the setup to support one.

This is going in to my Deskpro 4000 P233MMX project, where it will be perfect because:

1. The system is already fitted with an Adaptec 2940U2w controller
2. I'm in need of a reliable optical drive
3. It's from the right period

Back then, all my systems, including my DP4000 at work, were SCSI, so I'm right at home. I've already gone through 3 used IDE CDROMs that all have reliability issues, so a Plextor SCSI unit for $25 with a warranty is just what I need.

I'd use the PCI 6200's all day in my budget Retro-Lan setup. A bunch of P4/Athlon 64/Athlon XP/late P3 machines all running Windows ME, LucasArts Outlaws (which runs fine on these, and only works proper on 9x) and bunch of later-9x compatible games? Perfect, reliable, works in the otherwise undesirable PCI-only P3 and P4 machines.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-25, 13:42:

On a side note . .found two Quadro FX1800 cards for 45 AUD for both today, not sure if they are worth grabbing for such a low price but I guess it cant hurt to have a few spare PCIe throw away GPUs laying about. (They fall between a 9400gt and a 9600gt being closer to the 9600GT)

The advantage and disadvantage is that they don't need extra power, and don't have extra power. i.e. advantage that you can throw them in a box with weakish PSU and no PCIe power connectors, disadvantage that you can't clock them higher because there's no power to play with.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-25, 17:52:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-25, 13:42:

On a side note . .found two Quadro FX1800 cards for 45 AUD for both today, not sure if they are worth grabbing for such a low price but I guess it cant hurt to have a few spare PCIe throw away GPUs laying about. (They fall between a 9400gt and a 9600gt being closer to the 9600GT)

The advantage and disadvantage is that they don't need extra power, and don't have extra power. i.e. advantage that you can throw them in a box with weakish PSU and no PCIe power connectors, disadvantage that you can't clock them higher because there's no power to play with.

True True, but cant complain for the price either. (they might clock a little higher, they are not far off a 9600GT)

IIRC Quadro does tend to use slower Vram from their gaming counterparts.

There it is, the TTSOLO1-SL including packaging, this variant has even less components than the other: ESS Solo 1 different versions (Thanks HanSolo for the link to the thread.)

The back of the package even mention the fish: 🐟
"Did you know? - The latin name for the fish on the front is ANOPLOGASTER CORNUTA."
😊
Wait, is "latin" a typo? 🤔 😅