VOGONS


Reply 21760 of 27168, by TechieDude

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Well, it's mostly yesterday, but I tested some old DDR1 DIMMs that I had laying around and hadn't gotten around to testing until now. They turned out fine.

Reply 21761 of 27168, by 386SX

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Lately still fighting with my mini-itx Atom sytem (I know it's a pointless effort.. 😁) having my usual Atom Cedar Trail SoC and its GMA SGX545 gpu which I'm still trying to understand why its speed is so low/variable.
The more I read on old discussions and even the official PowerVr dev forum and the public architecture papers explaining this series of low power mobile oriented gpu, the more I wonder if back in those years (almost a decade ago) the gpu had such a very different architecture from the usual desktop ones that make it not possible to compare to others gpu at first.

Many ones where blaming the original gpu speed but what I think have understood is that this gpu was scalable depending on the company choosing the configuration for what they needed I suppose depending on costs/power demand/core size@manufacturing level. So the quite low bench results is not necessary a problem of the design itself but I think the choice of which version were integrated into the SoC itself while having the same name SGX545. Also the specific architecture seems would have needed specific optimization to unleash its performances I wonder not necessary at driver level but more at games development which were of course oriented to desktop usual architectures. The common "unified shaders" logic here seems different while it might be considered (from GPUZ and some users discussions) as 4 "unified shaders" (USSE) 4 TMUs 2 "ROP" (while it has been said they can't be called that way on this gpu) running @ 400Mhz and using the 1066Mhz DDR3 single channel shared memory from 64MB minimun to 1,5GB whatever..

From the official forum few discussions the theorical numbers for the SGX545@400Mhz it was said:
"800 Mpixels/sec textured fillrate (2 textured pixels per clock)
6.4 Gflops (4 flops per clock per USSE, 4 USSEs total)
80 M transformed triangles/sec (5 clocks per triangle)"

( https://forums.imgtec.com/t/sgx545-vs-amd-nvidia/1838/2 )

The whole discussion is really interesting to understand what probably wasn't a gpu fault but more the version the gpu has been configured to be implemented in a SoC that was more oriented to "light desktop-notebook" but at the edge of Win 8 didn't have enough muscles probably to render both the newer GUIs and Dx10 games at the expected levels.

My numbers are this on a Win 8.1 x86 config with 4GB@3GB DDR3 single channel single dimm, along the SoC dual core 1,9Ghz SSSE3 cpu: 3DMark2001 3900 points (4100 on Win 7), 3DMark03 1930 points, 3DMark05 750 points, 3DMark06 420 points.
The WDDM1.1 driver doesn't help imho in the modern unsupported o.s. but still working. What's interesting is that these low numbers still aren't cpu limited even with such low power cpu so mostly gpu limited. But the synthetic numbers are more interesting with a strangely low fill rate that reach 650 Mt/s in single texturing and I can't understand why (and probably a reason for its low speed in old games) a much lower multi texturing number around 250Mt/s. The triangle rate is 24MT/s at best and 10MT/s in complex light scenes. The theorical DX10 level compatibility never saw a driver and remained compatible to Dx 9.3 probably surpassing that anyway. The H264/VC1 decoding engine can easily work with 1080p 60fps test videos.

What really make this gpu on a different level is the power demand when calculated from the wall plug meter. It looks like its power demand reach something like a maximun of 3 watts of difference from "idle" to "stress" and at idle desktop it probably ask something like 1 watt maybe less. So I wonder something like a 3,5 watts like gpu in the worst scenarios which doesn't make much difference even in the heaviest benchmarks. I suppose the biggest problem of this SoC was that the cpu itself and I suppose the memory controller or whatever took most of the SoC size @ 32nm leaving not much space for the configuration choice of the gpu to integrate which might scale up to much more unified pipelines.

Reply 21762 of 27168, by Zeerex

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Added an extra 128mb dimm (already had a single 128mb slot installed) to my PCChips M577 MVP3 board to get some additional memory speed with via 4x memory Interleaving. I didn’t even get a single megabyte of increased throughput in benchmarking it was literally identical. I figured I would avoid the cacheable memory performance penalty above 128mb with this board since it has 1mb cache - and that seems to be true as benchmarks (3dmark99/Sandra) are identical. Well, maybe I’ll turn off interleaving to see the result.

Reply 21763 of 27168, by framebuffer

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Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-18, 08:36:
Glad to see you taking good care of your boards 🙂 And you definitely got a good number of them 😋 I'm pretty sure btw I'll find s […]
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framebuffer wrote on 2022-05-15, 07:59:

Technically I did this the last weekend, anyways I checked pretty much all my non-in-box mainboards for bulged capacitors and did a re-organisation in the storage to make them more easy to identify
Also found few CPUs I forgot in the socket who knows when 😁

Glad to see you taking good care of your boards 🙂
And you definitely got a good number of them 😋
I'm pretty sure btw I'll find some more surprise-CPUs in my boards, I'm due checking through all of my boards sometime later this year.

post some pics when you do it 😉

Windows 98 and SAMBA | Quake CPU Benchmarks | GeForce2: GTS vs MX400

Reply 21764 of 27168, by Tetrium

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framebuffer wrote on 2022-05-18, 16:36:
Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-18, 08:36:
Glad to see you taking good care of your boards 🙂 And you definitely got a good number of them 😋 I'm pretty sure btw I'll find s […]
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framebuffer wrote on 2022-05-15, 07:59:

Technically I did this the last weekend, anyways I checked pretty much all my non-in-box mainboards for bulged capacitors and did a re-organisation in the storage to make them more easy to identify
Also found few CPUs I forgot in the socket who knows when 😁

Glad to see you taking good care of your boards 🙂
And you definitely got a good number of them 😋
I'm pretty sure btw I'll find some more surprise-CPUs in my boards, I'm due checking through all of my boards sometime later this year.

post some pics when you do it 😉

Can do! Gonna be a lot of pics though and I've got several other projects that need to be completed before that (mostly not to do with anything hardware related btw).

Btw, how many boards do you have in total? If you have THAT many without a motherboard box I reckon your stash is quite substantial indeed 😋

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 21765 of 27168, by TechieDude

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Misplaced the receiver of my Logitech F710 and looked for it all over my room. Not only I didn't find it, I stupidly managed to knock over the water bottle I had on my desk, giving the box of older graphics cards next to it a nice shower... Luckily, it wasn't that much water, and it was hot and sunny outside, so wiping each of them and letting them out to dry made them as good as new. Some got even better than before they got wet. Not the most ideal reason to clean old GPU's if you ask me.
AND I STILL HAVEN'T FOUND THE DAMN RECEIVER!

Reply 21766 of 27168, by debs3759

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I love a story with a happy middle 😄

See my graphics card database at www.gpuzoo.com
Constantly being worked on. Feel free to message me with any corrections or details of cards you would like me to research and add.

Reply 21767 of 27168, by bofh.fromhell

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TrashPanda wrote on 2022-05-18, 03:40:
The Compaq EVO N1000v arrived today and its a tank ...got some amazing speakers built into it too, nice set of UBL speakers and […]
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The Compaq EVO N1000v arrived today and its a tank ...got some amazing speakers built into it too, nice set of UBL speakers and overall its in mint condition. It needs a new battery a SSD and more ram but I think I will enjoy using this little tank and for a P4 its very snappy and should be a great little Multimedia machine.

Not sure how I will fit a SSD in this, its got a IDE setup but there likely wont be enough room for a sata convertor + drive, hmmm might have to go with a m.2 > IDE setup instead.

Something like this I think should work.

61iuVbK8slL._SL1024_.jpg

Have a few of those adapters.
They don't fit any of my laptops....
The reason is that the 44 pin connector is thru hole and pokes out to far on the backside.
So basically the package is to thick to fit the bays it really should fit into.
I guess you could grind the pins back some, but I haven't tried that yet.

Reply 21768 of 27168, by TrashPanda

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bofh.fromhell wrote on 2022-05-18, 21:51:
Have a few of those adapters. They don't fit any of my laptops.... The reason is that the 44 pin connector is thru hole and poke […]
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TrashPanda wrote on 2022-05-18, 03:40:
The Compaq EVO N1000v arrived today and its a tank ...got some amazing speakers built into it too, nice set of UBL speakers and […]
Show full quote

The Compaq EVO N1000v arrived today and its a tank ...got some amazing speakers built into it too, nice set of UBL speakers and overall its in mint condition. It needs a new battery a SSD and more ram but I think I will enjoy using this little tank and for a P4 its very snappy and should be a great little Multimedia machine.

Not sure how I will fit a SSD in this, its got a IDE setup but there likely wont be enough room for a sata convertor + drive, hmmm might have to go with a m.2 > IDE setup instead.

Something like this I think should work.

61iuVbK8slL._SL1024_.jpg

Have a few of those adapters.
They don't fit any of my laptops....
The reason is that the 44 pin connector is thru hole and pokes out to far on the backside.
So basically the package is to thick to fit the bays it really should fit into.
I guess you could grind the pins back some, but I haven't tried that yet.

Ill give that a shot when it arrives and let you know how it goes, shouldn't be too hard to shorten the pins a little.

Reply 21769 of 27168, by pentiumspeed

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Atom stuff does not have dual channel memory subsystem. Hence poor video performance.

Plus SGX545 is very poorly supported. Only two OS supported. XP and 7. The linux has none. I even tried video card in the PCI slot. Performance went down.

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 21770 of 27168, by TechieDude

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debs3759 wrote on 2022-05-18, 21:30:

I love a story with a happy middle 😄

Felt more like a middle finger if you ask me.
EDIT: Never mind, found it in my bed when I went to sleep 🤣

Last edited by TechieDude on 2022-05-19, 10:59. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 21771 of 27168, by ptr1ck

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Fired up a native DOS game for the first time in over 20 years. Felt like a mini achievement.

I think the last one I played was Curse of the Azure Bonds Gold Box on my 286-16 with CGA. I really don't miss CGA.

"ITXBOX" SFF-Win11
KT133A-NV28-V2 SLI-DOS/WinME

Reply 21772 of 27168, by framebuffer

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Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-18, 20:00:
framebuffer wrote on 2022-05-18, 16:36:
Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-18, 08:36:

Glad to see you taking good care of your boards 🙂
And you definitely got a good number of them 😋
I'm pretty sure btw I'll find some more surprise-CPUs in my boards, I'm due checking through all of my boards sometime later this year.

post some pics when you do it 😉

Can do! Gonna be a lot of pics though and I've got several other projects that need to be completed before that (mostly not to do with anything hardware related btw).

Btw, how many boards do you have in total? If you have THAT many without a motherboard box I reckon your stash is quite substantial indeed 😋

Maybe you can select just the less common / more interesting ones 🙂
I could have done the same but completely forgot, too focused on getting that floor clear 😅

ATM I have 124 boards and pretty much no more space, so I'm holding on new purchases unless it's something I really, really (really!) want 😅

Windows 98 and SAMBA | Quake CPU Benchmarks | GeForce2: GTS vs MX400

Reply 21773 of 27168, by 386SX

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pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-05-18, 22:24:

Atom stuff does not have dual channel memory subsystem. Hence poor video performance.

Plus SGX545 is very poorly supported. Only two OS supported. XP and 7. The linux has none. I even tried video card in the PCI slot. Performance went down.

Cheers,

Imho it might be that the SGX545 could be configured for different speed demand designs but for this Atom SoC it was probably choosen a low end (I suppose cheaper) 4 USSE pipeline version that later was tried for the GMA 3650 @ 640Mhz with few difference like +50 points in 3DMark06 along the faster HT +200Mhz CPU and from what I read at higher power demand (compared to the original 400Mhz 32nm specs, a sort of "Turbo version"). It is interesting that later Atom versions still using the SGX545 for Win 8, decreased the clock to 533Mhz that if I remember correctly closer to probably the mobile oriented original spec/power demand but still sharing speed problems and its drivers not compatible for some reasons for the older SoC.

I wonder it wasn't a SGX design problem (imho even reading the above official linked answers, was not comparable to common gpu designs, like the old Kyro II) when it could have been configured with more unified pipelines (and bigger core area size) but probably with power demand/costs the SoC wasn't intended for. The choice was done in the Win 7 o.s. times for notebook/netbook low end idea and the gpu I suppose could have accelerated (as showed in the Win 8 tablets or like I'm testing myself with WDDM1.1 drivers) the Metro GUI but not in this version as a desktop gaming product where older games weren't intended to run (as they could) on modern o.s. (also fill rate is quite low for old games) while modern games simply were heavy for the gpu shaders/vertex speed where games weren't specificallly optimized for its design like on smartphone games, considering the same SGX gpu was used in well known mobile/tablet devices.

On the driver side, the Win 7 ones are stable and compatible to a certain point in Win 8.x and a bit slower but still runs. XP drivers I think didn't have acceleration, Linux did have some debian official DRM drivers (tried lately in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) that worked good imho in such discontinued o.s., do use the GPU to accelerate but not the OpenGL part. Other linux based o.s. could run OpenGL but still requiring a manual compilation with old kernels/xorg/mesa versions dependencies. Some community projects existed for later o.s. but for the GMA500 (SGX535 I think) I don't know if they worked on the SGX545 and up to a 4.x linux kernel with same xorg/mesa old dependencies. Nowdays it still exists a compatible DRM gma500 kernel module which use the gpu as frame buffer (not bad) driver but no acceleration is used beside the basic one.

The external PCI video card option was mostly limited by the bus and video card IC bridges imho and too bad only few mainboard choosed to use the PCI-EX rail to install a full PCI-EX x16 bus (limited to x1) while most other boards had PCI and miniPCI-EX. I also tried the few PCI last gen solutions, they improve the GPU speed and compatibility for sure but very limited by the bus more than the cpu itself, not to mention those 20-30 watts more added to the equation compared to the 2-3 watts of the iGPU.

Last edited by 386SX on 2022-05-19, 11:11. Edited 7 times in total.

Reply 21774 of 27168, by appiah4

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Repaired a Terratec Gold 16/96.

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Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 21775 of 27168, by Radical Vision

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appiah4 wrote on 2022-05-19, 08:33:
Repaired a Terratec Gold 16/96. […]
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Repaired a Terratec Gold 16/96.

Before:

Terratec Gold 16-96 Damaged.jpg

After:

Terratec Gold 16-96.jpg

Nice this is prob one of the few premium ESS Audio cards, compared to the cheap crap. Also the PCB looks ALOT better then the normal green/ shitty yellow ones..
Good job repairing the card, i on other hand dont like to bother with repairs, i sell/ trade parts that are like in this condition, as i like to get only stuff as close to factory condition.

Like this crap... Gravis also did have ESS model Red PCB how nice..

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Mah systems retro, old, newer (Radical stuff)
W3680 4.5/ GA-x58 UD7/ R9 280x
K7 2.6/ NF7-S/ HD3850
IBM x2 P3 933/ GA-6VXD7/ Voodoo V 5.5K
Cmq P2 450/ GA-BX2000/ V2 SLI
IBM PC365
Cmq DeskPRO 486/33
IBM PS/2 Model 56
SPS IntelleXT 8088

Reply 21776 of 27168, by PcBytes

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Wondering whether I should adventure in getting a slotket to work with my ABIT BE6-II. I have had rather unpleasant stuff going on with the old one (which just for the lulz I might relegate to a 440LX mobo just to see if I can get a 633 or 700MHz Celeron to run on those - they're 66FSB parts after all, even if they're Coppermine.) and the new slotket I got, while looking a bit more advanced than the old one (I have a row of dip switches on the new slotket dictating the CPU VCore to whatever I want 🤣) , also required doing the wire mod to allow Coppermines to run (talk about being so cheap you fake advertise it as FCPGA compatible - it wasn't until I read the puny VCore table that I realized this was a Mendocino only slotket - the original table doesn't go less than 2.0V vcore - I had to manually track down a photo of a newer revision of the slotket I have (apparently made by a company named Cooltek or something around that) where it had a broader VCore table that would go down to 1.6V max.

And my other question would be whether those DIP switches can set it lower than 1.6v? If so, this might be the biggest score for me, as not only I could dictate VCore at my absolute free will, but also I'd be able to run pinmodded Tualatins without any adapter, very likely.

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 21777 of 27168, by PARKE

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PcBytes wrote on 2022-05-19, 09:54:

And my other question would be whether those DIP switches can set it lower than 1.6v? If so, this might be the biggest score for me, as not only I could dictate VCore at my absolute free will, but also I'd be able to run pinmodded Tualatins without any adapter, very likely.

If there are 5 dipswitches it should theoretically be able to address the whole range from 1.3v through 3.5v that is available on Coppermine ready motherboards. Can you post a photo of that slotket ?

Reply 21778 of 27168, by PcBytes

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Sure, here you go. Note that it originally was a Mendocino only slotket, hence why the printed VCore settings don't go lower than 2.0v. (and disregard the 1GHz P3, it was there as a filler.)

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Also, these are the settings I found (which work accordingly) for it after I did the mod. Same company that did my slotket btw.

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"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 21779 of 27168, by PARKE

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They are sure similar in looks but as far as I have been able to sleuth the first one is made by Soyo (that used the [PII CPU CARD] denomination for several revisions) and the second one is made by Shuttle - see attached.

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But the dipswitches work exactly the same so you were lucky. I guess these guys sometimes worked together to some extent and/or 'borrowed' design details from each other.