Trashbytes wrote on 2024-07-14, 05:49:

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-07-14, 04:02:

G-X wrote on 2024-07-13, 18:55:

Hi all, New to the forum but have been lurking for quite some time. Have not come across an "intoduction" type thread so might a […]
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Hi all, New to the forum but have been lurking for quite some time. Have not come across an "intoduction" type thread so might aswell start this way.

This may not be quite as old as most of the hardware here but in my search for rebuilding the PC's i built as a teenager i came across this card.

Quite dusty but still works.

An AGP Asus X850XT.

When these cards just came out i bought a Sapphire X850XT-PE (pci-e) for my first gaming pc. For a brief second i was the man at a lan party... then 5 seconds later better cards came out. But that's the nature of the game.

I have not yet been able to find an affordable Sapphire PE to rebuild my old pc but perhaps one day i'll find one.

There was a x850xtpe not long ago on ebay. Fantastic card from when ATI was really kicking arses. Super rare. I was ready to pay (A LOT) but I didn't increase my max bid since I had a significant advantage, but then someone managed to outbid me in the last 10 seconds. And it was the AGP one too. I will forever regret it. I waited years for that card to show up on ebay.

PCIe models of that card tend to be fairly cheap and you can get PCIe Win98 motherboards .. this is the path I took since the AGP models go for insane amounts of money and the AGP models also tend to be DOA due to the heat issues the Rialto Bridge chip suffers from due to ATI not bothering to put adequate cooling on the poor thing. If you can ever get a working AGP X850XT PE then your first mission is to put a heat sink on the Rialto Bridge chip and then throw a better cooler on the card. I wouldnt ever use the AGP model without doing these two things first or at the bare minimum repating it and putting a heat sink on the bridge chip.

There are native AGP versions IIRC, but they should be even more rare than the bridged versions.

Interesting. Rather, I'd not use them. I am not into modifying old classic GPUs. The X850XTPE was top of the line. Must be a super tasteful modification otherwise nope.
Do you think I can solve this and similar problem with extra ventilation? I was thinking to buy a bunch of these PCI slot fans and put them above and below the cards.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-07-14, 13:25:

hehe .. yup I too know how much that CPU can cost, as for the ram I have a lot of the PC4000 DDR500 stuff but have never seen DDR 550, must be exceptionally rare. (Added it to my saved searches, might show up eventually)

Well, if you can live with just 1 single stick, there are currently floating around 1x 512mb for $9.95, and 1x 1024mb at the bargain price of merely $129.99 ...... 🤔

Lostdotfish wrote on 2024-07-14, 13:30:

The Opteron 165 I bought recently does 2.8GHz at 1.4v (memory on the highest divider for around 315MHz). It's a cheap enough chip to find and I doubt this FX60 will go much higher...

What's crazy is that modern chips on nodes nearly 1% of that node size are still running up to 1.4v

Cough 14900 cough

Multiple factors in that, semiconductor bandgap, noise tolerance, economics of production... i.e. low bandgap semiconductors are neither very noise resistant or economic at scale.

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-07-14, 04:02:

There was a x850xtpe not long ago on ebay. Fantastic card from when ATI was really kicking arses. Super rare. I was ready to pay (A LOT) but I didn't increase my max bid since I had a significant advantage, but then someone managed to outbid me in the last 10 seconds. And it was the AGP one too. I will forever regret it. I waited years for that card to show up on ebay.

Yes i remember wanting the fastest consumer card possible (buying it with some of my first paychecks!). That was the only time i ever did that though .. quickly realised that half the price would get you 80% of the performance so i never went for top-end anything after that.

EBAY prices are outrageous to be honest .. i sometimes browse arround but have yet to buy anything related to retro hardware over there. There is one up at the moment (refrence card?) but buyer wanting $400 ... that's just silly.

I was lucky enough to pick mine up for $25 (non PE) .. quite a steal actually when i see the prices on ebay.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-07-14, 05:49:

PCIe models of that card tend to be fairly cheap and you can get PCIe Win98 motherboards .. this is the path I took since the AGP models go for insane amounts of money and the AGP models also tend to be DOA due to the heat issues the Rialto Bridge chip suffers from due to ATI not bothering to put adequate cooling on the poor thing. If you can ever get a working AGP X850XT PE then your first mission is to put a heat sink on the Rialto Bridge chip and then throw a better cooler on the card. I wouldnt ever use the AGP model without doing these two things first or at the bare minimum repating it and putting a heat sink on the bridge chip.

There are native AGP versions IIRC, but they should be even more rare than the bridged versions.

Thanks for the heads up! I didn't even realise these had a bridge chip (on my agp 3850 it's quite obvious) does the non PE version also usually come with a bridge chip? I will check to see if it has one and if so try and find a heatsink for it.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-07-14, 05:59:

G-X wrote on 2024-07-13, 18:55:

An AGP Asus X850XT.

When these cards just came out i bought a Sapphire X850XT-PE (pci-e) for my first gaming pc. For a brief second i was the man at a lan party... then 5 seconds later better cards came out. But that's the nature of the game.

The problem with Radeon R400 chipset family was Pixel Shader model 3.0 games started coming out a year before. Great GPUs with plenty of speed, but limited to 2.0 shaders meaning Nvidia had easy time marketing against them.

Which was nothing but marketing. I argued back then that the GF6 cards would be too slow by the time SM3 mattered, and after trying Bioshock on a 6800gs, I stand by that statement.

Can someone please upload a disk image of the Montego 2 Quadzilla CD? Seems to only have the regular card drivers on here and they specifically say not for use with the Studio or Quadzilla cards.

G-X wrote on 2024-07-14, 18:18:

Yes i remember wanting the fastest consumer card possible (buying it with some of my first paychecks!). That was the only time […]
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Wes1262 wrote on 2024-07-14, 04:02:

There was a x850xtpe not long ago on ebay. Fantastic card from when ATI was really kicking arses. Super rare. I was ready to pay (A LOT) but I didn't increase my max bid since I had a significant advantage, but then someone managed to outbid me in the last 10 seconds. And it was the AGP one too. I will forever regret it. I waited years for that card to show up on ebay.

Yes i remember wanting the fastest consumer card possible (buying it with some of my first paychecks!). That was the only time i ever did that though .. quickly realised that half the price would get you 80% of the performance so i never went for top-end anything after that.

EBAY prices are outrageous to be honest .. i sometimes browse arround but have yet to buy anything related to retro hardware over there. There is one up at the moment (refrence card?) but buyer wanting $400 ... that's just silly.

I was lucky enough to pick mine up for $25 (non PE) .. quite a steal actually when i see the prices on ebay.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-07-14, 05:49:

PCIe models of that card tend to be fairly cheap and you can get PCIe Win98 motherboards .. this is the path I took since the AGP models go for insane amounts of money and the AGP models also tend to be DOA due to the heat issues the Rialto Bridge chip suffers from due to ATI not bothering to put adequate cooling on the poor thing. If you can ever get a working AGP X850XT PE then your first mission is to put a heat sink on the Rialto Bridge chip and then throw a better cooler on the card. I wouldnt ever use the AGP model without doing these two things first or at the bare minimum repating it and putting a heat sink on the bridge chip.

There are native AGP versions IIRC, but they should be even more rare than the bridged versions.

Thanks for the heads up! I didn't even realise these had a bridge chip (on my agp 3850 it's quite obvious) does the non PE version also usually come with a bridge chip? I will check to see if it has one and if so try and find a heatsink for it.

Just look on the back just above the AGP fingers, you cant miss the bridge chip if yours has one. If you dont see a large square chip there or a square of what looks like foam then yours is a native model.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-07-14, 17:23:

Multiple factors in that, semiconductor bandgap, noise tolerance, economics of production... i.e. low bandgap semiconductors are neither very noise resistant or economic at scale.

and dont forget Intel cowboy attitude to all of this while trying to desperately cling to performance crown
Apr 11, 2024 https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-13th-gen … th-gen-crashes/
11 Jul 2024 [Intel has a Pretty Big Problem] Level1Techs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y
TLDR: 14900 degrade in couple of weeks after installing and start crashing, even on server W680 chipset meaning with zero overclocking.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-07-15, 04:45:

and dont forget Intel cowboy attitude to all of this while trying to desperately cling to performance crown Apr 11, 2024 https:/ […]
Show full quote

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-07-14, 17:23:

Multiple factors in that, semiconductor bandgap, noise tolerance, economics of production... i.e. low bandgap semiconductors are neither very noise resistant or economic at scale.

and dont forget Intel cowboy attitude to all of this while trying to desperately cling to performance crown
Apr 11, 2024 https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-13th-gen … th-gen-crashes/
11 Jul 2024 [Intel has a Pretty Big Problem] Level1Techs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y
TLDR: 14900 degrade in couple of weeks after installing and start crashing, even on server W680 chipset meaning with zero overclocking.

Yeah they have a big problem with their halo CPUs, my guess is they are driving the voltage to high and its causing far to much electron migration which in turn is damaging the silicon. Problem is once the damage is done it only gets worse and the CPU at that point is no better than an expensive paper weight.

Got this Geforce 4 Ti4200 for $15 USD. I don't know much about Geforce 4's. I figured it would be fun to try out in a early 2000 build. The seller reckons the back of the card has corrosion but the metal plate looks way too clean. I think the stuff on the back is inspect poop. Hopefully the "untested" card is working.

Nice & compact designed card. Looks very clean layout-wise.
Let's hope it works.

I bought an uncommon TNT2 M64 with 32MB of memory. The seller said that he had trouble getting to to detect his monitor. I wonder why...

The "A7I" SOT-23 seems to be a switching transistor. I found lots of results for "A7" online. What does the "I" mean?

"D" is diode array in each 3 legged package, two diodes each. A7 is correct component type.

Like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/185732718068

The real reason this does not work is R8 (slid sideways) broke the sync signal path (resistor marking "101"). Solder resistor back on.

Cheers,

Got this Radeon X800 XL AGP which the seller was kind enough to keep cushioned on the carpet. Description said they got it from a charity shop and couldn't test it. Always a bit suspect when things are "untested", but given the other stuff they were selling it seemed believable they weren't the type to have an AGP board lying around to try it. Works perfectly so far and only £20. Pretty good deal, no?

giantenemycat wrote on 2024-07-15, 20:10:

Got this Radeon X800 XL AGP which the seller was kind enough to keep cushioned on the carpet. Description said they got it from a charity shop and couldn't test it. Always a bit suspect when things are "untested", but given the other stuff they were selling it seemed believable they weren't the type to have an AGP board lying around to try it. Works perfectly so far and only £20. Pretty good deal, no?

You beat me to the checkout on that one. Congrats

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-07-15, 19:36:

I bought an uncommon TNT2 M64 with 32MB of memory. The seller said that he had trouble getting to to detect his monitor. I wonder why...

The "A7I" SOT-23 seems to be a switching transistor. I found lots of results for "A7" online. What does the "I" mean?

The attachment 20240715_153412.jpg is no longer available

Man, you can see the scrape that took all of those components out...

I would resolder the resistor as pentiumspeed said. If anything else is still not quite right then it could be any of those other components that took a hit. Even C5 looks to have a bit of damage on one end, though probably not enough to have broken it.

Probably wouldn't be a bad idea to check the rest of the card thoroughly just in case.

I'm looking forward to this repair. I have several M64 16MB PCI cards, however this is my first 32MB one. I've wanted to try upgrading the memory on my other cards, but I've wondered if this was even possible or if it would require a different BIOS. I'll be able to dump this BIOS if necessary now to test if that will make it work.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-07-16, 01:44:

I'm looking forward to this repair. I have several M64 16MB PCI cards, however this is my first 32MB one. I've wanted to try upgrading the memory on my other cards, but I've wondered if this was even possible or if it would require a different BIOS. I'll be able to dump this BIOS if necessary now to test if that will make it work.

Just curious, is there any practical use for more than 16MB on an M64?

I know that even the 8MB Velocity 100 (Voodoo3 2000 with half the memory) seems to perform very close to the 16MB Voodoo3s in games where these cards are fast enough to make sense. With an M64 being so much slower it seems like it would struggle to make use of more than 16MB before the rest of the card was overwhelmed. Late 1999 games with 32\24bit color at 1024x768 would likely do it, but it'd likely be a slideshow at that point.

Not to say there's no use at all for 32MB on such a card... just wondering if you know of anything specific that would benefit.

EDIT: I actually found some benchmarks...
download/file.php?id=55042&mode=view

It seems having 32MB on an M64 didn't give any gains until running Quake3 at Max texture settings in 32bit color. There is a clear benefit at that level, but you'd have to play at 640x480 for it to be decently smooth (around 40fps average). Simply dropping to 16bit color (still max textures) almost doubles the frame rate at that res, and the 16MB card performs about the same there. They also perform the same at 800x600x16 at max textures.

It would be interesting to see a similar test run in other games of course. 😀

IMO that seems to apply across a lot of video cards, the "premium" RAM capacity never seeming worth it over ordinary or middle one, since by the time the games need it, the gfx engine is too slow for it to count.