Nunoalex wrote on Yesterday, 11:20:

Alexraptor wrote on Yesterday, 08:59:

Picked up a Matrox G400 in excellent condition. 😀

The attachment HG_43FNawAAiLNB.jpg is no longer available

Great find!

I have 3 matrox 450 similar to that one, but I think the 400 was actually superior to the 450

It is, yes. I was actually running a G450 Dual Head before i picked this one up. 😀

I also have a G550, but i think i got a bum card, because i get artifacting from it in 3DMark 99, while the G450 and 400 run it just fine.

H3nrik V! wrote on Yesterday, 05:50:

Nicolas 2000 wrote on 2026-04-26, 19:36:

A pair of Matrox Millennium II. A 703-00 Rev A and a 708-01 Rev A. These seem to be quite sought after?

Are they both 8 megabyte versions? In my opinion an 8 megabyte version would be extremely sought after (Yes, I loooove Matrox cards 🤣 )

The 703 is an 8MB version, the 708 a 4MB. Both PCI. The 708 is up for sale, the 703 remains in my bin in case I ever come across an early Pentium build that I want to supercharge.

After some change of thoughts, I now have the following in my spare bin:

-a test PC consisting of a slot-galore P3 733 motherboard, CT4810 sound card (low overhead, just works, quite good with DOS), and the mighty (if you put it in a sufficiently old PC at least 😁) MX460.
-A P3 667 CPU.
-a spare Audigy 2 (I have one in my W98 PC)
-a spare Audigy 2 ZS (I have on in my XP PC)
-a Trio64V+ because one day you'll find yourself in a situation that asks for a "just do it" gpu.
-an 8MB Matrox Millennium II as stated above.
-a 10/100 network card.

All the rest will be up for sale. The MX460 and the 8MB Millennium 2 were the highlights of the lot, the rest mainly was impressive in quantity or nice collateral damage such as a spare Audigy2.

Nicolas 2000 wrote on Yesterday, 13:31:

H3nrik V! wrote on Yesterday, 05:50:

Nicolas 2000 wrote on 2026-04-26, 19:36:

A pair of Matrox Millennium II. A 703-00 Rev A and a 708-01 Rev A. These seem to be quite sought after?

Are they both 8 megabyte versions? In my opinion an 8 megabyte version would be extremely sought after (Yes, I loooove Matrox cards 🤣 )

... The MX460 and the 8MB Millennium 2 were the highlights of the lot, the rest mainly was impressive in quantity or nice collateral damage such as a spare Audigy2.

I agree the MX460 and 8Mb Millenium 2 stand out, but if you are not rating your 128bit TNT and 128bit TNT2 then you're more than welcome to pass them onto me! 😉

Your i740 is noteworthy also: Computer history buffs value it, while game enthusiasts ignore it.

The i740 will always be the first AGP card, the architecture that AGP was designed to support, and the only card that utilises AGP the way the architects intended. It's like the prototype demonstrator of the AGP vision, and that vision was ironically not widely adopted until the PCIe era.

The architects believed VRAM was going to remain prohibitively expensive - they were wrong.
The architects also believed that 3Dfx Voodoo 4Mb would remain the industry benchmark - they were wrong.
The architects believed upcoming games would demand massive detailed textures - they were wrong.

i740 launched into an era characterised by small repeating textures, fill rates arms race, and lots of cheap VRAM - the exact opposite of what it was optimised for. But, there were software demonstrations specifically for use with an i740. The i740 is the grandfather of iGPU. The technologies pioneered in the i740 finally went mainstream in the PCIe era.

It remains to be seen if that TNT2 is 128 bit, and was there a TNT in the lot? I'll have to check.

Edit: no TNT in the lot, only a TNT2.

However, I saw there was also an AGP Millennium 2 with a daughterboard. Is that daughterboard extra RAM, and if so, could I put it on my 8MB PCI version to create a monstrous Millennium 2?

The Dell AGP Millennium is a 4MB 672-04 with a 4MB expansion card. I wonder if that expansion card on the 703-00 would make it (recognize itself as) 12MB?

Nicolas 2000 wrote on Yesterday, 15:34:

The Dell AGP Millennium is a 4MB 672-04 with a 4MB expansion card. I wonder if that expansion card on the 703-00 would make it (recognize itself as) 12MB?

I believe so.

Nicolas 2000 wrote on Yesterday, 15:17:

It remains to be seen if that TNT2 is 128 bit, and was there a TNT in the lot? I'll have to check.

Edit: no TNT in the lot, only a TNT2.

However, I saw there was also an AGP Millennium 2 with a daughterboard. Is that daughterboard extra RAM, and if so, could I put it on my 8MB PCI version to create a monstrous Millennium 2?

Diamond Viper V550 is a TNT (not TNT2). But, if you don't want it please PM me!

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/Manufacturer … _viper_v550.php

Oh is that a TNT in disguise, I didn't know. I'll test them all once -ever- the test PC is up and running.

So I'll put the 4MB expansion on the 8MB Mill2, just to have a 12MB PCI card waiting for an unsuspecting early Pentium.

This way, a nice lot just became an even nicer lot. A 12MB Mill2 is something well above average in my book. I knew there were no voodoo's or anything in the lot, but finds like these elevate it above the "my grandma had one just like it" level.

Nicolas 2000 wrote on Yesterday, 15:54:

Oh is that a TNT in disguise, I didn't know. I'll test them all once -ever- the test PC is up and running.

So I'll put the 4MB expansion on the 8MB Mill2, just to have a 12MB PCI card waiting for an unsuspecting early Pentium.

This way, a nice lot just became an even nicer lot. A 12MB Mill2 is something well above average in my book. I knew there were no voodoo's or anything in the lot, but finds like these elevate it above the "my grandma had one just like it" level.

The Viper 550 is a premium branded TNT that humiliates your M64s. Your newer (and currently unverified) 128bit TNT2 might be only slightly faster . You did okay with that lot.

Thanks for that info! The question in my case is though: is there a point in keeping that V550. For my W98 P3 1000, I aim at faster cards (has a Ti4200) and I have an MX460 as a spare. I don't see myself ever building another PC that already has AGP but is slower than my P3 1000 but not as slow as my hypothetical early Pentium with the 12MB Mill2. So it seems to me that there is in my collection no real use case for it. I'm not looking for something "fast Voodoo" as I already have that in the V2 SLI W98 PC.

I understand the V550 and TNT2 are nice cards, I just don't see where in my spectrum I could ever find a use for them. I don't want 10 PC's, I have no room for them. 3 or 4 is already stretching it. 😀

If you are doing a period correct build for a specific era, there might be use for a card like the V550. If not, then you might as well sell it.

Indeed, that's my conclusion as well. I'm not big on "period correct" in that sense that I've never built a "1997 PC" or something like that. I start from a use case such as "W98 up to DX7" and then throw the most ludicrous hardware that works at it, even if there is a 7 year spread in the hardware used. In the end the game still runs non-emulated on real hardware and that is what I'm after.

So, time to flood the market with 25-30 year old mid spec GPU's! 😁

Nicolas 2000 wrote on Yesterday, 16:26:

Thanks for that info! The question in my case is though: is there a point in keeping that V550. For my W98 P3 1000, I aim at faster cards (has a Ti4200) and I have an MX460 as a spare. I don't see myself ever building another PC that already has AGP but is slower than my P3 1000 but not as slow as my hypothetical early Pentium with the 12MB Mill2. So it seems to me that there is in my collection no real use case for it. I'm not looking for something "fast Voodoo" as I already have that in the V2 SLI W98 PC.

I understand the V550 and TNT2 are nice cards, I just don't see where in my spectrum I could ever find a use for them. I don't want 10 PC's, I have no room for them. 3 or 4 is already stretching it. 😀

The behaviour difference between a TNT and TNT2 is small, so for rendering scenes a V770 gives you everything a V550 can and more.

Studying the V550 only really helps answer, "why invest in creating a V770 in the first place?"

And, I like studying those kinds of questions! An exam question I might create could be, "How did this machine's user experience inform emerging GPU product strategies?"

Given that question, a V330 with Win95/DX3-era drivers is interesting because it lets me observe the assumptions and compromises of that moment and see why V550 was designed the way it is. If I install later V330 DX5 drivers, I may get a working/better system, but in doing that I have introduced future code paths that weren’t part of the original context and destroys my ability to confidently answer my own exam question.

So the value of something like a V550 is not necessarily that it fills a performance gap between a Millennium II and a Ti4200, but that it can represent the pure DX5 class stack with the driver challenges, API interactions, and Nvidia's market positioning in ways that a V770 cannot.

If the question you want to answer, "What is the best practical build?", then the V550 will never be as valuable as a V770 or your OEM 128bit TNT2.

If the question is "How did the challenge to 3Dfx unfold?", then the V550 becomes much more interesting.

Got this RIVA TNT2 M64 16MB. Only £23.27 including shipping, which is a good price for a (properly) 3D capable PCI card.

Was sold as for parts because of a degraded RAMDAC, which causes a ghosting/banding effect that's most noticeable outside of games and on lighter backgrounds. But otherwise apparently works fine, no artifacts or anything like that. This works for me because I'll mainly be using it for testing, as a hypothetical "endgame" upgrade to test the limits of my first PC - a 430TX that maxed out at P233MMX (no K6 support at all). It'll be at least a little better than the Virge DX we actually had, surely. 😉

giantenemycat wrote on Yesterday, 23:41:

Got this RIVA TNT2 M64 16MB. Only £23.27 including shipping, which is a good price for a (properly) 3D capable PCI card.

The attachment IMG_1317.jpg is no longer available

Was sold as for parts because of a degraded RAMDAC, which causes a ghosting/banding effect that's most noticeable outside of games and on lighter backgrounds. But otherwise apparently works fine, no artifacts or anything like that. This works for me because I'll mainly be using it for testing, as a hypothetical "endgame" upgrade to test the limits of my first PC - a 430TX that maxed out at P233MMX (no K6 support at all). It'll be at least a little better than the Virge DX we actually had, surely. 😉

It's a nice upgrade for a pre-AGP system. I investigated that particular card, and I did not agree with the seller.

First, a RAMDAC generates each pixel sequentially left-to-right. That means full-line darkening (pixels to the left) would require a RAMDAC to do time travel and I'm not buying that - so it's not the RAMDAC.

What I'm seeing is whole lines darkening (or brightening) to match an average. Looking really closely at the artefact, I think each line is showing the average brightness of the preceding line. To me that looks like some kind of moving average bias in the analogue stage after the RAMDAC.

I have done some reading and I think the fault can be better described as "baseline shift/droop in the analogue stage of resistance and capacitance".

Healthy PCBs stay within 0.0v for deep black to 0.7v for bright white, but afflicted cards are drifting. Sometimes the voltage drifts too low (e.g. -0.3v to +0.4v - darkened) or drifts too high (e.g. +0.3v to 1.0v - brightened).

According to one manufacturer of ceramic capacitors, Barium Titanate capacitors are known to show DC bias and ageing characteristics - and that fits. The challenge might be in identifying analog stage Barium Titanate capacitors, testing, and replacing them. I discussed this briefly with @Ozzuneoj who has VGA cards showing the same symptoms. @Ozzuneoj felt Barium Titanate capacitors are not discussed in the retro community and encouraged me to post my findings.

Overall I think this means £23 is a very good price for the later era PCI card, and I think more repairable than the seller realised. I was tempted to buy and kept putting it off. I hope it gives your P5/MMX a boost. Let me know if you want to dig into the science or capacitor manufacturer's data on this.

Nicolas 2000 wrote on Yesterday, 20:05:

.. time to flood the market with 25-30 year old mid spec GPU's! 😁

PM me a price for the V550? 😀