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Zotac Nvidia Geforce FX 5200 PCI RAM Upgrade

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Reply 20 of 22, by Mondodimotori

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NorsteinB wrote on Today, 15:31:

Oh by the way, could you maybe dump the BIOS of your card?

That and the exact model of your GPU's RAM chips would be helpful for modifying my own one.

Sure! Is there an easy way to dump the BIOS from WinME? I'm not 100% comfortable in removing the card to stick it in an XP machine after what happened yesterday to one of my FX5600 (that temporarly died after I had to pull it out of the system for testing).
The picture of one of the memory chip I can take it with the card still in the machine when I get back home in a bit. I'll edit this post with the pictures and, eventually, the BIOS dump.

EDIT: Here's the memory chips on my Zotac FX5200 PCI. 8 of them all on the top side.

The attachment 20261016_175904.jpg is no longer available

Reply 21 of 22, by NorsteinB

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Mondodimotori wrote on Today, 15:34:
Sure! Is there an easy way to dump the BIOS from WinME? I'm not 100% comfortable in removing the card to stick it in an XP machi […]
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NorsteinB wrote on Today, 15:31:

Oh by the way, could you maybe dump the BIOS of your card?

That and the exact model of your GPU's RAM chips would be helpful for modifying my own one.

Sure! Is there an easy way to dump the BIOS from WinME? I'm not 100% comfortable in removing the card to stick it in an XP machine after what happened yesterday to one of my FX5600 (that temporarly died after I had to pull it out of the system for testing).
The picture of one of the memory chip I can take it with the card still in the machine when I get back home in a bit. I'll edit this post with the pictures and, eventually, the BIOS dump.

EDIT: Here's the memory chips on my Zotac FX5200 PCI. 8 of them all on the top side.

The attachment 20261016_175904.jpg is no longer available

That's crazy, this is 5ns RAM. 5ns as in it is rated for 200 MHz (400 MHz DDR a.k.a. effective speed).

I think we are having a misunderstanding here. It is much more likely that this was not in fact overclocked to 333 MHz (666 MHz DDR) but rather, what often happened with high density modules like these, they were not running at their rated speed. The web is full of Geforce FX 5200 256 MB cards that are clocked 250 MHz for the core and 166 (333 MHz DDR) for the RAM.

A chip rated at 200 MHz running 375 (750 DDR!) would be... unlikely to say the least.

It would be far more likely that Zotac underclocked them (we know this was common practice at the time) to make up for the lack of cooling and to save power, maybe they even tightened the RAM timings to make up for some of the lost clock speed. That would certainly explain why the chips would then fail to meet their rated speed of 200 MHz, when they are getting less than 2.5V and/or are running on tightened timings.

Last edited by NorsteinB on 2026-10-16, 18:13. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 22 of 22, by tehsiggi

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NorsteinB wrote on Today, 18:03:
That's crazy, this is 5ns RAM. 5ns as in it is rated for 200 MHz (400 MHz DDR a.k.a. effective speed). […]
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Mondodimotori wrote on Today, 15:34:
Sure! Is there an easy way to dump the BIOS from WinME? I'm not 100% comfortable in removing the card to stick it in an XP machi […]
Show full quote
NorsteinB wrote on Today, 15:31:

Oh by the way, could you maybe dump the BIOS of your card?

That and the exact model of your GPU's RAM chips would be helpful for modifying my own one.

Sure! Is there an easy way to dump the BIOS from WinME? I'm not 100% comfortable in removing the card to stick it in an XP machine after what happened yesterday to one of my FX5600 (that temporarly died after I had to pull it out of the system for testing).
The picture of one of the memory chip I can take it with the card still in the machine when I get back home in a bit. I'll edit this post with the pictures and, eventually, the BIOS dump.

EDIT: Here's the memory chips on my Zotac FX5200 PCI. 8 of them all on the top side.

The attachment 20261016_175904.jpg is no longer available

That's crazy, this is 5ns RAM. 5ns as in it is rated for 200 MHz (400 MHz DDR a.k.a. effective speed).

I think we are having a misunderstanding here. It is much more likely that this was not in fact overclocked to 333 MHz (666 MHz DDR) but rather, what often happened with high density modules like these, they were not running at their rated speed. The web is full of Geforce FX 5200 256 MB cards that are clocked 250 MHz for the core and 166 (333 MHz DDR) for the RAM.

A chip rated at 200 MHz running 375 (750 DDR!) would be... unlikely to say the least.

Pretty sure we're talking going from 166MHz (333MHz DDR) to something higher. Neither the chips nor the layout would do 375MHz (750MHz DDR)

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