I'm still guessing it's memory (can you swap them with known good ones from another card?) or eventually filter caps.

This won't answer your question, but I have a similar card and posted a topic about it a while ago. Sadly not much info about it I'm afraid:

EGA/VGA Optima 1024 P.N. 3071 Rev A (Tseng Labs ET3000AX) info or manual?

Kubik wrote:

I'm still guessing it's memory (can you swap them with known good ones from another card?) or eventually filter caps.

Well only one of my cards has socketed memory and while I do have a card which also has this memory socketed its dead and has only half the amount of chips so not really is the answer. I'm not sure what the filter caps are, would you be so kind and pin point me to the right component?

MMaximus wrote:

This won't answer your question, but I have a similar card and posted a topic about it a while ago. Sadly not much info about it I'm afraid:

EGA/VGA Optima 1024 P.N. 3071 Rev A (Tseng Labs ET3000AX) info or manual?

Here are the jumper settings if you have not seen them already

yeah it's 99% a ram fault, don't bother with capacitors ... start changing ICs one-by-one until you don't get artifacts then throw away the defective memory IC.

After spending at least an hour swapping memory chips left and right I realized that I do have a card which uses the same memory and is known good. Well long story short it's not the memory. Swapped the memory in from the know good card and it's still artifacting, swapped it back and the other card is still working perfectly. I will test the other memory chips in this card at a late date just to be sure though.

I did learn a lot about the card though.
- It needs at least 6 memory chips to produce its normal picture
- It needs at least 2 to work at all
- If you go down to one you have to go up to three again to make it work again

The new picture is with the known good memory chips, so some new artifacts have joined the party.

I also noticed testing in EDIT for artifacts (cause the don't show up as often with just 2 memory chips) that scrolling the screen with enter seems to clear the artifacts and only produce an artifact once in a while, while scrolling with the cursor keys produces a whole rainfall of artifacts (at least that is what it looks like since the artifacts just scroll of the screen)

Maybe somebody with knowledge can make any sense of this.

Oh bad luck then 🙁 check for solder defects or damaged traces...

Eleanor1967 wrote:

Here are the jumper settings if you have not seen them already

Thanks! I didn't know about this page. I might try some settings next time I pull my ET3000ax out of storage.

Played a bit with the cards today. The new artifacting from my last post is gone again, I guess thats good. I tested all the memory chips in my known good card and they all work fine. I also tested another DAC on one of the cards. Can't spot any bad solder points or cracks or damaged traces anyhwhere.

What about the filter caps mentioned above? What part is this?

Eleanor1967 wrote:

Can't spot any bad solder points or cracks or damaged traces anyhwhere.

Could you post some well-lit, high resolution photos of both sides of the card?

CkRtech wrote:

Eleanor1967 wrote:

Can't spot any bad solder points or cracks or damaged traces anyhwhere.

Could you post some well-lit, high resolution photos of both sides of the card?

There you go. I can try again if necessary.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6rin7lcls9yo6i2/et3000ax.rar?dl=0

I also tried the oven trick with one of the cards but it didn't work. Fresh out of the oven still a bit warm the card was artifacting hard and would crash almost instantly, the system wouldn't even finish counting the memory. After some cooling done its back to working and "normal" level of artifacting.