VOGONS


First post, by appiah4

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I bought a parts lot and this turned out to be in it (picture not mine, but the card is identical):

rtg3105iehfb.jpg

Does anyone know what kind of performance this card has or whether it has any highlights or not? It seems to be a rather LATE chipset for the ISA bus, introduced in 1994, well after VLB and PCI were a thing. One would assume it would be a fairly integrated and fast ISA chipset, but knowing Realtek that's not very likely?

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Reply 1 of 12, by keropi

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I have some RTG3105 cards they are really basic and slow ... maybe this later controller is better I had no idea they continued the vga releases

q1VYWEfl.jpg

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Reply 2 of 12, by Scali

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Friend of mine had a RealTek VGA card in his 386SX-16 back in the day. It was horrible, to the point that it made Trident and Oak look good.
I had a 386SX-16 as well, but my VGA card was a WD Paradise. Made a huge difference.

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Reply 3 of 12, by appiah4

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Scali wrote:

Friend of mine had a RealTek VGA card in his 386SX-16 back in the day. It was horrible, to the point that it made Trident and Oak look good.
I had a 386SX-16 as well, but my VGA card was a WD Paradise. Made a huge difference.

Wow, being worse than OTI is indeed a feat.. I was hoping maybe it would have decent VESA or EGA compatibility or something, but I guess just junk. 🙁

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Reply 4 of 12, by keropi

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^ better test it yet to be sure, your card uses a newer chip

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Reply 5 of 12, by The Serpent Rider

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All Realtek chips are horrible: http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/benchmarks/quake-320

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Reply 6 of 12, by 386SX

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The Serpent Rider wrote:

It get lower frame rate of the Oak OTI037! If that was possible.. 😁

By the way the Trident TGUI9680 is quite powerful I didn't expect that!

Reply 7 of 12, by The Serpent Rider

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By the way the Trident TGUI9680 is quite powerful

It sucks at SVGA though.

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Reply 8 of 12, by leileilol

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appiah4 wrote:

Does anyone know what kind of performance this card has or whether it has any highlights or not?

Having owned the card myself (and even dumped a BIOS of it at one point) I can assure you it'll bring a hard bottleneck 😜 A big step down from the earlier Tsengs, even if it does have OK VESA capability (1024x768x4 was highest, iirc).

1994 class card it isn't, but it was around that time for $30ish and serves as a budget getSimcity2000working card. There is no DirectDraw support. I don't think Scitech does anything useful for it either....

Also the signal's a bit tan, so if you're after color reproduction, then this is definitely not that card.

tl;dr: 1994's FX5200 64-bit

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Reply 9 of 12, by Grzyb

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appiah4 wrote:

It seems to be a rather LATE chipset for the ISA bus, introduced in 1994, well after VLB and PCI were a thing.

Where have you found that date?
The copyrights on that chipset are from "1987-1990", and the FCC ID is from 1992-07-17.
Anyway, as already mentioned, there's nothing interesting about that chipset, just yet another dumb framebuffer, max 512 KB DRAM.
It does have CGA/Hercules compatibility modes, though, I think I have the software for that chip/card somewhere...

Edit:
I just realized that card has a jumper to set IRQ7 or IRQ9
What sense does it make?
The standard setting is IRQ2 (equals to IRQ9 on 16-bit ISA), but it's hardly ever used on VGA, I reckon often it's not even implemented, so what's the purpose of setting it to IRQ7, where there can't be any software to use that?

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Reply 10 of 12, by leileilol

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Grzyb wrote:

The copyrights on that chipset are from "1987-1990", and the FCC ID is from 1992-07-17.

(C) 1987-1990 Quadtel Corp, like many many many other video cards... There is a (C)1990-94 REALTEK in there afterward.

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Reply 11 of 12, by dionb

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Grzyb wrote:
appiah4 wrote:

It seems to be a rather LATE chipset for the ISA bus, introduced in 1994, well after VLB and PCI were a thing.

Where have you found that date?

Look at the two Fujitsu chips above the Realtek controller. They have '9512' codes on them. That sounds like week 12 1995, which would match with the '9516' in lower right for the whole board, week 16 1995.

That makes this very late for ISA VGA and so extremely low-end. The use of 3-year old 100ns DRAM chips (1992 date codes there) supports that - this was made using the cheapest possible (overstock) components at a very late date. The design is certainly older, but then, who would design a new ISA VGA card in 1995?

In any event, this wasn't sold new to anyone even remotely interested in performance or even up-to-date buses. It was to produce a VGA picture, nothing more or less.

Reply 12 of 12, by Grzyb

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Yes, there's no doubt the CARD is from 1995, but the CHIPSET itself was introduced earlier.
I've found the drivers diskette (see the attachment) - most of the files are from 1992, some from 1993, notably the drivers for the brand-new Windows 3.1, obviously added after the initial release.
Anyway, even in 1992 that chipset was far from high-end.

Attachments

  • Filename
    realtek.zip
    File size
    1.1 MiB
    Downloads
    251 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Żywotwór planetarny, jego gnijące błoto, jest świtem egzystencji, fazą wstępną, i wyłoni się z krwawych ciastomózgowych miedź miłująca...