Well, this was not really necessary, but I felt the itch and had to try it.

I was testing some more cards today and came across this super generic and cheap looking "UNION" S3 Virge DX card. When I ran WinTune97 it was clear that this card was abysmally slow for a VirgeDX. It scored 15MP, compared to 35MP for a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro which runs at 75Mhz and is basically the fastest configuration of a Virge DX.

I had my suspicion that this was caused by the card being configured for 2-cycle EDO mode, which utterly destroys performance vs 1-cycle but increases compatibility with slower memory chips.

I ran Astra32 to get some information about the card and it reported not only that the clock speed was 50Mhz (33% slower than the Diamond), but that it was running 2MB of "FPM"?? I don't know exactly why it reported that, but it reports 1-cycle EDO on other cards, so I figured at the very least this card was not configured for 1-cycle.

After the experience gained from this thread, I figured it was fixable. The chips on this card are Alliance 50ns EDO, which based on Trio64V+ testing should be okay for 1-cycle mode, at least at 50Mhz. It seems the VirgeDX uses the same basic pinout as the Trio64V+, so I was able to find the same pins that toggle 1-cycle or 2-cycle.

Low and behold, they hid them under the BIOS chip, and the resistors were indeed missing! They must have designed this PCB to be stable with far worse memory than this particular card ended up with, so they had to leave it gimped in 2-cycle mode.

So, I did what any "normal" person would do... I found a couple of spare 10k resistors, used my hot air gun and a bit of solder paste and turned this into a 1-cycle card.

Now, it scores around 27MP in the same test, up from 15! Astra32 now reports that it is using EDO in 1-cycle mode too, so it was indeed successful.

... it's still a junky model of a lame card, but, hey it's significantly faster now. I tried clocking it a tad higher, just to 60Mhz and it started artifacting, so maybe this memory is right on the edge of being good enough for 1-cycle. Either way, I'm happy to have made this thing less awful. 🤣

I'm impressed this kind of mod even exist 😀

Pushing the Tualatin even further. And it wouldn't have been a coincidence that I had to come across @VooDooMan's thread with the RAM binning.

Great, now I have to add another variable. As if 186FSB wasn't hard enough 🤣