Doornkaat wrote on 2021-03-19, 22:43:
Tetrium wrote on 2021-03-19, 20:53:
Doornkaat wrote on 2021-03-19, 18:48:
Could also be though if they were cutting corners like that they would have probably also used slower memory.
Iirc Voodoo 3 cards made by STB cards also often used faster memory. My guess is that stock of the slower memory was low, so they would sometimes used the faster one.
So it wouldn't surprise me if this is the reason this card also received faster memory. And it got active cooling, so the chip would run more stable when clocked a bit higher.
Seeing as the later EvilKing mostly have 5ns memory I believe they used fast chips by choice.
I'm not convinced it was by choice. Unless there are actually design schematics available that this was done conciously and not for the same reasons STB used faster chips.
For all we know EvilKing gave it active cooling so they could overclock the chip to 166MHz in the first place:P This would explain why the chip can't reach 183MHz reliably even with active cooling while the memory chips (apparently) can.
And it wouldn't make much of a point to add faster memory chips on purpose so they could make a card intended for overclocking when the most important part of the graphics card isn't actually capable of handling even such a basic overclock to begin with. It just doesn't make any sense.
But then again, a lot of things back then happened that didn't make much sense 😜 Those were crazy times in a way and quite spectacular and fluid compared to these days.