What retro things have you done today?

[paradigm]

Good job

Personally I'd be keeping it - they're only ever going to get more expensive.
(Unless you acquire a fully original one somewhere done the line, then get rid of this one)

I was more thinking that the PCI ones are worth more typically than the AGP ones, but an AGP one would be more useful to me. If I could swap at £0 cost to me then I'd consider it.

 

[Armageus]

Cheap bundle of Retro CPUs ending soon (2xK6-2, P3 1Ghz, Pentium 60 + others) - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/19-cpus-processors-Various/264802470477

 

[paradigm]

Pretty gutting day. My GeForce 256 DDR is DOA

So, spurred on by my Voodoo 5 5500 PCI success (I actually found a few more missing components that I've since re-added, a couple of surface mount capacitors near the molex connector), I thought I'd revisit the GeForce 256 DDR. I went over it incredibly carefully with the USB microscope and found that whilst the top of the card was fine, the bottom had clearly been rubbed against something (probably other cards in poor storage conditions), and that no less than 11 components were missing judging by the solder pads looking "used" compared to where there had clearly never been components before. Using reference images from VGA museum I've worked out all except for one component value, so harvested them from a dead G4 Cube GeForce 2 MX.

Now, first time around I only spotted about half of the missing components (near the rear of the GPU itself), and this was the result:

After realizing that something was wrong (there was never a 16MB GeForce 256 DDR, though through searching for if this was possible, I discovered there WAS a 16MB GeForce 256 SDR), I took another look at the back of the card and found some more missing components near the RAM. Suitably replaced these and:

There is one thing left to solve, there appears to be no fan spin, but I'm not sure at the moment if that's the fan itself or the card, but either way it's fixable.

The best thing is, I received a refund for this card this morning (seller didn't even put up any resistance to the request, nor want them back), so this is now a £0 GeForce 256 DDR!

 

[LewisRaz]

Really good work there mate you must be well pleased!

 

[paradigm]

Really good work there mate you must be well pleased!

Very, I've been wanting one of each card for a while and that's two now knocked off the "dream" list.

 

[LewisRaz]

Well lets see the builds and benchmarks soon

 

[paradigm]

@LewisRaz I'm just putting the Voodoo 5500 card through it's paces in my Slot-1 machine at the moment. I'm having performance issues with it (well, I assume I am, it seems slow), getting a whopping 43.0 FPS at 1024x768x16 in Quake III Arena. I thought it might have been a failed chip so only operating in single-chip mode, but forcing single-chip mode sees the FPS consistently drop to 37~ in demo four. This would indicate that SLI is fine.

I need to do some more testing, but it might be due to the fact that this build already has Voodoo II and Rage 128 Ultra drivers on it and causing some kind of slowdown that way.

Either way, no graphical corruption and both chips seem to be reaching similar temperatures (using the highly accurate "finger on heatsink" method). This would suggest that the issues now are software not hardware.

 

[paradigm]

So after an hour or so of messing I've now pretty sure I've got a vsync or similar issue. Everything is limited to 70fps, Quake 3 (regardless of colour depth or resolution, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768) and 3DMark2000 both seem 70fps limited.

All references to vsync are off, I've even forced vsync in 3dfx tools to 120Hz (that the monitor can't do, it's a 60hz panel), no difference at all.

 

[LewisRaz]

The voodoo drivers I use need a restart before Vsync changes take effect, did you do that?

 

[paradigm]

Only a million times. Something is odd, I'm still thinking it might be related to how many other drivers this build has now seen!

At least I'm now pretty convinced the card itself is fine though, so that's a bonus

EDIT: Removed as many traces of the old drivers as possible.

Quake 3 Arena 32-bit (32-bit):

1024x768 73.9fps
800x600 76.3fps
640x480 76.3fps

Still seems throttled. I wonder if it's CPU constrained now.

3DMark2000 now goes over 99fps in the Helicopter tests (maxes the FPS counter)

 

[LewisRaz]

Thats good work mate!

Ive spent most of my afternoon playing Transport tycoon with the AWE64 supplying the soundtrack. Nice to have some playing time and not bothering ebay or pulling rigs apart!

Am needing to be talked out of a putting an order in for a simmconn

 

[!bluetonic!]

Hats off to you @paradigm.

Seriously good work there.

 

[cee-S-dee]

Am needing to be talked out of a putting an order in for a simmconn

I wouldn't bother if I honest dude. Your limited to windows when it comes to loading sound font's so it's quite an outlay. I don't use mine at all.

If you want some good quality Midi and happy to play dos games through windows get the Yamaha S-YXG100Plus SoftSynth.

Here is a link to setting it up https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=33661&hilit=yxg100

@paradigm, nice work rescuing those cards.

 

[paradigm]

Thought I'd throw up a pic of how the Voodoo 5 5500 PCI now looks. Still waiting on some A4 sheets of 19mm circular stickers so I can print some labels for the fans, but we're almost done:

This was how it looked on the eBay listing:

 

[LewisRaz]

I wouldn't bother if I honest dude. Your limited to windows when it comes to loading sound font's so it's quite an outlay. I don't use mine at all.

If you want some good quality Midi and happy to play dos games through windows get the Yamaha S-YXG100Plus SoftSynth.

Here is a link to setting it up https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=33661&hilit=yxg100

@paradigm, nice work rescuing those cards.

This looks like fun! I can get it to work in windows but not DOS yet. Cheers

I think its the AWE64 taking the 330 address?

 

[paradigm]

So, the GeForce 256 DDR. Turns out the fan isn't spinning because the fan is dead (I had thought it was due to the dry solder joints on the rear of the card, but reflowing these made no difference). I happened to have a spare HSF combo off an old RAID card that shares the same mount-hole spacing and fan header as the GeForce, so plugged the fan in (with the original heatsink still attached as it was thermal epoxied), and the fan indeed spins \o/

So, into the freezer the GeForce went, and an hour later it was time to lever the old heatsink off. Turns out this card has an NV10GL rather than NV10 chip on it, Quadro branded. It definitely has a GeForce 256 DDR BIOS on it though, not a Quadro one.

 

[LewisRaz]

So, the GeForce 256 DDR. Turns out the fan isn't spinning because the fan is dead (I had thought it was due to the dry solder joints on the rear of the card, but reflowing these made no difference). I happened to have a spare HSF combo off an old RAID card that shares the same mount-hole spacing and fan header as the GeForce, so plugged the fan in (with the original heatsink still attached as it was thermal epoxied), and the fan indeed spins \o/

So, into the freezer the GeForce went, and an hour later it was time to lever the old heatsink off. Turns out this card has an NV10GL rather than NV10 chip on it, Quadro branded. It definitely has a GeForce 256 DDR BIOS on it though, not a Quadro one.

Does that mean that someone has been upto some funny business in the past? Or were there 256DDRs like this from factory?

 

[paradigm]

@LewisRaz I have absolutely no idea. It looks like a completely standard reference GeForce 256 DDR, and has the right Creative Labs markings to be a standard GeForce 256 DDR. I can only assume that at some point it became cheaper for nVidia to simply only produce the one set of GPUs regardless of the final board/version.

 

[paradigm]

I really need to dig out the P4 Shuttle so I can bench the Voodoo 5 and GeForce 256 with the same setup as all my previous benchmarks, but seeing as the P3 850 was already set up I thought it would be nice to at least compare the V5 with the GeForce.

3DMark2000

Voodoo 5: 3846 3DMarks
GeForce 256: 5385 3DMarks

Quake 3 Arena (32-bit textures and colours):

V5 640x480: 76.3fps
GF 640x480: 96.7fps

V5 800x600: 76.3fps
GF 800x600: 93.4fps

V5 1024x768: 73.9fps
GF 1024x768: 75.8fps

The Voodoo 5 is clearly CPU bound here, it will likely scale a bit higher especially at lower resolutions. The GeForce 256 doesn't have a nice image quality, but hardware TnL appears to be massively beneficial in 3DMark2000 as the framerates in Dragothic were LOWER for the GeForce, yet the overall score is massively higher. I guess the Hardware TnL is making a significant difference because of the fact that it's only a mediocre CPU and bottlenecking the Voodoo 5, the GeForce is offloading more calculation to the GPU allowing the CPU to get on with the job of filling the framebuffer.

I'll get them both on the P4 this week to see what's what.

 

[Armageus]

@LewisRaz I have absolutely no idea. It looks like a completely standard reference GeForce 256 DDR, and has the right Creative Labs markings to be a standard GeForce 256 DDR. I can only assume that at some point it became cheaper for nVidia to simply only produce the one set of GPUs regardless of the final board/version.

Probably, and back in those days probably less common for people to take coolers off (and notice such things)