Ati Rage Fury Maxx 64Mb Agp (1999)

A note to any potential buyers, this card will only work on Windows 98SE. The way that ATI put two GPUs on the AGP bus isn't supported by the Windows NT kernel, so if you install it in a Windows 2000 or XP machine, it will only see one of the two GPUs and run like a normal Fury Pro card.
 
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I grabbed one last year for $40ish Buy It Now. It had been sitting there because the seller listed it as a regular Rage. Got lucky.

Works great. One of the fans is loud - but I can't track down a part number for it to hunt for a replacement.
 
Centauri said:
I grabbed one last year for $40ish Buy It Now. It had been sitting there because the seller listed it as a regular Rage. Got lucky.

Works great. One of the fans is loud - but I can't track down a part number for it to hunt for a replacement.
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I'd just pull the loud fan, snag a comparably sized Molex-powered fan, and gank it onto the heatsink. It's not a posh solution, but if you're running a graphics card old enough to vote, buy pornography and cigarettes, and get wistful about its early childhood, polish isn't really the goal. I wonder how well one of these would manage to run Unreal Tournament 2004.
 
Ehhhh... No. Nobody is buying these for use. They're being bought for rarity/collecting. They're famous for not being particularly well-running either. And the dual-GPU implementation here really hasn't been seen since and I'd be shocked if more than a few games even support it.

Just want a fan that works and the ability to demo it here and there.
 
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Centauri said:
Ehhhh... No. Nobody is buying these for use.
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To each his own. Any old hardware I get is always used. Buying something just to have it sit on a high shelf nobody can see or use is a waste and disservice to everyone who would otherwise want to use it. I have a general disdain for collectors of any sort, they drive up prices for everyone else and often behave like a smug ass "haha look at you scrub ur poor can't afford a single $<insane price>k <insert thing here>".

Centauri said:
They're famous for not being particularly well-running either. And the dual-GPU implementation here really hasn't been seen since and I'd be shocked if more than a few games even support it.
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Zero games supported it, which is why it was done on the back end in firmware and drivers, like 3dfx cards. The game didn't even know it was running on multiple GPUs.

The reason that the MAXX had lackluster performance is first, the RAGE architecture wasn't that great to begin with. It was cobbled together technology over the course of several years that originally started off as a pure 2D accelerator. Second, it used a problematic rendering solution called AFR where each GPU took turns rendering alternating frames, unlike 3dfx's method of alternating scan lines. The AFR approach could lead to bad stuttering if one frame took appreciably longer to render than another frame, which happened often due to the weak architecture. ATI would have had a better card if they used a different rendering approach and better drivers.
 
If you have a disdain for collectors then you should probably only emulate.

If you seek out these types of hardware but don't consider yourself to be collecting, then you're a fool.

Collectors, of all things, are also pretty much the only reason historic examples of products continue to exist in presentable, original working order.

Not really sure what the point of your post was.
 
Centauri said:
If you have a disdain for collectors then you should probably only emulate.
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You're free to spend several thousand dollars on FPGA hardware, PCB design, VHDL and reverse engineering of the Rage Fury Pro GPU to make your own MAXX card. You seem to think that everyone is made of money.

Centauri said:
If you seek out these types of hardware but don't consider yourself to be collecting, then you're a fool.
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It's not considered collecting if you're actually using the hardware in question the way it was intended to be used. Calling that "collecting" is about as dumb as saying someone with a 20 year old Honda, or a 100 year old house is a collector just because they have and use it every day.

Centauri said:
Collectors, of all things, are also pretty much the only reason historic examples of products continue to exist in presentable, original working order.
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Do tell us how collecting vintage computer hardware and putting it on a high shelf or in a glass case is preserving history? With the rise of the "vintage computing" craze in the recent years, many people get into "collecting" because it's a fad, not because they actually care. Looking to make a quick buck, they often resort to unethical behavior like splitting rare machines up to jack up their value and make a quick buck. Proprietary keyboards and mice are the most sought after by people like this because they know there are machines which will not work at all without them. They'll just sit on items for years with an inflated price tag because they know someone will eventually be forced to buy it from them.

Electronic parts are like anything else, they rot away over time. If you think having something sitting on a shelf to look pretty is preserving them, you're sadly misguided. Components fail and can render parts completely worthless, a great example being the early integrated Macintosh machines with suicide batteries exploding and destroying the logic board. Capacitors can fail as well as specialty ICs, another example being on Commodore and Amiga machines where memory chips, ERPOMs, 74xx logic chips, and the specialty chips used for generating sound and graphics. Entire machines are often trashed because "collectors" don't have the expertise or desire to even try to save the machine. And the ones who buy just to have a private collection of them would not ever know of these issues since they'd never use the item in question.

Centauri said:
Not really sure what the point of your post was.
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Not sure what more you need explained. Collectors who buy stuff as an investment, to wave in front of everyone like a status symbol or keep it on a shelf to never be used while claiming that is preserving history are misguided and a disservice to everyone.
 
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