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Post PICs of your old cards!
- Thread starter Warrior
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ExplodingTurnip
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First time post here so please bear with me. 
Anyway, here's my own small collection of cards that I've used over the years. I apologize for the general crappy quality of the pics, they were taken using a cheapo webcam.
Monochrome Card.
This is the oldest card I've got. It's a plain ISA monochome card that I dug out of an old 286 that was given to me many years ago. For a while I was using this as my primary display adapter when my home file server was running on a Pentium Pro 200. I pulled it out once I upgraded the motherboard. I kind of lamented the fact that the new board didn't have any ISA slots, it was a nice card for what it did.
Creative Labs 3D Blaster PCI
This thing was based on a Rendition Verite 1000 based chipset, circa 1997 IIRC. The only thing that set this card apart from the others (at the time) was that it supported a hardware accelerated version of Quake called VQuake. More on that here. The Voodoo wasn't around in those days, so if you wanted to play a hardware accelerated version of Quake the V1000 was the way to go.
Matrox Millenium II 8MB
This was my main video card when I was using my Pentium Pro 200 as a desktop machine. Since most Voodoos were passthru cards having a good 2D card was a must. Having a whopping 8MB on the card made this board one of the best 2D cards in its class. I used this card along with a Diamond Monster 3D.
Canopus Pure 3D 2 (3DFX Voodoo 2)
I purchased this as a replacement card after my Monster 3D died an untimely death. This one's another Voodoo (2) based passthru card with 12MB of EDO RAM.
ATI All-In-Wonder 7500
I used this card for a couple of years on my old Athlon based system. Nice card, pain-in-the-ass driver installation. Although I really enjoyed this board's features it'll most likely be the first and last ATI based card I'll be getting.
The only two other boards not shown here are my Diamond Monster 3D and my 3DFX Voodoo 3/2000. The Monster 3D was thrown away after it died, big regret. The Voodoo 3 is currently sitting in my file server.
Anyway, here's my own small collection of cards that I've used over the years. I apologize for the general crappy quality of the pics, they were taken using a cheapo webcam.
Monochrome Card.
This is the oldest card I've got. It's a plain ISA monochome card that I dug out of an old 286 that was given to me many years ago. For a while I was using this as my primary display adapter when my home file server was running on a Pentium Pro 200. I pulled it out once I upgraded the motherboard. I kind of lamented the fact that the new board didn't have any ISA slots, it was a nice card for what it did.
Creative Labs 3D Blaster PCI
This thing was based on a Rendition Verite 1000 based chipset, circa 1997 IIRC. The only thing that set this card apart from the others (at the time) was that it supported a hardware accelerated version of Quake called VQuake. More on that here. The Voodoo wasn't around in those days, so if you wanted to play a hardware accelerated version of Quake the V1000 was the way to go.
Matrox Millenium II 8MB
This was my main video card when I was using my Pentium Pro 200 as a desktop machine. Since most Voodoos were passthru cards having a good 2D card was a must. Having a whopping 8MB on the card made this board one of the best 2D cards in its class. I used this card along with a Diamond Monster 3D.
Canopus Pure 3D 2 (3DFX Voodoo 2)
I purchased this as a replacement card after my Monster 3D died an untimely death. This one's another Voodoo (2) based passthru card with 12MB of EDO RAM.
ATI All-In-Wonder 7500
I used this card for a couple of years on my old Athlon based system. Nice card, pain-in-the-ass driver installation. Although I really enjoyed this board's features it'll most likely be the first and last ATI based card I'll be getting.
The only two other boards not shown here are my Diamond Monster 3D and my 3DFX Voodoo 3/2000. The Monster 3D was thrown away after it died, big regret. The Voodoo 3 is currently sitting in my file server.
1994
Genoa WindowsVGA 24 8500VL
Diamond Stealth 64 (S3 Trio64)
Trident Union?
1996
Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (S3 ViRGE)
1997
Trident 3DImage9850
Number Nine (S3 ViRGE/ GX2)
Not a single one with a heatsink..... gotta love it!
Sorry for the cheap lighting in the pictures.
~Enjoy
Genoa WindowsVGA 24 8500VL
Diamond Stealth 64 (S3 Trio64)
Trident Union?
1996
Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (S3 ViRGE)
1997
Trident 3DImage9850
Number Nine (S3 ViRGE/ GX2)
Not a single one with a heatsink..... gotta love it!
Sorry for the cheap lighting in the pictures.
~Enjoy
Borgschulze
2[H]4U
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Yeah the title says Post PICs of your old cards...TheJackal said:it's older than my 6600GT
In that case I could post my 6600GT and 9600 Pro.
Borgschulze
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Umm? What?... That's fine... that reply was pointless...TheJackal said:but that is my card
...and it's older than my 6600gt so i posted a picture of it
Back on topic shall we?
Warrior
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awesome cards people...this pag has got some old ones... and in this thread thats a good thing
and in this thread thats a good thing
Warrior
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if it was of true interist it would be sticky along time agoDanK said:I had one of those, it was my first AGP card... man, it was a piece of junk.
Yeah, 400+ replies and 29k+ views... nobody is interested.
its not really the "hot topic" lol
The Resident
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At the risk of posting off-topic, here's some pictures of an old system of mine. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to really take it apart properly and get the best photos.
It's my old 25 MHz 486 SX! This wasn't my first computer, but it the first one I really dug into and learned about computers on (which, being a 486 SX, you really had upgrade to make feel like a 486. See below..).
Here's the rear. As you can see, the video was onboard. Also notice the sound card all the way to the right... an EXTERNAL volume control wheel: one of my most-loved and most-hated features of the sound card.
The motherboard is mostly obscured by a power supply/drive chassis. I can't communicate just how much of a pain it was to have to remove the chassis everytime I needed to get to the good stuff. Here's a top-down view of the exposed parts of the motherboard.
Hey, what's that secondary Intel chip with the stubby heatsink?
Why, that's an Overdrive sub-processor! The 486 SX CPU itself didn't have a floating-point unit, so all the floating-point math had to be done in software, which was DOG SLOW even for the time. See this sordid story on Wikipedia about the SX. Anyway, I had enough of that and wanted to upgrade, so I went out and got the Overdrive, which delivered the hardware floating-point processing I wanted, but also included an extra 128 KB of cache! Of course, it was the actually extra cache that brought up my FPS in Doom 1.
And damn it, AST required me to order that specialized daughterboard to install the Overdrive. The pain in the ass was two-fold: 1, I needed a daughterboard; 2, it had an LIF socket as opposed to ZIF socket!! The Overdrive had to be brute-forced onto the daughterboard! I was certain I had killed it by simply squeezing the hell out of it getting it installed. Fortunately, it all worked the first time...
This system had been through 3 hard drives, and this was the only one that didn't come from the manufacturer. It was also the last one and it still works!
Here's the ISA cards. The one in back obviously is a Sound Blaster 16. The middle one is a Suncom joystick card. (I didn't actually use joysticks that often, but I was fooling around with connecting a Mattel Power Glove to the system and needed a clean source of +5 V, which joystick ports provided. Fortunately, the card was cheap.) The front card is either a US Robotics Sportster or the original 2400 baud modem.
Closeup of the SB16. Notice the IDE-like cable connected to the rear. That was actually a Creative Labs-unique CDROM interface. The card and CD-ROM drive came as a big multimedia package, back when everyone was exclaiming that "multimedia is going to change the world!!!" Anyway, it was totally unique to Creative Labs, so it required specialized hardware/replacement parts. I didn't have any concept of "future-proof" at that age. All I cared about was playing 7th Guest. =)
Yeah, I know - no video card pictures this time. As I mentioned earlier, the video card was onboard. When I get more time to thoroughly take this system apart, I'll snap some pictures of the motherboard proper. The neat thing about the onboard video card (which was actually on the mobo's VESA Local Bus) was the huge grid of upgradable VRAM slots.
It's my old 25 MHz 486 SX! This wasn't my first computer, but it the first one I really dug into and learned about computers on (which, being a 486 SX, you really had upgrade to make feel like a 486. See below..).
Here's the rear. As you can see, the video was onboard. Also notice the sound card all the way to the right... an EXTERNAL volume control wheel: one of my most-loved and most-hated features of the sound card.
The motherboard is mostly obscured by a power supply/drive chassis. I can't communicate just how much of a pain it was to have to remove the chassis everytime I needed to get to the good stuff. Here's a top-down view of the exposed parts of the motherboard.
Hey, what's that secondary Intel chip with the stubby heatsink?
Why, that's an Overdrive sub-processor! The 486 SX CPU itself didn't have a floating-point unit, so all the floating-point math had to be done in software, which was DOG SLOW even for the time. See this sordid story on Wikipedia about the SX. Anyway, I had enough of that and wanted to upgrade, so I went out and got the Overdrive, which delivered the hardware floating-point processing I wanted, but also included an extra 128 KB of cache! Of course, it was the actually extra cache that brought up my FPS in Doom 1.
And damn it, AST required me to order that specialized daughterboard to install the Overdrive. The pain in the ass was two-fold: 1, I needed a daughterboard; 2, it had an LIF socket as opposed to ZIF socket!! The Overdrive had to be brute-forced onto the daughterboard! I was certain I had killed it by simply squeezing the hell out of it getting it installed. Fortunately, it all worked the first time...
This system had been through 3 hard drives, and this was the only one that didn't come from the manufacturer. It was also the last one and it still works!
Here's the ISA cards. The one in back obviously is a Sound Blaster 16. The middle one is a Suncom joystick card. (I didn't actually use joysticks that often, but I was fooling around with connecting a Mattel Power Glove to the system and needed a clean source of +5 V, which joystick ports provided. Fortunately, the card was cheap.) The front card is either a US Robotics Sportster or the original 2400 baud modem.
Closeup of the SB16. Notice the IDE-like cable connected to the rear. That was actually a Creative Labs-unique CDROM interface. The card and CD-ROM drive came as a big multimedia package, back when everyone was exclaiming that "multimedia is going to change the world!!!" Anyway, it was totally unique to Creative Labs, so it required specialized hardware/replacement parts. I didn't have any concept of "future-proof" at that age. All I cared about was playing 7th Guest. =)
Yeah, I know - no video card pictures this time. As I mentioned earlier, the video card was onboard. When I get more time to thoroughly take this system apart, I'll snap some pictures of the motherboard proper. The neat thing about the onboard video card (which was actually on the mobo's VESA Local Bus) was the huge grid of upgradable VRAM slots.
8lack8rain
Limp Gawd
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I found these at the local thrift. Thought I might be able to use them on an old 486, but never got around to tinkering.
The box they came in said PHOTON PCG Graphics controller. PHOTON 2848 50V. I googled them but never found anything. Any Idea where I can get drivers?
The box they came in said PHOTON PCG Graphics controller. PHOTON 2848 50V. I googled them but never found anything. Any Idea where I can get drivers?
8lack8rain said:I found these at the local thrift. Thought I might be able to use them on an old 486, but never got around to tinkering.
The box they came in said PHOTON PCG Graphics controller. PHOTON 2848 50V. I googled them but never found anything. Any Idea where I can get drivers?
Searching usenet with Google Groups dug up some info. Personal Computer Graphics / Photon made cards for driving fixed-frequency workstation monitors. They're now defunct. Apparently they had a website at www.photonweb.com, but it's been taken over by domain squatters, and no record of it exists on archive.org. (Archive.org does have a record of their previous website, at http://web.archive.org/web/19981203054505/http://home.earthlink.net/~photon/, which shows that even in 1998 people were keyword-spamming search engines - hit ctrl+a once the page loads.)
Pretty much every post on usenet was complaining about the cards being overpriced / PCG's support being bad / their cards being junk. Maybe you should give up on the idea of using them, and just pretend they're awesome video cards. They certainly look impressive.
8lack8rain
Limp Gawd
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Thanks DanK. You just saved me a lot of headaches. I'll have to find something else.
An old ATI Mach64, no idea where this came from. I have another with the ram extension but its being used in some rig somewhere.
I pulled this out of a random computer found on the side of the road
I really have no idea what this is! It's not a video card, but hopefully someone can tell me something
I also have an ATI Xpert98, Voodoo2 12mb, Voodoo3 3000 and Radeon 8500le all being put to use somewhere. My first decent computer was built by my uncle with the xpert98, and half-life was choppy as hell. I saved up my money and got that voodoo2... it was like butter After that I upgraded to the voodoo3 and counter-strike was running at 30-60 fps with the minigl glide driver on a K6-2 500 w/ 64mb ram. When I built my first computer with a 1.4ghz AYHJA core t-bird (never even OCed!), I paired it with the Radeon 8500LE, but for some reason counter-strike ran slow as hell! I was getting worse performance than my old system! That computer still angers me to this day.
I pulled this out of a random computer found on the side of the road
I really have no idea what this is! It's not a video card, but hopefully someone can tell me something
I also have an ATI Xpert98, Voodoo2 12mb, Voodoo3 3000 and Radeon 8500le all being put to use somewhere. My first decent computer was built by my uncle with the xpert98, and half-life was choppy as hell. I saved up my money and got that voodoo2... it was like butter
After that I upgraded to the voodoo3 and counter-strike was running at 30-60 fps with the minigl glide driver on a K6-2 500 w/ 64mb ram. When I built my first computer with a 1.4ghz AYHJA core t-bird (never even OCed!), I paired it with the Radeon 8500LE, but for some reason counter-strike ran slow as hell! I was getting worse performance than my old system! That computer still angers me to this day.My old g3 Ti200 64mb (Vision Tek). OC'ed @ 264/555.(if i remember correctly) stock was 198/and I forget the mem.. mainly because i never had it not OC'ed lol. I used it up until bf2.. which this card sadly could not play.
& my even older s9 card. 8mb......
& my even older s9 card. 8mb......
*Ç|®8tË<ETH>
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This thread keeps going, and going..............I love it, sadly they won't sticky it!
Elios said:
yeah... i remeber the term thick net being thrown around aswell, but for pc to pc transfer it was pertty fast considereing what it was, the cable you use for cable tv was basicly the same damn cable,(i used cable tv cables as replacement cables ,or extenders, when the store bought cables didnt reach, it worked fine.. lol) and i seem to remeber getting 10mb/sec out of the systembut, this was in like 96... so i could be wrong... cable modems use some of the same principals as that nic, but more auth and error checking goes on, other wise, its a load shareing network all the same... kinda funny because its 3 steps foward and 2 steps back, but the possibilitys are endless
thore
Warrior
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awesome!.. i was waiting for someone to post a Ti200... i had one of thoes cards... i want to find it.. its in a computer somewhere...
Warrior said:
Hands down the best video card I have ever owned.(rock solid dependability + OCing was insane on stock cooling) I could run cod @ 800x600 textures maxed out + 2xaa af was up there as well.
. That card lasted me for years.(EDIT) I decided to keep it alive and put it in my moms computer, still going strong)
SSlaytanic
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ownage
Warrior
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re-opened for greatness!
Warrior
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ok just goodWarrior said:
pmrdij
Limp Gawd
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what my Creative Labs TNT2 Ultra looked liked after reading this TechZone article so many years ago. wish i still had my Voodoo 2 SLI cards for pics as i epoxied Tennmax Stealth heatsinks to them
pmrdij said:what my Creative Labs TNT2 Ultra looked liked after reading this TechZone article so many years ago. wish i still had my Voodoo 2 SLI cards for pics as i epoxied Tennmax Stealth heatsinks to them
On page 3 of that TNT mod article, they use a spacer that's made from a leftover chunk of a case; it looks like a piece of cheap steel. I'm surprised it worked, steel is actually a pretty poor conductor of heat (see this graph).
Warrior
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i just read that... i was wondering wtf...
Warrior
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lalala
pmrdij
Limp Gawd
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yeah i noticed that as well at the time --> can't really say if it is infact Steel, though. used Aluminum in my effort and everything worked peachyDanK said:
