Ati Rage XL PCI - New remede card

 Ati Rage XL with PCI is a great low price alternative for Pentium class PC. Especially if you want to try some 3D games  and you can't get Ati Rage PRO Turbo PCI / Nvidia Riva 128 PCI / Voodoo 1 in reasonable price. 

Many of those cheep Ati Rage XL PCI available on the market are new cards which are "remade" in China. They have new PCB but chips like RageXL , bios and SDRAM are desoldered from old servers or VDI terminals.

What is important to know about this "remade" cards?
Those cards are cut down with components responsible for power supply. This make it compatible only with PCI 2.2 slots (mainly Pentium 3 boards and up - PCI with support for 5V/3.3V power delivery). But with some soldiering you can make card posts on older boards (tested on PCI 2.1 and 2.0 boards- PCI with support 5V power delivery). Video how to do this trick ->  link .

In case of drivers there are known two working ATI driver packages compatibles with Windows 9x.
Original Rage XL with PCI interface was released in year 2000. So no earlier drivers with CIF (ATI proprietary API) support can be used (however marxveix on Vogons try -> link good luck!). 

Older 9x driver:

W98_RXL_4_12_2647.exe -> link 

From my experience this driver is only good for Final Fantasy VII - pleated textures works, no graphic glitches. However Some games like Diablo II can't run 3D mode with this driver.
Biggest issue with this driver is that computer freeze when you start dos game from Windows.



Newer 9x driver:

wme-j5-30-1-b02.exe -> link

Fixes 3D in many games but breaks Final Fantasy VII pleated textures. Dos mode in windows work correctly.

In Windows 95 you have to delete this registry to not get DLL error at startup:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CurrentVersion\RUN\AiPTA 

For me newer driver is way to go. However i have found two unsolvable issues for this card:

1. In high resolution 1280-1024 on desktop there are random glitches and lines (maybe poor quality of PCB and components?) .

2. In Roller Coaster Tycoon here are some flickering objects, see video -> link . I think this is driver related thing. I have the same in Rage PRO Turbo and newer driver. Older Rage PRO driver (4.11.2560)

Compared to Rage PRO PCI 4 MB this card perform a lot better:
In 3D Mark 99@640x480 on my test bench (Cyrix MII-333@263MHz, 64 MB Ram, Intel 430TX) points are:
RAGE XL PCI: 936 3D Marks

RAGE PRO TURBO PCI - 4MB: 496 3D Marks

Graphic effects like smoke, shadow and broken glass looks very raw on Rage XL. I like such things in old graphic cards.


Technical facts about  my Ati Rage XL PCI:

chips on card
Graphic: Rage XL 215R3LASB41 DF9599.00 0434AA TAIWAN @83MHz
               manufactured date: 34th week of 2004
Memory: 1x EtronTech EM638325TSA-5G 023A903AFT400,11ZN 8MB@83 MHz 32 bit
                manufactured date: 23th week of 2000
BIOS: ST Micro M28F101-150K6 BP8030009C KOREA
                manufactured date: 9th week of 2000


PCB: Unknown manufacturer PCB dated - 0723: 7th week of 2023 
ATI Part Number: 113-72307-100
BIOS: 4.330 - 2000/12/18
ASIC Type: Rage XL
ASIC ID: 4752
Bus type: PCI
Memory Upgrade: Not Applicable





Over all from my retro perspective card has good 3D performance and generate some cool old-school artifacts with mip-mapping and dithering. PCB has cute small size and never run very hot. Unfortunately period correct machines for this Rage are from years 2000-2001 but let's not be so picky ;) .

Komentarze

Prześlij komentarz

Popularne posty z tego bloga

Ati in 1998 advertise 1996 graphic cards

Obraz
 Recently while I was reading old PC Word magazine from July 1998, I saw Ati advertisement: It looks like normal ad from this time but if you close up, yo can find out that graphic card which this man holds are a little bit out dated for 1998. Firstly lets look on the right red side of the advertisement. There we can see the boxes of Ati Rage Pro cards so called Xper@Work and Xpert@Play which were good and mature late 1997 product. But if we do close up to the lest side of ad and look closely what cards the man is holding we will see that those cards are not from the Rage Pro line: Those cards PCB contains old style  28 legs bios EPPROM chips. Which in later 1997 Ati cards were replaced with smaller rectangular 44 pin bios chip. So from right side we have: Ati Rage II: 3D Xpression+ PC2TV 4MB EDO Full version of this card looks like this: (source: http://vgamuseum.info/images/zaatharen/ati/rageII_fhq.jpg) Next will be:  Ati Rage II: 3D Pro Turbo 4 MB SGRAM (not to be...
Czytaj więcej

Very early Pentium II

Obraz
 Officially Intel Pentium II had it's premiere on 7th of May 1997. Initially this processor was oddly expensive and until early 1998 there were better alternatives as AMD K6 233 and Pentium MMX 233.   At lunch there were two speeds available of PII: 233 MHz and 266 MHz. 300 Mhz variant join later during summer of 1997. Until September of 1997 the only available chip set for Pentium II was 440FX which was modified Pentium Pro chip set. It lacks modern features like SDRAM support, UDMA-33  and of course AGP port. Those lacks was solved in 440LX chipset which was officially shown at atumn 1997 and the real career of PII begins.  Pentium II processor on its cartridge (called SECC-1) had clear identification of date code when it was produced. On top view in second row, second digit mean year code (7- 1997, 8- 1998, 9 -1999, 0 - 2000 - but I had never seen 0) and the third and forth digit is week of the year. For example R7380547 means that it was produced in 1997 at ...
Czytaj więcej