Gfx card RAM - What do people need?

[Hodgkinson]

Hi,
I've read somewhere that you can salvage RAM IC's from old PC gfx cards and use it to upgrade Amiga graphics cards.

Since I've got a heap of old cards that are unlikely to ever be used again, what RAM IC numbers are people looking for? I might be able to spot a few IC's for the Amiga community one day.

Hodgkinson.

[motorollin]

I bought an S3 Virge Trio from eBay and used its RAM chips in my CV64.

--
moto

[Hodgkinson]

moto:- Any idea what the chip numbers were? Most of the Gfx cards here are of that kinda spec/era.



Any other ideas?

Hodgkinson.

[motorollin]

Not off the top of my head, but I will open up my A4000 later and check for you.

--
moto

[Hodgkinson]

Thanks in advance!

Hodgkinson.

[rkauer]

 Some old ISA VGA cards have the same RAM chips needed to fix A600 & 1200 bad RAM chips. Unfortunately, I don't remember who's who by now.

 Need a heavy research to bring you this information.

[RW222]

Not only late ISA but VLB and early PCI cards had the right chips, the 16Bit wide 40 pin SOJ ones. They come off real easy if you scrape underneath the pins with a sharp blade. You can cull cards for chips for SOJ upgrade sockets like that, don't even need to clean them up well beyond making sure nothing is shorting, coz the sockets grip on the sides of the pins.

[LoadWB]

We used to sell those SOJs by the bucket load at the PC store I worked.  That was back in 95-96, though, when I thought Amiga Quake was going to herald the rebirth :-)

[Plaz]

I couldn't tell you the numbers since I don't have the cards anymore, but I recall using plugable memory from an old ATI pci card to upgrade a PicassoII.

Plaz

[Hodgkinson]

Re using RAM to repair A1200's and A600's, I can open up an A1200 to check the RAM IC numbers, but could someone else have a look inside their A600 please? The more IC numbers I can find, the more I can look for.

Thanks for all the info folks,
Hodgkinson.

[motorollin]

Sorry for the delay getting this info for you. It slipped my mind for a bit - been studying too hard! :-)

Each of the four RAM chips I plugged in to my CV64 are branded "Silicon Magic" and have a speed of "66MHz". They are numbered "C9728 SM81C256K16BJ    -35". I'm not sure whether the "C9728" and "-35" bits are part of it as they are somewhat separated from the long string of characters. To possibly save you some legwork, I was unable to find any of the chips for sale separately, except for from one retailer who would only sell them in large quantities. It was much cheaper in the end to get two 1MB S3 Virge Trio cards from eBay. They have four chips on each, two of which are surface mounted and two of which are socketed (which is why you need two cards to get the full set of four chips for the CV).

HTH

--
moto

[Hodgkinson]

Thanks for the info!

Will keep it in mind!

Regards,
Hodgkinson.

[RW222]

-35 is 35 nano seconds minimum access time. Equivalent to about 28.5Mhz maximum clock rate. The other number is probably just an internal code to ID which machine, line or die packaged it, or a date code.

Edit: Oh yes, beware, the good S3 virge cards would have had 35ns RAM on but the cheaper ones used 50 or even 60ns ... with lots of wait states programmed one would presume. Got 3 or 4 S3 cards kicking around somewhere but only one has the 35ns on it. I think though that the 4MB ones are a safer bet, it's the 2MB ones that cheap out.