Odd PCI card

[lorddef]

Hi chaps,

I've got an old machine here (a dual p100 believe it or not) and it has some sort of voltage reg board in one of the PCI slots. It says "POWER CARD 5V TO 3.3V REV 1.1" on it.

The only ref I can get on the web is here

And ideas what it actually does?

Perhaps a converter to make the 3.3v line for the socket7 slot?

can anyone read the oriental text on that site?

[LoadWB]

My best guess would be that it converts a 5v PCI system or down-stream PCI ports to 3.3v PCI.  Unfortunately I cannot read Taiwanese, though I know someone who might.

edit: It might not matter.  This looks like an eBay-ish site, and the only apparent information is that on the auction and seller, but no details on the part itself.  Another best-guess.

[lorddef]

Hmm, but if it converted the pci slots down to 3.3v surely the  card would not fit ?

There'd be no point as the only 3.3v cards that would fit would be dual 5v/3.3v cards, and thus not actually need the 3.3v

I'm just curious really, the machine has been in service for years and now I'm dismantling it. A bit sad really, I've never seen a similar dual pentium system before, I simply don't have the space (or reason) to keep it.

[cantido]

You could trace out the pins it has to work out what it does.. the only active component on there looks to be a linear regulator (hence the massive heat sink). It has to be feeding something on the PCI bus unless the slot it's in isnt really a PCI slot or has non-standard additions.

[lorddef]

As I recall, going back to 2000 ish when I inherited the machine, this was the only pci card in it. I just left it in place as I guessed it was doing something specific for the motherboard.

All the other pci cards are totally non related.

[Zac67]

Possibly that card generates the PCI bus's 3.3V not natively available from the mainboard otherwise. In the baby AT era the PSU did not provide 3.3V yet, so a card like that could upgrade a '5V only' PCI system to '3.3 & 5V'.

Note that I'm talking about voltage supply only, signal level (and card keying) is something else.

[modrobert]

can anyone read the oriental text on that site?

Google translated.