What you can buy in Bangkok for 1$

[lecter]

Yeah, besides a hooker or a small Heineken.

I got this little baby yesterday...now I'll just have to look for 8x256k VRAM chips to really max it out For those of you that don't know, it's a 10 year-old Matrox Athena. It's even supposed to still be in working condition, but I haven't gotten around to sticking it in my oldie rig to test that. I assume that I can get the NT 4.0 drivers for it off the Matrox site, right? I was told Win98 has direct support for it, but I can't find a copy of it around to test that.

[lecter]

Close-up of the chip. BTW, does anyone have any specs for this thing? I couldn't find anything on the net, I'd be especially interested to know at what speed the external RAMDAC is running.

[UtwigMU]

IMO Haig is the person to ask such questions.

I see a Productiva G100 going for 7$ locally and I'm wondering wether to start collecting them.

BTW, is that an ISA card?

[lecter]

Nope, it's PCI (as u can plainly see in the first pic ). And yeah, I'm thinking of starting a little collection...might be nice to find some Atlas and Titan boards lying around

[Ribbit]

That's a 175MHz RAMDAC.

[thop]

Nice buy. You should send it to that chinese guys who is collecting Matrox cards (don't remember his nick).

[Belwarrior]

Exactly where in thailand did you get that MGA card?
My friends are planning a trip there, so maybe i can get them to buy me one

[rylan]

Might want to get that card checked out before putting it in your system, being from Bangkok and all.. who knows what kinds of computers and pci slots its been in!

[lecter]

Belwarrior, I got it from the local IT superstore, called Pantip Plaza. Besides new hardware, it has a huge assortment of oldies plucked from brand-name workstations, servers, etc. I also saw some Millennium II's, some Mistiques, and awhile ago I bought a Millennium I which is performing great in my oldie PC.

[lecter]

Part 2 of my little foray, this is an Athena-R2 which I got hold of. As you can see, it's a Compaq OEM part and if no one else has any idea, i'll ask Haig about that very strange looking 80pin connector on it.

[lecter]

Close up of the connector, if i didn't know better, I'd say it was a SCSI connector Maybe it's for some multimedia upgrade card?

[High_Jumbllama]

COuld it be a feature connector?

[UtwigMU]

Perhaps for some videoediting AEDIS or something addon card.

[rylan]

Connector for SLI mode? :P

[Ribbit]

While we're posting pictures of our obsolete Matrox cards, here's mine. It's a VLB Ultima with a 200MHz DAC and a whopping 4MB VRAM, part no. MGA-VLB/4/200.

I found it several years ago in Computer Exchange in Tottenham Court Road for I think £20. Matrox had just released the chip specs for the Athena, so I figured I'd have a go at writing an XFree86 driver for it and get dualhead on my 486 Unfortunately it died before I could make much progress (still works as a standard VGA, but the Matrox-specific stuff is broken). Pity, because it gave a clear sharp picture, even pushed right to its limits at 1600x1200. My other board had a 220MHz DAC, but it would go fuzzy above about 170MHz (about 1280x960 at a decent refresh). This Ultima was fast too - under Windows anyway. Playing DOS (S)VGA games or demos on it was like cutting my CPU speed in half.