Seanix Riva128, AGP?

[RaptorZX3]

i found in one of my boxes a Seanix "Nipigon" Riva128 AGP...but i thought they only made PCI Riva128, while the ZX had the option to be AGP!



Is that a common thing to use PCI cards and turn them into AGP cards? if i believe this sticker, it have 4mb...and only the PCI version had 4mb if i "believe" Wikipedia...

 

[ClassicHasClass]

There were a number of early cards that had PCI-AGP bridges, yes. They obviously did not take full advantage of AGP, but they did gain some performance improvement from the additional bandwidth and exclusive bus, and were a quick way for many manufacturers to get into that market with little extra design cost. They faded from the market fairly rapidly, though.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I remember dealing with one of those ATI All-In-Wonder AGP cards (an 8500?) that actually had the reverse, an AGP->PCI bridge on it, that served the onboard video tuner and Firewire port while the video chipset itself was fully AGP. The reason it caught my attention was, of course, that said bridge chip was causing driver issues with the particular motherboard it was plugged into. Whee.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Ugly. I would be impressed if a setup like that ever worked; it seems like a recipe for bus contention on its face.

 

[RaptorZX3]

is the SST chip the "bridge" on this card?

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Probably, or it contains the bridge logic and some other stuff. The other chips (aside from the GPU) look like RAM.

 

[RaptorZX3]

seem so, EtronTech is a RAM company i guess, as i've seen a lot of their RAM chips on a lot of stuff including HDD cache chips.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

Probably, or it contains the bridge logic and some other stuff. The other chips (aside from the GPU) look like RAM.

No.

The SST chip is the EEPROM for the VGA BIOS. Many mid to late 90s cards had big EEPROMs on them like that.

Unless there's another chip on the back of the card, there's no bridge chip and the GPU is directly connected to the AGP bus. Bridge chips require lots of pins to interface to both buses it's translating, so it's going to be readily apparent where the bridge chip is. It'll either be a BGA part or a PQFP with hundreds of fine pitched pins.