Did STB make an 8mb V2. 24 chips, 8 MB?

[SavantStrike]

Alright, this is just weird.

I went on the bay recently and found some STB Black Magic V2's brand new, with oem packaging. They were supposed to be 12mb versions. I snagged three of them (everybody needs a spare right)?

They have ram chips on both the front and back of the card, and the card is marked C 1998 STB systems.

Looking at pictures at FalconFly, the 3dfx cards (which were 8mb), are marked c 1999, not 1998. I've got two competing skus though (an 8 mb and a 12 mb sku).

Do I have some sort of weird transitional card here?

Can anyone tell me exactly what I'm dealing with here, I've got maybe 12 hours to make a decision to keep them or send them back.

[ps47]

back at those days, everybody was making them, so strange/unusual versions pop out quite often.I would keep them,but try to get a partial refund (item not as advertised).note: make sure they really are 8MB-see the pictures:

8MB version will have missing modules on the back side: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5253/5516803954_9774ebd6db.jpg

12MB version will have all modules: http://www.3dfx.ch/gallery/d/5223-2/3dfx_voodoo2_stealthcooler_back.jpg

[SavantStrike]

Yeah. That's the weird thing. Memory on the front and the back, 24 chips total. The cards should be 12MB, but they just don't appear to be that way (in software at least).

I can post pics of the back soon, but the picture of two Black Magic cards on Wikipedia depicts the exact cards I've got. Same exact memory part numbers, and same copyright date.

I will point out that the memory part numbers do not all match.
Part numbers on the memory are not all the same though, is that normal? They are all Alliant V53C16258HK25, but the top portion of the memory chips says 9905F and 9903F

Are the 3dfx reference drivers botching this somehow? The drivers report a 4MB framebuffer but only 8MB per card.


I'm going to try the FastVoodoo drivers, maybe that will help.



EDIT: I edited the topic name to make it clearer.

[rottentreats]

With the Voodoo2 8MB cards you get 4MB for the frame buffer and 4MB for texture memory.  (8MB total memory)



A 12MB Voodoo2 has 4MB for the frame buffer and 8MB for texture memory. (12MB total memory)  The only difference between the 8MB version and the 12MB version is the amount of memory for the textures, both versions have 4MB for frame buffer)



In my screenshot below I had two 12MB V2's in SLI, and you can see I have 8MB of frame buffer memory (4MB + 4MB) and 16MB of Total Texture Memory (8MB + 8MB).  These numbers do make things a bit different, but now you see where the "24MB of Voodoo2 SLI Power" comes from. (8MB+16MB = 24MB)



Hope that helps a bit, I know I had the same questions some time ago.

[SavantStrike]

That helps a lot, thanks rotten.

When I used the 3dfx reference drivers, the system said 16MB of texture memory and 8mb framebuffer). At least I'm pretty sure it did. I'm getting a different result from the FastVoodoo drivers, and it's been a few weeks now. Using the FastVoodoo drivers it shows 4mb framebuffer and 8mb of texture memory, but the overlay is screwed up (I'll take some screenshots when I get a chance.

Neither driver showed all of that information as legibly as your screenshot does. It almost looked like the text was off center.

However, it's clear I'm getting the full 24MB, I just didn't think about the fact that 8 of it is frame buffer memory.

This is addictive though. I bought three cards so I had a spare I could put in a shadow box and hang on the wall. I'm now planning a second build with a solo V2 card, and wondering if I shouldn't snag another V2 and sli that rig too.