What a combo. Anyway, subject of this post are dreaded Williamette-based Asus P4T and no-name Nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 8x. What a mouthful. Today’s also a high time for a post about some retro stuff modding and fixing, since last posts were quite boring. Then again, I’m very limited on stuff I can mess with, let alone stuff I’m not worried about breaking.
Let’s make an exception.
Let’s start with this motherboard, I got it for cheap as a whole platform, because it wasn’t able to shut itself down.
Let’s investigate it first.
OK, it POSTs and I can’t show it in the picture, but I was able to shut it down just fine. No idea what was wrong there, maybe someone had a broken Windows install.
let’s check out the goodies.
RAM is definitely weird. Mostly because it’s RD-RAM, a failed standard, that didn’t perform as good as DDR while being HOT.
Capacity is also weird, it recognizes 384MB, but there are 4 64MB modules installed. I’m not going to complain, free more memory.
Look at all the dust I got for free!
CPU also is not great. Again, it was more expensive than Pentium 3, and was a bit slower.
Essentially You paid more for worse RAM, no upgradability, and a slower CPU than You already had.
Cool.
This particular SKU is 1.5GHz, lower end of the P4 family, which was more or less as fast as AMD Athlon 1GHz (Thunderbird core, not the XP cores, like Palomino, T-bread, Barton) or P3 1GHz.
All that while costing 629$, compared to the Athlons 183$ or P3s 258$.
Ouch.
I absolutely love the very industrial and early-2000-ish look of the NB. It reminds me of P3/Celeron SEPP packages. Truly a blast from the past.
Cue the “Area 51 DNA – Stepfather” for more nostalgia.
OK, time for some GPU action.
Say hello to the GF4Ti 4200, slowest of the GF4 family, yet the most popular one.
This particular card works fine, as indicated by POST screen.
Man, do I need to make myself some rechargable CR2032 batteries. (EPIC FORESHADOWING 2!)
While taking it apart I had a wild idea.
This is it’s VRAM. It’s plenty fast for a GF4, but it’s only 64MB.
What if I doubled it?
So hunt for some VRAM began.
My attention went immediately to my spare-parts box.
This Radeon 9550 looks mighty delicious.
It has a compatible VRAM, 128MB, even less than 4ns timings, and it doesn’t output any picture.
I wanted to give it a last chance to work by rewriting its BIOS.
VBIOS read shows 9600 PRO? I guess they really didn’t care about hiding the fact that 9550 used the same core as the 9600.
As You can see the GPU is still d…
Hold on, IT POSTED???
Oh, I guess I have to refurbrish it now…
The core looks not fresh. In real life it’s far worse than in this picture. Every corner is chipped and discolored.
Refurbrished with a fixed Nvidia Quadro heatsink.
…
I’m sure this is some sort of a crime.
Anyway, I came across a sad FX5200. Honestly, I forgot that I even had this GPU.
Splash screen had me worried for a second. 64MB…
… but its datasheet clearly shows 128Mb IC, which means that half of them were disabled.
What’s more, I found some more VRAM IC, which for sure won’t be needed (epic foreshadowing).
Let’s start with the modding.
I obviously pre-heat the PCB to make it easier for me to remove necessary ICs. It also helps by removing some of the heat strain from the PCB.
GPUs without VRAM look… naked?
I don’t know, it really messes with me.
GPU is back together, let’s test it. I’ve not flashed modded BIOS at this point, but it shouldn’t matter, since that 5200 run at 64MB just fine.
…
…
Welp, there’s a reason why I rarely mod working stuff.
What’s wrong?
Oh, there is some damage to the SMD components.
Yep, looks the same for me.
OK, let’s resolder the VRAM ICs, all of them.
Finally, some change.
I actually was stuck at this point for a bit. I didn’t have MATS for this GPU yet, so I looked around the PCB without any clue which chips are faulty.
But then THE ONE VOGONS POST happened. I found older MATS version. I lost a link to it though, sorry.
Right, where do I start.
Bank B is fine. Rest are faulty.
I was able to fix bank D, there was a small short on two data lines.
At this point I was unable to see any more fails on my end, so I fired the BGA machine and changed the back A and C channel ICs.
It posted almost artifact-free! I only needed to replace the front C chip.
Surely enough my soldering isn’t that bad.
I just harvested bad VRAM ICs.
Time for some VBIOS modding.
There is one small catch though.
I couldn’t find a 128MB version of compatible VBIOS.
Incompatible, on the other hand, well, is incompatible.
That’s what happened when I flashed VBIOS image from my Medion GF4Ti 4200 128MB.
I looked at the log from MATS and the controller literally cannot adress a single VRAM IC.
I guess I have now a GF4Ti 4200 with an indentity crysis. It’s hardware is 128MB, but software is 64MB.
At least it still works.
Thanks for reading!