3dfx Voodoo4 4200 Daytona Review

  • Just to summarize the key features of VSA 101:

    - cooler Chip compared to the VSA 100, there is no need for any (!) heatsink

    - DDR support

    I'm sure the low end OEM units would have been without heatsinks, the higher end would have had active cooling.

    Gary Donovan

  • finaly tested my a1 daytona. with some kind of register tweaking, found absolutely no problem with available games and tests. tested under win98 and have to say this card gives no shit what driver to use, it work as good as ordinary v4 pci card. used amigamerlin and raziel64 latest drivers and all was just fine. all quakes, hl, carma2, ut, 3dm01, no issues at all. test system is piii 1000 on bx board, but, as mentioned before, i'm very much sure that it will run fine on any system where v3-v4-v5 run good

  • if we talk about most common 16mb a1 card and bios 1.05, than we have to change addres of LFB to e0000008 (pci 14h). that's it. if we want this card with this bios run faster than 143 mhz, we should fine tune draminit1 regiter. also, as this bios has ibm sub ven, sub sys id, good idea to change it to 121a 0005

  • a little bit more. as this card has a11 line routed to top memory chips, these cards can be memory expanded to 32mb two ways, as four chips 2m x 32 or two chips 4m x 32. moreover, 64mb configuration is possible with small 1.5cm length rework lines at back side. not tested 64mb yet, but very much looks like as i said

    correct memory configuration in bios required of course

    Einmal editiert, zuletzt von Anthony (20. Oktober 2018 um 15:31)

  • Hello,

    Anthony, Correct. My modded Daytona IBM 64Mb DDR SGRAM works perfect using 4 banks with 16Mb each chip with a total 64Mb, and yes, you need to connect rear side A11 pin memory to chip daytona. If you want to use only 2 front chips with 16Mb each chip for total 32Mb, you dont need to do any rework.

    I did not modify directly register 'on fly' if not I did all the work via STRAPPING, difficult work since without Daytona Databook, you must guess what are the correct points but with patience and checking PCI18 IO data you can start to check bits in dramInit0.

    As you declarated before of original IBM does not work correctly since membase PCI14 is set up with only 64Mb and for perfect function it needs to be 128Mb.

    I still working on IBM Daytona since my main idea is to mod the daytona IBM with 128Mb- I have in mind some crazy idea for doing it - komponent style - , but not sure if it will work though. Just waiting for new Qtsop memory.

    Anyway, a Daytona with 64Mb is not bad option. You can play it 1280x1020 2xFSAA. About O/C, with new memory 4ns I am awaiting I hope to reach more than 220MHz- actually I use memory of 5ns and it reached 190-195MHz estable. Daytona chip O/C as the hell, just you need to find correct memory. I own an original Daytona 4-2 4800 agp 32Mb with not heatsink and it works with 0 problem over 220MHz and it has not any VMod or similar and it uses standar dramInit0 and dramInit1 register used on daytona bios 1.06 or 1.05c.

    Regards,

    Oscar.

  • I did not modify directly register 'on fly' if not I did all the work via STRAPPING, difficult work since without Daytona Databook, you must guess what are the correct points but with patience and checking PCI18 IO data you can start to check bits in dramInit0.

  • i found that bios overwrites strapping values anyway, so i prefer to compile bios with desired registers value


    my card stable only at 180mhz with 5ns memory chips. will try 4ns anyway, but may be this particular vsa chip not good in terms of overclocking ability

  • Zitat

    my card stable only at 180mhz with 5ns memory chips. will try 4ns anyway, but may be this particular vsa chip not good in terms of overclocking ability

    If you use Hyundai or Samsung 5ns- I had same problem here and card needed a lot of dramInit1 tweaks for runing over 180MHz. I dont think it is a VSA101 problem if not a problem of right memory with right timing. I tested 4ns and now card works 200MHz but I did fast tests and It will need more tweaks for runing over 200MHz.

    Regards,

    Oscar.

  • If you use Hyundai or Samsung 5ns- I had same problem here and card needed a lot of dramInit1 tweaks for runing over 180MHz. I dont think it is a VSA101 problem if not a problem of right memory with right timing. I tested 4ns and now card works 200MHz but I did fast tests and It will need more tweaks for runing over 200MHz.

    Regards,

    Oscar.

    tryed ascend 5ns from gf2

    i'll get mx440 card with fast memory, do test memory frequency potential, exam bios for timing, then will try these memory chips with these timings on my daytona. hope it'll give me something

  • Yet I still am wondering on how the image quality of the Daytona is compared to Napalm & Avenger?, that is when using both the D-Sub & DVI-D..

    Did 3dfx improve the 2D & 3D filters of the Daytona boards or are they pretty much the same as Napalm for example when it comes to overall image quality output?

  • i didn't saw any flaw in napalm based cards regarding image quality. had more than 20 of them. may be i just not see something, my nec 2090uxi has 1600x1200 native resolution all the others are blurry by nature of lcd and this particular resolution displayed very good and i see no difference between avenger/napalm/napalm refresh