LGR - 1999 GPU Upgrade: Diamond S3 Savage4 Pro+
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
Battle
The moment I received a CD-ROM drive for Christmas and tried to install it into my Packard Bell 386SX-16 I knew I was in for a hard time. Not only were the screws some kind of alien fastening technology I've never seen before, but the Expansion slots needed this alien screw bit I've never seen before. So my father sent out my PC for an upgrade with the sound card and CD-ROM drive. Only having to swallow the cost of a -Packard Bell Approved- CD-ROM kit. Never did get the original drive and sound card back. 6 months later, yes, SIX months later, did we get the PC back. Minus the OS and all my project files. I had a Packard Bell PC with a CD-ROM drive.
Which managed to eff itself six months later with a faulty HD and a blown motherboard. I think it was another three months for repair. I did get it back, but not in a stable working order. A week later and I was in my father's car heading to Manchester, NH. Where I met this very awesome guy who owned a PC shop and who kindly imparted his PC building knowledge with me. Setting jumpers, making sure the power connectors were right, memory and CPU voltage were right. And more importantly the value of the magic blue smoke that made everything run. And out of the four PCs I helped build for my father I received one of them as a gift.
Still wish I had that PC, but the local phone company one day decided to run a cleaning pulse down the lines. Blew clean through the modem, motherboard, and RAM. Even the hard drive took a direct hit from the cleaning pulse. They never did admit fault for blowing modems and PCs, but then never did send a cleaning pulse down the phone lines again.
TL; DR Packard Bell machines were poo stains. Mine used a plastic S shaped rod to connect the power button to the power supply. Which broke. Many times. Many, many, MANY times.
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The moment I received a CD-ROM drive for Christmas and tried to install it into my Packard Bell 386SX-16 I knew I was in for a hard time. Not only were the screws some kind of alien fastening technology I've never seen before, but the Expansion slots needed this alien screw bit I've never seen before. So my father sent out my PC for an upgrade with the sound card and CD-ROM drive. Only having to swallow the cost of a -Packard Bell Approved- CD-ROM kit. Never did get the original drive and sound card back. 6 months later, yes, SIX months later, did we get the PC back. Minus the OS and all my project files. I had a Packard Bell PC with a CD-ROM drive.
Which managed to eff itself six months later with a faulty HD and a blown motherboard. I think it was another three months for repair. I did get it back, but not in a stable working order. A week later and I was in my father's car heading to Manchester, NH. Where I met this very awesome guy who owned a PC shop and who kindly imparted his PC building knowledge with me. Setting jumpers, making sure the power connectors were right, memory and CPU voltage were right. And more importantly the value of the magic blue smoke that made everything run. And out of the four PCs I helped build for my father I received one of them as a gift.
Still wish I had that PC, but the local phone company one day decided to run a cleaning pulse down the lines. Blew clean through the modem, motherboard, and RAM. Even the hard drive took a direct hit from the cleaning pulse. They never did admit fault for blowing modems and PCs, but then never did send a cleaning pulse down the phone lines again.
TL; DR Packard Bell machines were poo stains. Mine used a plastic S shaped rod to connect the power button to the power supply. Which broke. Many times. Many, many, MANY times.
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mrdali67
I did play a lot of EverQuest back in 99 and up to around 2004, and it was a problem as SOE updated the game over the years, especially when DirectX 6 came out, was about the end for 3Dfx and we had to get an unofficial Dx6 updated drivers for our aging Woodoo 2 cards we kinda had to get Nvidia or S3 cards to move on, cause the game engine simply got upgraded so much and they dropped the glide support complete when switching to Dx6. Never really think S3 was that great compared to what came with the Nvidia cards. And I still remember mourning the day I had to ditch my Woodoo card along with my Asus P2b Pentium board. That is today still one of the best PC build I ever did and maan that Asus P2b went thru so many upgrades and lots of fun OC memories of those awspme 300Mhz Celerons that oc'ed to 500mhz and experience with 2x Woodoo in sli. I never had a more stable Mobo than that one.
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I did play a lot of EverQuest back in 99 and up to around 2004, and it was a problem as SOE updated the game over the years, especially when DirectX 6 came out, was about the end for 3Dfx and we had to get an unofficial Dx6 updated drivers for our aging Woodoo 2 cards we kinda had to get Nvidia or S3 cards to move on, cause the game engine simply got upgraded so much and they dropped the glide support complete when switching to Dx6. Never really think S3 was that great compared to what came with the Nvidia cards. And I still remember mourning the day I had to ditch my Woodoo card along with my Asus P2b Pentium board. That is today still one of the best PC build I ever did and maan that Asus P2b went thru so many upgrades and lots of fun OC memories of those awspme 300Mhz Celerons that oc'ed to 500mhz and experience with 2x Woodoo in sli. I never had a more stable Mobo than that one.
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Tyler
Honestly I had a video card that froze or crashed the system too when I used it, so much so I had to return the card. I think it was an ATI something, had 2 GPU on the card itself like a SLI type setup (my memory is foggy, that was like back in the year 2000. I have no idea why, but back then certain systems had hard incompatibilities with a certain card or chipset.
But I really hated the time though, because there was a time, I think 1997-2000 where almost all the games out there only supported Glide and that meant you MUST have a 3dFX card. It sucked because at the time all the 3dFX cards were expensive as hell too. I think it was only when the price of them came down a bit later on that I went with a Voodoo 3 or 4. But good thing they unified the API's because it's frustrating to buy a video card and find out 80% of the games out there don't work with it.
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Honestly I had a video card that froze or crashed the system too when I used it, so much so I had to return the card. I think it was an ATI something, had 2 GPU on the card itself like a SLI type setup (my memory is foggy, that was like back in the year 2000. I have no idea why, but back then certain systems had hard incompatibilities with a certain card or chipset.
But I really hated the time though, because there was a time, I think 1997-2000 where almost all the games out there only supported Glide and that meant you MUST have a 3dFX card. It sucked because at the time all the 3dFX cards were expensive as hell too. I think it was only when the price of them came down a bit later on that I went with a Voodoo 3 or 4. But good thing they unified the API's because it's frustrating to buy a video card and find out 80% of the games out there don't work with it.
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Recycled
I remember years ago while working in a computer shop we would mess a try and make fast machines to play games out of hours, we would find a computer with that card and another with this and mix them before we put back together. I can not remember for sure but I think we made a 486DX 50 and/or a 486DX2 100 with a VLB, this would drive the VLB at 50mhz which was out of spec (all from memory, I am not sure. Video cards capable of doing that were not common but if we found one in another computer we would play with it for a bit. I would like to see what could be achieved with VLB at 50mhz. We often had problems with the IO and sound cards too, we found a system once that did the lot once we put a DX2 100 in it. LGR do that.
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I remember years ago while working in a computer shop we would mess a try and make fast machines to play games out of hours, we would find a computer with that card and another with this and mix them before we put back together. I can not remember for sure but I think we made a 486DX 50 and/or a 486DX2 100 with a VLB, this would drive the VLB at 50mhz which was out of spec (all from memory, I am not sure. Video cards capable of doing that were not common but if we found one in another computer we would play with it for a bit. I would like to see what could be achieved with VLB at 50mhz. We often had problems with the IO and sound cards too, we found a system once that did the lot once we put a DX2 100 in it. LGR do that.
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Skye
I had one of the Diamond Stealth II for a brief time. At the time, I had an AMD K63-333 with 16MB of ram at the time, and I believe I was running Windows 98SE (Win2k had only just recently come out around that time) and I just could not, for the life of me, get the card to work right. I had no graphics acceleration, though I did have full 1024x768 resolution. Running games like Half-Life resulted in single digit framerates. After everything I tried, uninstalling, even fresh installs of the OS, I gave up and returned the card. Shortly thereafter, I managed to pick up a Voodoo3 3k. 3dFx Glide was SO much better at the time. (Edit, I realized it was actually a Diamond Stealth II Rendition Verite-based card)
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I had one of the Diamond Stealth II for a brief time. At the time, I had an AMD K63-333 with 16MB of ram at the time, and I believe I was running Windows 98SE (Win2k had only just recently come out around that time) and I just could not, for the life of me, get the card to work right. I had no graphics acceleration, though I did have full 1024x768 resolution. Running games like Half-Life resulted in single digit framerates. After everything I tried, uninstalling, even fresh installs of the OS, I gave up and returned the card. Shortly thereafter, I managed to pick up a Voodoo3 3k. 3dFx Glide was SO much better at the time. (Edit, I realized it was actually a Diamond Stealth II Rendition Verite-based card)
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ra
I saw a lot of Packard Bells in the 90s, and they were often hinky with compatibility. More than half the time, I'd go to a customer's house, try like hell to install an upgrade like that video card, and eventually, if it worked at all, it would still be underpowered and unsatisfactory. Often it would end with me selling them a $50 case / $70 mainboard, and move the cpu/ram/harddisk over and they'd have a decent cheap computer that was no longer hampered by being a Packard Bell.
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I saw a lot of Packard Bells in the 90s, and they were often hinky with compatibility. More than half the time, I'd go to a customer's house, try like hell to install an upgrade like that video card, and eventually, if it worked at all, it would still be underpowered and unsatisfactory. Often it would end with me selling them a $50 case / $70 mainboard, and move the cpu/ram/harddisk over and they'd have a decent cheap computer that was no longer hampered by being a Packard Bell.
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xXHairRazorXx
Hey there LGR! I have a question, I have a Dimond Viper 770u gpu, I have had it for many many years. The fan is gone and was dead a long time ago, where can I go about getting a replacement fan for this card?
In fact I have a few GPUs of older age that needs fans. A general fan place would be nice, unless you know exactly where to get the right fans for the cards I have. Any help would be great!
-A Fellow Retro Gamer!
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Hey there LGR! I have a question, I have a Dimond Viper 770u gpu, I have had it for many many years. The fan is gone and was dead a long time ago, where can I go about getting a replacement fan for this card?
In fact I have a few GPUs of older age that needs fans. A general fan place would be nice, unless you know exactly where to get the right fans for the cards I have. Any help would be great!
-A Fellow Retro Gamer!
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Neil
I had one of these (paired with an AMD K6-2 450 mhz. I was disappointed with the Savage despite being cheaper than a TNT2. It had pretty poor OpenGL driver support, making Quake III (and games on a similar engine, like Jedi Outcast 2) unstable. It also made the old version of 1964 hang consistently when using the rice plugin. I sidegraded to a TNT2 and the difference was night and day, both in terms of compatibility and speed.
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I had one of these (paired with an AMD K6-2 450 mhz. I was disappointed with the Savage despite being cheaper than a TNT2. It had pretty poor OpenGL driver support, making Quake III (and games on a similar engine, like Jedi Outcast 2) unstable. It also made the old version of 1964 hang consistently when using the rice plugin. I sidegraded to a TNT2 and the difference was night and day, both in terms of compatibility and speed.
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Quajay
The reason most likely it wouldn't work in the Packard Bell was because you need to disable the onboard video. The only way to do so is to boot into the bios's 'advanced' mode. I don't remember exactly what key you press but its something like hold A while holding the bios key eg: F2 and A or Del and A. again, it's not exact but I remember I had to do something similar to mine to get it to work back in the day
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The reason most likely it wouldn't work in the Packard Bell was because you need to disable the onboard video. The only way to do so is to boot into the bios's 'advanced' mode. I don't remember exactly what key you press but its something like hold A while holding the bios key eg: F2 and A or Del and A. again, it's not exact but I remember I had to do something similar to mine to get it to work back in the day
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Peter
I have the AGP version and the same issue. It freezes when WIndows 98 starts. I used a TUSL2-C, Socket 370 with Tualatin Pentium III 1133 MHz. I thought the card is broken. But seems more like a driver issue with some hardware combinations. maybe I try it with another board, again. I would like to check the S3 Textrues in UT. I hat the GOTY back then and was always curious what these S3 Textures ar about.
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I have the AGP version and the same issue. It freezes when WIndows 98 starts. I used a TUSL2-C, Socket 370 with Tualatin Pentium III 1133 MHz. I thought the card is broken. But seems more like a driver issue with some hardware combinations. maybe I try it with another board, again. I would like to check the S3 Textrues in UT. I hat the GOTY back then and was always curious what these S3 Textures ar about.
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