u/Divergent5623

The Z200 was the first and last graphics card produced by Diamond after S3 and Diamond Multimedia merged in 1999. The Savage 2000 chip was a flop as it had broken hardware T&L, compatibility issues with existing S3 MeTaL API games, and was eclipsed by the GeForce 256, which was releasded a month later. Soon after, Diamond left the PC expansion card market and the S3 graphics assets were sold to VIA.

Earlier versions of the S220 were released with the standard 40MHz core / 80 MHz memory clocks of the V2100 chip, but due to lackluster performance, Diamond shipped later cards with a BIOS bumping clocks to 55MHz core / 111MHz memory, the same as the V2200 version of the chip. This later BIOS can be flashed onto the earlier cards, as has been done with this example.

In the early 2000s, PowerVR offered an excellent value and an alternative to NVIDIA and ATI in their KYRO series. It featured a tile-based rendering technology that allowed it to only render parts of a scene that were visible and thus offered impressive performance - even if it didn't have the raw horsepower of some of its competition. And yes, I am aware that the capacitors on this board are getting a little pudgy. I'll have to replace those soon.

I love PowerVR stuff. These early models don't even feature a display output because they sent their 3D image to the 2D card's frame buffer over the PCI bus.

The Intel 740, released in 1998, was essentially Intel's only discrete graphics chip until Arc in 2022. It was released as an attempt to highlight the new AGP interface. It shipped with only 2-8MB of VRAM when some competitors had as much as 32MB. Supposedly it would overcome this by using AGP's new technology of fetching textures from system memory, but this turned out to be a very slow process and overall performance was disappointing.

I've always loved the look of the HD 5000 series cards. This dual GPU card is LONG. Even without the support bracket, it's as long as my GeForce 3090 Ti, and this was in 2009.

To think that this was released just seven months after the 3870 X2. The rate of product releases back then was just insane. This was ATI's second dual GPU card of 2008.

This was ATI's first dual chip card since the Rage Fury MAXX. It also finally gave ATI fans a card with performance that could exceed a GeForce 8800 GTX or 8800 Ultra in games that took good advantage of CrossFire.

I got this duo not too long ago from a friend and they are one of my favorite things to play around with under Windows XP. ATI made some improvements with this iteration of CrossFire, but it was still done with an external cable.

CrossFire genesis, when it was handled by an external cable that connected the two GPUs together and then sent the signal to the monitor. A major critique of this first generation was a limit of 60Hz output at 1600x1200, which was probably the resolution you were trying to play at if you were purchasing two top-of-the-line GPUs.

This was ATI's answer to the first GeForce, the GeForce 256, until they could release their Radeon. This was one of the first dual chip graphics cards, aside from offerings from Quantum 3D. It had two Rage 128 Pro chips. My understanding is that it only works under Windows 9x and has compatibility issues with a lot of motherboards due to its haphazard dual chip implementation.

The GeForce 7950 GX2 was NVIDIA's first factory dual GPU "card" with two G71 dies. I say "card" because it's actually two PCBs screwed together with an SLI connector in the middle, so it's more like two 7950 GTs in SLI while using only one PCIE slot and having slightly reduced clocks and really sh*tty cooling. As far as I know, two of these cards are also the only way to do quad SLI in Windows XP.

Hunted for one of these for years. The GeForce 5800 Ultra was a big disappointment when it arrived late, with very limited availability, and a notorious "dustbuster" cooling solution. It was only slightly faster than ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro and looked even worse as time went on due to the FX series' poor DirectX 9 performance.

This card features 2D and 3D graphics acceleration, sound, and Sega Saturn controller ports as a kind of all-in-one multimedia solution. It uses NVIDIA's first graphics chip, the NV1. Its 3D applications are limited as it did 3D rendering with quadrilaterals when the rest of the industry went with triangles so there are only a few select games that support it. This is the high-end model featuring a daughterboard that upgrades it to 4MB of memory.

My family used one of these dual 56K modems from Diamond for a short while before broadband become available in our area. I remember we had only recently upgraded from 33.6K to 56K. We already had a second phone line so that when someone was on the Internet someone else could still use the phone. With this bad boy, we used both phone lines and the Internet was flying! I was downloading QuickTime video clips like they were going out of style.