Old VisionTek video card

[Wntermute]

I came across this old VisionTek AGP video card when trying to cobble together a temporary computer for my mom to check her email and surf the web on. It seems that being AGP, it'd likely be better than the plain PCI video card that was in it, but I can't seem to find the right driver for it. Also, I can't seem to find ANY specs on it other than it goes into AGP, it's NVidia-based, and has a VGA port.

 

Here's what I know so far:

- Labelled: VisionTek NV993.0 (circa 1999)

- VisionTek says that it is from "the old VisionTek company. That Visiontek company went out of business about 7 years ago"

- Everywhere I've looked for information can agree on one thing: it's an AGP video card, no other information about it listed (chipset, RAM size, etc.)

 

There are some places that still sell these as hard to find or refurbished stock, but still have the same lack of information regarding the specs and no digital copy of the manual can be found by digging through Google.

[potatohead]

Looks to me like these guys just produced both ATI and nVidia video devices.

 

These guys appear to have it, but they want you to sign up!

 

http://www.karolmagazyn.eu/download/nvidia-nv9930-nvidia-card/atech-modem-nvidia-nv9930-nvidia-card.zip

 

Good luck!

[Wntermute]

Looks to me like these guys just produced both ATI and nVidia video devices.

 

These guys appear to have it, but they want you to sign up!

 

{whatever the URL is}

 

Good luck!

 

I did find that site myself.. the link is for a MODEM driver that it only sends to people registered and logged in.

[+poobah]

Probably a Riva TNT or TNT2

[potatohead]

What a PITA. The old company just evaporated. I think I would go and get classic ATI and nVidia drivers from that time and just try them. Many of those were unified, and would work on a lot of chipsets. You might get lucky...

 

Didn't see that was a modem driver. Bummer there. Good luck on this one. I gave it a seriously good look just an hour ago, and that's the only suggestion I've got, other than to go through images.google.com and compare ATI and nVidia cards to yours for some additional clues.

[+poobah]

Internet archive snapshot of old visiontek site

 

I'm just about certain it is a TNT2 now.

 

They appear to have produced TNT2, GeForce256 and GeForce 2 cards.

 

With the exception of some GeForce 2 MX cards, only the TNT2 cards would have fanless heatsinks.

 

Nvidia still has driver downloads for the TNT2 cards, I'd suggest giving those a whirl.

[Wntermute]

Sounds like a plan. Now I just have to get the glacier to get that far. heheh

[gdement]

Sounds like it's been figured out, but just so you know-

You can identify unknown cards like this by looking at the PCI "Vendor ID" and "Device ID" values. Most BIOSes will show this when the system is booting, but there's probably a way to bring it up in Windows also. These values are reported by any PCI or AGP card (prob also Express, but I don't know about those).

These values are what allow an OS to automatically identify the card.

There's some web site that has a searchable database of these codes. The Vendor ID is registered to a particular company, and I suppose the device ID is assigned however that vendor decides.