A ‘new’ graphicscard
It’s been a year since I last bought a graphicscard and well, since I decided I better spent 3 times a hundred euros in three years than once 300 in the beginning of it… it became time I got myself another card and I did :-)
Here you can see both, my ‘old’ card above, a Sapphire ATi 9600 Atlantis and my ‘new’ one (bought second hand), a Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 Pro. In almost every aspect, the new card is more than double of everything my old card is… 8 pipelines instead of four, 256-bit memory instead of 128-bit and the memory itself is 310MHz instead of 200MHz (620MHz DDR compared to 400MHz DDR) and the benchmarks show it, I get more than double the results :-)
Who needs a Mac Mini, when my 1988 Compact Mac SE on steroids does this? (later on I even score 6377 points in 3DMark03).
Oh, and this couldn’t just all have gone without a little soldering, could it? Somehow I kept having black&white on my TV-out(which I use to connect to my Video Projection System. So after trying all the plugs/adapters etc which I had laying around, without result, it was time to dive into the information and come with a solution! I combined this info with this info and so I decided to put a 470pF capacitor in between pin 15&20 of my Scart-plug… and that seems to do the trick very well! I did put it on the outside, so I can experiment with different components, to get to the best result. It seems that a ‘normal’ S-Video->Composite connector (usually comes with your graphicscard) just connect pins 3&4 to the signal… in other words, in those connectors there isn’t any component in between… Hmmmmz….
ADDED
Hmmmz, maybe Half-Life2 on my 9700 Pro delivers a little more as what I was hoping for :-)
Oh and I’m soooo impressed by the performance now… I decided to put an ATi-casebadge on my Media Center :-)
permalink - 
add to del.icio.us
I don’t know if your projector has a SCART connector, but if it does, this might be helpfull: http://www.idiots.org.uk/vga_rgb_scart/
A little bit of soldering is involved ;-)
Greetz
Friso