![]() Or maybe it’s all Occam’s Razor and people simply forgot about it. The 64-bits variant of the Riva 128ZX is known, so this is strange. This kind of cards must have sold to OEMs for a dime a dozen. Is it so rare that nobody among enthusiasts even acknowledges its existence? That sounds hard to believe. I do find it interesting that nobody really seems to have any info on this old, gimped TNT. In all cases, the same drivers were used. But my TNT is also massively underpowered next to the simulated Vanta LT, even though the bus width is the same, and core and memory frequencies aren’t too different (my TNT is 90c/80m). The Vanta LT would have been massively underpowered next to a regular TNT2, due to its lower clocks and narrower data bus, only somewhat holding up at 640×480. The scores shouldn’t leave much to the imagination. Quake 2, 16-bits (multitexturing enabled from registry) Forsaken, 16-bits Incoming, 16-bits The only difference would be the extra memory size (32MB, while the Vanta LT was only 16MB), but for these old tests it shouldn’t make any difference. I do not have a Vanta LT, but I can easily “simulate” it by bringing down the clocks to 105c/100m. I do have a TNT2 M64 in my personal collection, of course, given that those things on auction sites are more common than TIE Fighters in a galaxy far far away. This, on the other hand, is just called a TNT. The Vanta line was a real thing, so to speak, with a properly named chip and everything, even the Vanta LT wasn’t incognito. I even started thinking: maybe this is actually based on the TNT2 M64, rather than the original TNT? That seemed unlikely, of course. If I must tell the truth, I was initially unwilling to admit this because there was no mention of this kind of card on VGAMuseum or anywhere else, aside from that small blurb on Wikipedia. Even though the core clock is the same at 90mhz for both cards, that’s barely more than a third of the memory bandwidth. For comparison, a regular TNT had its RAM clocked at 110mhz and a 128-bits bus, for a total of 1760MB/s. But not just that, the memory is also clocked at a measly 80mhz. The card indeed has a 64-bits wide data bus. Let’s try with something else? Everest to the rescue.Īnd so the truth is revealed. Recently, I’ve learned that Powerstrip is unreliable at best, and I’ve also read around that Nvidia released some incognito TNT cards with half the bus width and half the memory size. So for a long time, I trusted it and didn’t think much of the situation anymore. The first idea that sprang to my mind was that maybe I had a 64-bits bus width card. Well, I’ll have to look into swapping it with a heatsink. Although, that fan was so hard to pull out, I wonder if it was put on it to hide the chip. The chip itself also would rather you didn’t get its name wrong. But even less doubt is presented by the drivers. The Bios POST screen also showed little doubt, but who knows? These things can be changed relatively easily, I think. As you can see, the outside doesn’t show any indication that you have a blazing fast Nvidia Riva TNT ™. I can confirm the multitexturing part because Quake 2 uses it. At higher resolutions, it seems more like a Riva 128 with multitexturing. They are so bad, in fact, that I’ve often wondered if it was truly a TNT. Long-time readers of this blog (who?) might remember that for a long time I have had a strange Riva TNT, one that gives laughably bad scores in any benchmark. ![]() On the other hand, a netbook only lets you play modern games, except they run like crap. While they are both slow, the old PC allows you to play things that would perhaps be incompatible with modern Windows. The idea of using a netbook to play games is perhaps not as exciting as using an old PC to play games. Nine years later, I just decided to exhume it back from the earth, to test the limits of human patience. In fact, it was bad enough that I didn’t use it for much of anything. In truth netbooks were already on the way out by that point, and I only bought it due to a work trip, but in the end didn’t really use it much for work. Still, it went on for a time, and in 2012 yours truly got one for himself. The craze continued for a while, until users started getting savvy and realizing that perhaps they were missing out on, you know, not waiting for your life to end while the netbook was loading Youtube. Do you remember the netbook craze of 2007? At the time, everyone wanted one of those things, no matter how slow they actually were.
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