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II2II
Junior Member
Canada
115 Posts |
 Posted - 28 Oct 2002 : 23:51:51
I don't remember much about the card since it is packed up in a box on the other side of the country. It is a NuBus card (pulled from a Q950), it does not have I/O ports, and the circuitry looked pretty basic. Prior research suggested that it is a diagnostics card, but that conclusion was in no way conclusive.It could be useful if it is a diagnostics card. In that case, which software would recognise it? II2II
Intelligence officer in training. |
Trash80toG-4
NIGHT STALKER
USA
2899 Posts |
Posted - 29 Oct 2002 : 00:33:52
Tom Owad has a scan of one over on fritter in the NuBus Mafia collection. He mentioned it in a thread too, IIRC. Could have been an auction tho, check it out.jt  ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF |
II2II
Junior Member
Canada
115 Posts |
Posted - 29 Oct 2002 : 01:34:25
That's the card, but nobody knew what it was.  I poked around the other directories and found a photo of the Q950 mainboard. How they managed to get it bigger than life, I will never know. But the quality is unbelievable. II2II
Intelligence officer in training. |
Gothikon
Full Member
Australia
537 Posts |
Posted - 29 Oct 2002 : 02:53:15
I've never seen a bus master card but I seem to recall that some of the more expensive graphics cards are capable of acting as bus master cards. They are meant to improve performance of the other nubus cards but I am not sure how. I think it takes a load of the CPU. I dunno *bus master* I guess it acts as I kind of nubus controller card.Forgot to mention I don't think it requires any software to function just check it in there with the rest of the cards. Edited by - gothikon on 29 Oct 2002 02:55:58 |
Trash80toG-4
NIGHT STALKER
USA
2899 Posts |
Posted - 29 Oct 2002 : 07:34:01
quote:
That's the card, but nobody knew what it was. I poked around the other directories and found a photo of the Q950 mainboard. How they managed to get it bigger than life, I will never know. But the quality is unbelievable.
The power of SCANNING! The technique was introduced by our very own manical muse, Dana scanned her TrueVision NuVista card to compare it to the eBay piccie of mine and a new hardware documentation tool was born.  jt ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF |
II2II
Junior Member
Canada
115 Posts |
Posted - 29 Oct 2002 : 11:21:30
quote:
I seem to recall that some of the more expensive graphics cards are capable of acting as bus master cards. They are meant to improve performance of the other nubus cards but I am not sure how.
IIRC, a bus master can take control of the bus. In a graphics card (such as my 8•24 GC) this allows one card to do the rendering to send the results to another card for display, so yeah it takes a huge load off the CPU. The problem is that this card is way to simple to be a graphics card.
II2II
Intelligence officer in training.
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Gothikon
Full Member
Australia
537 Posts |
Posted - 01 Nov 2002 : 01:45:18
I imagine the overhead of passing the rendered graphics to another card for display is higher than that required to send it to screen. That just doesn't make sense to me.I still think the bus master just lowers the CPU load improving overall performance. I am sure there was an article or Lowend mac about the bus master function on those old Apple graphics cards. I tried googling but couldn't find it. IIRC it basically said installing a busmaster card will improve overall system performance. Nubus cards don't just have to be graphics cards either it would help with ethernet cards, sound cards, SCSI cards etc etc. I am surprised no one else has been able to provide a good answer as I thought these would be pretty popular for improving the performance of old nubus Macs. The only other thing I seem to recall about these is having more than one won't improve performance any further.
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II2II
Junior Member
Canada
115 Posts |
Posted - 01 Nov 2002 : 02:41:12
I honestly don't know what is going on with this card, but I doubt that it is a generic performance booster. Why? Because nobody seems to know what this card is and it appears as though it would be dirt cheap to produce. It also appears to be an Apple product and it is not documented on Apple's website. That implies that it was not produced for end users, but there are too many of these cards floating around in strange places (ie. Canada).So the mystery continues. II2II
Intelligence officer in training. |
Gothikon
Full Member
Australia
537 Posts |
Posted - 01 Nov 2002 : 15:05:54
This is all I could find for the time being about bus master cards. I still see no reason why the bus master funciton could not be put on a seperate card. And if there is room to fit it on a graphics card it can't take up that much space.
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What is an Apple Bus Master card
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