[sdz] of Vogons discussion board brings us an surprising gadget for the twenty first century – a 3dfx Voodoo 4 card in MXM format, outfitted with 64MB of RAM. This isn’t only a showpiece – this card truly, correctly works when put in into our hacker’s Dell Precision M4800, and [sdz] tells us extra on how the cardboard got here to be.
Outfitted with a VSA-100 GPU, this card has a complete lot of help parts for adapting previous interfaces to trendy ones. There’s a PCIe-PCI bridge IC, an FPGA, HDMI muxes, and a Realtek scaler for video conversion. Dealing with all of the MXM interfaces would’ve been downright unimaginable, so the cardboard additionally holds an LVDS header for the M4800’s panel. Plus, for testing all of it, [sdz] has developed a PCIe to MXM adapter board with minimal circuitry wanted to have the cardboard work – it is a significantly concerned hack and it’s executed remarkably nicely.
The discussion board publish exhibits a complete lot of the journey, from receiving the PCBs to code and FPGA gateware bringup, in addition to movies of VGA and HDMI operation. Ultimately, our hacker exhibits us a completely working setup, the 3dfx card inserted into M4800 and driving its show, in addition to overclocking experiments; the creator has promised to open-source the cardboard recordsdata in due time, too. It’s significantly good to see DIY MXM playing cards within the wild, and should you ever wished to construct one, we’ve obtained an article tells you everything you could want to know concerning the MXM commonplace.
We thank [Misel] for sharing this with us!
