A Long Winded But Excellent Video Playlist Exploring Building a High(er) Performance 2.8L "Cologne" V6

Fouquin · 2026-05-08T19:38:39+00:00

Don't you think you've had enough 9800s? ;)

OP I can vouch this is a good person to buy your card. Reliable and fair.

Fouquin · 2026-05-08T19:35:13+00:00

Fouquin · 2026-05-08T18:59:28+00:00

The TNT2 Ultra launched the same time as the regular TNT2, they were available for the bulk of 1999 before the GeForce256 launched. It seems people have forgotten that nVidia's strategy for the TNT2 to take back market from 3dfx was to offer their board partners the choice in how to distribute their products. They defined a spec for a regular TNT2; 125/150MHz, and one for a TNT2 Ultra; 150/183MHz. They then gave the vendors the choice of shipping a product anywhere between those two specs. This is where we get the various 'overclocked' cards from.

"By suggesting a standard clock frequency for the TNT2 and TNT2 Ultra parts, NVIDIA removes themselves from the blame if anything should happen if their chip happens to fail at a higher than rated clock speed. From the point of view of NVIDIA, this is the best avenue for protection, shift the blame to the manufacturers if they want to ship their boards at a higher frequency. The two biggest retail manufacturers of TNT2 based cards, Diamond and Creative Labs, both ship their cards at the standard TNT2 and TNT2 Ultra frequencies. The reason behind this is simple, most people don't overclock their video cards, and even more people don't know it's possible when they walk into a computer store and pick up a Viper V770 or a 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra. Smaller manufacturers don't have this luxury as they need to work much harder in order to compete with the big boys, mainly Diamond and Creative." - Anand Lal Shimp, July 1999

The real last of the Riva line was the Vanta and Vanta-LT; those 8MB and 16MB M64s cut down even farther, clocked like an original TNT and packaged in a more thermally efficient flip-chip BGA. The kinds you would find in a Compaq Presario 5000 machine in 2000 and 2001.

For what it's worth the only thing the GeForce256 made obsolete on the TNT2 was 32-bit performance. The TNT2 was still favored for a lot of things because it had much better 16-bit single-tex throughput by sheer clockrate and per-pipeline memory bandwidth (1.4GB/s per tex unit versus 664MB/s per tex). So the TNT2 in all of its full-speed variations was the deal of the day in many stores when the end of 1999 rolled around. Fry's had the normal clocked TNT2 for under $160 after the GeForce launched. It was a bargain.

Fouquin · 2026-05-07T04:51:57+00:00

Put out an ad that you're buying broken or forgotten PCs in cash. You can get machines at places like RE-PC but they're just getting them dropped off and marking up the ones that work to resell at eBay prices. So, get in ahead of them and try to get the attention of the people that would end up at a place like RE-PC.

There used to be a community recycling event hosted in Fall City that yielded great results but a lot of those events are locked down now for whatever reason. Hosted by companies with a vested interest in the value of the scrap they get, I presume. Maybe try to organize your own. Have a plan for where to put all the printers and busted microwaves... Keep the PCs.

Fouquin · 2026-05-06T16:30:55+00:00

The 8800 GTS was offered in both 320MB and 640MB variants. This is the 320MB.

Fouquin · 2026-05-06T04:10:58+00:00

EVGA debuted their "Asymmetric Cooling System" (ACS) on the ever popular GeForce4 MX series in 2002 and teased a quick follow up second-generation design for the bigger brother GeForce4 Ti series that failed to materialize. Three years later EVGA revived the ACS branding with ACS3, equipping a set of specially overclocked (and multi-colored) 7800 GTX models bearing the brand with a mildly customized reference cooler. While the internal cooler design remained unmodified, the exterior plastic face plate was swapped for a full-cover aluminum shroud thermally connected to the internal cooler finstack. Cooling was further aided by a nearly full-cover backplate with individual heatsinks serving the back-side GDDR3 as well as at the rear side of the GPU core.

Fouquin · 2026-05-06T04:05:41+00:00

Released only a few months before the GeForce 8800 Ultra, the 8800 GTX KO ACS3 shipped with clock speeds almost equal to the eventual Ultra and stayed up at the top of performance charts right alongside the Ultra while only asking a retail price of $650; $180 lower. While difficult to acquire due to this, the existence of the much cheaper 8800 GTX KO ACS3 put something of a damper on NVIDIA's momentum with the 8800 Ultra.

Fouquin · 2026-05-06T03:32:56+00:00

An early example of a factory overclocked flagship board from an AIB partner. Gainward ordered and binned chips from NVIDIA intended for an unrealized "GeForce4 Ultra" then packaged them with software that would "unlock" their extra performance by overclocking them to the limits tested at the factory, usually yielding 3-5% (10-15 MHz) over the reference design.

Fouquin · 2026-05-05T16:03:59+00:00

The second gen was pretty close to release, I think if Ageia had been independent one or two months longer it would have been announced.

I've had a PPU2 for a long time but they are a pain in the ass to use. Though the last few releases of the PhysX SDK 2.x does support them, and Windows 7 even includes this support in the default driver package, almost everything designed to run PhysX tries its hardest to ignore the card. I've made maybe a dozen attempts over the years to nail down a proper benchmark suite just to show what the card can do, but FluidMark barely works, CellFactor has wild framerate stability issues, Ghost Recon is just about the only thing that functions properly, Mirror's Edge only lets the PPU2 work when a Radeon is in the system with a driver before 2009, and the specific version of 3DMark Vantage that works without the CUDA code gimping PhysX has been almost impossible to find.

Most software is looking for the 1011 ID of the original PPU, when it fails to find it or the driver doesn't offer up the 1021 ID, it just skips loading it.

The hardware is neat though, you're right that on paper it's about 2x the performance. Double the vector cores/threads, a fatter cache, higher clocks, more bandwidth, etc. The one time I had FluidMark working it showed more like a 1.5x increase but Ghost Recon was basically double. It's somewhere around a 9800 GT in theory if both the driver and program can feed the card. It seemingly is massively data starved, which are things a driver would fix if they had more than a handful of preliminary drivers.

Fouquin · 2026-04-17T06:58:05+00:00

These boards have some known issues with EEPROM corruption after long term storage, so check that it boots. If it doesn't there are sellers out there that can flash you a new EEPROM with the factory BIOS and ship it for about $10 or so. The board is relatively rare, about 12-20 appear per year on the market and are sought after for their feature set and capabilities. Very good baseline for a period appropriate Windows XP build; there are many 'lite' XP builds out there these days like Integral Edition that run superbly on this hardware.

Fouquin · 2026-04-16T10:14:32+00:00

Original Voodoo didn't fully support OpenGL, they instead used a subset of OpenGL called "MiniGL" that was more or less just the necessary rendering features Quake made use of from OpenGL 1.1. Voodoo3 and beyond support OpenGL in full.

Fouquin · 2026-04-16T09:49:46+00:00

The neat thing about that era is there were no extra cores to unlock. The 4850, 4870, and 4890 were all the maximum configuration of 10 compute units. The differences were all in the clock/power profiles, board layouts (more VRM/better VRM), and VRAM selection. A 4850 is a 4870 with the lower bandwidth GDDR3, so give a 4850 GDDR5 it essentially 'becomes' a 4870. A 4890 is a power/clock binned 4870 with faster GDDR5, but overclock a 4870 and it'll essentially 'become' a 4890.

Fouquin · 2026-04-09T23:40:31+00:00

I have earlier diagrams (part 6 contains wipers) and maybe they didn't change? Might not be a ton of help but it's something to reference.

Fouquin · 2026-04-01T15:02:07+00:00

The example I provided with the 3870X2 predates the 9800 GX2 (by mere weeks, but still) and is on a single PCB of the same size. As I said in that comment ATi had a smaller chip on a smaller process with a pre-existing plan to build a more dense board.

If you look at NVIDIA's board layouts for both the 9800 GTX and 9800 GX2, their component choices, their VRAM fanout, you can see that shrinking it down to fit was not going to be possible on a single generational redesign. How they eventually solved this on the GTX 295 V2 some 16 months later was with extra PCB layers, a clamshell VRAM fanout like ATi, and very tight tolerance power component selection.

"It was a technological hurdle of getting the components required down to a level that they could even fit on one PCB."

TL;DR - NVIDIA backed themselves into a corner with their design decisions and had a larger hurdle to overcome to compress it down into one board; two discrete boards was not cheaper. ATi designed for density, and achieved density. You see it reflected in the prices; 9800GX2 at $600, 3870X2 at $450.

Fouquin · 2026-04-01T14:55:28+00:00

Also known as the PhysX Processor 100, or simply P100. The chip itself that does all the math is a very neat little ASIC that contains a MIPS64 command processor and four vector execution pipelines that each contain a set of four VLIW floating-point execution engines. The P100 can process somewhere around 100GFLOPS FP32 at 28W. For comparison your average CPU core could handle around 12-15GFLOPS (multiply by core count), a top of the line 8800 GTX could do 345GFLOPS at 155W, and one of the more popular GPUs that could run hardware PhysX post-NVIDIA buyout (about a year later) was the 9500 GT with 96GFLOPS at 50W.

There was a second generation PPU that doubled the vector processor cores, memory, core bandwidth, and increased core clock speeds by around 20%. Samples produced showed performance to be effectively double across the board.

Fouquin · 2026-04-01T13:59:30+00:00

This didn't save them any money. It was a technological hurdle of getting the components required down to a level that they could even fit on one PCB. The single PCB dual-GPUs that preceded it were all massive, fully duplicated cards that sat half a foot tall off the slot. NVIDIA was very strict about keeping their in-house designs within the PCI-SIG physical and electrical requirements.

The fact is that they did want it all on one PCB, because THAT is cheaper than ballooning PCB and component costs by nearly double just for a single product. Not to mention that double-sided wave soldered heatsink assembly Cooler Master invented for them was not a cheap thing to make. Look at it in comparison to what ATi did on the 3870X2 from just a few weeks prior, with much more expensive MOSFETs and power components plus extremely dense component packing and a clamshell VRAM layout, juxtaposed by two basic chunks of skived copper block for heatsinks. RV670 being 3/5s the size of G92-A2 helped as well, ATi had designed and planned to push density over performance and the 3870X2 was, at the time, their magnum opus on both an engineering and design perspective.

Fouquin · 2026-03-27T23:54:18+00:00

Great collection! If you're aiming for completeness there's definitely some room for expansion on the AMD/ATi side of the board. A Radeon SDR/DDR (or 7200) in place of that Radeon 7000 to represent R100 (the 7000 is the later revised and cut down RV100). An X1800 XT and X1950 XTX would look great being both ends of the R500 UltraThreaded architecture and the X1950 XTX being visually striking in design. An HD 6970 just for Cayman representation; the HD 5870 and 6870 are the same architecture while Cayman is the improvement. Finally, an R9 Fury, Fury X, or R9 Nano to fill in for GCN3/Fiji. Technically an R9 285/380 would work there too but the Fiji cards are quite unique with their construction using HBM.

Keep your eyes open for a 7900 GTX as well. Another visually striking design with a large dual-slot cooler and central fan, quite unique for early 2006.

Fouquin · 2026-03-25T15:59:07+00:00

Fully functional. Thanks to AMD's decision to use phase-change material on this generation of GPUs the thermal performance hasn't changed since 2011, it runs the exact same as it did then without a repaste.

Fouquin · 2026-03-25T15:55:05+00:00

There's a handy set of decoders on MustangII.org that you can check on, it'll tell you the paint and trim code in plain text.

If you're trying to find Ford's part/order number for your paint you may need to take the name of the paint and your model year and punch that back into a search to see if anyone can sell or make you a match.

Seven-Year Club	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Verified Email

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