ATI 3D Charger
The 3D Charger arrived in early 1997, a little after the 3D Xpression Plus. Like the 3D Xpression series, it was based around a new variant of ATI's Rage II chipset, and was designed to be a low-cost option for OEMs and system integrators.
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Released | Early 1997 |
| Bus | PCI | |
| Chipset | ATi 3DRage II+ DVD | |
| Standards | VGA and SVGA | |
| Memory | 2 MB EDO | |
| Ports | 15-pin DSUB (RGB analogue) | |
| Part # | 109-40600-00 | |
| FCC ID | ||
| Price | At launch: ? | |
| See Also | ATi 3D Xpression Plus |
Unlike the original 3D Rage II chip from 1996, the 3D Rage II+ DVD chip added hardware MPEG decompression and further optimised 2D and 3D performance, on top of the Rage II's support for 16-bit hardware Z-buffer and a lot more Direct3D features including support for 4-bit and 8-bit compressed textures, bilinear and trilinear filtering, MIP mapping, alpha-blended transparency, and fog.
The GPU operated at a frequency of 60 MHz providing a theoretical performance of 60 MPixel/s pixel rate and 60 MTexel/s texture rate. Memory ran at 83 MHz with bandwidth of approximately 664 MB/s.
The onboard memory tends to be Hynix (Hyundai) HY514264B EDO DRAM chips, which are 512 KB in capacity each. All 3D Chargers came with all four memory IC locations populated, so are all 2 MB in capacity. Unlike other cards that use the same chipset, the memory was not upgradable. Memory speeds are either 50 or 60 MHz.
The 3D Charger was only made available for the PCI bus.
Board Revisions
There is only one actual board revision of the 3D Charger, and they all appear to come with BIOS chip part #113-40602-100 (actual BIOS versions on this chip may differ though).
Numerous other 3D Rage II+ DVD-based cards have a BIOS with "3D Charger" on the label. It is for this reason that lots of people and other websites mistakenly think their card is a 3D Charger simply because they see the BIOS chip label with "3D Charger" on it, when actually they have another 3D Rage II+DVD-based card like one of the 3D Xpression series.
One point however, is that the presence of this 3D Charger BIOS indicates that these BIOSes are likely interchangeable between all the various cards that use this chipset.
Competition
In 1997, the 3D boom was well and truly under way, with 3Dfx' Voodoo cards taking the top spot for gaming performance where games were written to support them, or if you wanted combined 2D/3D they had released the Voodoo Rush this year.
S3 were still a prominent player with their ViRGE DX and GX cards, and were busy developing their new Trio3D chipset for the next generation.
At the budget end we had SiS with their 6326 chipset, similar in performance to the Rage II and II+DVD.
In the Media
I'm not sure the 3D Charger card was ever sold retail, and there are no direct reviews of the card outside of full PC comparisons where some PCs made use of them.
Setting it Up
There is no hardware configuration required for the 3D Charger.
Downloads
Rage II+DVD User Guide A simple 12-page user guide showing installation and loading of drivers for Windows 3.1, NT 3.51 and 4.0, and Windows 95. |
Windows 95 Two floppy disks with the drivers for ATI Mach64/Mach64GT (Rage) cards |
Windows 95 Two floppy disks with the ATI utilities for Mach64/Mach64GT (Rage) cards. Designed for Windows 3.1x, NT 3.5x, Windows 95, and OS/2 |
Mach64 Windows NT 3.51 Driver Windows NT 3.51 drivers for Mach64 cards |
Mach64 MPEG/Video Player ATI Mach64 v2.22 MPEG/Video Player 1/1 |
Mach64 DirectDraw ATI Mach64 v2.22 DirectDraw for Win 1/1 |
Mach64 DOS/Win3.1/OS2 Disks ATI Mach64 DOS/Win 3.1x/OS2 disks |
Mach64 Windows 95 Driver ATI Mach64 Win95 1/1 |
Mach64 Windows 95 Driver ATI Mach64 Win95 disks
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Driver Installation CD An ISO image of the Driver Installation CD for all ATI Rage-series cards. Works with Windows 3.1x, NT 3.51/4.0, and Windows 9x |
Driver Installation CD An ISO image of the Driver Installation CD for all ATI Rage-series cards. Works with Windows 3.1x, NT 3.51/4.0, and Windows 9x |
VGA BIOS ROM An ATI Mach64 BIOS (ATI Part #113-40602-100), 64 KB in size. |
More Pictures
DOS Days contributor, targeted, provided images of his 3D Charger
Another ATI 3D Charger