[rescue] Identifying Alphastation 250 graphics card

Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. rescue at hawkmountain.net
Fri May 2 13:24:29 CDT 2003


I have a PCI video card (or should I say "cards" as it is two cards
connected together) for an Alphastation 250.

The cards seem to have KA541 and KA542 at the beginning of their 
(part?) numbers.

There are lots of chips on these two cards.

Can anyone tell me what this card set is ?

I'm assuming since it is genuine DEC that OpenVMS and Digital UNIX
supports it, anyidea if Open/NetBSD or Linux support it  (I won't
even ask about NT :-) ) ?

Any idea what kind of video performance this beast has compared to
say a 4MB S3 PCI video card or a 4MB Matrox PCI video card (G400 ?) ?

Got lucky with another alpha I'm working on... had a PCI SCSI card out
of a compaq with a Symbios chip on it (Ultra Wide) that doesn't have a
BIOS (so in a PC I would not be able to boot from it).... turns out the
SRM firmware in my Aspen Alpine 275XS supports it ! yay !  This will
allow me to have UW SCSI and I'll drop in a Tulip card for 100MBit...\
a lot better than 10baseT and 10Mbit SCSI ! :-) (I'll use the fast
narrow scsi for the cd-rom drive).

Brings up another question, I'm looking for rails for my Aspen Systems
Alpine.... it appears to use IBM AT rails but with self contained spring
clips at the front edges....  for now I have a set of AT rails that I'll
put the CDROM in with... but no way (without custom engineering) to
keep it held in place....  The case is Marked A-TCH CO inside... my guess
is they made cases for PCs as well.... anyone got any ?

-- Curt



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