ATi Rage 6
Celeron 433
I found this card a while ago and thought it would be a good addition to my collection. And sure it is!
The official name of *this* card is ATi Rage 6 which doesn't sound to speedy and spectacular. Back then the ATi Rage 128 (Pro / Fury MAXX) was not the best graphics solution out there and why would the Rage 6 be better? Well, the Rage 6 was actually not a 'Rage'-family but a new iteration of ATi graphic cards. The Rage 6 turned out to be the ATi Radeon R100!
Let's dive into history first instead of talking about the new features compared to the Rage 128.
13 March 2000
Someone saw a working ATi Rage 6 board. Not much details were given at the time but the words 'performance, impressive and running at 50~75% of the planned speed' were set free. They said the board was still fresh and wasn't older then one week! This could be right because the PCB was made in the 9th week of 2000 which is somewhere between end Februari, begin March.
31 March 2000
According to a sticker on the back of the PCB my card is from (or released for testers) 31 march 2000. It's also a revision 6 board and it clearly states 'SAMPLE ONLY- NOT FOR QUALIFICATION'. Also note the CE and FC markings on the PCB are crossed and thus not valid. In this timeframe the card was still known as Rage 6. The PCB date is 11th of 2000 which is somewhere around 11 to 18 March. RAM dates back to 9th week and some parts, like the ATi Rage Theater chip are from 1999.
5 April 2000
ATi claims some domain names. This includes names like radeon128.com, radeoniimaxx.com, radeonpro.com, radeon256.com, radeonsma.com, radeonii.com and radeon256maxx.com.
In this timeframe ATi already decided to name their new board 'Radeon'. By looking at the chosen names ATi also kept options open for Radeon II and Radeon MAXX (dual-GPU) boards. Also note 'Radeon 256' which would be the name of this Rage 6 board. Later on ATi changed the name to 'Radeon' so it would not be the same as GeForce 256 as the Radeon was not meant to compete the GeForce 256 but to surpass it.
Summer 2000
The Radeon with SDR-SDRAM memory was added to compete with the GeForce2 MX. The SDR version is slower and left the market more quickly.
2000; after release of Radeon 8500
The original Radeon name was renamed to Radeon 7200. In the beginning the 7200 was used for the 64MB SDR card which lived short, the 32MB DDR versions remained unchanged. After the cards were discontinued the Radeon 7200 was the name for all R100 boards regardless of their memory configuration.
The old Radeon 32 DDR and Radeon 64 DDR were produced until summer 2001. After then the Radeon 7500 (RV200; 150nm chip with few tweaks) was used.
This card has a sticker on the back with the following text:
With pencil someone written the following on it, too:SAMPLE ONLY-
NOT FOR QUALIFICATION
P/N 102-70702-00 Rev. 06
ISR# 855 - 030
Date: 03/31/00
Made in Canada
ASIC TYPE: RAGE 6
ASIC P/N: 215R6WASA11
Not sure what it means, though. Perhaps something like a BIOS version?
061464.8
0012AA
B1058
Look at the second picture and see there is a rework on the EM97BF chip
. Final note: this card did not work in my AGP4x i815 system. It didn't boot up at all. However it runs great in an i440BX-based motherboard with only AGP2x. I checked the card using this method and it turned out to be an AGP4x Universal part. In the i440BX I noticed the fan stopped working sometimes.
