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Help with upgrading a Compaq Deskpro

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First post, by Anonymoose

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Heyo,
Per the title, I’m a bit confused on how to trick out my Compaq Deskpro 4/66i.

I’ve found a website describing the board, says it takes 32mb (4 banks of 8mb?) and a VRAM expansion. When I google vram expansions, all I get are modern day gpu upgrades and whatnot. What should I be looking for? This vram upgrade is a bit foreign to me.

There’s also a 486 cache slot. What is that? Would it benefit adding one to the computer? I’m unsure.

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Reply 1 of 6, by dominusprog

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According to the manual the board has 4MiB of onbaord RAM, so you have to install two 8MiB and two 4MiB for totall of 28MiB of RAM. For the VRAM, it seems that the board has its own proprietary connector for expansion.

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/compaq … v-3-p-n-00#docs

Duke_2600.png
A-Trend ATC-1020 V1.1 ❇ Cyrix 6x86 150+ @ 120MHz ❇ 32MiB EDO RAM (8MiBx4) ❇ A-Trend S3 Trio64V2 2MiB
Aztech Pro16 II-3D PnP ❇ 8.4GiB Quantum Fireball ❇ Win95 OSR2 Plus!

Reply 2 of 6, by Horun

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The video upgrade and cache module are very proprietary, the video upgrade has 1Mb vram on a flat card. Current Vram shows 4 - 256k x 8 for 1Mb.
Cache consisting of an Intel 82485 cache controller plus 64k of L2 cache also on a flat card like this:.
https://www.amibay.com/threads/compaq-23052-a … o-4-66i.106879/

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 3 of 6, by rasz_pl

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cache is unobtanium
Vram upgrade is pointless, what even is the VGA chip on this board? looks like something Compaq cooked themselves and got manufactured by LSI? Is it VLB? is it half decent?
4/66 means the only CPU upgrade possible is with Overdrive or one of those Socket 1/2/3 Voltage Interposer Tweaker (Alpha)

Open Source AT&T Globalyst/NCR/FIC 486-GAC-2 proprietary Cache Module reproduction

Reply 4 of 6, by Horun

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Hmm going thru wayback machine think that could be a remarked Qvision, my guess a Qvision 1024 per the doc at TRW.
The 4/33i and 4/66i share all the same files and this be the video driver:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040731174129/htt … ocate/3_51.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20040701081037/htt … nload/1051.html
Wasn't the Qvision used on Compaqs EISA video cards ???

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 5 of 6, by PC Hoarder Patrol

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Yes QVision (the Motorola chip rather than LSI)...@Robert B showed the VRAM upgrade module a year or two back

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Reply 6 of 6, by Anonymoose

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Ah, so the vram is difficult to get, that’s fine. And It is a Qvision 1024, you’re correct.

As for the memory, the board has 4mb of onboard ram? The bios says there’s 4mb of ram, but there’s a card in bank A of the memory module slot. Is that correct?

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