I don't know in what world card you think you can spend that quote of 80 on, and get something that runs most titles. You can't even touch any of the main lines of Nvidia cards for that. Even the 1650 which isn't great, is over 50 percent more than that.
The funny thing is that despite originally being a scam, at this point this card is likely valuable more to rare PC hardware collectors than it was when it was new.
You can't really budget build anymore everything is too pricey and games require too much to run even on low settings, Even if you are able to budget build its not gonna be able to run most games at least that has been my experience.
Sorry but I have to say this, you did in fact find a common scam architecture (SiS based AGP cards) of the time but you somehow stumbled on one of the few non scam versions of it. Pine was actually quite reputable at one time but fell prey to the idea that offering budget options was a great idea in a time where that was a terrible and volatile market to target. They ended up rebranding their graphics division for that exact reason. Prior to that they offered a fairly comprehensive product line from motherboards to graphics adapters. Pine didn't actually scam anyone with these, yes, the marketing and packaging could be misleading, yes, some of the info on the box was wrong but that was common at this time even with brands like Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Gainward etc. The drivers were for the correct SiS graphics chip, the manual mentions SiS is the core of the card etc. They were also priced accordingly even though not really worth the money, production costs + marketing + shipping etc meant they were simply not competitive or good value. Pine may have exaggerated their 3d capabilities/performance but they never hid the fact that these were very much budget cards. SiS based AGP cards WERE used on scam cards however, particularly sold to 3rd world countries. It was common to find "Radeon" branded cards that were in fact simply SiS 310/530/630/730 based cards with a BIOS mod that lied about the name. If you tried to install legitimate ATI drivers they would fail to detect the card and the legit SiS drivers wouldn't install either. These scams relied on the low availability of internet to actually work. You needed to install the supplied drivers from the driver CD for the card to even work. I personally purchased several versions of these while living and working in Africa around this time: Radeon 9200: SiS 6326 based Radeon 9500: SiS 310 based Radeon 9600/9600xt: SiS 530 based Radeon 9700: SiS 630/730 based I bought and tested all of these out of interest while living and working in Uganda and Rwanda in around 2003/2004. They were cheap, cheap enough to buy them for a laugh as a foreigner but for the people who actually lived there they were an expensive luxury. I gave them away to my students after fixing the BIOS mods to properly identify them as what they were (so the latest drivers would work). To my students any dedicated graphics card was better than old PCI or worse cards with no 3d capabilities at all. I had almost forgotten about those scam cards, some even went the extra mile of trying to make the cards visually look like the card they pretended to be. I wish I had held on to a few now. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. [edit] After a lot of searching I found some images of them: Google search "AGPX8-RADEON-9600-256-MB-SAPPHIRE-100-iU" The green PCBs with "Graphics by Radeon" or "Powered by ATI" are fake SiS based cards. Some are even for sale from Poland right now.
Thought I should add a little more here: These "GPUs" came about largely as a result of excess stock from motherboard manufacturers. Once iGPUs moved from dedicated chips on the motherboard (like all these) to being part of the chipset a ton of these simply had no use anymore. Most were dumped on various small scale 3rd party manufacturers and once there was no longer a point in making them (faster iGPUs on motherboards rendered them redundant) they would then dumped on 3rd world markets. A hell of a lot of these ended up in Africa, India and various other 3rd world countries. Many of the scam cards came out of India and China. BIOS mods, custom PCBs/heatsinks etc all designed to trick people into buying what they thought were much in demand Radeon cards. I didn't ever see Nvidia branded versions but they may well have existed too. The scam relied on the fact that most people in their target markets lacked access to the internet and typically would be happy enough to simply be able to play games. HL2 was a pipe dream to most in these markets, they would simply be looking to play whatever games they could find cracked on pirated CDs at flea markets etc (yes, I experienced this too). It was very interesting seeing the differences between Europe and Africa in the early 2000s. People in Africa had heard about and desired the latest tech but it was far outside the budget of most people who lived there. I am fairly certain most of the people who bought these scam cards knew they were scams, just like a lot of people buying fake Rolex watches know exactly what they are buying. They just wanted to feel like they had something special I guess. Regardless of the how, thousands of these ended up in 3rd world countries with countless people smiling looking at their "Radefake 9700" churning out 30fps at 640x480 in an outdated game that they couldn't play without it. Pity it had to be in the form of a scam. I should also note, an Nvidia FX5200 cost about 2 times more (in Uganda) than one of these wonderful fake Radeon 9700s in 2004. [edit] I can find absolutely nothing about these scam cards anywhere. I will keep looking, I find it hard to believe there is nothing at all about them anywhere. Now I really wish I had held on to a few..... [edit2] Found some images of them: Google search "AGPX8-RADEON-9600-256-MB-SAPPHIRE-100-iU" The green PCBs with "Graphics by Radeon" or "Powered by ATI" are fake SiS based cards. Some are even for sale from Poland right now.
It's actually hard to tell if Pine is still around. The other divisions of the company are gone and their stock doesn't appear to be traded anymore. Looks like XFX might have spun off into their own company.
@@PXAbstraction They are deff still around, just not as successful as they were! - just google "Pine Technology Holdings Limited" you will see all relevant info :) (or click through from the side bar of searching XFX)
"You are selling a graphics card, and your main quote that you're going for, is suffering." -Budget-Builds Sounds about right for a graphics card scam like this.
wisdom is found in many places, yet for many, it has to be pointed out they were the original "stop buying bad products if you want the company to improve" :)
That whole "no online info or brand presence" reminds me of my current card, a 3080 by a no-name OEM named OCPC, which i paid a suspicious MSRP for during the scalpocalypse. It's still working a couple years later, but i made sure to video the unboxing in case the generic GPU box it came in was filled with rabbit turds or something.
Pine Technology is still around, known by its current name: XFX. Their retail boxes even still had Pine Technology copyrights on them up to the Geforce 7000 era. What most people don't seem to know is that Pine/XFX was an nvidia partner up to the GTX 400 series in 2010. They _announced_ they wanted to make ATI/AMD cards in parallel a year prior and just _announcing_ the plans to produce AMD cards threw nvidia in a hissyfit which ended up in XFX being banned as a nvidia partner, which then left them with the choice of going full AMD or closing up shop. I think you can imagine what they went with, and it's kind of amazing that they're now seen as "the EVGA of AMD cards"
Would give Sapphire that crown tbh. I'm in manufacturing and the build quality on the Nitro+ is insane, as northwest repair also says, best AMD card you can get. My only criticism is the VRM potting which impacts most modern GPUs at some point.
God, it's insane how long Nvidia has been pulling this shit. Jensen Huang has to be the most cartoonishly evil CEO out there. Just burning bridges with companies for literally no reason.
To be fair, Pine were a relatively reputable budget manufacturer who had been around for well over a decade by this point. These will have been sold by them extremely cheaply (I'm pretty sure the like of Aria and Micro Direct were selling something very similar in around 2002 for a tenner). It's really the sheds that were ripping folk off here. As is usually the case - if you wanted to buy computer hardware from the like of PC World and Maplin, make sure you bring the lube. ISTR Maplin selling floppy drives for £60 when they were £8 at CCL...
I remember buying a PC power supply at Maplin. It was a proper Corsair jobbie, but it was next to house branded "G7" power supplies that had lurid branding and were obviously going to be Chinese death cubes.
@@ironhead2008 Yeah I worked that out after I posted the message above. Oddly enough I do have an XFX graphics card and PSU in one of my machines. Much like the old Pine stuff I had in the '90s, they don't set the world on fire but they work, and seem reliable enough.
My uncle used to run a IT shop and he was selling Win2k PCs in 2012. His customers were the type that didn't know better and where fine as long as it could run word and send email. It was all hot garbage though and he had a pallet of thin clients with more power than most of the desktops he was selling. By that I mean 1.2Ghz core 2 duo and 1GB RAM.
Man, I miss the early 2000s. So many insane tech rabbit holes you could go down on, so many weird, often shady companies, total chaos. It almost saddens me that the tech market isn't as insane as it used to be back then.
I don't know. There's plenty of fake and garbage hardware available now on AliExpress temu or even Amazon if you're not careful. And some of that crap even gets into mainstream stores
Interesting. I used to build and sell computers with cards like this. The box and information was always generic nonsense, but I never thought of it as a scam. This would be the budget card just for basic desktop use, not for gaming. We'd just give the actual specs. Sold separately, probably for $30-$40. From supplier probably $25. We'd use them also for repairing computers where the existing GPU died and the customer didn't do gaming, and just wanted the cheapest card that worked.
Same here. I wouldn't call the Pine cards a scam. These were entry level for granny to check email on her aging PII or Celeron. Same thing I think we sold them for like $35.
@@chad2787 If we want the first outright scam, that would probably be Intel with their i740 that did basically nothing of value that a 2d card wouldn't do. The UI for Windows at the time didn't use 3d effects like you see now, and it was woefully inadequate for basically any gaming due to the use of AGP for the RAM it actually needed to properly function. With more actual RAM it might not have been so completely useless.
Ah yes. But I remember seeing SIS or VIA and then purchasing. And then building something new 6 months later. With something with SIS or VIA on the box 😂
@@MT-cd7cs In all honesty, you could say the same thing about just about anything other than 3D FX, Power VR, nVidia and some of the Matrox chipsets for workstations. Most of the rest of the ones of that era were absolute garbage.
@@SmallSpoonBrigadeI also had most if not all of the above in some device or other 😂 I was definitely the target market: early Teens, parents who wanted to keep me quiet from talking about tech all the time, a small budget and an interest in building systems.. then building yet another system cause something new was available 😂
The Matrox cards were poor at 3D acceleration and gaming, but really did multiple monitors/multiple cards well. I used to use 2 matched cards and 2 monitors. The good gaming cards of the era could do multiple cards for 1 screen, but didn't do multiple monitors. Then there were the high end NVidia Quadros and ATI workstation cards that were designed for 3D rendering, but not great at gaming. Those workstation cards in that era used different chipsets, and the drivers were nit interchangeable.
It is not a scam. the SiS 315 was the only serious competitor to ATI, Riva, and 3dfx back in the day. It is not the only mention of SiS, it was in the manual you showed too. explicitly called out as a sis chip in both the diagram and in the specs. Nowadays the only serious competitor to AMD and nvidia is Intel. It is much older than the Radeon 9250 and 5200 Fx. This card competed against Riva 128 back before ncidia was nvidia and back before the Riva TNT even existed. You are comparing cards that were made 5+ years apart at very different price points.yes, some stores kept old stock at msrp prices for years and years, you see a lot of that today as well. That is more of a fault of the retailers never bothering to lower the price to move old obsolete inventory,. today If you bought a GTX 470 that has been sitting on the snelf for over a decade for a few hundred bucks off a website like Froogle, it is not a scam, it is buyer being not smart.
But it's not being sold as a SiS card, and it's not even a 315. No where close. It's an old card, from one brand, being resold as a newer, better card, and from another brand entirely, to trick people into buying it.... That is by definition a fucking scam. So by saying it's a scam, he's being honest. Don't know what you problem is, but you're wrong.
@@Special1122 probably lack of investor, Example you won't be able to search your name on google because you are not big influencer or have high reputation. You may find your name but probably will take days, months or years due to many amount of same or similar close name. Or atleast if it's prosuct too much competitor that your product getting pushed back on search bar
Oh god, I am now using an XFX Radeon 6700 XT... I searched for the company and found news that their Chinese office has been raided by police because they faked their cards to be lower value so they can pay less tax
@@tonecapone8021 I have a XFX 6950 XT and I had to disable the AMD Sound hardware, so my system would stop crashing. It works great now. I guess, it's a common AMD problem. I couldn't figure it out for the longest time.
This was from Pine Group (name's on the box) and the SiS chipset was very popular among low end video cards in the late 1990s. They had driver issues in anything other than Windows 9x/ME, but weren't usually sold as NT/2K/XP compatible. Pine Group might be more familiar to you as XFX.
Those weren't exactly a scam card but were originally targeted towards people who just needed a basic GPU. They were not really recommended for gaming but were an option created for the tons of people who did not have onboard graphics but needed a basic GPU. I had one in my first home server in late 2002 and I got it during a holiday sale for ~$35-40 in college around 2002-2003 and it served it's purpose until I ended up replacing it with a 7600GT along with a used motherboard, cpu, and memory in late 2006 to be a media center pc. At the time it ran 2D stuff quite well and allowed a few 3D applications to run decently but I mainly bought it for basic video output at the time. The reason you can't find much info on them is mainly because the internet archive started in 1996 but didn't actually crawl everything so many sites during that time were not picked up till years later when they were indexed by companies like google. Most of the issues you were having with the card not being picked up on boot may be explained by the card being new old stock sitting in a warehouse for over 20 years. Those caps have to be pretty dry by this point.
But what in 2000s needed dedicated GPU except gaming? Oh, 3D Studio and similar software, but it's struggles that time with ATi/nVidia consumer drivers sometime
@@tvarqwz A lot of motherboards (most) did not come with onboard graphics back then so this was a cheap alternative to get a display output if you didn't care about performance.
12:36 I reckon the "wiggle problem" was slightly tarnished contacts either on the card itself or the AGP slot. Nothing that cleaning with a generous helping of isopropyl alcohol wouldn't fix. This sort of stuff happens when your hardware is 20 years old.
These cards were rampant in the early 2000's, often found at computer shows. Pine was a budget offering that filled the $30-$60 price bracket. They also sold S3 Virge and Intel i740 under this label.
These date back to the beige PC box era where most PC's sold were not, at least in the US, from a name brand. I bought several Pine or Jaton branded cards, there were other brands like this. If you wanted to buy a Nvidia TNT, S3 Virge, or SIS, for cheap you, you would buy these brands. As noted they weren't well marked, but for beige box sellers or enthusiasts who knew what they were doing they were good bargains. The modern day equivalent are the Aliexpress non name brand names, except these cards or mb may use reused parts, where Pine or Jaton were always using new parts.
Don't spit too much on the SiS 315, It came in 2001 with hardware T&L and reasonably good performance with a complete feature set, at a low price. Most people who bought it for the good value it offered in the budget sector remember it fondly. It was a little card that could punch above its weight. What PINE did with the cut-down IGP version was very scummy, I must admit. The 315E has HALF of the performance of the regular 315.
As someone who worked at Maplin in the mid-2000s this unlocked some weird memories. It was always the GPU on the shelf that the staff who knew their stuff refused to sell, but Maplin was always full of wildly different qualities of products. Things like the 754 ECS motherboards where the RAM we sold was incompatible with them and a lot of the Sitecom networking products were so out of date they were incompatible with the current networking standards of the time. Gotta love the way that some companies just sourced random tech junk from China back then. Oddly enough the store I was in was not incentivized to sell that kind of stuff. The area was, in a word, rough. If something was bad, it got returned. From time to time the person returning it would be so pissed off at the quality of the goods that they would either threaten to punch the manager or, on one occasion, pull a knife on us. Sometimes managers from outside would push us to sell the junk, but we just ignored them.
It's just a Pine card with a SiS GPU. Phantom3D was just a product name like Geforce for Nvidia. They where everywhere in the low budget market back then. I am impressed it even runs HL2. If you want a large old GPU scam, check the S3 Virge. We had a ELSA Victory 3D card with a Virge DX. On the box it was written that it featured "3D FX". No not 3Dfx, but with a space between the letters. It was worse than a 1MB SVGA card.
I've always found the "register for warranty" very puzzling until I realized it's not normal to get a 5 year warranty by simply having a receipt from a store. No registration needed, and no hoops to jump through. If they don't want to honor it, they can't sell it here.
So first it was Pine, starting with SiS and then started with nvidia as XFX... and then shifted to Radeon full time. I won't fault anyone's scammer-radar going off at the prospects of such a company shifting repeatedly, for the name of shifting such sketchy stock.
@@gamingclan4651 I bought an XFX Radeon HD 6850 once. Playing Crisis 2, it blew up. Overheated and completely fried itself within less than a day or two of buying it. I RMAed it, got another one. That did exactly the same thing. I RMAed it and got an XFX Radeon HD 6770. That worked fine. They both used the same heatsink/fan, even though the 6850 had a significantly higher TDP. I've never bought an XFX since.
@@henryokeeffe5835 I remember having an XFX Nvidia 260 GTX that would fail on a bunch of certain places in some games, eventually the only fix I found was to re-flash the BIOS with lower voltages, the stupid thing was overvolted like crazy. Then everything worked. Also had a XFX 9800 that died on me, though that may have been bumpgate. Still swear off the brand now.
@@henryokeeffe5835 Come to think of it, the only card that ever died on me (an HD 4850) was an XFX. Lasted for three years and change, I think? Died about a third of the way into _BioShock Infinite._
@@henryokeeffe5835 Had the opposite experience with them. Got an xfx 580, still have it, had to put regular cheap thermal grease on it once and it still worked fine under heavy load. Amazingly good card all around, with hot swap fans.
I would try copying the disc under Linux, possibly with dd. That way you could hopefully bypass any weirdness. If the demo software crashes, you might try running it under DOSBox just to see what happens. Changes to the Windows API can cause software built against a different version to not work correctly.
this is an absolute scam of a graphics card, HOWEVER I have heard about 3DPhantom all these years back.. I might even have had that card, maybe not the exact model in the video, but one of the models on the side note, I'm glad you're making more videos nowadays, it's always a pleasure to watch
Isn't a Phantom an invisible person that act unseen in the background? Well then, 3dphantom means that the 3D -power isn`t visible which is quite honest😄
Holy shit, I remember seeing that card in a computer store ages ago! They weren't a big store, it was just a lot of stuff crammed onto its shelves, and the store was in an indoor strip mall-like plaza. They had all kinds of oddball looking graphics cards. Maybe one or two that you'd recognize the brand name, but otherwise, it was just cardboard boxes with weird imagery and odd names that seemed to just randomly mix and match letters and numbers. Thankfully, I was still new to computers at the time and didn't do much upgrading to get scammed over (I only upgraded the graphics card once from an Nvidia TNT2 PCI card, to an NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 4000 PCI card, sticking with a name I was at least a little familiar with). But the place also used to sell old computer games (including some Atari 400/800 carts), and I remember the 3D Phantom being one of the oddball cards I used to see when I went into that store. Daaaaaaaamn.
Blast from the past that one. As a young'n, my dad passed on a lot of hardware from work. At one time I had 4 SiS AGP cards and couldn't get over how they could be worse than integrated graphics. Sold em all to CEX, pretty sure they didn't get the better part of that deal:) Then got a Matrox G450. Happy days.
15:40 - I never thought I'd see that graphical glitch again. What you have to understand about these graphics cards is that some of us did use them them and had a great time despite the bugs. Circa 2005, my gaming rig died, and as a kid I had to save money to order new parts. I borrowed a Duron PC with SiS graphics from friend, and that's how I had to play Half-Life 2 and other Source games on it. It crashed sometimes, so I became quick save happy. I actually think that was the first PC I ever played Half-Life on. Halo: CE ran absolutely flawlessly too, and I played the hell out of it despite staying at my grandma's house with dial-up. In a lot of ways, those were the days. 22:44 - Quake III Arena was another I often played on it, and I remember the exact same frame drops when looking at elements like that mirror on the intro map. I was just happy that games were able to run.
I could see using this as a bare bones video card for something like a home file/media server. Applications where you need the bare metal "see words and pictures" video and that's about it. Always enjoy your videos!
No way! When you first said the name I thought it sounded familiar, then when I saw the box I thought "hmm, I think they used to sell those in Maplins". Then it turns out they did! I used to spend way to much time in that shop as a kid haha.
I have a feeling I have a boxed one on a shelf somewhere, from my time in UK. That mention of the wiggle reminds me of working in offices that were a converted barn. There were a couple of PCs which would fail to start up first thing on a winter Monday morning. You had to power them up, leave them for ten minutes, then power cycle them. They must have gotten cold over the weekend when the heating was in frost mode, and some random joint must have been loose. They were fine once they were warm. Ah the memories …
good chance the GPUs the company used were surplus from obsolescence, so got them probably pennies on the pound, got similar surplus ram and found or had access to a PCB maker. so they probably made these for ten or twenty quid a pop, and still made a killing.
I bought one of these types of scam cards back in 2006. The box art suggested Nvidia, and there was a play on the lettering. It did work okay, but it wasn't the performance card it claimed to be. I realized there was a problem when I tried to play COD (either United Offensive or World at War).
I remember my first experience of buying a graphics card, i must have been 13/14 at the time, earning £11.50 a week doing paper round before school. I had a PC with a pentium 4 socket 478, remember it having 128mb ram when i got it and doubled it to 256mb same day at a local PC shop for £10, those guys were great, basic shop with loads of spared lying around. a while later they had close down, so there was one other local option, i went in there asking for a graphics card upgrade, told them the game i wanted to play, they suggested a card that matched the VRAM requirement (maybe a HD4350?), cost me £40-£50ish, cant remember exactly, got home excited, installed the card, drivers, and bareley played the game... dissapointed teenager spending a months income on something that didnt meet the requirements i discussed with the coputer shop. Young and inexperienced i didnt know any better.
Gods, so many memories of when I used to do in-home computer support and budget systems based on SiS and VIA chiosets were everywhere. Absolute garbage peddlers they were. Several Mom and Pop computer stores here in Ottawa used to sell their low end models with cards like these if either the motherboards didn't have on board or if the customer didn't want some of their system memory shared with the graphics.
I grimaced at the mention of mid-2000s Maplins. That's when they had firmly transitioned into soulless box-shifters and you could tell that the staff just knew they were about to go out of business.
Actually I do have a 315 powered card in my collection and I use it quite frequently for... DOS. Yeah, DOS. Compatibility is reasonably well and it easily outperforms a Matrox Mystique, the once fastet PCI-card in dos for gaming in 480p. You're totally right about it's CRAPPY 3D performance, BUT mine plays back DVDs flawlessly on a PentiumIII 1000 running XP or 98SE!
The SIS 315 chipset was supposed to be a competitive value chipset to compete with the Geforce2 MX but unfortunately most of us encountered the 315e variant which was heavily cut back. It ended up being relegated as a desktop 2d card for the most part. The IGP versions came afterwards but to be honest that’s a whole other rabbit hole of confusion :-)
Imho, the S3 ViRGE chip was the _original_ 3D scam. Many years before this SiS crap, the ViRGE promised 3D-accelerated performance but really simply did not deliver any usable amount thereof. Its marketing was almost entirely bullsh&t.
that green lump of a heatsink made me go "oh boy a MX2 400" immediatly, i have SO MANY of these cards from trash picked computers its insane those things are in EVERYTHING
We sold these kind of cards as the cheapest 2d option or as a Voodoo I or II companion. Not as gaming cards. Even the Matrox cards were quickly obsolete as gaming cards. The hype on the box was standard. Mostly correct but useless. The real scam was done by the person who sold this card as a gaming card. It was obsolete but cheap. We used i740 in the same way. Sis was a very budget brand. Keep in mind the price difference in retail and pre-build option. C&C Generals ran bad on a lot of cards when it was released. People mis-remember stuff. trying to game on a budget or home-office PC was often disappointing. Didn't stop me from trying. 😜
Oh I know these cards. They or ones very much like them used to show up at PC parts fairs and the somewhat shady cash only PC parts stores, which is all we had to work with. I once worked for a company that decided every desk needed a PC as cheaply as possible and it was my job to build the PCs and so forth. I used very similar SIS cards exclusively because that's the budget I had. All it had to run was Windows98 and a couple accounting apps. It did that well enough. We never gamed on them, except fudging billing invoices. Really don't think it's a disaster in 2024 simply because ancient AGP slots are not something anyone will have in a serious PC these days. I AM shocked Pine has something to do with XFX. Fascinating. Great video!
Its not a scam. Its the super budget card like modern day GT710 or 910. The other thing is that some sellers tried to scam buyers. In 2004 my PC had 4mb S3 card (poor times). This one would be something beyond my dreams.
Hey, When you test the 8mb SiS card, test it for longer than few days. My 16mb one at first worked fine, you could watch videos and it wasn't too terrible, until one day it started to drop frames and I had to do some vlc workarounds that noticeably reduced image quality. XP ran fine. wc3 might work on 8mb, mortal kombat 4 I think requires 4mb vram.
The SiS 6326. I met that card back in those period of time. But I am pretty sure the one with which I used, I played Unreal Tournament 1999. The card was only a 4MB version. It was a dedicated GPU card, I installed the drivers for it. Worked cheap, and UT1999 was playable on ...what? I have a printscreen, checking... it's 640*480! But it was 3D rendered gameplay. Well, my timestamps sais it's summer of 2001 when I made that printscreen. And I know, that the 6326 was already a used card. We bought somewhere near München, Germany. Good memories!
I had one of those, second hand, when I was still a kid. I was VERY surprised that such thing existed but I never imagined any kind of scam involved. I probably paid little to nothing for it. It allowed me to run and play the games I wanted, which was a massive win for me at that time. But there was some specific game (I don't remember it now) that would freeze and BSOD sometimes. I remember I had it for very little time and replaced it with an NVidia one. You made me realize that I had many of those crappy/scammy/hated cards and for me were massive improvements every time.
It has still a better performance than my old Dell Notebook which I got from my dad for my studies several years ago. This thing was not even able to run Half-Life 1 (!) smoothly and had an AMD Sempron.
I had a lenovo thinkpad with an amd a6 5350m and holy crap it suffered running anything. It would stutter opening two tabs on internet explorer in windows 8 or 7. Any version of Linux besides puppy Linux ran super slowly for some reason. The temperature always went up to 125C and idled at 101C according to temperature monitoring software
Holy crap I'm pretty sure I had one of those! Or something like it. Even getting the thing was an "adventure". It was our first PC and a big purchase. My mum worked with a bloke who was a big PC gamer and had vaguely overheard snippets of conversation involving "graphics cards" and "blew it up". This convinced her that a "graphics card" was a bomb that had about a 10% chance of making your computer explode when you installed it. Anyway we got it, plugged it in, and got no output at all. We called tech support for the PC, who diagnosed it as "probably dead". We then remembered the box for it was covered in loads of tape and it was on sale... IE somebody had already returned it once and PC World had just sold it again! We evolved a scam to buy another one elsewhere for full price, put the dud in the box, and return that. The one we bought, while nominally the same, looked totally different when we got it out. We tried it on anyway, and made a whole £2.95 "profit" on the deal. And could play GTA3 on max detail!
Other stuff I vaguely remembered: -The broken one was about £25 and the "good" one just under £30, so PC World knew they were polishing a turd by that point. -The PC I had had 2mb of onboard graphics so even this seemed like a huge improvement. -The next PC I got had 32mb of onboard graphics, so I assumed it would be the same. It wasn't! I think it was a Time PC (Remember those ads with Leonard Nimoy?), if you want to track one down and experience the horror. GTA3 choked it, and fire was transparent where it overlapped cars. It even had trouble with OpenGL Doom source ports! For that PC I bought a budget 128mb graphics card in a very plain cardboard box with a white label on. I got pretty lucky, Vice City looked amazing and Manhunt... worked.
The SIS 6326 was a way older card they had. A prebuild I was given as my first brand new pc (a Pentium III 500mhz) came with one of those. Changed it for a Voodoo 4 4500AGP.
I had a piece of crap like that. It wasn't exactly the same card, it was taller, it looked a bit like a Gf4ti. Back then, people were idiots and bought video cards based on the amount of megabytes they had, and not based on their specifications (kind of like today, people being idiots and not realizing that processors with astronomical TDP are expensive, inefficient, and problematic because they are squeezing more than is possible for the current silicon technology). Back then I had an incredible Celeron 300A, which I overclocked heavily (I won the silicon lottery), and I was looking for something better than the onboard video card (some 8MB piece of crap) to run GTA Vice City. I bought this piece of crap, I think it was my first AGP card. It was a SiS chip, it was like a SiS card from the late 90s, but with 32MB of VRAM. At that time I knew I should have bought an Nvidia or ATI, but I didn't have the money, and I knew that this card would probably be some crap, but I expected it to at least be enough to play Vice City. Well, I can't say it wasn't, but running the game on low at a horrible frame rate like 18fps is not what I expected.
I remember these. I had one and didn't recall it being this bad. Then I realized I had it in 2000 or 2001. These were on sale in California at stores like PC Club that early, and at that point the price was actually a reasonable ask. So the scam likely is that you got pushed the gear we stopped buying years before (and at about the same price), but that doesn't mean it was always a scam.
So it turns out I own one of these unknowingly... A few years ago, I was looking for AGP graphics cards on eBay and came across a seller which was selling bundles of older AGP graphics for cheap. A bundle would have 4 or 5 loose graphics cards and a single bundle would cost around £20, so I bought two. One of the bundles I bought had this card and the TNT2 M64 AGP shown in the video, but I never tried them out. Watching this video now, I'm glad I didn't put the time into the Pine cards.
At about 10:49 I spotted a folder "Xabre" on the driver disk. Had a SiS Xabre 200 at some point. The last semi OK from SiS. Would be great if you can get your hands on a Xabre and do a review!
Haha I remember these. From 1998-2005 I worked for a local computer company and built literally thousands of white box PCs with cards like this, including the Phantom. We had a vendor on the west coast and for base model PC's we would order video cards where the description was basically: AGP Video Graphics card, xMB. They would come in boxes just like this one and would be named stuff like Phantom, Viper, Pegasus, etc and the boxes looked they were printed on someone's cheap inkjet printer. They all looked 100% exactly like the one in the video.
Oh man the AGP slot 😂. I remember having a Matrox Millenia or something like that in a few of my desktops as a middle schooler. I remember when AGP 8x cards became affordable to me and eventually after eons of saving grabbing a 9800XT and thinking “Well, this is clearly the pinnacle of video card performance.” 😂 now the little 6GB RTX 4050 in my laptop has hardware specs that even the highest end AGP SLi setup couldn’t even remotely dream of. Incredible how the hardware world has rapidly evolved
Pretty sure that green effect when playing the dvd's is the macrovision copy protection. Alot of old playback software didn't like it, and i wouldnt be surprised if the card had no built in codecs to properly handle it.
I used to see these around a lot in places like independent local computer stores, car boots and so on. Useless for 3D gaming, but if all you needed was a display adaptor then they'd do that for you. But they should have been a £10-£20 as they were only really useful for adding a display output for a second monitor or if your mobo didn't have onboard graphics and you just wanted a CLI.
To quote from Wikipedia how they differed from the real Sempron 2800+ (Socket A / 462) this was how to visually distinguish them: "Fake Sempron 2800+ (Thoroughbred) - Wrong font on label. Note L6 & L8 Bridges cut and some filled - This is a remarked Geode NX." So , not only was the font on the label wrong , but silicon plate had distinguished marks too. From my understanding , they were Geode NX embedded CPUs which used the same socket , but were underpowered. Most likely CPU that was used was Geode NX 1500 or 2000 , and entire Geode NX series were to be used on kiosks , casino machines etc , not for desktops , as they were too weak and were fanless designs , often without heatsink whatsoever.
@@Ts6451 I suggested pairing this fake GPU with fake CPU and how bad it could be if someone got both in their desktop at the time , as I totally forgot about fake CPUs being a thing. I can bet that pairing these two would make PC from hell.
And maybe down the line , completely scam / fake pc build , like buying pre-built pc , but with as much as possible fake parts from early to mid 2000's. :)
I've been a fan of XFX for a decade. Every GPU I've bought, as an AMD/ATi fan, has been XFX since the late 2000's. I had absolutely no idea they had this shady origin story. Wow.
If you like those 3D Models go check out our channel artist here: ruclips.net/user/shortscsw-7F4sPjw?si=WmwXa3ZrM3_7poWB
i have a pc thats older and sat gathering dust for more than 20 yrs
dude it says pine technologies right on the box... probably sopmething with an SIS chipset on it.
Umm the trick with these cards is you need to pull up the real model.
I would have gone for a download from SIS.
Hi Buget builds, your discord link is broken.
I don't know in what world card you think you can spend that quote of 80 on, and get something that runs most titles. You can't even touch any of the main lines of Nvidia cards for that. Even the 1650 which isn't great, is over 50 percent more than that.
The funny thing is that despite originally being a scam, at this point this card is likely valuable more to rare PC hardware collectors than it was when it was new.
True
They're definitely flying off the shelves on ebay now... just bought one 🥳
@@Hugobros3 The only card that's coveted to me is that GTX 500 series street fighter card. I forget which GPU it is.
Yall bout to make this card a meme
@@halo2600 The rare Pokémon card of gpu world
Budget builds seems to be attracted to scams. And scams are attracted to him! Truly a match made in heaven
A love/hate relationship ❤
Budget Builds x Scams one-sided yaoi
💀🙏@@tayntedmemories
Once scams are grasped, miracles are possible.
You can't really budget build anymore everything is too pricey and games require too much to run even on low settings, Even if you are able to budget build its not gonna be able to run most games at least that has been my experience.
Sorry but I have to say this, you did in fact find a common scam architecture (SiS based AGP cards) of the time but you somehow stumbled on one of the few non scam versions of it. Pine was actually quite reputable at one time but fell prey to the idea that offering budget options was a great idea in a time where that was a terrible and volatile market to target. They ended up rebranding their graphics division for that exact reason. Prior to that they offered a fairly comprehensive product line from motherboards to graphics adapters.
Pine didn't actually scam anyone with these, yes, the marketing and packaging could be misleading, yes, some of the info on the box was wrong but that was common at this time even with brands like Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Gainward etc. The drivers were for the correct SiS graphics chip, the manual mentions SiS is the core of the card etc. They were also priced accordingly even though not really worth the money, production costs + marketing + shipping etc meant they were simply not competitive or good value. Pine may have exaggerated their 3d capabilities/performance but they never hid the fact that these were very much budget cards.
SiS based AGP cards WERE used on scam cards however, particularly sold to 3rd world countries. It was common to find "Radeon" branded cards that were in fact simply SiS 310/530/630/730 based cards with a BIOS mod that lied about the name. If you tried to install legitimate ATI drivers they would fail to detect the card and the legit SiS drivers wouldn't install either. These scams relied on the low availability of internet to actually work. You needed to install the supplied drivers from the driver CD for the card to even work. I personally purchased several versions of these while living and working in Africa around this time:
Radeon 9200: SiS 6326 based
Radeon 9500: SiS 310 based
Radeon 9600/9600xt: SiS 530 based
Radeon 9700: SiS 630/730 based
I bought and tested all of these out of interest while living and working in Uganda and Rwanda in around 2003/2004. They were cheap, cheap enough to buy them for a laugh as a foreigner but for the people who actually lived there they were an expensive luxury. I gave them away to my students after fixing the BIOS mods to properly identify them as what they were (so the latest drivers would work). To my students any dedicated graphics card was better than old PCI or worse cards with no 3d capabilities at all.
I had almost forgotten about those scam cards, some even went the extra mile of trying to make the cards visually look like the card they pretended to be. I wish I had held on to a few now. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
[edit] After a lot of searching I found some images of them: Google search "AGPX8-RADEON-9600-256-MB-SAPPHIRE-100-iU" The green PCBs with "Graphics by Radeon" or "Powered by ATI" are fake SiS based cards. Some are even for sale from Poland right now.
Thought I should add a little more here:
These "GPUs" came about largely as a result of excess stock from motherboard manufacturers. Once iGPUs moved from dedicated chips on the motherboard (like all these) to being part of the chipset a ton of these simply had no use anymore. Most were dumped on various small scale 3rd party manufacturers and once there was no longer a point in making them (faster iGPUs on motherboards rendered them redundant) they would then dumped on 3rd world markets. A hell of a lot of these ended up in Africa, India and various other 3rd world countries. Many of the scam cards came out of India and China. BIOS mods, custom PCBs/heatsinks etc all designed to trick people into buying what they thought were much in demand Radeon cards. I didn't ever see Nvidia branded versions but they may well have existed too. The scam relied on the fact that most people in their target markets lacked access to the internet and typically would be happy enough to simply be able to play games. HL2 was a pipe dream to most in these markets, they would simply be looking to play whatever games they could find cracked on pirated CDs at flea markets etc (yes, I experienced this too). It was very interesting seeing the differences between Europe and Africa in the early 2000s. People in Africa had heard about and desired the latest tech but it was far outside the budget of most people who lived there. I am fairly certain most of the people who bought these scam cards knew they were scams, just like a lot of people buying fake Rolex watches know exactly what they are buying. They just wanted to feel like they had something special I guess. Regardless of the how, thousands of these ended up in 3rd world countries with countless people smiling looking at their "Radefake 9700" churning out 30fps at 640x480 in an outdated game that they couldn't play without it. Pity it had to be in the form of a scam.
I should also note, an Nvidia FX5200 cost about 2 times more (in Uganda) than one of these wonderful fake Radeon 9700s in 2004.
[edit] I can find absolutely nothing about these scam cards anywhere. I will keep looking, I find it hard to believe there is nothing at all about them anywhere. Now I really wish I had held on to a few.....
[edit2] Found some images of them: Google search "AGPX8-RADEON-9600-256-MB-SAPPHIRE-100-iU" The green PCBs with "Graphics by Radeon" or "Powered by ATI" are fake SiS based cards. Some are even for sale from Poland right now.
@@Xaltar_ Thanks, that was really interesting!
Those chip fakeries back then were also the pentium mobile turned into desktop.
Absolutely fascinating read that, thank you for the information.
I did see some fake GeForce MX cards using sis graphics chips
Time to watch funny British computer man to distract me from my crippling Saab addiction
I just use the weeks-long wait for parts from Orio to do that.
@@francistheodorecatte eh? You order from them directly?
Saab ? 😭
@@samholdsworth420 Hotel?
@@GrockleTD motel?
I remember these.
It was the sort of hardware you'd always see in the window of an independent computer repair shop.
With the box slowly being bleached by the sun.
I just looked on Wikipedia and XFX is a division of Pine Technology Holdings Limited to this day. Fascinating.
It's actually hard to tell if Pine is still around. The other divisions of the company are gone and their stock doesn't appear to be traded anymore. Looks like XFX might have spun off into their own company.
this is a strange rabbit hole he opened
@@PXAbstraction They are deff still around, just not as successful as they were! - just google "Pine Technology Holdings Limited" you will see all relevant info :) (or click through from the side bar of searching XFX)
XFX used to be Nvidia only before they switched to AMD only. My first ever GPU was from Pine Technology, a GeForce 2 MX400. It did its job at least
Spoken like a true Vulcan.
I'm surprised you can do ANY research with the modern search engines.
half of page 1 were probably paid advertisements.
"Sponsored"
All I can say is: the _before:_ parameter helps a lot along with some of the others.
Honestly, Google feels like it became like the old AOL search
I tried googling it. All I got was links to ebay to second hand auctions, aliexpress for "pc components" and more ebay auctions....
"You are selling a graphics card, and your main quote that you're going for, is suffering." -Budget-Builds
Sounds about right for a graphics card scam like this.
wisdom is found in many places, yet for many, it has to be pointed out
they were the original "stop buying bad products if you want the company to improve" :)
That whole "no online info or brand presence" reminds me of my current card, a 3080 by a no-name OEM named OCPC, which i paid a suspicious MSRP for during the scalpocalypse. It's still working a couple years later, but i made sure to video the unboxing in case the generic GPU box it came in was filled with rabbit turds or something.
Refurbished ex-mining card?
OCPC is a Visiontek brand, Visiontek is a legit OEM and were used by big OEMs like dell before.
You should take a pic of it and search with google lens!
there is info on it, plenty of google results. BBO is full of shit
I was looking for the unboxing on your channel but found a cat instead, i'm not dissapointed 😂😍
HL2: LSD Edition, truly the peak of gaming.
Wake up, Mr. Freeman. Wake up and smell the rainbow.
The real gpu was the frames and money we lost along the way
Pine Technology is still around, known by its current name: XFX. Their retail boxes even still had Pine Technology copyrights on them up to the Geforce 7000 era.
What most people don't seem to know is that Pine/XFX was an nvidia partner up to the GTX 400 series in 2010. They _announced_ they wanted to make ATI/AMD cards in parallel a year prior and just _announcing_ the plans to produce AMD cards threw nvidia in a hissyfit which ended up in XFX being banned as a nvidia partner, which then left them with the choice of going full AMD or closing up shop. I think you can imagine what they went with, and it's kind of amazing that they're now seen as "the EVGA of AMD cards"
Would give Sapphire that crown tbh. I'm in manufacturing and the build quality on the Nitro+ is insane, as northwest repair also says, best AMD card you can get. My only criticism is the VRM potting which impacts most modern GPUs at some point.
Yeah XFX has nowhere near the notoriety of EVGA. As the other guy said, Sapphire is more of the premium bin for AMD
God, it's insane how long Nvidia has been pulling this shit. Jensen Huang has to be the most cartoonishly evil CEO out there. Just burning bridges with companies for literally no reason.
To be fair, Pine were a relatively reputable budget manufacturer who had been around for well over a decade by this point. These will have been sold by them extremely cheaply (I'm pretty sure the like of Aria and Micro Direct were selling something very similar in around 2002 for a tenner).
It's really the sheds that were ripping folk off here. As is usually the case - if you wanted to buy computer hardware from the like of PC World and Maplin, make sure you bring the lube. ISTR Maplin selling floppy drives for £60 when they were £8 at CCL...
It's still around, you might know them as XFX.
I remember buying a PC power supply at Maplin. It was a proper Corsair jobbie, but it was next to house branded "G7" power supplies that had lurid branding and were obviously going to be Chinese death cubes.
@@ironhead2008 Yeah I worked that out after I posted the message above. Oddly enough I do have an XFX graphics card and PSU in one of my machines. Much like the old Pine stuff I had in the '90s, they don't set the world on fire but they work, and seem reliable enough.
My uncle used to run a IT shop and he was selling Win2k PCs in 2012. His customers were the type that didn't know better and where fine as long as it could run word and send email. It was all hot garbage though and he had a pallet of thin clients with more power than most of the desktops he was selling. By that I mean 1.2Ghz core 2 duo and 1GB RAM.
Man, I miss the early 2000s. So many insane tech rabbit holes you could go down on, so many weird, often shady companies, total chaos. It almost saddens me that the tech market isn't as insane as it used to be back then.
I don't know. There's plenty of fake and garbage hardware available now on AliExpress temu or even Amazon if you're not careful. And some of that crap even gets into mainstream stores
Interesting. I used to build and sell computers with cards like this. The box and information was always generic nonsense, but I never thought of it as a scam. This would be the budget card just for basic desktop use, not for gaming.
We'd just give the actual specs. Sold separately, probably for $30-$40. From supplier probably $25. We'd use them also for repairing computers where the existing GPU died and the customer didn't do gaming, and just wanted the cheapest card that worked.
Same here. I wouldn't call the Pine cards a scam. These were entry level for granny to check email on her aging PII or Celeron. Same thing I think we sold them for like $35.
Yeah i'm sure they were about £20 at the computer fairs, could have been some non computer centric retails stores upsold them?
@@chad2787 If we want the first outright scam, that would probably be Intel with their i740 that did basically nothing of value that a 2d card wouldn't do. The UI for Windows at the time didn't use 3d effects like you see now, and it was woefully inadequate for basically any gaming due to the use of AGP for the RAM it actually needed to properly function. With more actual RAM it might not have been so completely useless.
Old rule back from these days: If you see "VIA" or "SIS" somewhere on the box, put it back on the shelf.
Machines with these chipsets weren't targeted at gamers. These are machines for light office work or media player.
Ah yes. But I remember seeing SIS or VIA and then purchasing. And then building something new 6 months later. With something with SIS or VIA on the box 😂
@@MT-cd7cs In all honesty, you could say the same thing about just about anything other than 3D FX, Power VR, nVidia and some of the Matrox chipsets for workstations. Most of the rest of the ones of that era were absolute garbage.
@@SmallSpoonBrigadeI also had most if not all of the above in some device or other 😂 I was definitely the target market: early Teens, parents who wanted to keep me quiet from talking about tech all the time, a small budget and an interest in building systems.. then building yet another system cause something new was available 😂
The Matrox cards were poor at 3D acceleration and gaming, but really did multiple monitors/multiple cards well. I used to use 2 matched cards and 2 monitors.
The good gaming cards of the era could do multiple cards for 1 screen, but didn't do multiple monitors.
Then there were the high end NVidia Quadros and ATI workstation cards that were designed for 3D rendering, but not great at gaming. Those workstation cards in that era used different chipsets, and the drivers were nit interchangeable.
It is not a scam. the SiS 315 was the only serious competitor to ATI, Riva, and 3dfx back in the day. It is not the only mention of SiS, it was in the manual you showed too. explicitly called out as a sis chip in both the diagram and in the specs. Nowadays the only serious competitor to AMD and nvidia is Intel. It is much older than the Radeon 9250 and 5200 Fx. This card competed against Riva 128 back before ncidia was nvidia and back before the Riva TNT even existed. You are comparing cards that were made 5+ years apart at very different price points.yes, some stores kept old stock at msrp prices for years and years, you see a lot of that today as well. That is more of a fault of the retailers never bothering to lower the price to move old obsolete inventory,. today If you bought a GTX 470 that has been sitting on the snelf for over a decade for a few hundred bucks off a website like Froogle, it is not a scam, it is buyer being not smart.
but why this rebranding and why no info could be found about this card and it's producer
But it's not being sold as a SiS card, and it's not even a 315. No where close. It's an old card, from one brand, being resold as a newer, better card, and from another brand entirely, to trick people into buying it.... That is by definition a fucking scam. So by saying it's a scam, he's being honest. Don't know what you problem is, but you're wrong.
@@Special1122 probably lack of investor,
Example you won't be able to search your name on google because you are not big influencer or have high reputation.
You may find your name but probably will take days, months or years due to many amount of same or similar close name. Or atleast if it's prosuct too much competitor that your product getting pushed back on search bar
Oh god, I am now using an XFX Radeon 6700 XT...
I searched for the company and found news that their Chinese office has been raided by police because they faked their cards to be lower value so they can pay less tax
😳
Based and tax evasion pilled
I bought an XFX Radeon RX 6800 about 6 months ago.
It's already dead.
@@tonecapone8021 I have a XFX 6950 XT and I had to disable the AMD Sound hardware, so my system would stop crashing. It works great now. I guess, it's a common AMD problem. I couldn't figure it out for the longest time.
@@tonecapone8021 just because im curious, what were your temps like? Across all sensors.
This was from Pine Group (name's on the box) and the SiS chipset was very popular among low end video cards in the late 1990s. They had driver issues in anything other than Windows 9x/ME, but weren't usually sold as NT/2K/XP compatible.
Pine Group might be more familiar to you as XFX.
Those weren't exactly a scam card but were originally targeted towards people who just needed a basic GPU. They were not really recommended for gaming but were an option created for the tons of people who did not have onboard graphics but needed a basic GPU. I had one in my first home server in late 2002 and I got it during a holiday sale for ~$35-40 in college around 2002-2003 and it served it's purpose until I ended up replacing it with a 7600GT along with a used motherboard, cpu, and memory in late 2006 to be a media center pc. At the time it ran 2D stuff quite well and allowed a few 3D applications to run decently but I mainly bought it for basic video output at the time. The reason you can't find much info on them is mainly because the internet archive started in 1996 but didn't actually crawl everything so many sites during that time were not picked up till years later when they were indexed by companies like google. Most of the issues you were having with the card not being picked up on boot may be explained by the card being new old stock sitting in a warehouse for over 20 years. Those caps have to be pretty dry by this point.
But what in 2000s needed dedicated GPU except gaming? Oh, 3D Studio and similar software, but it's struggles that time with ATi/nVidia consumer drivers sometime
@@tvarqwz A lot of motherboards (most) did not come with onboard graphics back then so this was a cheap alternative to get a display output if you didn't care about performance.
@@kuhrd yes, I know (got Rage II, than TNT2, than Radeon 9500 Pro), but getting such pseudo-3D were mistake by any standards.
12:36 I reckon the "wiggle problem" was slightly tarnished contacts either on the card itself or the AGP slot. Nothing that cleaning with a generous helping of isopropyl alcohol wouldn't fix. This sort of stuff happens when your hardware is 20 years old.
Correct.
Sometimes on these cheap old cards the gold actually starts to flake off the contacts
These cards were rampant in the early 2000's, often found at computer shows. Pine was a budget offering that filled the $30-$60 price bracket. They also sold S3 Virge and Intel i740 under this label.
1:18 I've seen wireless adapters larger than that.
These date back to the beige PC box era where most PC's sold were not, at least in the US, from a name brand. I bought several Pine or Jaton branded cards, there were other brands like this. If you wanted to buy a Nvidia TNT, S3 Virge, or SIS, for cheap you, you would buy these brands. As noted they weren't well marked, but for beige box sellers or enthusiasts who knew what they were doing they were good bargains. The modern day equivalent are the Aliexpress non name brand names, except these cards or mb may use reused parts, where Pine or Jaton were always using new parts.
Don't spit too much on the SiS 315, It came in 2001 with hardware T&L and reasonably good performance with a complete feature set, at a low price.
Most people who bought it for the good value it offered in the budget sector remember it fondly. It was a little card that could punch above its weight.
What PINE did with the cut-down IGP version was very scummy, I must admit. The 315E has HALF of the performance of the regular 315.
Not a huge SIS315 fan, but the full chip can manage some proper 90s classics and retailed very cheap. 👍
There should be an 'Pro' version of this card with the SiS 315 on it but never seen one in the wild.
Honestly both SiS & later S3 from the early 00's was okay mid-range hardware; but it was completely let down by the absolute garbage drivers.
As someone who worked at Maplin in the mid-2000s this unlocked some weird memories. It was always the GPU on the shelf that the staff who knew their stuff refused to sell, but Maplin was always full of wildly different qualities of products. Things like the 754 ECS motherboards where the RAM we sold was incompatible with them and a lot of the Sitecom networking products were so out of date they were incompatible with the current networking standards of the time. Gotta love the way that some companies just sourced random tech junk from China back then.
Oddly enough the store I was in was not incentivized to sell that kind of stuff. The area was, in a word, rough. If something was bad, it got returned. From time to time the person returning it would be so pissed off at the quality of the goods that they would either threaten to punch the manager or, on one occasion, pull a knife on us. Sometimes managers from outside would push us to sell the junk, but we just ignored them.
It's just a Pine card with a SiS GPU. Phantom3D was just a product name like Geforce for Nvidia. They where everywhere in the low budget market back then. I am impressed it even runs HL2.
If you want a large old GPU scam, check the S3 Virge. We had a ELSA Victory 3D card with a Virge DX. On the box it was written that it featured "3D FX". No not 3Dfx, but with a space between the letters. It was worse than a 1MB SVGA card.
I've always found the "register for warranty" very puzzling until I realized it's not normal to get a 5 year warranty by simply having a receipt from a store.
No registration needed, and no hoops to jump through. If they don't want to honor it, they can't sell it here.
Norway?
Countries with such reasonable legislation are a rarity.
So first it was Pine, starting with SiS and then started with nvidia as XFX... and then shifted to Radeon full time. I won't fault anyone's scammer-radar going off at the prospects of such a company shifting repeatedly, for the name of shifting such sketchy stock.
Oddly xfx actually makes pretty god Radeon cards
@@gamingclan4651 I bought an XFX Radeon HD 6850 once. Playing Crisis 2, it blew up. Overheated and completely fried itself within less than a day or two of buying it. I RMAed it, got another one. That did exactly the same thing. I RMAed it and got an XFX Radeon HD 6770. That worked fine. They both used the same heatsink/fan, even though the 6850 had a significantly higher TDP. I've never bought an XFX since.
@@henryokeeffe5835 I remember having an XFX Nvidia 260 GTX that would fail on a bunch of certain places in some games, eventually the only fix I found was to re-flash the BIOS with lower voltages, the stupid thing was overvolted like crazy. Then everything worked. Also had a XFX 9800 that died on me, though that may have been bumpgate. Still swear off the brand now.
@@henryokeeffe5835 Come to think of it, the only card that ever died on me (an HD 4850) was an XFX. Lasted for three years and change, I think? Died about a third of the way into _BioShock Infinite._
@@henryokeeffe5835 Had the opposite experience with them. Got an xfx 580, still have it, had to put regular cheap thermal grease on it once and it still worked fine under heavy load. Amazingly good card all around, with hot swap fans.
I would try copying the disc under Linux, possibly with dd. That way you could hopefully bypass any weirdness.
If the demo software crashes, you might try running it under DOSBox just to see what happens.
Changes to the Windows API can cause software built against a different version to not work correctly.
this is an absolute scam of a graphics card, HOWEVER I have heard about 3DPhantom all these years back.. I might even have had that card, maybe not the exact model in the video, but one of the models
on the side note, I'm glad you're making more videos nowadays, it's always a pleasure to watch
Looks like a 10/100 network controller card.
Isn't a Phantom an invisible person that act unseen in the background? Well then, 3dphantom means that the 3D -power isn`t visible which is quite honest😄
The original owners' kids are now driving around US going to college and getting boba in their Lambos SUVs or G-wagons...living their best lives...lol
8:21 the 3d render of the crap card is priceless but cool.
Holy shit, I remember seeing that card in a computer store ages ago! They weren't a big store, it was just a lot of stuff crammed onto its shelves, and the store was in an indoor strip mall-like plaza. They had all kinds of oddball looking graphics cards. Maybe one or two that you'd recognize the brand name, but otherwise, it was just cardboard boxes with weird imagery and odd names that seemed to just randomly mix and match letters and numbers. Thankfully, I was still new to computers at the time and didn't do much upgrading to get scammed over (I only upgraded the graphics card once from an Nvidia TNT2 PCI card, to an NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 4000 PCI card, sticking with a name I was at least a little familiar with). But the place also used to sell old computer games (including some Atari 400/800 carts), and I remember the 3D Phantom being one of the oddball cards I used to see when I went into that store. Daaaaaaaamn.
That C&C generals performance was very similar to the performance i had on the IGPU on my Via 700mhz motherboard. Its almost nostalgic to see
Blast from the past that one. As a young'n, my dad passed on a lot of hardware from work. At one time I had 4 SiS AGP cards and couldn't get over how they could be worse than integrated graphics. Sold em all to CEX, pretty sure they didn't get the better part of that deal:) Then got a Matrox G450. Happy days.
15:40 - I never thought I'd see that graphical glitch again. What you have to understand about these graphics cards is that some of us did use them them and had a great time despite the bugs. Circa 2005, my gaming rig died, and as a kid I had to save money to order new parts. I borrowed a Duron PC with SiS graphics from friend, and that's how I had to play Half-Life 2 and other Source games on it. It crashed sometimes, so I became quick save happy. I actually think that was the first PC I ever played Half-Life on. Halo: CE ran absolutely flawlessly too, and I played the hell out of it despite staying at my grandma's house with dial-up. In a lot of ways, those were the days.
22:44 - Quake III Arena was another I often played on it, and I remember the exact same frame drops when looking at elements like that mirror on the intro map. I was just happy that games were able to run.
I could see using this as a bare bones video card for something like a home file/media server. Applications where you need the bare metal "see words and pictures" video and that's about it. Always enjoy your videos!
3W, can't complain about that power usage.
No way! When you first said the name I thought it sounded familiar, then when I saw the box I thought "hmm, I think they used to sell those in Maplins". Then it turns out they did! I used to spend way to much time in that shop as a kid haha.
I have a feeling I have a boxed one on a shelf somewhere, from my time in UK. That mention of the wiggle reminds me of working in offices that were a converted barn. There were a couple of PCs which would fail to start up first thing on a winter Monday morning. You had to power them up, leave them for ten minutes, then power cycle them. They must have gotten cold over the weekend when the heating was in frost mode, and some random joint must have been loose. They were fine once they were warm. Ah the memories …
If that Presario is the same as mine, the onboard Radeon Xpress would take this poor thing behind the shed.
its not, that one has an SiS Chipset.
good chance the GPUs the company used were surplus from obsolescence, so got them probably pennies on the pound, got similar surplus ram and found or had access to a PCB maker. so they probably made these for ten or twenty quid a pop, and still made a killing.
I bought one of these types of scam cards back in 2006. The box art suggested Nvidia, and there was a play on the lettering. It did work okay, but it wasn't the performance card it claimed to be. I realized there was a problem when I tried to play COD (either United Offensive or World at War).
I remember my first experience of buying a graphics card, i must have been 13/14 at the time, earning £11.50 a week doing paper round before school.
I had a PC with a pentium 4 socket 478, remember it having 128mb ram when i got it and doubled it to 256mb same day at a local PC shop for £10, those guys were great, basic shop with loads of spared lying around.
a while later they had close down, so there was one other local option, i went in there asking for a graphics card upgrade, told them the game i wanted to play, they suggested a card that matched the VRAM requirement (maybe a HD4350?), cost me £40-£50ish, cant remember exactly, got home excited, installed the card, drivers, and bareley played the game... dissapointed teenager spending a months income on something that didnt meet the requirements i discussed with the coputer shop. Young and inexperienced i didnt know any better.
Gods, so many memories of when I used to do in-home computer support and budget systems based on SiS and VIA chiosets were everywhere. Absolute garbage peddlers they were. Several Mom and Pop computer stores here in Ottawa used to sell their low end models with cards like these if either the motherboards didn't have on board or if the customer didn't want some of their system memory shared with the graphics.
Genuinely wouldn’t think I would see Volvo S40 racing again on this channel lol
Imagine getting one of these back in those days.. Thats gotta be the worst!
Genoa Systems made a graphics card called the Phantom 3D in 1996. It was powered by the S3 Virge chip.
24:29 - GT1030 DDR4 says hi
I grimaced at the mention of mid-2000s Maplins. That's when they had firmly transitioned into soulless box-shifters and you could tell that the staff just knew they were about to go out of business.
The Mao Zedong quote on 6:19 .... lol
'But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow!'
Actually I do have a 315 powered card in my collection and I use it quite frequently for... DOS. Yeah, DOS. Compatibility is reasonably well and it easily outperforms a Matrox Mystique, the once fastet PCI-card in dos for gaming in 480p. You're totally right about it's CRAPPY 3D performance, BUT mine plays back DVDs flawlessly on a PentiumIII 1000 running XP or 98SE!
The SIS 315 chipset was supposed to be a competitive value chipset to compete with the Geforce2 MX but unfortunately most of us encountered the 315e variant which was heavily cut back.
It ended up being relegated as a desktop 2d card for the most part.
The IGP versions came afterwards but to be honest that’s a whole other rabbit hole of confusion :-)
Imho, the S3 ViRGE chip was the _original_ 3D scam. Many years before this SiS crap, the ViRGE promised 3D-accelerated performance but really simply did not deliver any usable amount thereof. Its marketing was almost entirely bullsh&t.
Ye olde 3D decelerator!
that green lump of a heatsink made me go "oh boy a MX2 400" immediatly, i have SO MANY of these cards from trash picked computers its insane
those things are in EVERYTHING
those are #1 and the #2 spot is Geforce4MX here in Greece too! :D
We sold these kind of cards as the cheapest 2d option or as a Voodoo I or II companion. Not as gaming cards. Even the Matrox cards were quickly obsolete as gaming cards. The hype on the box was standard. Mostly correct but useless. The real scam was done by the person who sold this card as a gaming card. It was obsolete but cheap. We used i740 in the same way. Sis was a very budget brand. Keep in mind the price difference in retail and pre-build option. C&C Generals ran bad on a lot of cards when it was released. People mis-remember stuff. trying to game on a budget or home-office PC was often disappointing. Didn't stop me from trying. 😜
These lowpoly animations are great
Oh I know these cards. They or ones very much like them used to show up at PC parts fairs and the somewhat shady cash only PC parts stores, which is all we had to work with. I once worked for a company that decided every desk needed a PC as cheaply as possible and it was my job to build the PCs and so forth. I used very similar SIS cards exclusively because that's the budget I had. All it had to run was Windows98 and a couple accounting apps. It did that well enough. We never gamed on them, except fudging billing invoices. Really don't think it's a disaster in 2024 simply because ancient AGP slots are not something anyone will have in a serious PC these days. I AM shocked Pine has something to do with XFX. Fascinating. Great video!
Perfect way to end the week, another glorious esoteric adventure.
Its not a scam. Its the super budget card like modern day GT710 or 910.
The other thing is that some sellers tried to scam buyers.
In 2004 my PC had 4mb S3 card (poor times). This one would be something beyond my dreams.
Hey, When you test the 8mb SiS card, test it for longer than few days. My 16mb one at first worked fine, you could watch videos and it wasn't too terrible, until one day it started to drop frames and I had to do some vlc workarounds that noticeably reduced image quality.
XP ran fine. wc3 might work on 8mb, mortal kombat 4 I think requires 4mb vram.
The SiS 6326. I met that card back in those period of time. But I am pretty sure the one with which I used, I played Unreal Tournament 1999. The card was only a 4MB version. It was a dedicated GPU card, I installed the drivers for it. Worked cheap, and UT1999 was playable on ...what? I have a printscreen, checking... it's 640*480! But it was 3D rendered gameplay. Well, my timestamps sais it's summer of 2001 when I made that printscreen. And I know, that the 6326 was already a used card. We bought somewhere near München, Germany. Good memories!
I remember back in the day here in Ireland we had a shop called maplins, and in this store they had some of these pine graphics cards
I love that he uses a key to open packages. I do that same thing regardless of how many times I'm told "You're going to break that key one day"!
If Phantom3d makes GPUs again, ill buy it
The are known as XFX Now. so you could actually buy a new phantom3d. It just will not be a scam and maybe even pretty good!
I had one of those, second hand, when I was still a kid. I was VERY surprised that such thing existed but I never imagined any kind of scam involved. I probably paid little to nothing for it. It allowed me to run and play the games I wanted, which was a massive win for me at that time. But there was some specific game (I don't remember it now) that would freeze and BSOD sometimes. I remember I had it for very little time and replaced it with an NVidia one. You made me realize that I had many of those crappy/scammy/hated cards and for me were massive improvements every time.
It has still a better performance than my old Dell Notebook which I got from my dad for my studies several years ago. This thing was not even able to run Half-Life 1 (!) smoothly and had an AMD Sempron.
Normal Sempron behaviour
I had a lenovo thinkpad with an amd a6 5350m and holy crap it suffered running anything. It would stutter opening two tabs on internet explorer in windows 8 or 7. Any version of Linux besides puppy Linux ran super slowly for some reason. The temperature always went up to 125C and idled at 101C according to temperature monitoring software
@@SatelliteEnthusiast hey, that is a socketed CPU! Good luck finding one that you can upgrade it with though
@tezcanaslan2877 yeah I got rid of it and got a better-performing toshiba satellite
Holy crap I'm pretty sure I had one of those! Or something like it.
Even getting the thing was an "adventure". It was our first PC and a big purchase. My mum worked with a bloke who was a big PC gamer and had vaguely overheard snippets of conversation involving "graphics cards" and "blew it up". This convinced her that a "graphics card" was a bomb that had about a 10% chance of making your computer explode when you installed it.
Anyway we got it, plugged it in, and got no output at all. We called tech support for the PC, who diagnosed it as "probably dead". We then remembered the box for it was covered in loads of tape and it was on sale... IE somebody had already returned it once and PC World had just sold it again!
We evolved a scam to buy another one elsewhere for full price, put the dud in the box, and return that. The one we bought, while nominally the same, looked totally different when we got it out. We tried it on anyway, and made a whole £2.95 "profit" on the deal. And could play GTA3 on max detail!
Other stuff I vaguely remembered:
-The broken one was about £25 and the "good" one just under £30, so PC World knew they were polishing a turd by that point.
-The PC I had had 2mb of onboard graphics so even this seemed like a huge improvement.
-The next PC I got had 32mb of onboard graphics, so I assumed it would be the same. It wasn't! I think it was a Time PC (Remember those ads with Leonard Nimoy?), if you want to track one down and experience the horror. GTA3 choked it, and fire was transparent where it overlapped cars. It even had trouble with OpenGL Doom source ports! For that PC I bought a budget 128mb graphics card in a very plain cardboard box with a white label on. I got pretty lucky, Vice City looked amazing and Manhunt... worked.
You should send it to that surgeon cause he desperately needs it for his doctor stuff!
Damn that takes me back
@@cyphaborg6598 XD it's my favorite video
Videos like this I absolutely LOVE you making! OF COURSE I want to see more!
I see what you meant now... I am so sorry you had to endure this card 😱
The SIS 6326 was a way older card they had. A prebuild I was given as my first brand new pc (a Pentium III 500mhz) came with one of those. Changed it for a Voodoo 4 4500AGP.
I had a piece of crap like that. It wasn't exactly the same card, it was taller, it looked a bit like a Gf4ti. Back then, people were idiots and bought video cards based on the amount of megabytes they had, and not based on their specifications (kind of like today, people being idiots and not realizing that processors with astronomical TDP are expensive, inefficient, and problematic because they are squeezing more than is possible for the current silicon technology).
Back then I had an incredible Celeron 300A, which I overclocked heavily (I won the silicon lottery), and I was looking for something better than the onboard video card (some 8MB piece of crap) to run GTA Vice City. I bought this piece of crap, I think it was my first AGP card. It was a SiS chip, it was like a SiS card from the late 90s, but with 32MB of VRAM.
At that time I knew I should have bought an Nvidia or ATI, but I didn't have the money, and I knew that this card would probably be some crap, but I expected it to at least be enough to play Vice City. Well, I can't say it wasn't, but running the game on low at a horrible frame rate like 18fps is not what I expected.
The jittery PS1 looking preview render of the card is fantastic.
damn... i have some old ISA video cards that look meaner than that skinny piece of disappointment
Knew this would be good as soon as I saw the Pine logo. If you're not familiar with Pine, maybe you know their division, XFX Inc.
Cool CRT ❤
It’s actually brand new. I’ve just never had the chance to use it
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial I had the same back in the days. Greetings
I laughed when even PC was rejecting this card.
PC: "The hell you installed?! Not recognized!"
The drivers were generally garbage. High CPU use from memory. Great at 2D when they worked and terrible at 3d
this is the best stuff to come out of RUclips, love the vibe in these videos
Those HL2 psychedelic textures are kinda cool, but would be better at 3x the FPS.
SIS: Suffering Is SIS.
Yep, that scans.
Came for the headlines. Stayed for that natty MIDI music
I remember these. I had one and didn't recall it being this bad. Then I realized I had it in 2000 or 2001. These were on sale in California at stores like PC Club that early, and at that point the price was actually a reasonable ask. So the scam likely is that you got pushed the gear we stopped buying years before (and at about the same price), but that doesn't mean it was always a scam.
So it turns out I own one of these unknowingly... A few years ago, I was looking for AGP graphics cards on eBay and came across a seller which was selling bundles of older AGP graphics for cheap. A bundle would have 4 or 5 loose graphics cards and a single bundle would cost around £20, so I bought two. One of the bundles I bought had this card and the TNT2 M64 AGP shown in the video, but I never tried them out. Watching this video now, I'm glad I didn't put the time into the Pine cards.
Funny how you decided to use Balamory for the DVD playback test. 😆
At about 10:49 I spotted a folder "Xabre" on the driver disk. Had a SiS Xabre 200 at some point. The last semi OK from SiS. Would be great if you can get your hands on a Xabre and do a review!
Haha I remember these. From 1998-2005 I worked for a local computer company and built literally thousands of white box PCs with cards like this, including the Phantom. We had a vendor on the west coast and for base model PC's we would order video cards where the description was basically: AGP Video Graphics card, xMB. They would come in boxes just like this one and would be named stuff like Phantom, Viper, Pegasus, etc and the boxes looked they were printed on someone's cheap inkjet printer. They all looked 100% exactly like the one in the video.
When you need to change your catchphrase by : « _but can it run Wing Commander_ » XD
Oh man the AGP slot 😂. I remember having a Matrox Millenia or something like that in a few of my desktops as a middle schooler. I remember when AGP 8x cards became affordable to me and eventually after eons of saving grabbing a 9800XT and thinking “Well, this is clearly the pinnacle of video card performance.” 😂 now the little 6GB RTX 4050 in my laptop has hardware specs that even the highest end AGP SLi setup couldn’t even remotely dream of. Incredible how the hardware world has rapidly evolved
I can't wait to see a 6500 XT video in 20 years!
You are the tech version of a guy paining his unmentionables for art. Thanks for your dedication. I'm entertained.
Pretty sure that green effect when playing the dvd's is the macrovision copy protection. Alot of old playback software didn't like it, and i wouldnt be surprised if the card had no built in codecs to properly handle it.
The green playback was actually a budget builds video, no copy protection.
I used to see these around a lot in places like independent local computer stores, car boots and so on. Useless for 3D gaming, but if all you needed was a display adaptor then they'd do that for you. But they should have been a £10-£20 as they were only really useful for adding a display output for a second monitor or if your mobo didn't have onboard graphics and you just wanted a CLI.
To quote from Wikipedia how they differed from the real Sempron 2800+ (Socket A / 462) this was how to visually distinguish them:
"Fake Sempron 2800+ (Thoroughbred) - Wrong font on label. Note L6 & L8 Bridges cut and some filled - This is a remarked Geode NX."
So , not only was the font on the label wrong , but silicon plate had distinguished marks too. From my understanding , they were Geode NX embedded CPUs which used the same socket , but were underpowered. Most likely CPU that was used was Geode NX 1500 or 2000 , and entire Geode NX series were to be used on kiosks , casino machines etc , not for desktops , as they were too weak and were fanless designs , often without heatsink whatsoever.
Was there anything about fake semprons in this video, or was this comment posted to the wrong tab?
@@Ts6451 I suggested pairing this fake GPU with fake CPU and how bad it could be if someone got both in their desktop at the time , as I totally forgot about fake CPUs being a thing. I can bet that pairing these two would make PC from hell.
And maybe down the line , completely scam / fake pc build , like buying pre-built pc , but with as much as possible fake parts from early to mid 2000's. :)
I've been a fan of XFX for a decade. Every GPU I've bought, as an AMD/ATi fan, has been XFX since the late 2000's. I had absolutely no idea they had this shady origin story. Wow.
I knew you would put it in the compaq concidering the internal gpu was on its way out 😅
I'm jealous of that HP CRT with such good geometry!
It is brand new to be fair