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Written by Robo
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Friday, 05 September 2008 09:10 |
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Page 1 of 7 The VS40X was a graphics card made by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for one of their VAX workstations. DEC made lots of powerful, high-spec computers aimed at professionals running UNIX, VMS or Windows NT, to be used for Important Work. Anyway, even expensive computers become obsolete, and since this circuit board is from sometime in the mid-1980s, it's probably safe to say that it's obsolete too. 
This is the board. On the left is a huge load of memory in ZIP packages. The rest of the board is populated by a lot of chips (of which the eight on the left are identical), made by DEC, and one RAMDAC by Brooktree. The RAMDAC's job is to store the complete image information in memory, and convert the digital signals to analogue signals for the monitor. 
The main processor has a funny heatsink on top. 
This is one of the many chips made by DEC. All are housed in ceramic Quad Flat Pack packages, which are very easy to open. 
The RAMDAC. Brooktree specializes in chips like this, which have very high performance requirements. The quality of the RAMDAC is a major factor in the final image quality. Today these are almost obsolete however, since digital monitor connections like DVI and HDMI are beginning to replace analogue connections.
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