3D card with TFT LCD Display

[Hiraghm]

I have a dilemma. I have an old lunchbox PC with a 12" TFT SVGA LCD
panel. It currently uses a C&T 65554 PCI video card with 4 meg of ram.
I know I can stick a new motherboard in it (currently using a QDI K6
300mhz,) but I would like to upgrade the video. Is it possible to find
or convert an ATI video card to work with the display in this lunchbox?
Is there some way to adapt a DVI connector to attach to the ribbon
cable of the LCD?

 

[Augustus]

I have a dilemma. I have an old lunchbox PC with a 12" TFT SVGA LCD
panel. It currently uses a C&T 65554 PCI video card with 4 meg of ram.
I know I can stick a new motherboard in it (currently using a QDI K6
300mhz,) but I would like to upgrade the video. Is it possible to find
or convert an ATI video card to work with the display in this lunchbox?
Is there some way to adapt a DVI connector to attach to the ribbon
cable of the LCD?

I would say no. And that 12" TFT SVGA will be an analog display, not DV. If
the card works, why bother. It's not exactly a game box. And a 4Mb card will
do 1280x1024 if needed. Costs $1000 to replace it!!
http://www.onestopsystems.com/products/pages/179.asp

 

[Hiraghm]

I would say no. And that 12" TFT SVGA will be an analog display, not DV. If
the card works, why bother. It's not exactly a game box. And a 4Mb card will
do 1280x1024 if needed. Costs $1000 to replace it!!
http://www.onestopsystems.com/products/pages/179.asp

If it's analog, would it be possible to convert the 15 pin output of a
video card to the ribbon cable of the display?
I do 3D graphics work with lightwave and other programs; I know I can
stick a motherboard in it that will take up to a 1ghz chip and a gig of
ram for around $30 US. Sure, I'd prefer a laptop, but right now
upgrading this box is a lot cheaper, and should add to its value
if/when I sell it and buy a laptop. I can run lightwave on it right
now, but it's slow and sluggish, and some of the other tools I use
require OpenGL or DirectX hardware-based acceleration.

 

[Hiraghm]

I followed your link. The specs match my card, but mine has just one
ribbon port along the topside of the card. But it does have 4 meg of
ram.

Gee, if it's worth so much, maybe I could get enough for it off of ebay
to buy a more powerful laptop!...

 

[J. Clarke]

I followed your link. The specs match my card, but mine has just one
ribbon port along the topside of the card. But it does have 4 meg of
ram.

Gee, if it's worth so much, maybe I could get enough for it off of ebay
to buy a more powerful laptop!...

The bottom line on this is that to do what you want to do is going to end up
costing you more than a new 64-bit laptop.

You would basically have to design, build, and troubleshoot electronics of
the same general nature as those that go between the VGA connector and the
LCD on a standalone monitor. If you had the skills and access to the
facilities to do this cheaply then you wouldn't have needed to ask the
question.

If you know the manufacturer and model number on the LCD panel, then you
might with diligent searching find a manufacturer's data sheet with a
reference circuit that you could build and with luck you might even find a
single-chip solution. But you'd still have to make the circuit board and
so on and find the parts (and one-off on specialized parts is sometimes
ridiculously expensive if you can find them at all), which means that you'd
have to make or buy the tools needed . . .

 

[First of One]

Is this a 34-pin ribbon cable, with the same physical shape as a floppy
cable?

Many older cards, such as RageXL and 3dfx Voodoo3, have a "feature
connector" on the board that looks the same and *should* perform the same
function. The Voodoo2 cards actually used this port to transfer analog image
data between two cards for SLI operation.

However, since almost nobody uses the connector anymore, even if you find a
card that has it, driver support might have been dropped a long time ago.