ISA Video card problem!!!!!!

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

Hello
I have an ISA video card Cirus Logic
ID on the chip:
CL-GD5420-75QC-C
21421-277CG
9338 T
KOREA-B
On the Bios chip it writes 1993 Ciruss Logic corp. and below It says the manuf. Quadtel corp. also 1993
The memoryy i do not know exactly how much but it has 4 large chips in the memoryy area which can be taken out.
I think it has 1M as i know from win95 display control panel anyway not larger than 2 megs.
The problem it's that i can only see a z letter on a green background (the background it's as large as the letter z it's) on the left upper corner of the screen.What could this be?i tried to clean the contacts i swaped between isa ports cleaned the bios contacts the memory contacts but nothing helped !!!!what could this be?
Any help would be appreciated thank you
Alex.

[NickS]

It could be dead. Static damage due to mishandling, or corrosion of the through-hole plating ("vias") can result in electronics dying of "old age". in the case of static it can be months or years after the event.

well i put it into another system and still the same ,but when the win95 log appears it's working very fine but when entering win the display becomes distorted and ......anyway not correct
Your opinion it's O.K. it sure is old and it sure is in some way or another danmaged but.... kind of a starnge.Any other suggestions would be appreciated.
i am trying to use it on a system which it's in bootblock stage of opperation and it's no use because of that problem.
Thank you
Alex.

well i put this ISA video card in another computer with win 95 and the display it's not working only in dos enviroment .When the win995 logo screen appears the image it's displayed corectly and then also in win 95 enviroment.
What could this be???????
I am very confussed
it's working or not working???????
Alex.

[Denniss]

Maybe the VGA-memory is damaged somehow - one of the 4 chips might be not working in the way it should do .
Windows-mode requires more memory than DOS-mode so the damaged area might be used and your display is corrupt .

there are many other thing that may be damaged - get a new card

[KachiWachi]

Wierd display in Windows could be because the card is not using the right driver. Try using the standard VGA driver.

It should work in a plain MS-DOS environment no matter what (unless it is a bad card of course).

If you have an old copy of Nortion Diagnostics that runs in DOS you could run the video test on it...

O.K. thank you guys i will try these options and seewhat comes up to be the problem!
Anyway if it doesn't work i can always buy another for almost no money )))
Thank you for the info.
Alex.

There are several possible reason. Can you tell us the mainboard in which you test the video card ? Old VGA Card, even the PCI one sometimes have compatiblity problem with the mainboard chipset. Sometimes due to the mainboard or video driver and due to the mainboard BIOS. If you can use it flawlessly in windows and cannot use it in DOS, it's very possible the BIOS has "configured" the VGA card incorrectly, while in windows, the "driver in-charge" (for the video driver and the motherboard) configure it to "the right place".

well i tryed in a MSI 5184 ,a M539,a M558 and in it;s original mainboard from a 486 based computer.i do not know any details about the 486 mainboard but i would like to find, so please can you tell me a good site for retreiving info on 486's????????mainboards....
I am telling, you in all the boards i listed up here,the symptoms are the same.

well, for the 486 info, I don't know either. You'd better PM Denniss, Ajzchips, KachiWachi, or other Moderator. They know better than me, or perhaps, try PM edwin, I think he knows what are you looking for since he's an "Hardware Archivist"

hi thank you for the info and sorry for replying so late but just an hour ago i managed to restore my system from a weird MB failure i guess.
It restarted and the screen remained blank!I put the proc in another MB and it runs .Well i switched to another MB and everything it's fine right now