While I already have a VGA card that I built previously, I have started working on a new version as well. Part of the reason for the new board was to increase the number of colors displayed. The old version used 12-bit color (4,4,4) to have 4096 colors in total. The new board has full 24-bit color using a ADV7123 Video DAC.

The last board used a Xilinx Spartan 6 XC6SLX9 which was the largest QFP package in that range, this board uses a Xilinx Spartan 3 XC3S500E 208 pin QFP package. In addition to the improved colour output, the SRAM was doubled to 4MB in a 1Mx32-bit VRAM which should provide a lot better bandwidth.

I designed the board last year and back in August the board was sponsored by PCBWay who kindly made some for me. The boards are good quality and well made.

At the moment the project is on hold as the last 6 months have been crazy busy and I didn't have much time for personal projects. It's only recently I've had some time to start back working on some of these hobby projects. 

The main reason I'm posting this now is that I've been getting constant emails from PCBWay asking to promote them and today hit a breaking point where I had an email which was just straight out rude and pushy so here's my review. 

The actual PCB is nice but if you have something built by them for free, expect a lot of badgering until you give them what they want. I won't be ordering anything from them in the future after this and I can see any benefit of the service they offer over other places.