Im pretty sure thats memorry issues.
I had the same problem with one Voodoo 1 MX card.

What bus speed are you running?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

What bus speed are you running?

Good question, I'm not sure so I'll have to check in a bit. I know the AMD AM5x86-P75 is running at its default speed of 133Mhz so I'm assuming a 33mhz bus speed.

Stojke wrote:

Im pretty sure thats memorry issues.

I been thinking that to but if it were wouldn't all games look messed up? Tombraider, Quake, etc 3D games look just fine, 2D games also look fine. I'm not sure how many megs of ram the cards have, I know there's 2 chip sockets that are empty on the board.

Same happened to me. Some times works fine, some times awesome rainbow of death.
Might be a cold solder joint.

So I just tried Build engine games with the S3 805 VLB card and the same issue, really weird for 2 separate VLB graphic card to have the same issue, so I'm thinking the problem may be in the M919 motherboard (it's a PCChips motherboard) or possibly its VLB slot is bad.

I checked for cold solder joints on the cards and everything looks fine.

Guess I'll know for sure once the Gigabyte GA-486VS motherboard comes. I really hope it's not the VLB cards.

Have you tried underclocking the FSB? It's PCChips so I wouldn't be surprised if it is finnicky even when not using high bus speeds.

alexanrs wrote:

Have you tried underclocking the FSB? It's PCChips so I wouldn't be surprised if it is finnicky even when not using high bus speeds.

Not yet. I might not tinker with that motherboard anymore since I'm expecting a better one soon, and will test those VLB graphic cards on it, hopefully successfully without them doing that weird rainbow of colors.

I have a Hercules Terminator 64 DRAM VLB based on Trio64 that also has funny colours *sometimes*. I assumed it was bad memory, but maybe the IC is bad somehow. It was the first S3 product with an integrated RAMDAC, so who knows.

Just a quick follow up. The Gigabyte GA-486VS board arrived today and the S3 Trio64 VLB and S3 805 VLB cards are working just fine and great without any rainbowing effect! Rocking Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, etc like a boss! 😎

So the culprit was definitely that piece of crap PCChips M919 v3.4B/F motherboard. Blech! 😵

Which 486 processor are you using?

Robin4 wrote:

Which 486 processor are you using?

Currently an Intel 486DX4-100 in that M919 I was using an AMD AM5x86-P75

Can you do some performance comparison between Trio64 and 805? I'd like to see Phil's benchmark suit done on the same platform but with different graphic cards. If possible also Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 with Winbench 3.11 and Wintach 1.0 - when and if you find the time 😉

kixs wrote:

Can you do some performance comparison between Trio64 and 805? I'd like to see Phil's benchmark suit done on the same platform but with different graphic cards. If possible also Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 with Winbench 3.11 and Wintach 1.0 - when and if you find the time 😉

I'll see what I can do, however I can tell just by eyeballing it, the S3 Trio64 VLB board is faster than the S3 805 VLB board in DOS, i'll have to try out Windows 3.11 WFW but i'll assume the same can be said for it as well.

kixs wrote:

Can you do some performance comparison between Trio64 and 805? I'd like to see Phil's benchmark suit done on the same platform but with different graphic cards. If possible also Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 with Winbench 3.11 and Wintach 1.0 - when and if you find the time 😉

Ok here's what I pulled from Speedsys.

S3 805 VLB 1MB - 4780 KB/s

S3 Trio64 VLB 1MB - 17841 KB/s

Thanks for the Speedsys... now I'm really interested in Windows performance as my VLB Tseng w32 has the same VESA speed and I believe Trio64 is the last gen VLB graphic card.

i have the very same problem with the m919 and the amd P75 (133mhz) cpu. with a trident card Vesa

everything looks ok,untill i run doom, the title menu and gaming looks with different colors. like inverted but the colors are all different
i tried lowering the mhz to 100mhz and got the same result.

i tried the card on another motherboard with a dx2 66mhz and the card works perfectly

i dont know what is the issue on M919, maybe a bios setting? or jumper setting i dont think so

The problem with my Trio64 VLB card (Hercules Terminator 64/DRAM) turned out to be cold solder joints, not a motherboard issue. Your issue is likely the M919. PCchips sucks!