Yeah, those are standard 256Kx16 FPM chips, same as most video cards of the era used.

Those are just regular 256kx16 FPM DRAMs. Very common.

The chips I ordered have arrived. They are the chips that go in to the Diamond Speedstar64 card. There are 2 empty sockets on this 1mb card. If these sockets are filled with 512kB chips, it should upgrade it to 2mb. And it works! The BIOS POST now displays 2mb for this card. 😀

The 2 chips have NEC -bla bla- 70 written on them.

That was nice and easy. It should be rather significantly faster now, since you've got the full 64-bit memory bus available... gonna run any tests with the change?

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

That was nice and easy. It should be rather significantly faster now, since you've got the full 64-bit memory bus available... gonna run any tests with the change?

Yes of course! 😁 What would you suggest? WinTune 97 inside Windows 95, perhaps? Or would WinTune 2 inside Windows 3.11 be just as good? Any suggestions, and I'll be happy to run 'em!

Any of the Windows benchmarks should show a pretty good boost, so I'd say just rerun whatever tests you've done before just for comparison's sake.

But I'm actually a bit more interested to see what it does for unaccelerated DOS performance... I've never seen an actual comparison between 32 and 64 bit configurations on a card in DOS mode.

I doubt the ISA bus is fast enough to make a difference.

For DOS, I ran 3DBench 1.0 before and after the 1mb "transplant", and I get the same score: 18.8, if I set the mobo to "insane performance". I'm just about to run WinTune 97 inside Windows 95...I'll report back in a bit.

I'm just messing about with screen resolutions, and bus speeds. I tried to set the screen res to 1280x1024, but the monitor went "out of range", so I'll just stick to 1024x768. Would 256 colors be a good depth for WinTune, or would I get more interesting tests at a 16-bit color depth?

Well, the higher the resolution and color depth, the more the memory bandwidth will matter. However, as Anonymous Coward mentioned, I'm not sure at what point you'll run into a bus bottleneck, but there probably will be a bottleneck at play here... this would certainly be a good card for testing the performance scaling of higher ISA speeds.

I'd expect the effects of the ISA bus would be lesser in Windows than in DOS, being that the Windows mode uses a certain amount of behind-the-scenes voodoo in its acceleration methods, whereas DOS is pretty much straight 'bus-to-buffer-to-monitor'. So it'd be completely conceivable if there isn't any performance difference outside Windows.

Thanks a lot for the info people. I ran WinTune97 inside Windows 95. I'm using 16meg of RAM. I've discovered that these Contaq mobos are a bit temperamental. Today, it will only boot up Win95 using the /8 bus speed option with a 100 MHz osci. So, with that in mind, here's 2 screenshots. The first is 1024, and the second is 640 resolution.

I recall getting about ~4+ MP/s at 1024 resolution with the ATI 8514 Ultra card.

Does this sound like FPM 512kb chips?

(Motorolla) MCM34260AJ70
HCHCH6E9519

Placed inside a PCI Tseng Labs ET4000/W32P

ON ebay I could buy a bare Speedstar64 with 2meg or a boxed speedstar64, I would prefer the boxed version, so the sentiment is this type of memory is easy and cheap to come by?

Is this ISA VGA card worth getting? (ebay item, ATI with chipsets = 38800-1 and 28800-6). Thanks for any advice!

I have one of those, it's the ATi Graphics Ultra. It's basically a combo of an ATi VGA Wonder 512K for DOS, plus a 1MB Mach8 (same as your 8514/Ultra) for Windows acceleration.

I like it. It seems to be quite fast all around, at least as far as ISA cards go. But that seems a bit pricey for it, when you count shipping, and I'm not sure if it'll gain you much over just using your existing 8514/Ultra paired with an ET4000 or something... unless you want to save an ISA slot.

Thanks a lot. I really like the 8514/Ultra card, and so I bought this card because it saves an ISA slot, and these things are beginning to get hard to track down, so it's probably a wise idea to get it. I'm all done now with VGA ISA cards. When I say done, I mean done buying them. I'm still going to test them all again, and do some kind of group comparison some time in the future. Something a bit like Mau1wurf1977's thead perhaps.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

Speaking of interesting and uncommon pieces of history, I was browsing eBay today and ran across a very odd variant of the 8514 Ultra... an ISA/Microchannel combo version.

I never knew such a thing existed...

me neither....

let's just hope some idiot doesn't try to cram it into a PCI-E slot 🤣

If you're going to get another ISA card, get a Mach32 or Mach64. However, I don't know that you're really missing much. The CL5434 should be pretty much as good as it gets.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

If you're going to get another ISA card, get a Mach32 or Mach64. However, I don't know that you're really missing much. The CL5434 should be pretty much as good as it gets.

Cheers!
I'll keep mine very safe then 😀
I tried looking for the Mach64, but it's just not worth it to me, financially, to purchase one.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

Holy crap that's expensive! Hell, that thing would double the value of most of the systems I'd be connecting it to. 😳

I think I'll be sticking with the grungy old cables I already have...

I've just spotted these IXOS 3 metre VGA cables again on ebay. The seller is practically "giving them away", at just £6 each (that's about 10 US dollars), with free shipping to within the UK. The seller does ship internationally, and it says on this advert "Overseas - email for quote."

I've just weighed one of the cables, which comes in a thin light bag, and it comes to ~570 grams, or 0.570 kilograms. I guess it only needs a "padded mailer envelope" to go in to. They don't weigh much. I guess the total weight will be comfortably under 1 kilogram.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

It seems that Paradise card is only 256kb. We'd need to know what chipset is on that card.

It uses the PVGA1B chip... I think more commonly called the WD90C00.

Those things were available in two versions, 256K and 512K. The 256K version has open sockets to upgrade the memory, though 64kx4 memory chips are a bit difficult to come by these days. The '1024' in the model name just indicated its support for 1024x768 resolution.

I see that this Paradise card I bought has the PVGA1B chip, as you say. Do you happen to know if this Paradise card is supposed to be fully EGA/CGA compatible? Thanks a lot.