What slots does your board have?

Board has 16-bit and 8-bit ISA, and plenty of them.

That might depend on what you are looking for.
Which of the following is important to you?
- Compatibility for DOS games
- Speed in DOS
- Speed in Windows 3.x (ie. GUI acceleration)
- installed RAM (unfortunately this is not specified in most of the auctions so one would have to guess from the pictures)

From personal experience I can say that the WD90c31 (aka Paradise) is extremely fast for an ISA bus. I'd say it saturates the ISA bus and will even profit from overclocking the ISA bus (I used to do this). Compatibility was fine, I can't remember a game that had obvious video glitches.
But this seems to be one of the more expensive cards.

A combination between speed/compatibility for DOS games is ideal.

The current GPU installed is....glitchty. I have noticed slowdowns in games (Jazz Jackrabbit), with a 33MHz CPU, and PLENTY of memory. I'd like to blame the GPU, since it's easy to replace.

Other times, the colors become rather psychedelic...along with visual garbage appearing on the screen.

Get a card with at least 512 kB and VESA 1.0x BIOS (or available driver) and min. 50 MHz DAC, min. 256 color DAC.
As idspispopd noted a PVGA1D is already quite good.
Other options would be a ET4000, a CL-GD5422 (like the AVGA3) or 5420, Trident TVGA9000i is probably also ok.

A bonus would be if the card has a HiColor(15/16 bit) or TruColor(24 bit) DAC with 66 or even 80 MHz, 1 MB Video RAM. You may need an extra utility for high resolution modes to enable 60 Hz.
f.e. for 1024x768 256 color SVGA mode default is 43 Hz interlaced, which no normal TFT will display.

Tseng ET4000 cards get my vote!

I think ET4000AX is the tseng ISA chipset, and it gets my vote too! Compatibility is good and it looks amazing compared to others I've tried.

What, nobody likes S3 805? What about the ATi VGA Wonder XL or 1024 series?

Was WD paradise really that good? I never liked the look of them.

for me, there are only two godlike isa video cards to be considered: tseng labs et4000 for dos, and ati mach64 for windows.

Trident 8900D, Trident 9000 are OK and can be found anywhere in surprisingly high quantities for (almost) free. Never had any trouble with them.

What makes the ET4000AX stand out? Is the 1mb VRAM standard on the original ISA model?

It's faster than all the others. All the ET4000AX's I've seen had 1mb.

silentwulf wrote:

What makes the ET4000AX stand out? Is the 1mb VRAM standard on the original ISA model?

It was legendary for being a very fast, for long the fastest, card for DOS gaming performance. Often recommended for games and therefore used by many game developers.

Wasn't the AX version the cheapest card of the 4000 series? Thought it was the 4000W32 versions that was the best ones.

The W32 is rarer as ISA version and Win32 GDI acceleration gives no benefit in DOS.

And ET4000 is fast but not the fastest. There are chipsets that are faster like the late Cirrus Logic chipsets.
Like the Spea V7 Vega: http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/v7_vega.jpg

Oh and Acumos2 chipset is also fast.

and how fast is the ati mach64 isa? its one of the latest isa cards, and probably the only isa video card with 4mb vram(that version is rare as hell though, i only have one with 2mb dram).

If you're doing stuff that required 4MB vram, I think you are using the wrong machine if you have one with only ISA slots 😀

So, back to reality.
Silentwulf wants to play DOS games with a 486-33. So most games would run in low resolution, maybe 640x480x8bit for strategy games or adventures.
So either 256kB or at most 512kB of RAM should be sufficient. I doubt that HiColor or TrueColor would be necessary, equally an especially fast DAC.
A Tseng ET4000 would of course be great of course.

Some comments on the cards in the Ebay search:

About those Realtek cards: I can't remember hearing about these but they seem to be legit. Can't say if they are good but they seem to be the cheapest. There is some information about these on vgamuseum.info so it might be possible to determine the exact models.

OAK: AFAIR somewhat mediocre, but not terrible.

UMC: Similar to Realtek. There is only one model listed on vgamuseum which has a slightly different chip designation but a similar design.

WDC: As I said those should be rather nice, and the WD90C11 (visible when zooming in the image) should be as fast in DOS as the WD90C31. (Compare http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/benchmarks/308-diag and http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/benchmark … tware-rendering.

@Anonymous Coward: Yes, the WD90C31 was very fast. On a 386DX-40 and 8MHz ISA bus a MOVSD loop would transfer roughly 8MB/sec to the card, when overclocking the PCI bus by changing the divider from /5 to /4 or even /3 the performance scaled proportionally (benchmarked it myself). At the time we had this card in our family computer I wasn't even aware how fast that was for ISA.
About S3 and ATI: Those cards are not in silentwulf's Ebay search, I don't doubt they are good though. Still their advantage is probably in GUI acceleration.

Cirrus Logic: Generally quite fast, though a CL-GD5401 like in one offer (again zooming into the image) is not at the top of the ISA cards. Check the actual model in the benchmarks.

Real Magic: I doubt that this is a VGA card, might be a special purpose card for MPEG, at least that's what I associate with the name.

Trident: Generally fine, although according to the mentioned benchmarks there seem to big speed differences in very similar named cards/chips.

ACUMOS AVGA1: Quite fast according to the benchmarks, but not at the very top.
CHIPS: Don't really know, but a very similar named card is at the bottom of the Quake 1 list.

ATI: The VGA 640 seems to be quite an old model and not very fast.

Sigma Design: Again I suspect an MPEG card or similar.

Creative Labs: This already says "Capture Card".

Quadcolor: Doesn't have a VGA connector, huge amount of chips, probably very old for TTL. Maybe even CGA.

Hercules: Monochrome card, not VGA. (All actual Hercules chips are
pre-VGA. They later built cards with chips from other manufactures.)

Blastronix: Don't know what that thing is, surely not a VGA card.

idspispopd wrote:

So, back to reality. Silentwulf wants to play DOS games with a 486-33. So most games would run in low resolution, maybe 640x480x […]
Show full quote

So, back to reality.
Silentwulf wants to play DOS games with a 486-33. So most games would run in low resolution, maybe 640x480x8bit for strategy games or adventures.
So either 256kB or at most 512kB of RAM should be sufficient. I doubt that HiColor or TrueColor would be necessary, equally an especially fast DAC.
A Tseng ET4000 would of course be great of course.

I just wrote HiColor and fast DAC would be a bonus, not that it is required. For SVGA 640x480 at 256 colors you need 512 kB on the card.
256 kB cards can do 800x600 at 16 colors, but thats already SVGA and not relevant for games.

I did some benches myself in 2007 with this results:

1::: Pentium 166 MMX on a VX Pro Mainboard.
2
3Duke Nukem 3D with DNRATE
4
5Karte              320x200         640x480        no stuttering with Keen4?
6
7V7 Vega      ISA    9              -              +
8http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/cl_vga.jpg
9
10Paradise PVGA1A ISA 23              -             +
11http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/pvga1a.jpg
12
13WDC90C11 ISA       32              9              +
14
15ET4000AX     ISA   14              3 mit VESA 1.2 von SC2000   +
16                                   3 mit UniVBE 6.70
17http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/et4000.jpg
18
19andere ET4000AX    32              9 UniVBE6.70   +
201 MB               34 UniVBE 6.70
21
22Trident
23TVGA 8800C 512kB   17                             +
24
25Papilio G1-2 PCI   37              9              +
26(Weitek P9100)
27http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/papilio_ultracad.jpg
28
29S3 Trio64    PCI   81              24             +
3086C764-P
31S3 Trio64    PCI   88              27             +
3286C764X
33http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/s3trio64.jpg
34
35S3 Trio64V+  PCI   83              23             +
36S3 Trio64V+  PCI   90              28             +
3786C765
38http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/winner1000.jpg
39
40Oak Spitfire PCI   66              21             +
41http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/oak_spitfire.jpg
42
43Ati Mach64   PCI   70              29 mit UNiVBE 6.70  -
44http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/ati_mach64.jpg
45
46ATI RAGE Pro   PCI  80             29             -
47http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/rageproturbo.jpg
48
49ATI RAGE 128   PCI  91             30             +
50
51Elsa Victory Erazor 84             32             +
52(Riva128 NV3) PCI
53http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/elsa_victory_erazor.jpg
54
55Avance Logic
56ALG2301.A           81             28 UniVBE 6.70 +
57http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/v7vega.jpg
58
59ALG2301.B           76             28 UniVBE 6.70 +
60

61ALG2564             90             32             +
62http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/gaia.jpg
63
64Karte              320x200         640x480        800x600    no stuttering with Keen4?
65
66Hercules Dynamite 128/Video
67TSENG ET6000 PCI    90             36             25         +
68http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/et6000.jpg
69
70Matrox Millenium
71MGA2064W PCI        90             34             22         -
72http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/matrox_millenium.jpg
73
74Cirrus Logic PCI    71             23             16         +
75GD5440 1MB
76http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/cl_gd5440.jpg
77
78Trident             65             25             17         +
79TGUI9440 1MB
80http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/tgui9440.jpg
81
82Cirrus Logic ISA    32              9              4         +
83GD5420 AVGA2 1MB    34 UniVBE 6.70
84http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/cl_gd5420.jpg                 
85
86::: AMD K6-III 166 MHz
87
88ET4000 ISA 1MB      32              8 UniVBE
89                    43 UniVBE 
90
91
92::: Core2 Duo 2.66 GHz on a nForce590SLI Mainboard
93
94Karte              320x200         640x480        800x600    no stuttering with Keen4?
95
96Hercules Dynamite 128/Video
97TSENG ET6000        404?           83             58         +
98
99Matrox Millenium
100MGA2064W            333?           71             46         -
101
102Elsa Victory Erazor 404?           89             57         +
103
104Weitek P9100 PCI     64            16             10         +
105
106GF7950GX2 PCIe      548?           145            99
107
108Spea Mirage P64     333?           80             49
10986C764X
110
111Spea Mirage P64     333?           80             49
11286C764-P
113
114Elsa Winner1000     333?           88             51
11586C765
116
117Diamond Stealth64/V 333?           76             47
11886C765
119
120AvanceLogic         333?           88             56
121ALG 2564
122
123Ati Rage128         333            60             30
124320x200 im VBE2.0 Modus: 70
125
126Ati Mach64          333            49             29
127
128Oak Spitfire        207            44             27

So early ET4000s are still slow, the PVGAs are overall good with increasing speed with Revision. Fullscreen Action at SVGA modes like 640x480x256 only for slow paced games as SC2000, as they reach only 9 fps in Duke3D.
I did this nearly 6 years ago, so the other ISA cards featured in my gallery are not in, but I could do some additional tests with vidspeed f.e. if requested.
For available cards follow the gallery link in my signature.