ISA only, go Tseng ET4000, it should be a bit faster. Otherwise you are bottlenecked by ISA, if you want faster video, find a VLBus board. The Etherlink III uses a software utility included with the drivers to set the IRQ and I/O address in lieu of jumpers. It can also be used to disable PnP mode on the card as well.

To improve for Windows, particularly for move and scroll, you need a card which features windows acceleration (hardware Bitblt).
In Cirrus Logic, it came in with the GD5426.
In Western digital, it started with the 90C31
For Tseng the ET4000/W32 - the 4000AX is a fast DOS card, but is not a windows accelerator

Why not just change the IRQ for the scsi card, might be lot easier then buying an LAN NIC again.

See attached for the NIC drivers. You want to run 3C5X9CFG.EXE to setup the card's resources.

Robin4 wrote:

Why not just change the IRQ for the scsi card, might be lot easier then buying an LAN NIC again.

Tried that of course but the built in drivers in windows 95 will work with the default settings or nothing, as if they are not expecting the card in other irq than 11.
It's not that I'm desperate to make the ethernet work I'm sure in the end I will find a way.

What I would like to do now is to add an IDE disk as D or E drive, I have a multi I/O as primary, nothing connected apart from the diskettes and serial ports, I've tried with an IDE drive but if I set the drive as a slave and a master is not present is not being recognized. If I set the disk as Master, then the BIOS will try to boot from the IDE first instead of SCSI, any idea? I was thinking of setting the multi I/O as secondary, perhaps that will work though I won't have a Primary IDE.

Matth79 wrote:

To improve for Windows, particularly for move and scroll, you need a card which features windows acceleration (hardware Bitblt). […]
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To improve for Windows, particularly for move and scroll, you need a card which features windows acceleration (hardware Bitblt).
In Cirrus Logic, it came in with the GD5426.
In Western digital, it started with the 90C31
For Tseng the ET4000/W32 - the 4000AX is a fast DOS card, but is not a windows accelerator

I knew about certain CL, did not which one was, thanks for the tip.
What abouit those Realtek or Oak ISA ? or Trident 8900 ISA Edit: Trident 8900 is garbage, and possibly the others are no better.

I think the poster is complaining about the redraw performance under Windows, so the best way to speed things up there would be investing in a card that supports accelerated graphics. For ISA my top picks are ATi Mach64 or Cirrus Logic CL 5434. S3 cards are good too, but are harder to get for ISA bus. In light of the ISA card roundup, I don't think that either of the two cards I mentioned are going to be slower than Tseng or WD under DOS.

16/24-bit are going to be slow even on an accelerated ISA cards, just too much bandwidth is needed. But 8-bit will be fast. Tested on Win95 with 386DX-40 and CL-5429 2MB ISA.

16-bit is like 10x slower then 8-bit, but it's still faster then 8-bit on Trident 8900 😉

vmunix wrote:

I knew about certain CL, did not which one was, thanks for the tip.
What abouit those Realtek or Oak ISA ? or Trident 8900 ISA Edit: Trident 8900 is garbage, and possibly the others are no better.

The strength of Oak and Trident cards was only having the cheapest price, never the performance, so you most probably will not be happy with them. I have a SIIG CL 5429 with 2MB RAM and it works quite nicely. 24bit color was a luxury for that era, so I believe it will be probably not satisfactorily speedy in any case with an ISA card. I remember using 16bit color even with 4MB PCI S3 cards during 1994-1995. And the monitors that I had at that time only good enough (i.e. big enough) to show 800x600 reliably.

A Windows accelerator card like a later Cirrus Logic or S3 might help somewhat (e.g.: dragging windows around with visible content), but I agree with others that you might ask too much from your machine. No matter how fast the video card (and good ones are not easy to get for the ISA bus), there will always be situations where CPU/memory/bus speed come into play.

IMO Win95 feels sluggish even on my 486DX4 / S3 Virge system, so I use Win3.11 instead. 🤣

I can't speak personally for the CL 5434, but I can for the Mach64...despite being ISA, it's pretty quick even in 16-bit and 24-bit modes. They talk about this in an issue of PC magazine reviewing the Mach64 prototype cards.

I think with 20MB of RAM, Windows 95 should be fine on a 386 as long as you're not running games.

For the Etherlink III you have to configure it with the config tool on the cards disk for PnP, then you can change the IRQ in Win9x. If you go for non-PnP then you have to set the IRQ in the config tool.

For Windows you may try to get a Weitek P9000 based card. S3 Vision 82C928 would be another option. As already mentioned here BitBlt performance for 8,16 and 24 Bit may vary a lot with early WinGDI accelerator cards.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I think with 20MB of RAM, Windows 95 should be fine on a 386 as long as you're not running games.

In part that's the reason windows is still somewhat "usable", but hey I have not built this thing to use windows 95, it was fun though pushing it to the limit.

elianda wrote:

For the Etherlink III you have to configure it with the config tool on the cards disk for PnP, then you can change the IRQ in Win9x. If you go for non-PnP then you have to set the IRQ in the config tool.

I will try that for sure, using diskettes or burning cd-roms everytime is tiresome 😁

tayyare wrote:

The strength of Oak and Trident cards was only having the cheapest price, never the performance, so you most probably will not be happy with them. I have a SIIG CL 5429 with 2MB RAM and it works quite nicely. 24bit color was a luxury for that era, so I believe it will be probably not satisfactorily speedy in any case with an ISA card.

And that's the reason why at least where I live sighting anything other than those very very cheap VGA cards is super rare.
The problem with the CL 5424 I have is that even at 8bit color is slow and the CPU or bus is not a bottleneck, getting a 5429 or an Ati Mach are my choices then.

@vmunix

the battery on the mobo shows signs of leaking. Remove it ASAP!!!!

keropi wrote:

@vmunix

the battery on the mobo shows signs of leaking. Remove it ASAP!!!!

well spotted, thank you it is indeed starting to leak, I have not removed it because believe it or not it still holds a charge but I'm getting rid of it TODAY