VOGONS


First post, by Mattyice1994

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Hey Vogons,

I have been looking at Cirrus Logic cards mostly, and I haven't found much about the 5430 cards. I find a lot of 5428 (for instance), and part of me wants to make sure there's a decent following behind the chipset I choose.

Does anyone have one? I'm building a 486 machine, so I want to ultimatley choose a card that is VLB, well-performing, and compatible.

Thanks!
Matt

Reply 1 of 10, by The Serpent Rider

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Budget variation of high performing CL-5434. Something like S3 Trio32, all things considered. Should be more than enough for a typical 486 VLB. Even with CL-5428 it barely matters, with CPU bottleneck.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 2 of 10, by Anonymous Coward

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5430 should be identical to 5434 in DOS. Windows performance will be dragged down a bit by the narrower datapath (32-bit vs 64-bit on 5434), and the slower RAMDAC (more flickering if using a CRT).

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 5 of 10, by TheMobRules

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Mattyice1994 wrote on 2020-07-17, 01:35:

Thanks for the replies so far guys! Would it be a bad experience to use a 32 bit for Win.311?

Are you planning to use any demanding applications in Win 3.11? In any case, the 5430 should do memory interleaving in Windows when equipped with 2MB of RAM. So if you are concerned about performance in Windows you can upgrade the video memory to close the gap with 64bit cards.

For DOS games, as mentioned above, there should be only a few FPS of difference with "high-end" VLB cards, regardless of memory configuration since the 486 CPU will be the limiting factor.

Reply 6 of 10, by kixs

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Like Trio32 the 5430 also doesn't use memory interleaving. That's why it's much slower then Trio64/5434 in Windows. This isn't an issue in DOS.

For best DOS/Windows experience I usually recommend S3 864 or better.

Requests are also possible... /msg kixs

Reply 7 of 10, by Anonymous Coward

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I think in Windows at 640x480 and 800x600 there shouldn't be much issue.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 9 of 10, by Mattyice1994

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I appreciate the info so far guys.

Another question, I've been looking up about what RAMDAC is, since Anonymous Coward mentioned it.

Do you guys have a preference for an integrated vs. external RAMDAC? I don't have a monitor yet, but eventually I would like a legit CRT to use. That being said, I'll probably hook it up to some sort of LCD in the meanwhile. How would the color vibrancy and actual brightness be with integrated vs. external?

Reply 10 of 10, by darry

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Mattyice1994 wrote on 2020-07-17, 05:43:

I appreciate the info so far guys.

Another question, I've been looking up about what RAMDAC is, since Anonymous Coward mentioned it.

Do you guys have a preference for an integrated vs. external RAMDAC? I don't have a monitor yet, but eventually I would like a legit CRT to use. That being said, I'll probably hook it up to some sort of LCD in the meanwhile. How would the color vibrancy and actual brightness be with integrated vs. external?

That will likely be affected more by RAMDAC frequency and quality rather than whether it is external or not, AFAIK .

EDIT: That said, certain cards, from Matrox for example, that were prized for the quality of their output used external RAMDACs until a certain point in time where a high quality RAMDAC was integrated into the main chip .