Apart from the Compaq Qvision boards the ELSA Winner 1000 combo board is one of the/or the only common EISA graphic boards.
There are only few others, like MIRO Crystal 24, but these are hard to find (and were hard to find even 20 years ago when I started collecting).
Beware from these ET4000 Optibus boards looking like EISA but using the proprietary OPTI Local Bus.

Im sure you want every drop of performance for your DX2-66 but it’s my understanding there wasn’t much performance difference between EISA and ISA. Maybe not worth the cost or effort?

eisapc wrote:

Beware from these ET4000 Optibus boards looking like EISA but using the proprietary OPTI Local Bus.

Yes, but I'm looking for an OLB ET4000.

Coincidentally I just picked up an ATI Mach32 EISA card at a swap meet for about $1. I don't have any motherboards with EISA slots though so I have no idea if it even works. I always wanted a EISA board though, had no idea the ATI was that uncommon.

I have an EISA machine that I bought recently that has the ati mach32. I had no idea they were so rare and expensive

Here’s an image of the card in my machine, for sake of comparison:

And this is how a Graphics Ultra Pro (Mach32 EISA) including all the accessories looks like:

blurks wrote on 2021-02-04, 19:31:

And this is how a Graphics Ultra Pro (Mach32 EISA) including all the accessories looks like: […]
Show full quote

And this is how a Graphics Ultra Pro (Mach32 EISA) including all the accessories looks like:

I wish I had that manual. There is a bank of dip switches and I would love to know what they do

Hello, I have an "ELSA Winner-1000/XHG" video card (uses S3-924 chip with 2MB RAM ). It has both EISA and ISA-16 bus connectors on opposite long edges of the PCB and two VGA (DB15FM) connectors on the opposite short edges. May have the original user manual but would need to double-check. It's suprisingly heavy compared to its size, maybe because of the many SIPP RAM chips installed and the weight of the dual EISA/ISA16 bus connector? Best regards: Tamas Feher, Hungary.

My sincerest apologies for bumping a very old thread here, but I find this topic quite interesting and was wondering if anyone had any thoughts or advice on how to find EISA video cards. I don’t want to create a new thread, as my interest is much the same as slaynmage’s.

I’d like to know if it’s just me, or if there really are very few S3/Tseng/ATI EISA video cards available? Does anyone have any idea where the heck to find these cards and whether any are still floating around out there?

I do have a Compaq QVision 1024/E, but this seems to be one of the easier-found cards. I’ve scoured the usual sources and heard little back; this is strange to me, as it seems like there should be some out there. I am located in the USA—is that perhaps a barrier to sourcing these cards? Someone mentioned to me that they are more commonly found in Europe these days.

Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated! I’m quite interested in the characteristics of these cards and I’ve been planning a VL/EISA build that I think would be great for testing these and doing some comparisons. I’m also considering an EISA Pentium build and was considering something somewhat unconventional. I am a big fan of early Windows accelerator cards and EISA video hardware has always been intriguing to me.

When you are planning a VL/EISA build, add an EISA SCSI adapter (like the Adaptec 2740W or 2742W) and a VL graphics card.
EISA graphic cards are rare and VL ones are more common and faster.

Disruptor wrote on 2021-10-10, 20:59:

When you are planning a VL/EISA build, add an EISA SCSI adapter (like the Adaptec 2740W or 2742W) and a VL graphics card.
EISA graphic cards are rare and VL ones are more common and faster.

That’s definitely the plan for normal use!

I have been hunting EISA graphics cards as I’d like to benchmark them myself, and just generally explore EISA hardware. I own the ATI Mach32 in both ISA and VLB, and was hoping to find an EISA variant to do a cross-bus benchmark, and see just how well these cards perform in both DOS and Windows on their respective buses. I was hoping to do the same with S3 cards, like the 928 and 805/911/924. Truthfully, with how rare the EISA Mach32 is, I was planning on looking at S3 cards first, if at all possible.

And as an aside, and speaking of EISA SCSI hardware, I actually have a 2740W that I want to pit against an EISA DTC2290 IDE controller. I suspect the DTC2290 will lose horribly, but as is the theme of this build, I would like to really test out and feel out the EISA bus.

Thing is, when cross comparing the different busses, you really need to make sure that everything is running at the same exact speed on the cards themselves which is likely to never happen.

I have an ISA Tseng ET4000 card that has a jumper for a "turbo" mode which makes the performance of that card much faster than other ET4000 cards I have.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-10-11, 01:57:

Thing is, when cross comparing the different busses, you really need to make sure that everything is running at the same exact speed on the cards themselves which is likely to never happen.

I have an ISA Tseng ET4000 card that has a jumper for a "turbo" mode which makes the performance of that card much faster than other ET4000 cards I have.

You are very right. That’s not something I thought about (and I really should’ve), but the truth is that I’m quite interested in even roughly comparing these various buses. Plus, I guess I’ve sort of caught the EISA bug!

I think the EISA bus is pretty fascinating. It’s capable of ~33MB/s at 8.33MHz, which is pretty wild actually. I’d like to think that it’s comparable to VLB in some aspects, and that perhaps EISA graphics cards offer something decent for Windows acceleration.

Out of curiosity, I noticed my SpeedStar plus has this turbo mode. Do you have any idea what it’s enabling/doing? Benchmarks improve a good bit with it on.

I have the Mach32 in nearly all bus variants which were available (MCA and PCI excluded). Not getting much usage though, more or less just display items.

blurks wrote on 2021-10-14, 16:59:

I have the Mach32 in nearly all bus variants which were available (MCA and PCI excluded). Not getting much usage though, more or less just display items.

4.jpg

Whoa, what a gorgeous array of cards! I find it very interesting that the Mach32s all were advertised with the Graphics Ultra Pro on the box. The 8514 Ultra is an exceptionally cool card; I believe those used some sort of video passthrough over MCA, right?

The VGA Wonder XL24 is quite nice too! I find it quite funny how ATI had such gorgeous and distinct packaging for those cards, and yet the Graphics Ultra Pro was confusingly marketed.