Best choice for an ISA Video Card \ VOGONS

Best choice for an ISA Video Card

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First post, by pianoman72

Posted on 2007-03-17, 14:07

pianoman72 Offline

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Hello,

I have the opportunity to upgrade my ISA video card, currently a VGA Oak Technology with 512kb of video memory (installed in my old 386dx40 PC).

There are 3 choices which I'm looking at, but I'm not sure which one I should pick for best compatibility and performance with that system, and playing those early 90's games on it. Here are the choices:

TRIDENT 8900C SVGA ISA VIDEO CARD with 1 meg memory
TSENG ET4000 SVGA ISA VIDEO CARD with 1 meg memory
ATI VGA GRAPHICS ULTRA VRAM ISA VIDEO CARD (using the ATI 38800-1 chipset), with 2 megs memory.

It seems that I normally one should go for the card with more memory, therefore the ATI, however I have heard lots of good things in this forum concerning compatibility with the Trident and/or the Tseng as well.

I would appreciate very much hearing your opinions on it.
Thank you

Reply 1 of 5, by Kippesoep

Posted on 2007-03-17, 14:09

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The Trident and Tseng are the most widely supported. Of the two, the Tseng is by far the faster one, so I'd recommend that one.

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Reply 2 of 5, by pianoman72

Posted on 2007-03-18, 04:02

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Thanks, I will choose the Tseng card.

Reply 3 of 5, by 5u3

Posted on 2007-03-20, 11:24

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I second that. The Tseng is the best solution in this case, because the Trident is one of the slowest VGA cards ever made (about the same speed as the OAK you have now). The ATI would be the better choice if you're running Windows (3.x) or SVGA resolutions, but on a 386 you wouldn't have much chance to use these features anyways.

Reply 4 of 5, by swaaye

Posted on 2007-04-07, 21:03

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I used to have one of those Trident 8900C cards. They are really terribly slow in DOS. I don't know how fast a ISA vanilla ET4000 is, but a VLB ET4000/W32p is insanely faster than that Trident card. I actually "upgraded" from that Trident to a ISA Diamond Speedstar Pro (CL 5426) and it was way faster too.

Reply 5 of 5, by pianoman72

Posted on 2007-04-08, 00:18

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I got the Tseng card a while ago, and I am very happy with its performance in DOS 6.22, playing Wing Commander on my 386DX40. It certainly is quite noticeably faster than my previous card. You can't go wrong with this card, that's for sure.

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