Trident 9440-3, is it rare? \ VOGONS

Trident 9440-3, is it rare?

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First post, by waterbeesje

Posted on 2024-05-28, 15:21

waterbeesje Offline

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In the bottomless box of interesting untested stuff I found a shiny little pearl: a PCI VGA decelerator with the Trident TGUI 9440-3 chip on it. I like Trident for no obvious reason, so had it for a little run on a Celeron board and it seems to work fine.

A little internet search gave me the obvious Wikipedia link.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_Microsystems
It states the 9440-3 is supposed to be somewhat rare?
I know it's wikiwisdom that everybody can contribute to, so can you point out if it is rare indeed?

I'm gonna keep it anyway so if there's nothing special about it, I'm fine 😀

Stuck at 10MHz...

Reply 1 of 7, by Grzyb

Posted on 2024-05-28, 15:55

Grzyb Offline

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I quickly found one listed for sale, so I guess not that rare...

Kiełbasa smakuje najlepiej, gdy przysmażysz ją laserem!

Reply 2 of 7, by the3dfxdude

Posted on 2024-05-28, 17:32

the3dfxdude Offline

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Tridents were common SVGA cards in the 90s. It seems strange to label one rev of a series of a common as beans card as rare. It's probably not really any different than the others.

Reply 3 of 7, by waterbeesje

Posted on 2024-05-29, 18:25

waterbeesje Offline

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It's performance is no different from my other Trident 9440 (first version) and it looks and feels no special as well 😀 so possibly it's just a troll that altered the Wiki page.

Stuck at 10MHz...

Reply 4 of 7, by The Serpent Rider

Posted on 2024-05-30, 00:12

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From my observation, 9440-3 performs quite well actually, for what it is (budget chip from 486 VLB days). Trident probably die-shrinked the original 9440/9440AGi design and increased the stock clock through the roof. It can outperform S3 Trio 32 and Tseng ET4000/W32p.

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

Reply 5 of 7, by demiurge

Posted on 2024-05-30, 00:25

demiurge Offline

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It is fairly common compared to the 9440-2. I found lots more of them before I tracked down a dash-two for the vgamuseum.

https://vgamuseum.info/index.php/component/k2 … dent-tgui9440-2

Reply 6 of 7, by demiurge

Posted on 2024-05-30, 00:32

demiurge Offline

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waterbeesje wrote on 2024-05-29, 18:25:

It's performance is no different from my other Trident 9440 (first version) and it looks and feels no special as well 😀 so possibly it's just a troll that altered the Wiki page.

There are incremental improvements for each revision, dash-two added an integrated rom and I think dash-three added isa bus support for some reason.

Reply 7 of 7, by the3dfxdude

Posted on 2024-05-30, 01:21

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Or they were just differentiated because they made 3 variants for specific use cases.

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