Got my first "interesting" VLB videocard today — an ARK1000VL board.
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I have a couple of Cirrus Logic boards and an S3 805, but never saw any of the ARK/Mach/Trio boards locally. I know VLB benchmarks are a tricky issue as no one has enough hardware to make a comprehensive comparison, but looks like ARK1000VL is one of the fastest DOS cards for VLB.
486 is definitely not a practical choice for retro gaming, but for some reason I keep coming back to this platform. Maybe that's because I simply like stuff that was designed right before Win95/Pentium went mainstream. It's pretty fast, yet still not meant for "general public" — if that makes sense to anyone. There are still some relatively obscure jumpers everywhere, and you certainly need a lot of know-how to make things work — at least compared to your typical Socket 7 build. Someone once said on Vogons that a proper 486 will fight you every step of the way, and I think that's a good summary.
I think I'll pair this card with an Intel DX4/WB (or maybe even a DX4 Overdrive), an AOpen VI15G board, a GUS Classic clone and an AWE32 Value board (CT3910, the one that has OPL3 but no SIMM slots). It's gonna run DOS and WfWG.
BTW, are Asus VLB boards better that VI15G? I can get one, but it's not going to be cheap enough for an "impulse buy", so I'm figuring whether that makes sense. They both use SIS471 chipset, and the only major difference seems the absence of a PS/2 header on the AOpen board.