VOGONS


First post, by MSxyz

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Arrived today via mail. I was looking for an OPTi Local Bus video card since I obtained a BC3486UL 386/486 motherboard.

The card works (my biggest fear since it can be mistaken for an EISA card and, as such, somebdoy could have tried to insert it into the wrong slot). I was curious about its performance, so I ran a few tests. I decided to use, as CPU, a Ti486DLC with Cyrix 83D87 FPU running at 40MHz. For testing I used Wolf3D (286 edition with built in benchmark), DOOM 1.9 (screenblocks=10) and Quake 1.08 (Mode 0). I compared it to a Genoa 7900B (ET4000, ISA) on the same motherboard and a ET4000W32/p VLB on a Panda 386V motherboard. Same CPU+FPU combo in all cases.

The results are in the attachments. This card is faster than the 'queen' of ET4000 VGA cards, the Genoa 7900, albeit not as fast as a ET4000W32 on a VESA local bus. I don't think it's a bus problem; the ET4000 chip still has a 16bit interface, so even if it can work at higher frequencies (for example, 16 or even 20MHz ISA speeds are achievable) bus width is possibly the main limiting factor here.

I'm looking forward to test it with some 486s, although this motherboard is certainly not the fastest.

For sure, this is another 'worthy' addition to my collection of ancient PC oddities!

EDIT: in the results table, I forgot to add the maximum write speed in VGA mode 13h, as measured with VSpeed, for this video card. It's 14521 KB/s; more than twice as fast as the score obtained by the same chip connected through ISA bus.