Well another thought is that most newer hard drives have 8-16mb of cache on them anyway. A controller such as the: promise ultra133 tx2 http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=undefined&product_id=87 might be a good option then? I guess you could also go nuts and get a SATA …

I don't see anywhere in the 5400 review where it mentions that you can connect a pure3dII to it, or that it has the witchdoctor feature. Inspecting the pictures, the witchdoctor "reverse pass through" din connector isn't present on the 5400. Witchdoctor actually allows any voodoo to be connected to …

RE: the canopus cards and their pure3dII passthrough Are you sure the Canopus Spectra 5400 (or above) can do this? None of the reviews I've seen make mention that they can - even though most newer canopus cards have a 14 pin header on them similar to that used with the 2500.

I've been thinking how to get a bit more speed out of my 486 and have been considering a faster disk controller. I've been deliberating between either a fast scsi solution (not too keen on this due to noisy scsi drives) or a caching IDE controller. I'm hoping that using a caching IDE controller …

ok did some testing - both with and without univbe. Most of these results seem quite similar.. 9 seems to be a bit of a barrier, I guess I'll have to go to 40MHz bus to get any higher. 486 rig: AMD 5x86 133, Asus PVI-486SP3 rev 1.8 (bios 306), 32 MB FPM RAM. I upgraded the cache on my motherboard to …

I had a 5150 once.. it really is god awful slow.. like wait for keystrokes to be echoed to the screen slow. Maybe with a 286 board it might be tolerable though.

I think the amd chip works out faster in most benchmarks than the dx4, but I've got no evidence to back up what I'm saying atm. Univbe idenifies my ET4000/W32P as a w32p rev D (AGP)? It works despite this though.. not sure why yours does not.

Yes, I'm running an amd 133 (33x4). The write-back cache on these cpus probably gives it a small edge over the dx4. I ran univbe and uvconfig and got 8.5 with the et4000/w32p - a nice easy tweak for a significant boost.

wow! great set of benchmarks there. A score of 10 would be great compared to what I'm getting now. I upgraded my bios on my 486sp3 and improved to 7.3 with the et4000 card (only 2mb though). I've definitely got a few things to tweak - I'll try and post my own benchmarks once I do.

ran that benchmark and got an underwhelming 6.3 Guess I've got a bit of tweaking to do!

Here is the G200 TSR. http://grafi.ii.pw.edu.pl/gbm/matrox/svbe.html It's only alpha, but it does appear to work. In System Shock, the highest resolution which is still reasonably fast is 600x400, but I'm not sure I'd like to play the game like this. I suppose I'd be better off playing it under xp, …

Ran that utility then and mine is a rev c (old revision). I guess that isn't the fixed version then? So - given the trio is the card of choice.. which manufacturer would have the best implementation (fastest ram, best features, etc)? My goal is to get system shock running smoothly on my AMD 486 133 …

Thought I'd dig through my box of pci video cards and post a list of the different chipsets. Maybe you guys can give me your thoughts on why these are better/worse than the trio? ARK2000 chipset (hercules legend64,stingray 64) S3 Virge DX (diamond stealth 3d 2000) Tseng ET4000/W32P (A generic card - …

@Cloudschatze - cool, glad to know there was a reason behind this! @Great Hierophant - personally I'd build another computer for newer era games. I think it's best to run whatever was the best hardware for the day to get maximum compatibility. A geforce with a voodoo 1 seems a clear mismatch to me - …

I agree with you about the G100/G200 series of cards (they did not have a VESA compatible bios), but the Millenium II has been going pretty good for me. Granted, I don't use a lot of the CGA/EGA modes (I would probably build an earlier computer for this), but the I have had no problems in other …

I've also got an asus pvi-486sp3. What revision do you have and what revision are you upgrading from? I was under the impression that 1.8 the last (and best) revision - is this so? Also, why did you use a trio over a matrox card?

I don't think there are soundblaster clone chips on the MAX? Though it can emulate a variety of cards (it's roland emulation is pretty good actually). The MAX basically performs identically to the original GuS, but with more ram (up to 1MB), a 16 bit recording option and a cd interface as standard. …