On a SS7 board an older video card will likely work better. Phil has done a whole series on video cards for the SS7. Given that your board has no AGP slot though, you are going to be limited to PCI cards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md5Wl7t-VfI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmQnEdoZyh8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrWURKq6oIM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIPtTM456cQ

I would try something like Geforce2 MX400 or similar.

Hamby wrote:

I'm sorry I didn't get back to you, I didn't see your offer for some reason?

Ah, no worries - I was just razzing you. 😀

Hamby wrote:

So I'm guessing that video card is toast 🙁
Seeing what's being sold on ebay, seems a lot of the old 3DFX cards are dying.

Do you have a way to write floppy images to a disk? Typically, that's either through a more recent computer (XP?) that still has a floppy drive, or a USB floppy drive. (The latter might be a good investment if you don't have one. They still work in at least Windows 7.) The reason I ask is, I have a bootable Memtest86 floppy that I use as a stability test on every system as I'm assembling it. It's a RAM checking utility, but it'll give the whole local bus a workout on older machines, and confirm at least a modicum of sanity on Socket 7 and up. I use that more than any other floppy in my arsenal, I would say. Certainly helps narrow down problems or absolve the motherboard if in doubt.

Hamby wrote:

Can you advise me on an era-appropriate VGA card? I'll need 2D and 3D acceleration, OpenGL support, DOS and Win95 support.

In those days, 3D was just becoming a thing with the Voodoo, but I didn't get one until well into my Penitum II days with a Voodoo 3. Back then, I had a Cyrix 5x86 with a Matrox Mystique - a card I still have and now use in my Pentium MMX 166 build. It has kind of partial 3D support, but it's a great 2D card. If you want to go big for the late 90s, an ATI Rage 3D or TNT2 would be reasonable. IMO, a Radeon would be like putting racing tires on a Winnebago, but this place is kind of the safe house for people doing utterly insane things, so... you do you. 😀

In a 486, it really matters a lot less. You'll get a decent bump going from any ISA card to VLB or PCI, but you'll still cap out on CPU and bus speed pretty quickly. A Cirrus Logic 5xxx is a decent start, but far from the only option. The Oak card is likely to be s-l-o-w, but if you DO use an ISA card, more modern chips like a Tseng, Trident 8900, Cirrus, S3, etc. etc., pretty much all would be fine. At a typical DOS 320x240, there's not much daylight between them. In Win 3.x, that'll change a little bit, and you'll definitely want a local bus card, but it's still not night and day.

Looking on ebay for ISA video cards... wow they're expensive.
I may try to find a non-3d PCI card for my 486 (I shopped long and hard to find a 486 motherboard with pci slots as well as isa).

Surprisingly good prices on FX5500s. I know they'd be overkill for my system, but they're cheaper than many other 3D PCI cards that are less capable.

The Trident 8900D can be found for ~$30. I don't know what your threshold for "expensive" is, but for retro PC parts, that's about the level of the floor. 😀

This is a matter of opinion, so take it with a grain of salt, but I think of 486s as more of a VLB era. PCI got traction with the Pentium, and was only really available on the tail, tail end of 486 boards. I know others here do run PCI 486 systems, but I would expect that it's probably half-baked. I could be totally wrong.

There are lots of possibilities, but I think it's best to align the capabilities of components within a build so you're not wasting the potential, or bottlenecking something arbitrarily. So, for 386s, you've got ISA. For 486s, you've got VLB. For Pentiums, PCI. For PII and up, you've got AGP. The only downside is... well, if you think ISA cards are pricey, VLB options aren't going to look like a bargain. 😉 If you get really lucky and find a good, stable, inexpensive PCI 486 board, then you definitely have more options for video cards. Most of them make no sense whatsoever in a 486, but they'll work.

I really understand your rant.

I do not use IDE HDD on my retro computers, they just suck.

One thing I learnt on this forum is that power supplies go bad and destroy hardware, even when they appear to be "working".
So I built a makeshift power supply tester to be sure that a seemingly good PSU won't cook my rare old computers.
And so I learnt how bad PSUs actually are.

It is crazy how difficult it is to find good pre-AGP/pre-PCI mobos and cards nowadays.
At least 95% of the stuff one finds on ebay etc is crap that I won't ever have bought when it was new.

For example VGA... there are very few good VGA that can make more than 80Hz refresh.
The cheapo way back then was to overclock ET3000 or ET4000... but that needs a selected combo of card+RAM+DAC. Easy when they were in mass use, so I could just picked the best parts from a pile and put them together.
For this reason anybody who wants more than the 60Hz flicker on ISA nowadays practically only can use Spea V7 Mirage and Mercury. The first one is quite rare already, and it's not easy to find one with good RAMs equipped. The latter is almost unobtainium, I managed to find only one, and it turned out to be dead... I'll one day try finding out whether it's fixable.

Or the difficulty to find IBM 5151... so I had to mod a HGC for making it VGA compatible, because I need a mono card on my 486.

And then all that case and cooling tinkering to make that stuff fit safely and staying cool.

I think it is like with old cars: without good workshop, the results won't be very satisfying.

SirNickity wrote:

The Trident 8900D can be found for ~$30. I don't know what your threshold for "expensive" is, but for retro PC parts, that's about the level of the floor. 😀

This is a matter of opinion, so take it with a grain of salt, but I think of 486s as more of a VLB era. PCI got traction with the Pentium, and was only really available on the tail, tail end of 486 boards. I know others here do run PCI 486 systems, but I would expect that it's probably half-baked. I could be totally wrong.

There are lots of possibilities, but I think it's best to align the capabilities of components within a build so you're not wasting the potential, or bottlenecking something arbitrarily. So, for 386s, you've got ISA. For 486s, you've got VLB. For Pentiums, PCI. For PII and up, you've got AGP. The only downside is... well, if you think ISA cards are pricey, VLB options aren't going to look like a bargain. 😉 If you get really lucky and find a good, stable, inexpensive PCI 486 board, then you definitely have more options for video cards. Most of them make no sense whatsoever in a 486, but they'll work.

Well, most of the ones I saw were around $100US, which is kind of expensive. I've got an oak ISA card that's working, but I was saving it for my 286 (and I have a Vega Video 7 8-bit VGA card I'm saving for a someday XT build I hope maybe someday.) I did see a Cirrus Logic for $29, and a Trident TGUI9440 for $19. And I did find a few PCI 2D only-cards.

I'm also looking at very expensive (from $69 to $198) Aved AV550 and AV545 cards, which are cards that support interal LCD displays as used in lunchbox cases. I have a lunchbox case I've been wanting to use, but haven't had a video card that supports the LCD. The remaining problem is that I don't have a cable to fit the non-VGA port on these cards, to connect external video to the LCD, which I would want in order to connect a Voodoo2 to the Aved AV550/545 and on to the LCD. I may make a separate post asking for advice/information on these cards. I can almost afford the $69 AV545, but then I probably couldn't afford the 3D card I now need for this Win98 system.

(as the Voodoo3 seems to behave better after it warms up, I wonder if reflowing the solder in the oven would fix its problem?)

I could not understand. Can I plug an IDE disk in a computer that says it is expecting an EIDE interface.

tonata wrote on 2022-10-31, 20:15:

I could not understand. Can I plug an IDE disk in a computer that says it is expecting an EIDE interface.

EIDE was a marketing term usually used to describe drives & controllers that comply with ATA-3 & ATA-4, or UDMA/33 standards, and are almost always backwards compatible with original IDE, ATA-0.

So yes, you should be able to use an EIDE drive with an IDE controller.

Sometimes I get some problems trying to use late model ATA-5 or ATA-6 drives on early ATA-3 or ATA-4 controllers unless I force the controller to use "CHS" addressing in the BIOS.

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Storage# … _IDE_Categories