Quite dubious store. It is identical to https://www.vgastore.com/vesa-local-bus and fails to implement their certificates properly.

Also shipping cost of ~$120 ?!?

Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead […]
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Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead

Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to www.tspire.com.

[...]

Web sites prove their identity via certificates, which are valid for a set time period. The certificate for www.tspire.com expired on 06/07/2016.

Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN

Regardless of price, I wouldn't trust that site with anything to do with money 😒

It is the same company based on the contact information provided.

They do list phone number and address.

Shipping would be $14.43 for me which is not out of line as fare as shipping goes with online stores like that.

Worst case scenario is that they don't ship anything and you have to open a dispute with your credit card company.

Whats so special about these cards, educate me since I legitimately don't know.

Rare and supposedly very fast (64-bit memory access). Latter is wasted on 486 anyway, due to poor CPU performance.

P.S.
Aaaand it's gone. Someone was really looking forward to pimp their 486 VLB system.

I own one and keep wondering why these are so popular.

They actually not that fast compared to other premium late VLB cards (like S3 Trio64, S3 Vision series, ET4000 w32/p). Neither in DOS nor in Windows (unless I used wrong drivers).

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-01-24, 03:07:

Rare and supposedly very fast (64-bit memory access). Latter is wasted on 486 anyway, due to poor CPU performance.

P.S.
Aaaand it's gone. Someone was really looking forward to pimp their 486 VLB system.

well I have a mach 64 PCI card somewhere, i used it before in windows 95 and it was super big time terrible. I didn't realize thats what thise thread was about until I wiki it. Should of known. No its not good in windows it can't even play Diablo 1 or Starcraft.

The only card that worth anything maybe is the EISA mach32 because its the best EISA card i heard. But not VLB.

All 3 gone... at those prices. wow.

Funny thing is there is1 company that makes new “vintage” graphics cards for about that price.

Ah well

mpe wrote on 2020-01-24, 09:07:

I own one and keep wondering why these are so popular.

People are just crazy about everthing VLB. The best VLB cards can hardly beat the worst PCI cards. Also, even "bad" VLB cards are way faster that any ISA card, so it doesn't really matter which one you use. There's not much point in spending lots of money for those that are sought-after. Just get a cheap VLB Trident TGUI 94x0 and you are good to go.

Funny thing is there is1 company that makes new “vintage” graphics cards for about that price.

New VLB cards?

I've been collecting VLB cards but I only buy them when I find them for great deals. I think I have either 3 or 4 different ATI Mach32 cards, a couple S3, some CL, and I think a Trident or 2.

Pretty sure I haven't paid over $35 a piece for any of them. There are very few video cards I will pay higher prices for. Even my high-end ISA cards I have mostly gotten in scrap lots.

Sound cards I'm generally willing to pay more for ones I am really looking for. Even then, I will not pay anywhere near the prices that are generally being asked for the more sought after cards.
If you don't count the LAPC-I that I traded for, I haven't spent over $100 on a single card... and the $100 was for a PAS 8-bit which is one of the cards I figured I would most likely never own.

Stores like this really irk me.

It's like the prices are set by a random number generator. Why else would a Physx PCI card be $1971.01?

I found a store last year that had a few things I was interested in but the prices were just stupid random numbers, so I emailed them to inquire about the items. I never got a reply. I contacted them through eBay (same items, same prices) three times and they never replied. And I contacted them through another marketplace and they didn't reply there either.

It's like there's an A.I. somewhere that is harvesting pictures of old computer hardware and listing it in a hundred different places online for random prices, just to terrorize people who are interested in such things.

I really love the one eBay seller that lists thousands of items and never puts pictures on them unless someone inquires about the item. They don't know a single thing about any of the items, the prices are all arbitrary numbers (dozens of cards will all be $79.44, others will be $112.38, and o thers $479.32) and there is no connection between what the items are and how they are priced. Half the time the title is all that they actually post, and it is generally just a random chain of letters and numbers that someone (another A.I.?) read off of the card... generally missing anything that actually identifies what it really is.

If they were making a killing selling things this way, I would just say "It's sad but I guess it works..."... but, these sellers aren't really selling much if you check their history. Why even bother?

Time flies but it wasn't that long ago that ebay was flooded with VLB cards and they were inexpensive. During that time I picked up a few VLB graphics cads I wanted to try plus a few VLB ethernet, caching controllers, and SCSI cards. I also picked up some EISA cards and finally snagged some EISA 486 boards some with VLB as well. I was also smart enough to get grab bags of VLB I/O IDE floppy controllers people were tossing.

Probably should have snagged more duplicates since prices seem to be going up but I think more like a collector part time hoarder then somebody looking for monetary returns.

Its true that early PCI graphics cards were much faster then most VLB cards because there was a big push for 2D gaming cards back then and higher true color resolutions along with higher refresh rates.

The quest for higher resolution never stopped but 2D got as good as it was going to get around the time Matrox Millenium 2 came about and then companies went for 3D which is still going on.

Anyway ATI cards were never that great for gaming anyway during the VLB era but they were good for Windows acceleration. Most gamers went for S3/Tseng/Cirrus Logic cards.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2020-01-24, 21:18:

If they were making a killing selling things this way, I would just say "It's sad but I guess it works..."... but, these sellers aren't really selling much if you check their history. Why even bother?

Ebay lets you list for free you only pay when something is sold. There are some people who buy from ebay and relist at massive markups and there are others that just crawl listings and list items they don't even have looking for people to buy it and then buy out another persons auction to deliver the goods at a healthy markup (no money tied up in inventory).

Unknown_K wrote on 2020-01-24, 22:22:

Anyway ATI cards were never that great for gaming anyway during the VLB era but they were good for Windows acceleration.

I had a VLB Mach64 when I built my 486DX2 in the mid 90s. It was SO FAST compared to anything I had seen at the time. (Which had been mostly ISA, and whatever my AST 486SX was using to connect its onboard graphics chip.) It was the first time I could play AVI files full-screen without dropping frames.

I recently found this card again online (and paid too much for it), and compared it to the handful of other VLB and ISA cards I have. It's the fastest of all the VLB cards I have in the (DOS-based) benchmarks I ran, but it's a photo finish. Basically, it all boils down to what you already know: PCI > VLB > ISA. Insert just about any card into the three categories and it stands.

As it relates to gaming... well, nobody was doing 3D graphics in Windows 3.1. Voodoo wasn't a thing yet. So if it could push pixels around quickly, it was good for gaming -- which it did, and it was. If you were playing multimedia games in Windows, the Video for Windows acceleration was pretty sweet, too. (Not that it was the only chip to have that capability, but it was the only one I had.)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2020-01-24, 21:18:

Why else would a Physx PCI card be $1971.01?

Washing cash?

Too complicated. "Charity" is better.

Performance VLB vs PCI with the same chipset and the same motherboard (486 VIP with 5x86-133) is the same. PCI isn't faster. Tested with ATI MACH64, S3 Trio64, Tseng ET4000/w32p.

Mach64 VLB is a great card. Good in DOS and very good in Windows. Plus most models can be upgraded to 4MB for higher resolutions. But it's pretty rare. I've only seen a few (4-5) on sale in the last 6 years. The same is true for the ISA card.

For DOS performance pretty much every VLB/PCI card is good enough. Performances can be different but not by much and you probably wouldn't even notice - unless you want the fastest thing around 🤣