I fear that even if you find one its going to come with an equally rare price tag to match its equally rare status.

You could try contacting the fellows over at the VGA Museum .. maybe they know of collectors who posses these ECS cards who could possibly have spares or know where to find them.

There's a Gigabyte Local Bus VGA on eBay right now selling for 350€. Oddly enough, a Gigabyte motherboard sporting the same proprietary local bus is selling on eBay only for 200€!

Also, I'd love to see a picture of all the three cards produced for this local bus. I remember seeing the ECS VI-833 around here but not the other one based on the ET4000 nor the one based on the S3-911

MSxyz wrote on 2024-04-06, 15:35:

There's a Gigabyte Local Bus VGA on eBay right now selling for 350€. Oddly enough, a Gigabyte motherboard sporting the same proprietary local bus is selling on eBay only for 200€!

Also, I'd love to see a picture of all the three cards produced for this local bus. I remember seeing the ECS VI-833 around here but not the other one based on the ET4000 nor the one based on the S3-911

580 AUD ..almost as bad as a Voodoo5 price wise.

ECS variant: ECS Local Bus VGA card artifacting
ecs gigabyte: GA-486SA: RARE EISA + VLB, or proprietary local bus slots?
opti: OPTi Local Bus variants
best thread combining all variants Pre-VESA Proprietary 32-bit Local Buses?

There is probably dozen people in whole world with different incompatible Local Bus boards looking for a graphic card. I dont see a reasonable point* in recreating a card for any of those variants, and that comes from someone who recently recreated Cache module reusing VLB connector for very obscure motherboard for maybe 3 people to ever make and use one! 😀

* cache module is easy, few super cheap in $1 range SRAM chips an you are done. Graphic card requires many more reverse engineered connections, fully documented graphic chip ($30 Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428?), and hope you get all the details right. Here is Madao taking two years and still not getting it fully right, and he was doing ordinary VLB card S3 ViRGE VLB project (or " Making a Concurrent for Creative 3D Blaster VLB" )

Aww... I'll have to find a faster ISA card then! 😀 I could clock the ISA bus to 10MHz or even 12.5MHz to squeeze a bit more bandwidth, but I'm not a big fan of running things out of spec.
Yet, this was the best one could buy in the PC world in late 1991, and a system like this remained top of the line until the 486DX2 and local bus debuted a year later.

Imaginge, how fast it would go with an upgrade.
Am5x86 50x3 150 MHz with 3,3 Volt adapter.

Disruptor wrote on 2024-04-08, 17:22:

Imaginge, how fast it would go with an upgrade.
Am5x86 50x3 150 MHz with 3,3 Volt adapter.

Well, my intention was more to reproduce the fastest PC available in mid 92. This comes quite close, the only element missing is a card using the ECS local bus. The Genoa Systems 7900 is plenty fast for an ISA card (even among the classic ET4000's it's probably the fastest), but no doubt I could squeeze a few fps more in Doom with a card that is not constrained by a 16 bit bus running at 1/6th of the speed of the processor bus. The rest is already pushed (almost) to the max that the BIOS allows. The 60ns memory runs at 0 WS (the board came originally with 70ns DIMMs that needed 1WS for the system to be stable), cache runs at 3-2-2-2 but even switching the original 20ns chips with 15ns ones, I couldn't get a stable system at 3-1-1-1. One thing I noticed is that the board doesn't provide a switch to add a wait state when the local bus operates at more than 33Mhz, nor there's an option in the BIOS. Either the timings are more relaxed by default or the single slot placed close to the CPU allowed paths short enough that a well designed graphic card could operate without problems at 50MHz even adding extra wait states.

Ye. A DX-50 is also cool.
I just wanted the numbers for comparison - also to some setups from my own.

I don't expect to get a contemporary system to get 2-1-1-1 @ 50 MHz.
Perhaps my pal mkarcher can get his work on a Biostar UUD to get 2-1-1-1 @ 50 MHz working, but it is a lot of work.

Since FX3000 has practically a VLB slot with different pinout, it's probably easier to mod the board or make a ribbon cable to make it electrically compatible with regular VLB cards.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-04-09, 06:54:

Since FX3000 has practically a VLB slot with different pinout, it's probably easier to mod the board or make a ribbon cable to make it electrically compatible with regular VLB cards.

You suggest to somehow adapt a local bus connector on a system that runs stable at 50 MHz FSB?
He has a matching graphics card, I would not change that system.

His 36 MB/s to the graphics card is unrivalled.

Disruptor wrote on 2024-04-09, 07:12:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-04-09, 06:54:

His 36 MB/s to the graphics card is unrivalled.

I believe the bandwidth reported by SpeedSys is not correct. Vspeed reports 6639 KB/s during writes to the frame buffer which is very good for a card on an ISA bus running at 8.33 MHz (ISA bus takes 2 cycles per transaction). EIther speedsys measures the internal bandwidth of the VRAM, or writes to a virtual framebuffer located in the main memory.

ISA does not work at 50 Mhz. It most likely works at 16 Mhz on that board.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-04-09, 08:04:

ISA does not work at 50 Mhz. It most likely works at 16 Mhz on that board.

It works at 8.33 Mhz and the divisor can be set from the BIOS. (CPUCLOCK/6). The board has a single 50Mhz crystal on a socket. Like many early boards, if one wants to mount a different CPU, he also has to change the crystal, there's no PLL or clock synthesizer, hence the settings in the BIOS. As a fallback option, it's possible to select 14.318MHz/2 from the system crystal.

I have an ECS SL-486E EISA board paired with the VI-833 which is the ET4000AX-based local bus graphics card. Interestingly the card itself is basically a Genoa 7900, uses the same BIOS and drivers. The card has a jumper to be able to run at 50MHz FSB, otherwise it doesn't work, so that probably adds a wait state.

At least on a DX-50, this card won't get you a lot more performance than a well-tuned ISA version (like the one you have), on my board I get around 22FPS in Doom and it seems to be stable at 50MHz FSB with DRAM set to "Slower" and cache timings 3-1-1 with the original 20ns chips, but it doesn't make a lot of difference. My board is quite picky when trying to run fast ISA cards with 0WS and/or overclocked ISA bus, I need to add wait states and slow things down or it won't even POST. So in that sense the local bus seems to be useful to me as I haven't got nowhere near your numbers with regular ISA cards.

I would also be interested in trying the S3 variant for the ECS local bus (VI-911) but as you have noticed these things are really uncommon. I was lucky that the seller I bought mine from had listings for both the card and the motherboard even though they were listed as "VLB" (and quite cheap for how rare they are!). Fortunately he mentioned that they were both working, so that meant that he tested both together, otherwise if he had used a regular VLB card on the board (or the ELB card on a VLB board) it would have been a disaster.

Oh, you may want to check this post, I don't think it was linked above.

TheMobRules wrote on 2024-04-10, 00:06:

Oh, you may want to check this post, I don't think it was linked above.

Thanks. I did read that post before.

According to the posted benchmarks, my motherboard is performing more or less the same; I'm getting slightly better scores with real life applications (Doom, Quake) and slightly worse in some synthetic benchmarks. Note that he's using a different ECS motherboard (there is one like that on sale on eBay now from a German fellow), with a different bios (options are different) and I was able to operate 60ns RAM at zero wait state at 50Mhz. (My board originally came with period authentic 70ns SIMMs that wouldn't allow me to go below 1WS). I believe my ISA card is also faster both than his generic ET4000 but also than his WD90C31, which is usually considered among the fastest ISA VGA cards.