You're going to solder the missing RAM back onto this card too? That's a lot of work. This card is not known for being terribly fast, are you sure it's worth your time?

The pads for memory is all torn up looks like somone plowed tool through each row of pads. Not worth the work to get this thing working.

Cheers,

The pads on right side for the 256x8 chips still look okay, but it looks like somebody used a dremel to cut the SOJ chips off. They might have sliced some critical traces while doing so.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-10-08, 00:23:

You're going to solder the missing RAM back onto this card too? That's a lot of work. This card is not known for being terribly fast, are you sure it's worth your time?

Old post, I know. I recently acquired and repaired one of these cards and it's actually remarkably fast. It falls just shy of the S3 Trio64 VLB.

You still need the bios? I got that card in my stash somewhere so probably can make an image if needed.

techweenie wrote on 2023-04-11, 17:01:

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-10-08, 00:23:

You're going to solder the missing RAM back onto this card too? That's a lot of work. This card is not known for being terribly fast, are you sure it's worth your time?

Old post, I know. I recently acquired and repaired one of these cards and it's actually remarkably fast. It falls just shy of the S3 Trio64 VLB.

What do you mean exactly with remarkably fast?
Can you give some benchmarks? Assuming you speak of DOS performance, so then phil's benchmark suite would be great:
Doom (fast PC), Quake, PCP 640x480, Chris benchmark 640x480?
Or at least throughput value of speedsys?

CoffeeOne wrote on 2023-04-11, 17:47:

What do you mean exactly with remarkably fast? Can you give some benchmarks? Assuming you speak of DOS performance, so then phil […]
Show full quote

techweenie wrote on 2023-04-11, 17:01:

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-10-08, 00:23:

You're going to solder the missing RAM back onto this card too? That's a lot of work. This card is not known for being terribly fast, are you sure it's worth your time?

Old post, I know. I recently acquired and repaired one of these cards and it's actually remarkably fast. It falls just shy of the S3 Trio64 VLB.

What do you mean exactly with remarkably fast?
Can you give some benchmarks? Assuming you speak of DOS performance, so then phil's benchmark suite would be great:
Doom (fast PC), Quake, PCP 640x480, Chris benchmark 640x480?
Or at least throughput value of speedsys?

Test system is a PC Chips M912 v1.7 with 512kb L2 cache and Award BIOS. CPU is Intel DX2-66 with 8MB 60ns FPM RAM. All timings are optimized and zero wait states enabled where possible. All test are default resolution because 640x480 is irrelevant on a 486 where these cards would be used.

1Video Card  VRAM  Interface  3DBench 1.0c  Chris's 3D   PC Player  Doom  Quake  Landmark
2S3 Trio64   2MB   VLB        50.1          57.8 / 34.7  12.3       2489  8.4    16661.69
3ALG2228.A   1MB   VLB        48            56.5 / 33.9  12.2       2514  8.3    13284.32
4CL-GD5429   2MB   VLB        48.3          51.6 / 31.0  11.9       2504  8.1    11988.29

techweenie wrote on 2023-04-11, 20:05:

Test system is a PC Chips M912 v1.7 with 512kb L2 cache and Award BIOS. CPU is Intel DX2-66 with 8MB 60ns FPM RAM. All timings […]
Show full quote

CoffeeOne wrote on 2023-04-11, 17:47:

What do you mean exactly with remarkably fast? Can you give some benchmarks? Assuming you speak of DOS performance, so then phil […]
Show full quote

techweenie wrote on 2023-04-11, 17:01:

Old post, I know. I recently acquired and repaired one of these cards and it's actually remarkably fast. It falls just shy of the S3 Trio64 VLB.

What do you mean exactly with remarkably fast?
Can you give some benchmarks? Assuming you speak of DOS performance, so then phil's benchmark suite would be great:
Doom (fast PC), Quake, PCP 640x480, Chris benchmark 640x480?
Or at least throughput value of speedsys?

Test system is a PC Chips M912 v1.7 with 512kb L2 cache and Award BIOS. CPU is Intel DX2-66 with 8MB 60ns FPM RAM. All timings are optimized and zero wait states enabled where possible. All test are default resolution because 640x480 is irrelevant on a 486 where these cards would be used.

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1Video Card  VRAM  Interface  3DBench 1.0c  Chris's 3D   PC Player  Doom  Quake  Landmark
2S3 Trio64   2MB   VLB        50.1          57.8 / 34.7  12.3       2489  8.4    16661.69
3ALG2228.A   1MB   VLB        48            56.5 / 33.9  12.2       2514  8.3    13284.32
4CL-GD5429   2MB   VLB        48.3          51.6 / 31.0  11.9       2504  8.1    11988.29

Hello,
Thank you!
The values look strange to me, because ......
I personally use a 486 (Am5x86) at 160MHz, and that seems to magnify the differences between lower performing cards and top cards.
The only benchmark that is really different seems to be Landmark, which I don't use.
Can you add speedsys 4.78 video throughput? It is not very accurate, so maybe do it 3 times for every card and take the average?
This thing is created at the start of speedsys, so it does not take much time!

EDIT: In case you don't know what I mean, here is a screenshot.
You don't need to wait for the memory test to be finished, please post only the graphics throughput.
It is here 27079 KB/s.

I recently get this card to my collection. According to my testing, in DOS the performance is really good, slightly better then Cirrus or S3 805. But in Windows 95, the GIU acceleration performance is much worse. So depending on usage, for DOS it is good, it has also very good VBE support. For Windows not so great- poor GUI performance and also just 1MB of VRAM. Generally Cirus is probably better choice. And also much easier to find and get 😉

I posted my card to The Retro Web: https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/spea … v7-vega-plus-vl
There is the BIOS as well as drivers.

All my testing and comparison of Avance with many other cards you can see there:
https://martesretrotech.substack.com/p/vlb-gr … ards-comparison

The 64-bit Cirrus logic cards were relatively good on VLB, but the CL-GD542x family was primarily designed for the ISA bus and used a 16-bit host interface. The S3-80x also used a 16-bit host interface. Neither of those chips are known for being particularly fast on VLB. So if the ALG card is slightly faster than either of those, it shouldn't be all that great, right?