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Choosing a PCI graphics card for a fast 486

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First post, by NorsteinB

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Hi, I'm using the Gigabyte GA-486AM/S for an AMD Am486 DX2-66 running at a 100% overclock (66 MHz bus, 2x multiplier), and with the dividers the board provides, PCI and AT bus are still at stock frequencies.

My only divider choices for the PCI choices are 1 and 2, so I could raise the PCI bus speed to 66 MHz, but nothing between that and the normal 32 MHz. And the AT bus can only be set to PCI/2, PCI/3 or PCI/4 so that would mean nothing less than 16 MHz then, I doubt that would work with any other hardware I would want to use. At the very least it would make me fear for my sound card.

So anyway, I guess I'll have to leave the bus speeds at stock, but I still want the graphics to be as fast as possible with that CPU.

I have a few graphics cards at my disposal, even one with a Trio64V2/DX chip, but that one is an ELSA GLoria XL, it uses tons of space and since I still have a near mint box for it and all accessories, I would prefer not to run that one.
Either way, since the board has no VLB slots, it needs to be PCI.
Some other PCI cards that I have at my disposal:

ATI Rage Pro Turbo 4+4 MB
ALI(?) ALG2301
Cirrus Logic CL-GD54M30
Cirrus Logic CL-GD5440-J-QC-B
Matrox Mystique
Matrox Millennium II
Matrox Millennium G200
Nvidia Riva TNT 2 M64
S3 Trio64
S3 Virge
S3 Virge/DX
S3 Vision 968
Weitek Power 9100

Something tells me that my Radeon 7000 64 bit, Radeon 9000 128 bit and Geforce FX 5200 64 bit won't work on the board... I haven't tried yet, but I am scared of frying them so I probably won't.

Can you tell which one of my cards is the fastest, or suggest an easily available one to come close to or outdo VLB cards?

Reply 1 of 5, by MagefromAntares

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Hi,

Do you wish to use the cards under DOS or Win95 or both? I would assume DOS or DOS/Win95 by default as I like to pair Win9x only systems with at least a Pentium or in case of AMD an Am5x86, however a 486 at this clock speed should be capable of running Win95 acceptably. It would be easier to tell which one is ideal knowing the operating system(s) it needs to run with.

The Motherboard should have 5 Volt 32-bit PCI slots, so any card that can work with these specs most likely can be tried and benchmarked for performance. Also it has a Dallas RTC, so that should be either fixed with attaching a coin cell to it, like on the 3rd picture on the page that you linked, or replaced with a whole new Dallas RTC compatible module.

"A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it." - Dune

Reply 2 of 5, by Yoghoo

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Fastest in what? DOS, Windows 3.1x, Windows 9x? I think the difference will not be that big on such a CPU either way. I would personally more look into compatibility.

I have half of the above GPUs (and some others) and in the end I choose the S3 Virge/DX for an AMD Am5x86-P75. It's very compatible with DOS games, more than fast enough and has Windows 3.1/9x drivers.

If you want (for whatever reason) want to run Windows 9x than a TNT 2 would be better of course.

Reply 3 of 5, by marxveix

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S3 Virge DX for the DOS usage, i would use Rage Pro cards (Win3x support) but lowest i have used them are on K5-PR166 (107Mhz) and you cant play 3D games well on 486.

You could run some older 3d demos in Win95, but how would win9x 3d games run, probably below 10fps.

Last edited by marxveix on 2026-07-05, 17:29. Edited 1 time in total.

Best ATi Rage3 drivers for 3DCIF / Direct3D / OpenGL / GLUT / DVD : ATi RagePro drivers and software
33+MiniGL / OpenGL Win 9x dll files for all ATi-Rage3 based cards : ATi RagePro OpenGL files

Reply 4 of 5, by pyrogx

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PCI bus on 486 machines is somewhat ancient. This excludes some modern PCI cards which require PCI 2.2 compatibility.
Also, all PCI cards that require a 3.3V voltage won't work unless you mod your board.
Some Win95 drivers for newer PCI video cards don't work on a 486 machine.
Best bet would be S3 Trio64 or S3 Virge, they are the most compatible ones.

Reply 5 of 5, by NorsteinB

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I should clarify that I definitely won't run Win9x on the machine, and probably no Win 3.X either.

Basically, I know compatibility of the Matrox and ATI cards isn't great, I know the Cirrus Logic cards are highly compatible but I wonder about their performance relative to a Tseng ET4000 VLB, and I do not know how compatible OR fast the Weitek and ALI cards are, so I'm hoping there are some people here who can shed light on that.

Also it would be nice if a 2D speed ranking of the S3 cards existed, because there are so damn many different models that are only differentiated by a 2 character suffix and for some reason I believe many people say the Trio64V2/DX is the fastest for 2D DOS, while some of the cards that I believe are newer (but I might be wrong there) are slower.
Would be absolutely grateful for any info regarding the pecking order there.

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