I found a S3-805 1 MB one NIB for ~$30 on eBay, and while not the fastest it is very compatible with old titles and quite good for an "all around" 486.

I have seen one Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 and one S3-805 and one Trident TGUI9440 which one should i pick?

.legaCy wrote:

I have seen one Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 and one S3-805 and one Trident TGUI9440 which one should i pick?

I own the TGUI9440 and 805 cards. Trident is quicker in most benchmarks however its windows drivers corrupted Windows so I suggest either S3 or Cirrus.

Trident 9400CXi, since it's the best (AFAIK) of the Trident VLB cards. The latest drivers should be available from Vogonsdrivers, since I shared them in the drivers thread some time ago, and should work fine with Windows 3.x.

I am using a 1mb S3-805 1mb on my Amd486dx2-80.
In real life experience, I have no real issue with this.
Works good, and never lets me down. Solid card.
People often say Cirrus Logic, though the 805 is better
than something like 5428 or 5430. And a strong VGA
signal too. Nearly no vertical spaghetti lines on LCD.

Cirrus logic is great for ISA only and great as a 5446 PCI.
On a CRT, you can go for CL cards. On flatscreen they suck.

I use a Diamond Multimedia Stealth SE with an S3 Trio32 chip on the card with 2MB of video memory (upgraded from 1MB) Honestly many cards from Cirrus Logic, S3, Tseng Labs, and SOME ATI cards are all worthy options. I'm partial to S3 and ATI. Trident is not often a great choice due to the often poor performance record of their cards, but if you can find one on the cheap (honestly it normally comes down to money) I'd say shoot.

In my upcoming Pentium Pro rig I am using an Ati MACH 64 2MB, which isn't a terrible card by any means, although it's not the most awesome option.

I'd look on Wikipedia, or look around different computer part index sites for specs and specifics on each card and chipset, and I would also check out benches and real world tests too. It's not too much different from looking for a card today.

They will work great with sim city 2000 and more demanding 486 era games right?

.legaCy wrote:

I have seen one Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 and one S3-805 and one Trident TGUI9440 which one should i pick?

I would go with cirrus logic CL-GD5428 (its a very fast card compared with the s3-805.(S3 is more an entry level graphics card) The trident is more like a budget VLB card, but its better then nothing and faster then a ISA card.

How is CL GD5428 not an entry level card? The S3 805 was always held in very high regard, being one of the first DRAM based cards to offer graphics acceleration.

Do you have any benchmarks to show that the CL GD5428 is faster than the S3 805? I would have thought in the worst case they should be equal. I do not have a VLB version of the 805 for testing, but my tests with a VLB CL GD5429 did not show that card to be anything special. The S3 Trio64 VLB I have is the fastest DOS VGA card I own.

Btw the price difference that i have seen is minimal and the Cirrus Logic is NIB while the other options that i have available to buy aren't .

Robin4 wrote:

.legaCy wrote:

I have seen one Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 and one S3-805 and one Trident TGUI9440 which one should i pick?

I would go with cirrus logic CL-GD5428 (its a very fast card compared with the s3-805.(S3 is more an entry level graphics card) The trident is more like a budget VLB card, but its better then nothing and faster then a ISA card.

I got higher score on an S3-805 than on a CL-5428. I think the difference was somewere between 4 or 6 or something like that using 3D-Bench. On the testmachine (Amd 486dx2-80), Doom was a bit sluggish with the CL-5428 whenever I turned around and going forth/back. When I ran it with my S3-805, I got a butter smooth experience, except for a very very very few places in the game. As I have mentioned a ton of times here on Vogons, the S3 have a minimum or nearly invisible speaghetti lines on a CRT/TFT, as were any CL VLB cards that I have tried (5425, 5426 and 5428) makes really visible lines on all flatscreens. CL cards however have more vibrant colours. And with an CRT and a fast enough CPU, a CL card is good enough for dos gaming. I just don't expect anything more demanding than Doom, to be used on any VLB cards. For stuff like Duke3D, then go for a PCI 486 system or a Pentium.

I google search spaghetti lines and got a bunch of dress on image search.
Well i dont wanna my doom with dress.
Just kidding, what is spaghetti lines?

Spaghetti lines are vertical white lines. Sometimes they are more visible than on other cards. They usually come from the monitor not being able to handle the video signal frequency and tries to compensate by displaying a resolution in another resolution. That is how i understand it. Yet I do not fully understand why. I only know of the result all too well. Usually they come, when trying to use pre-pci cards. Yet fully gone, when we get into AGP era stuff. CRT can handle many more resolution modes than LCD/TFT.

The following cards are the ones I have seen with spaghetti lines allmost not present (faint lines, not gone) and cards I can live with.

- Spea S3-805 VLB.
- CL-5422 16bit ISA with big chunky ram chips.
- ET-4000eax 16bit ISA noname/maker unknown.
- ET-3000 8bit ISA noname/maker unknown.
- CL-5446 PCI noname/maker unknown.

Cards that are horrible with extremely visible lines:

- All cirrus logic VLB that I have tried.
- CL-5430 PCI.
- ET-3000 16bit ISA.
- Trident 8900a 16bit ISA.
- Trident 9000c 16bit ISA.

As you can probably see. It all depends on what specific card there are dealt with. It is a kind of hit and miss game. And even the monitor has some influence as well.

My samsung 172-something are sensitive to this as were my IBM are better. Yet the samsung does not go into sleep mode on some ISA cards. The IBM does. However if I use a signal booster/splitter that in reality is a device wich you can use to get the same signal out on 4 monitors (same picture on each monitor) it will have the signal active all the time. What is going on, I do not know. I only know how to deal with it. The technical part is unknown to me.

Ampera wrote:

Trident is not often a great choice due to the often poor performance record of their cards, but if you can find one on the cheap (honestly it normally comes down to money) I'd say shoot.

Trident 9400CXi. Should work entirely fine with most period games, with none of the problems often described on these boards regarding Trident cards.

It's harder to find than the other Trident cards.

brostenen wrote:

My samsung 172-something are sensitive to this as were my IBM are better. Yet the samsung does not go into sleep mode on some ISA cards. The IBM does. However if I use a signal booster/splitter that in reality is a device wich you can use to get the same signal out on 4 monitors (same picture on each monitor) it will have the signal active all the time. What is going on, I do not know. I only know how to deal with it. The technical part is unknown to me.

Perhaps it's pin 9 on the VGA cable. Had an standby/signal issue with a screen/video card combo when not using a KVM switch. Turned out the KVM VGA cable had pin 9 (powered?) and my regular VGA cable did not. Getting a VGA cable with pin 9 solved the issue.

yawetaG wrote:

Ampera wrote:

Trident is not often a great choice due to the often poor performance record of their cards, but if you can find one on the cheap (honestly it normally comes down to money) I'd say shoot.

Trident 9400CXi. Should work entirely fine with most period games, with none of the problems often described on these boards regarding Trident cards.

It's harder to find than the other Trident cards.

That's the thing. I don't doubt Trident made alright cards, but it's easier to find something like a Trio32 or the like.