Just scalp needed amount from any common ISA card like Tridernd 8900D? Also times and times again was mentioned here that it's useless to upgrade 542x series to 2 Mb.

Won't it allow 1280x1024x16-bit colour in Windows? That's all I'm looking for.

I have a trident with socketed 80 ns chips, but the GD5428 VLB has 70 ns chips. Is 70 ns needed?

Sadly only 256 colours @ 1280x1024 with the upgrade and only interlaced due to maximum dot-clock of 80 MHz.

Wow, he really wasn't kidding when he said "useless". Looks like the best the card can do is 800x600x16 in non-interlaced mode, which it can already do with 1 MB. I understand why know this card was in a PC Chips motherboard.

They were good value for what they were...budget cards. I think CL must have tacked the second megabyte onto these chips just to tick a box on a spec list. ARK1000 is another card where the second meg is borderline useless.

just to make it more official:

Sounds like it is a better idea to scalp DRAMs from CL cards for the Trident rather than the other way around 😀

On the other hand there is a tiny benefit of using 70ns DRAMs instead of 80ns on 542x series as you can clock MCLK 5 MHz higher in extended RAS mode.

However, thats probably irrelevant as the acceleration features of GD-542x are very limited and thus this won't improve performance much.

haha, yup - I put the DRAM back into the Trident. I had one Trident with 80 ns, the other with 70 ns, and others were soldered. I only started using this 5428 Cirrus Logic card for setting up test beds. This way I don't have to use some of my now rare cards - Trio64, Mach64, & S3-968. I don't have very many VLB graphic cards.

80ns memory should be fine too. BTW Trident 8900D works perfectly fine win 100ns memory. Even if you overclock ISA bus.