Early VLB card with OAK OTI087 chipset. This seems to a design similar to Cirrus Logic 542x series. That means 32bit memory interface with 16-bit host interface adapted to VL-Bus through a series of 74F245 bus transceivers. The same chip appears on ISA cards and also on some Weitek P9000 cards (which cannot do VGA [...]
Late VL-Bus card with unusual Alliance ProMotion 3210 chipset. Introduced in fall 1994. It is a 32bit design with 2MB DRAM and bank-interleaving setup similar to Tseng ET4000 w32i cards. It comes with a decent quality 130MHz RAMDAC. The main highlight of the chipset was built-in basic video acceleration (Video scaling and colour space conversion). [...]
This is a Zeos branded card based on an uncommon NCR 77C22E+ chipset. This is likely a 32bit GUI design with a 16bit host bus interface. A solution that is not dissimilar to Cirrus Logic GD542x VLB cards. The card likely only appeared in Zeos line of 486 PCs at the early days of the [...]
A very fast S3 Vision 864 based card. One of the best all-arounder VLB cards ever made. The performance in DOS is nearly identical to S3 Trio 64 based Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM T model which shares the same 2D core.
Not that many customers were buying ISA graphics cards in 1996. Thus this ought to be a special one.This might be the ISA graphics card with the most advanced VGA chip ever produced. The CL-GD5434 is a modern 64bit chip with EDO RAM support and a comprehensive acceleration feature set. Obviously, it is sitting on [...]
In 1991 Intel found itself in a relatively uncomfortable position, at least when it comes to the bottom end of the market. The main competitor - AMD has won a series of legal battles and was about to repeat what happened in 286 days -flood the market with cloned 386 chips which were cheaper and [...]
I was wondering what would be the ultimate upgrade for my 386 motherboard. It has a soldered-in 386 CPU, an unpopulated 386 PGA socket, and a socket for either a 387 FPU or a 486 PGA. It might even be compatible with a Weitek processor, though I'm not entirely certain. There's also a possibility that [...]
I've recently acquired an interesting motherboard with Intel 430FX Triton chipset. It has a feature I particularly wanted - sockets for asynchronous SRAM chips as well as a slot for COAST modules. Due to this, it allows for an interesting comparison of these two cache technologies. Test environment: Freetech 485F61 motherboard in different cache configurationsIntel [...]
In this article I upgraded my ECS Si5PI motherboard to whooping 2MB of L2 cache. I was interested to see how much improvement the extra cache brings. I remember reading advice in old Pentium era magazines that further cache upgrades beyond 256kB give only small returns. So let's find out. The testbed is as follows: [...]