mmshah@athena.mit.edu (Milan M Shah) (04/17/91)
Hello! I post this in the hope that it will benefit others on the net. After hearing all the good things about the Orchid Prodesigner II and the Tseng 4000 chipset based super vga cards, I decided to get one myself. I was *very* disappointed. First of all, I have a 20 MHz 386 machine with 64K cache, 8 Megs of RAM. I have a Paradise 512K card, and my main environment is Windows 3.0 in enhanced mode and in 800x600x16 resolution. Video drivers used are the ones from cica. I use it mainly for development work, so I normally have 3-4 dos apps all running in windows. (Edit, compile, Microsoft's QH ie, quickhelp) etc. My main aim was to have 4 complete windows on the screen, all just a mouse click away. My main gripe is that the video update rate of each dos window is abysmal; running Checkit in a window gives a video rate of ~980 cps. After asking on the net, I heard that with Tseng 4000 based card, people were getting ~3000 cps (doubtless on 25 MHz machines and above). So I ordered an Orchid Pro II with 1 Meg. Well, I couldn't get the Orchid Pro II to beat the Paradise, especially while running dos apps in a window. This was while running the card in 16 bit mode. Unfortunately, my work demands a debugging monitor, and with the mono card in, the Pro switched to 8 bit mode. Video rate in a window dropped to about 800 cps. Surprizingly, the Paradise stays in 16 bit mode even with the mono card in. I have no idea why, but I ain't askin. Moreover, the 800x600 drivers for the Pro II have, in my opinion, a serious flaw : they use the fonts intended for 8514 (1034x768 mode). I don't like this because it takes up too much of my screen real estate : all the default window borders and scroll bars take up more space etc. I tried to modify my system.ini to get the smaller fonts etc. and succeeded, but it didn't solve the problem of title bars and scroll bars etc. taking up much more room. Lastly, I did try their 256 color drivers, and yes, here, the Orchid Pro II pretty much blew my Paradise away. Note, however, that this is not because the Orchid Pro becomes faster at the higher color mode, but that my Paradise is next to unusable at 256 colors. However, because of windows half hearted support of more than 20 colors, I don't think 256 color is too useful for a user like me. Thus, my conclusion is that at the current state of windows 3.0, processor cycles are the big bottle neck. The Tseng 4000 chipset might be faster, but its not enough to make much of a difference. So, if you, like me, are tempted to dump your current super vga card and replace it with a tseng 4000 based one, you might want to recheck the bennies. I am convinced that for windows, a faster mainboard results in a much higher increase in performance. I hope this helps someone. Milan .
jmerrill@jarthur.claremont.edu (Jason Merrill) (04/18/91)
>>>>> On 16 Apr 91 23:35:27 GMT, mmshah@athena.mit.edu (Milan M Shah) said: > After hearing all the good things about the Orchid Prodesigner II and > the Tseng 4000 chipset based super vga cards, I decided to get one myself. > I was *very* disappointed. I have had exactly the opposite experience; I am very happy with my ET4000 clone. > First of all, I have a 20 MHz 386 machine with 64K cache, 8 Megs of RAM. I > have a Paradise 512K card, and my main environment is Windows 3.0 in enhanced > mode and in 800x600x16 resolution. I have a 20 Mhz 386 with 64K cache, and 4 Megs of RAM. I had a 512K Paradise clone, but I traded it (and some cash) for my Diamond SpeedSTAR. I was running Windows in VGA mode; I am now running in 1024x768x16 mode. > Well, I couldn't get the Orchid Pro II to beat the Paradise, especially while > running dos apps in a window. This was while running the card in 16 bit mode. I haven't run any benchmarks, but I saw a very clear increase in speed; 1024x768x16 runs about as fast as plain VGA did on my Paradise. > Moreover, the 800x600 drivers for the Pro II have, in my opinion, a serious > flaw : they use the fonts intended for 8514 (1034x768 mode). I don't like this Get the file tsng4311.zip (drivers revision 3.11, dated Jan 4, 1991) from cica. They use the VGA fonts in 800x600 mode. > I am convinced that for windows, a faster mainboard results in a much higher > increase in performance. If you've got an old Paradise (one of the ones that only goes up to 800x600x16), a 16Mhz 386 will drive it as fast as it can go. The ET4000 cards can handle a considerably higher transfer rate (I don't know the numbers). In my system, the hard drive is my serious bottleneck... -- Jason Merrill jmerrill@jarthur.claremont.edu
raney@bluefish.Colorado.EDU (Scott Raney) (04/18/91)
For those in the market, the April 15th Infoworld has a review of 8
super-vga cards (1024x768x8 bits). There were some notable
differences in performance and in display quality (and of course
price). I don't really like the format of their reviews (not
technical enough for me), but I still find them useful. I highly
recommend 1024x768 on a 16" display (non-interlaced), it makes a big
difference over 800x600 on a 14" display ('course if you can afford
it, 1280x1024 on a 19" display ain't bad either).
Check it out,
Scott
--
======================================================================
Scott Raney No other person or organization
raney@boulder.colorado.edu can be held responsible for my
(303)499-9855 opinions or actionstneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) (04/18/91)
All I can say is that if you don't use the January 1991 drivers with your ET4000 based video card (Orchid, Boca or whatever), then you are in NO POSITION to make hardware recommendations to fellow users.