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Web Developer's Journal Archive SectionDiamond SpeedStar 64by Mark Davis |
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One of the biggest things you can do to improve the performance of Windows on your PC is to upgrade your video card. The right card can put a surprising amount of zip back into what you thought was an old, tired machine. Unfortunately, many users with older PC’s can’t take full advantage of the new video technologies coming out because they have an older ISA-only bus machine. Without VESA or PCI slots, your choices in a new video card are becoming increasingly limited. While I can understand the card vendors wanting to take advantage of new technologies, it doesn’t help those of us who want to get a little more life out of their current PC (and if I hear the words “buy a new motherboard” one more time, I think I’ll scream!). Fortunately, there are a few vendors that still sell quality video cards for ISA-bus PC’s. One of these is Diamond Multimedia, whose new SpeedStar 64 ISA card is a good value for anyone in the upgrade market.
The SpeedStar 64 is a standard 16-bit card, using the new Cirrus Logic 64-bit GD-6434 accelerator chip. While this chip is not the fastest one on the market by a long shot, it still has a good deal of “oomph” in it, and is a great improvement over most of the cards found in older PC’s (especially the dumb frame-buffer variety). Installation of the card is very simple. Simply stick the card into an empty socket, load the included Windows drivers, and you’re done! There are two jumpers on the card, one of which enables zero wait-state operation. The other one lets the card use IRQ 2 (both of these options will increase the card’s performance). Unfortunately, I had to disable both features on the card in order to get it to work correctly on my PC (the PC would refuse to boot otherwise). The card I reviewed had 2 Megs of RAM on it. A tip to remember when shopping for any video card is to make sure that you buy one with at least 2 Megs installed on it, if possible. Many video chip sets (the GD-5434 included) suffer a major performance hit with only 1 Meg of RAM installed, due to the way they handle the card’s memory for better performance. The extra memory will also allow you to display more colors at higher resolutions (particularly important for users who like to work with high-resolution graphics). We actually received 2 cards for review. The first one only recognized 1 Meg of memory being installed on it (even though 2 Megs were physically present), so we sent it back and got another one (which worked OK). The Windows driver software supplied with the card has some unique features. You can set up a virtual screen, which allows you to zoom from a higher resolution to a lower one without having to restart Windows (the lower resolution lets you pan around to see the whole screen). It also has a number of preset configurations for a wide variety of popular monitors; mine (a ViewSonic 6E) was not listed, however (I used the listed ViewSonic 15). You can also modify the presets for your specific monitor refresh rates. A separate DOS utility must be run, however, to tell the card what type of monitor you are using while in DOS mode (a ViewSonic 6 was listed among the monitor choices here). The documentation supplied with the card was adequate, although some features were somewhat glossed over (no info at all was available on the video driver’s features, for example). To test the SpeedStar 64’s performance, I ran several benchmarks, using some popular test applications. All tests were run on a 486SX/25 with 8 Megs of RAM, a secondary cache of 128K, a 540 Meg Maxtor hard drive, and an ISA bus speed of 10 Mhz. The other card in the test is my current video card, a generic 1 Meg ISA card based on a Cirrus Logic GD-5422 chip set (which is considered to be a low end Windows accelerator). The tests were run using Windows for Workgroups 3.11, with a 2 Meg disk cache. The cache used is called Cacheclk, and is part of the utility collection sold by Helix Software called Multimedia Cloaking. I don’t use 32-bit file or disk access. The test results are as follows (running in 800x600 mode with 256 colors): GD-5422 SpeedStar 64 % Increase Winbench 3.11 6.47 10.34 37.4 Winbench 4.0 2.53 4.20 39.8 Wintach 1.2 9.73 14.80 34.3 As you can see, the SpeedStar 64 outperformed the older card by about 37%. Visually, the difference in performance was definitely noticeable, although it wasn’t dramatically better (using a faster machine or comparing the card to a dumb frame-buffer card such as a low-end Trident would show much more noticeable differences). The card seemed to perform well, with no GPF’s caused by driver problems. I did have a problem, though, when running in 800x600 mode. When entering Windows, the display would be squashed toward the center of the screen, and I would have to adjust my monitor controls to resize the screen. This worked fairly well, but when I exited back to DOS, the screen would have to be manually resized again (the 640x480 and 1024x768 modes did not exhibit this problem). Diamond notes in its documentation that this is a problem with some monitors that have auto-resizing features, and you would be well advised to make sure that you can return the card to your dealer if you run into this problem on your monitor. In summary, I would have to say that the Diamond SpeedStar 64 is a fairly good video card, and is well worth considering if you need to replace or upgrade an older ISA-based card. While the performance is not earth-shattering, it should please all but the most demanding users, while not costing an arm and a leg to buy! |
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