From what I know about ARK, they came out too late (1995) to sell many VLB boards. I think the company only lasted for a couple of years, and most of the cards I see with the ARK chip are PCI bus. I believe that cards like the Hercules Stingray VLB version were special order only, but I could be …

I have all three of these cards. This is how I feel about them: I have an ATi Mach64 VRAM card. The VRAM version is probably one of the best VLB cards you can get for Windows. It's fast, the drivers are pretty stable, and the output quality is nice. The DOS performance is maybe better than average. …

Having a slower CPU can help, because it is very likely that they are capable of more than whatever intel locked them at. It is quite possible that all PIII-S and Celeron-T CPUs are capable of 1.4GHz since they are a late generation PIII with very small dies. However, I would guess that it would be …

I think the problem you are having is that you are actually running the CPU way out of spec. If your CPU is locked with 14X multiplier then you'll end up with more than 1800MHz on a 133MHz FSB. If you are serious about running 133MHz FSB you should really use a slower tualatin Celeron or a PIII-S.

The RAMquests can be difficult to find on eBay. I think the main problem is that there is no marking on the board whatsoever to identify the model name or the manufacturer. So, you need to know what the board looks like. Basically a full length card with 8 30pin RAM slots at the end with a single …

I have a Upgradeware Slot-T in my Abit BF6 right now. A P3-S 1400 resides in it. And yeah, I too have stability problems, even just at 133/1400. The board itself doesn't seem to like either the FSB clock or perhaps even the CPU clock (EMI/RFI?). It could also be a limitation of the Slot-T, I …

I like your PIII system. When the powerleap tualatin adapter first came out I tried to take my Abit BF6 PIII system to it maximum potential. In theory it should have made a pretty good machine, but in reality my system became somewhat unstable. I just ended up selling the adapter and getting an i815 …

Also, where do you get your numbers for 486 memory bandwidth? I have quite a lot of 486 motherboards, and the bandwidth can vary greatly. I have been using WinTune 2.0 for testing, but it may not be a very accurate tool. -opti495SX w/ti486SXL 40MHz reports ~14mb/sec -opti EISA VL am5x86 160MHz …

I am pretty sure that my Aires board is one of the buggy ones. It was relatively stable, but it just felt really slow overall. My Saturn board (I think Saturn II) may be one of the better ones. Actually, I never got around to testing it, butit looks nice though since it has on-board SCSI. I believe …

After doing some extensive reading, I have come to the conclusion there is no such thing as PCI 2.1 support on 486 system boards. There are four main late generation PCI chipsets for 486 systems: -Intel Aries & Saturn -SIS497 -ALi M1487 -UMC UM8881 I have read some documentation on all of them, and …

I'm not familiar with DTC SCSI controller. Does it use a common chipset? I know of Future Domain (seagate also), NCR and Rancho. I like Future Domains. They have really good device support. Did you say you have magneto optical drives? By any chance would you happen to have a copy of Corel SCSI? …

I think it's pretty interesting. I found a post you made in 2004 or 2005 in which you were really complaining about POD83, and how it is the worst upgrade chip ever. I really wonder what happened to make you fall in love with such a terrible device. 😎

You really brought this post back from the dead, eh? Your proposed XT looks pretty nice, but I really have to say "good luck" writing DVDs on an XT. Is it possible to get FAT32 partitions going on an 808x type machine? I haven't tried it yet. All I know is with FAT16 partition sizes are limited to …

I have to agree that in Pentium systems installing SIMMs in pairs is generally the rule of thumb, although not always true. For example, I had a K6 system based on an SIS 4471 chipset that allowed me to run the system with only one SIMM installed. Though, naturally there is a performance penalty for …

I think you must be the only person who ever liked POD83. From what I hear even when it is overclocked to 100MHz the am5x86 and cx5x86 have no problem knocking its ass around the block for integer performance. Though, POD83 supposedly has the best FPU of them all it would seem that not too many 486 …

I generally consider mixing 486s and PCI to be somewhat blasphamous, but I just stumbled across an interesting little board based on the UMC UM8881F chipset. I guess it's generic, and it's footprint is only half Baby AT. Before I waste some money on hardware, I want to confirm a few things about …