I think everybody has heard of this motherboard. It's probably the best PCI 486 motherboard that money can buy. If you use google, you should be able to turn up all kinds of useful information on it.

I actually planned to bid on that board myself, but got distracted by a 386SX with L2 cache. 😵

Nice board!

I've no experience with the UM8881 myself, but it seems to be one of the most advanced 486/PCI chipsets. Don't count on features like PCI 2.1 and EDO RAM support to work properly though.

Like on all 486 PCI implementations, the bus performance will be awfully slow compared to typical Socket 7 boards. Modern PCI hardware (network cards, harddisk controllers) might not run in this board, but older stuff like the Mach64 shouldn't cause any trouble.

The board that you bid on was a rev 4. I believe that was the last and best revision. The UM8881F should work properly with EDO RAM according what I've read, but the PCI is only 2.0.

So far my experience with PCI and 486 boards is not great, but I haven't tested out my UM8881F board yet. 5U3 mentioned that the Mach64 should not cause problems, but the Mach64 was a fairly long running series and there are different versions of the chipset. I tried running a Mach64GT (the last one I think) on an intel PCI board, and it was just terrible. Mach64GX probably has a better chance working. That one came out in 1994 I think.

Thanks for the quick replies! I really appreciate it. Talk about dumb luck. I get a decent 486 pci motherboard and I am completley ignorant on the subject. 😲 I looked up HOT-433 on the internet and I found this site:

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/S/SH … OT-433-VER.html

It shows the jumper settings etc. The information says that the board can take up to 256 mb of EDO memory. That would be a ridiculous amount of memory on a 486; especially when 64 meg of memory is probably all that is cached. I have 128 mb of edo memory lying around. I will have to try it out.

I was going to experiment with using a 4GB complactflash card as the hard drive with an adaptor. Would using the ide interface slow down the processor to much or should I go with an ISA scsi adaptor and use a scsi hard drive?

Look at this:
http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-95.html
http://www.redhill.net.au/ib.html
Very good and informative site.

Thank you for the links to the site. VERY informative, unfortunatley they didn't have my motherboard on it. 🙁 Anybody tried the compact flash adapter trick on older computers? I'm interested to see if it has worked well for anybody.

Yeah, I put one in my XT. My setup was not easy to get going though, partially because I used a SCSI bridge.

It seems that you can't always just buy an IDE-->CF converter, a CF card, pop it into your computer and expect it to work. For example, the 2GB Sandisk Ultra II card I have installed in my XT had "fixed disk mode" and "DMA mode" disabled by factory default. Sandisk expects you to buy an expensive industrial version of their card if you want those features. In my case those two features were critical to be able to use my CF card in DOS. I had to get a special utility off the internet to enable the features I needed. I would guess other manufacturers might also play the same nasty trick. Definitely do your homework before buying a CF card.

Finally I have heard that CF cards may eventually wear out. Some people claim this doesn't affect CF cards made in the last few years as the technology improved. Other people say that the 486 computers don't use enough bandwidth to wear the card out quickly. So you might also want to consider the usable life of the card before you buy. I guess it's not so easy to find that kind of information though.

Thank you for the information on the Compact Flash cards I will look into this in a little more detail. So, if I decide to go with a normal hard drive should I just use the on board ide or get a scsi controller for the isa slot. Did early IDE take up to much processor power?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Finally I have heard that CF cards may eventually wear out. Some people claim this doesn't affect CF cards made in the last few years as the technology improved.

I don't think it is the bandwidth or any improvement that makes a such a card suitable or not - it is the number of writes to the card that matters. And all flash-based memories has an upper-limit to how many times a given sector can be re-written.

However ......

2Mourty wrote:

I am using this to be my low end dos gaming rig. I have a k6 3+ rig for glide games, and a Asus CUBX 440bx board with a tualatin 1.4 GHZ processor in it for more modern, windows fare. I am going to use this machine in combination with a scc-1a, AWE 64 gold, and cm-32, and the previously mentioned mach64 and have it play all of my old vga and ega dos games, and WC3 =).

Since you are going to use this for DOS only, and not Windows (which will do a lot of re-writing on the card due to its use of virtual memory / disk swapping), any CF/flash card should be perfectly okay.