I have a Motion 771 way back when. It eventually died cuz of bad solder joints that worsened over time. Nice card.

Hopefully mine won't meet the same fate, because I like it.

I think this motherboard is cool 😀

It just breathes 486 motherboard but they "hot rod'ed" it with a socket 4 socket...weird design since it will be bottlenecked by a 32bit bus

Nice thats a clean looking machine. those dual connector cards are neat too i'm not sure i've seen that before.

Err, which dual connector cards? The IDE or SCSI controller?

Yeah your Pentium 133 reminds me of my 5x86 160 system.

Considering that VLB is a 486 bus extension basically, isn't VLB all gimpy on a Pentium system?

I haven't done any hardcore benchmark testing, but on the Wintune tests I ran the graphics and hard disk performance was excellent. I found VLB to be a bit gimpy on 386 systems, but this does not seem to be the case with the Pentium.

Maybe things only get ugly when PCI is also present....

Yeah, under those conditions the VL bus is probably chained off the PCI bus.

I'm impressed with the ATX to AT retrofit job you've pulled off. How hard was it to find an AT plate for an ATX case? Any issues mounting the motherboard? Any caveats with that ATX to AT power supply adapter?

I'd think many people would like to hear about this aspect of it since it's harder and harder to find good AT cases and good AT PSU's anymore. Your experience with this one might help lower the barriers for others thinking of building a retro rig.

The board seemed to fit perfectly into this case. All of the mounting holes lined up properly.
There was a small difficulty with the ATX to AT power adapter cable regarding the power switch. There was a metal spring in the plastic case button that had to be removed to allow the new switch to turn on and off properly. Not a big deal I guess.
Finding the new back panel was also a bit annoying. After quite a bit of searching I did find an ebay seller that had it. I think I paid about a $1 for it. The panel didn't really fit my case though, so I ended up having to drill two holes and use screws to secure it.
Overall I wouldn't say it was very challenging. You can pull off the whole mod for something like $10. Using the ATX power supply is optional. A regular slim AT power supply should be able to fit an ATX case.

Very nice, that back plate looks great.

That board is an absolute bastard. Must be pretty rare. You said something about an interleaved memory sub-system, dose that mean there is a dual channel function? Or is it still 32-bits all the way across. I haven't really heard much of Socket 4.. but I'm guessing the main goal of the design was to harness the Pentium bus with 486 generation components.

I'm not really sure what the difference is, but memory interleaving and dual channel memory seem to accomplish about the same thing: effectively doubling the datapath of the memory bus.

Anyone in here know what the difference is?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I'm not really sure what the difference is, but memory interleaving and dual channel memory seem to accomplish about the same thing: effectively doubling the datapath of the memory bus.

Anyone in here know what the difference is?

It is a way for slower DRAM to transfer data to and from the CPU, basically increasing the memory bandwidth of the installed memory modules.

Not really dual-channel memory mode however 😉

Remember that the older FPM and even the EDO type modules are slow compared to PC133 memory not to mention DDR1/2/3 types....

Wiki

some of those cards look they have pci and isa Frankensteined together

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I'm not really sure what the difference is, but memory interleaving and dual channel memory seem to accomplish about the same thing: effectively doubling the datapath of the memory bus.

Anyone in here know what the difference is?

Memory interleaving is taking separate RAM banks and interleaving your data among them. It's just a smart way to take "advantage" of slow RAM access time.

This is something that got much more popular towards the end of the '90s. I know some older video cards use it too, such as some ET4000 VLB cards which need 2MB to utilize it.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/ram/timingInterleaving-c.html
http://www.macspeedzone.com/archive/Compariso … nterleaved.html

1 Bank 0                      Bank 1
2           -----------------          -----------------
3           |       0       |          |       1       |
4           -----------------          -----------------
5           |       2       |          |       3       |
6           -----------------          -----------------
7           |       4       |          |       5       |
8           -----------------          -----------------
9           ~               ~          ~               ~
10           -----------------          -----------------
11           |     2N-4      |          |     2N-3      |
12           -----------------          -----------------
13           |     2N-2      |          |     2N-1      |
14           -----------------          -----------------
15                   ^                          ^
16                   |                          |
17                   v                          v
18           -----------------          -----------------
19           |    Buffer     |          |    Buffer     |
20           -----------------          -----------------
21                   ^                          ^
22                   |                          |
23                   v      System Data Bus     v
24        -----------------------------------------------------

Actually did you guys ever think about how SIMMs on 64-bit mobos are actually a dual channel setup? 😀 SIMMs are 32-bits wide so you need 2 of them to get a 64-bit data bus. It's just like today with 128-bit data buses running 2x64-bit DIMMs. For some reason this didn't occur to me until I saw it specifically called dual channel EDO by Everest.

Beautiful case! And professionally-finished rear too! 😀