Google revealed preciously little about your G486UVL-Z.

I didn't know they made VLB boards that late. Are you sure it's manufactured in 1996? Or is that just the date the BIOS shows you?

And about the AT case, if you find one, claim it!
If not, theres ways of fitting AT boards into ATX cases with the help of an AT backplate and an ATX to AT PSU adapter. It seems not all ATX cases have the mounting holes for AT boards though, so better check before you invest 😉

I'm not sure how many spare parts you have laying around, if you want flexibility then perhaps going "the adapter way" is the way to go

Are you sure it's manufactured in 1996? Or is that just the date the BIOS shows you?

No, that's the date of the board. There's a little inspection sticker on the back, marked 2/96, and all the date codes on the chipset and such are from the last few weeks of '95. That's what I found so surprising... I didn't know they made VLB boards that late either, until I had this one in my hands.

Of course, that fact has its advantages... being a later board, it has some more modern features that many other VLB boards lack.

As far as the case, yeah, if I run across one I'll pick it up, but it's been close to ten years since I last even saw one in person... and I'm hesitant to buy one online just because of the cost, counting shipping. Only one of my ATX cases has AT mounting holes, but that case is occupied by a Slot-A Athlon system I've been working on, and I'm not inclined to move it elsewhere. So, cardboard box it is.

This sounds like a fun project. What software/games are you going to install on it? Have you selected this 486/VLB board as your main retro rig, or do you also have a 386 and/or an old Pentium system? Also, it would be interesting to see some benchmarks. 😀

What benchmark tool would you recommend for a 486 btw?

Only benchmarking I have done is with SuperPi. I chose SuperPi mainly because it's compatible with any system running windows 95 and up so I could compare all of my systems with eachother.
I got anything from my crappy 486 benched through a couple socket 7's, P3, Athlons and Athlon 64's benchmarked.

Personally I'd prefer something that can run from a bootable floppydisk, just so I can do a quick bench and then swap and compare different CPU's without the OS affecting the benchmark results.
Btw I realize SuperPi isn't exactly the most real world-like way to compare CPU's but atleast it's very compatable and the results are very easy to compare (in a way that I could see that processor A is twice as fast as processor B, etc. Can also calculate CPU 'power' divided by the frequency).

Edit:If you're interested, I could post my results hehe 😉

I've been using

Superscape 3Dbench (there seems to be 2 different versions, 1 and 1c, I think). This tests VGA.
PCPbench. This tests SVGA.
Speedsys. This tests CPU, cache, disk IO.
Memtest. This tests RAM. RAM speed is shown.

There's also some cache testing utilites available on the net. I think it's called Cachechk.

Edit: I've never heard of SuperPi - I must try that one! 😀

I like SuperPi because it's very compatible with many different generations of CPU's, you can directly compare say a 486 with a quadcore and then say 'Hey, the quadcore at 4Ghz is xxx as fast as this 486 running at only 33Mhz!'

Also SuperPi is quite fast and the results are just one number.
I also used it to calculate how fast a certain CPU is per Mhz.
For instance you could calculate that if you'd have a P3 at 100Mhz and a P1 at 100Mhz that the P3 would be (the number is imaginary) 3 times as fast per clock tick then the P1, if you know what I mean.

Old Thrashbarg: I do not know where you live, but if you live near a containers/dumpsters (like I do) there many times, at least here where I live. There you can find a pc tower many times. So please check out those places first before you buy an AT case. or else I am just so damn lucky, that I find them so often. Heck I have been lucky finding even ram and CD drives, even DVD drives that are working. You name it.

What software/games are you going to install on it?

Currently, games-wise, I have Doom II, Legend of Kyrandia, Alone in the Dark, and System Shock installed... adding more after I work out all the little kinks. As for other software, I dunno... I'll be doing some digging through my old boxes of disks, see what I run across.

This machine is indeed my main retro rig for now... I do have an 8086, but it still has a few issues, and I've got a bunch of various Socket 7 parts that I'll do something with eventually, but the 486 was the higher priority since I'd been wanting one for a few years now.

I am familiar with all the benchmarks listed, and will be posting up some results soon.

@WolverineDK
Believe me, I'm always keeping an eye out. The thing is, around here, hardly anyone owns a computer, and if they do, they don't get rid of it. I even still get Apple IIs in for repair from time to time. But for some reason, there's sort of a gap, and I never see any hardware from the early to mid '90s...

I'm lucky to live in a large town which itself is near a bigger city but in my region I have noticed that the supply of AT cases have realy dried up since a year ago.
Best I can find cheap nowdays are P2's and P3's along with some old Socket A's from time to time (not counting P4's, I'm not too fond of the Netburst architechture).
I've been veeery lucky to have found 2 AT cases this year, and both were in pretty bad shape.
One was bend badly, someone had -ripped- the cover off, bending the U-cap and 5 1/4 bays badly. I had to bend it back.
Also the inside was full of snow and the RAM modules were laying on the bottom of the case. Obviously someone before me tried to remove some components from it but didn't even take it with him, my guess he thought it wasn't even worthwhile.
He did take the harddrive and cdroms out though.
It had a super 7 AT board in it made by PC Chips and to my surprise, a 2.88M floppy drive!!! 😁
Atleast the hardware was interesting. Judging from the components it had belonged to a hobbyist.

The second case was even worse. It was as if it had been on the bottom of a canal for a couple weeks and it smelled like mud. The mainboard had mud in all it's expansion slots and there was battery acid spilled all over the motherboard. Also the drive bay was missing and every-single-part of the insides was covered in mud and little twigs. I think it even had a couple dead bugs in it.
So I took all the hardware out and cleaned the case as best I could, took me about 2 hours to remove the inards and clean it up in the bathroom. Still have to put it all back together again 🤣.

Atleast it's a midtower, has room for 3 5 1/4 drives

Hm, I ran Speedsys and Cachechk, and neither reports any L2 cache... It's showing up in BIOS as 256K, the chips seem to be real, everything seems fine... it just apparently doesn't work. Any ideas what could be going on here?

Assuming that the L2 cache is real and theoretically working, the problem could be caused by wrong BIOS and/or jumper settings concerning the CPU.
Did you have any luck finding the jumper settings yet? If it is a OEM board, it could be listed on TH99 under a different name.

Nope, no luck on jumpers as of yet. I've been screwing around with it this evening, and I've so far stumbled upon about a dozen completely different settings that all seem to boot and work fine at the proper speed. Actually, one of two things seems to happen, for any given setting: it either boots up as a DX4-100, or it doesn't boot at all. I've not found anything in between.

So it appears it might not be one of those cases where simple trial-and-error will work... I'd be here forever. I'm not particularly good at reverse-engineering, either, so trying to follow traces and such usually ends up just confusing me more.

So, I'll scour TH99 again, just to see if there's something I missed, but it's looking like I may be SOL until I can find a manual for the damn thing.

Edit: Yep, nothing on TH99. I did finally come up with a hit on the BIOS ID string, though: the manufacturer is GTK. Whoever that is. Unfortunately, it's impossible to search for, because of the gazillions of pages about Gnome toolkit in Linux.

wild guess:
http://www.gtk.com.tw (always assume it was made somewhere over there 🤣)

I don't see anything about motherboards on there though, but it does look like a possibility.

I saw that, and it is indeed a Taiwanese-made board, but I can't find any indication that that particular company ever made anything other than cables and connectors.

I did come across some old VGA cards with the GTK brand (picture of one here), but that still doesn't give me much to go on, if it's even the same company.

There's also Soltek as a possibility, since they are/were also known as "Goldtek". But again, I can't find anything about their 486 boards.

Could you post a (clear) picture of the board?

And I wouldn't set jumpers at random, you might damage something

Attached is the best picture I could get with my absurdly crappy digicam.

The only real risk of damage is from the voltage jumpers, and I've managed to trace those out (J18, the two white ones directly above the voltage regulator), so I haven't been screwing with them.

I also submitted it to motherboards.mbarron.net. I dunno how active they are anymore, but it's a shot, anyway.

I'll bet theres still many old boards not included in th99.

I still have a 386 laying around for which I've never been able to find a manual and the jumpers aren't labelled 🙁

Edit:A quick thought points me to think it was made by DFI

Edit2:The sticker on the left with the large 'G' in it may help in identifying the maker of the board. Only problem is, finding another board with the same sticker.

Btw, I forgot the most obvious. The board will post, write down the BIOS string and post it here!

I think you missed the part in my post above... I checked the BIOS ID string, and it returned GTK as the OEM. The string was G2, on an Award BIOS, btw, but it wasn't listed in any of the ID tables I could find... An old program called CTBIOS gave me a hit, though.

My first thought was DFI as well, but that proved to be a dead-end. Their motherboards tend to be much more clearly marked. And anyway, that doesn't match with the BIOS ID.

I also looked at Joindata, which is still a possibility... I suspect that was a sub-brand of a larger company (sort of like how PCChips, Amptron, Matsonic, etc. are all under Hsing Tech). Unfortunately, there's just as little information available about Joindata as there is about GTK.

I missed it alright. I had the 'uncut' bios string in my head.

Just checking...the chips are socketed, right? Not soldered directly to the PCB.

What I've been wondering is...who would make a VLB board in 1996? That was the era of PCI and even PCI 486's were more the lower end at that time.