Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-05-30, 10:35:

canthearu wrote on 2020-05-29, 13:10:

VLB is a cool historical item, but at the time, PCI was a badly needed replacement. The Pentium and newer chips would have not been directly compatible with VLB, and the large card size and limited slot numbers significantly limited its future potential.

PCI was not a replacement for VLB. They came out at pretty much the same time and were actually competing standards. Until later in 1994 it was not obvious that PCI was going to be the winner. It was only when PCI 2.0 came around that things began to change, so if you want to be fair you should compare VLB 1.0 to PCI 1.0. There was a VLB 2.0 specification which addressed many issues of 1.0, but I think it wasn't really used in anything since Intel's chipset monopoly caused most other chipset vendors to throw in the towel.

In the short term, VLB was a very easy standard for the market to adopt. Not requiring any real chipset support and being backwards compatible with ISA, meant it could be added to motherboards at low additional development cost. While PCI was released 1992, no desktop parts were ready for it yet, so it makes sense that the market originally went with the easiest short term solution to adding more bandwidth.

However, due to it's lack of auto-configuration, and the physical presentation of the bus, in the longer term, it had no chance in terms of features and price when compared to PCI. PCI, once backed into the system chipset, was just cheaper to implement, and cheaper to build expansion cards for. Auto-configuration and robust signalling meant much fewer technical problems which would represent cheaper support costs. On phyiscal size alone, VLB cards had to be at least 3 times physically larger than PCI cards, exacerbating construction and transport costs for VLB computer equipment.

To say they were competitors to each other would be suggesting that VLB had a chance to become the long running dominant standard.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-05-30, 10:35:

SodaSuccubus wrote on 2020-05-27, 21:44:

Great to see another PCI 486-100mhz build around here though! I know they get a bit of flack for being a bit "boring", but regardless of what the VLB-Squad (or maybe VLBros?)

Where can I sign up for VLB-Squad?

I have a nice 486DX2-66 VLB system, and a 5x86-133mhz PCI systems.

Both are awesome, but I have put a video card in the PCI system (S3 968 with VRAM) that is ridiculously faster than the the one I have in the VLB system (S3 804 with DRAM). Unfortunately the really good VLB cards are damn rare and expensive. Just with a quick test at 800 x 600, 256 colours, the VLB card is only about 1/3 as quick as the PCI card in Windows

One of my VLB 486 computer motherboard just died. So If I can’t find in my collection a good working VLB motherboard I might build one of these PCI 486 builds. I remember purchasing these Socket-3 PCI 486 motherboards to use with a 486dx4-100 CPU but I never used them.
I have them somewhere in my garage. So if I can find them I will try one.
I think these are a good choice also because they have a modern bios which will allow you to enable and disable features like CPU and motherboard cache in bios. Along with other options.
This will be good in being able to down clock the CPU to a 386 and maybe even a 286 in order to play a large assortment of old DOS games.
Which is my primary objective in computers build is to play as many old DOS games as possible on one computer.

starcube wrote on 2020-05-24, 15:43:

r

What happened to the original post?

I'm not even sure what happened to the original topic? IIt's gone from a PC build to VLB vs PCI
But I'm enjoying the discussion so whatever

appiah4 wrote on 2020-06-01, 10:49:

starcube wrote on 2020-05-24, 15:43:

r

What happened to the original post?

Got deleted apparently.
Shame. What stood out the most for me was his use of LS-120 drives (both internal and external) and the way he tidied his rigs. His component choice was simply excellent, I could find nothing wrong with them, so to say 😜

pshipkov wrote on 2020-05-29, 15:40:

Hi Tetrium, […]
Show full quote

Hi Tetrium,

i keep posting info from time to time here: 3 (+3 more) retro battle stations
It is not structured as a proper "research document", so some of the points may not be obvious, but if you skim through it, you will notice the pattern.
Long ago i noticed some of that stuff about VLB and PCI graphics and kept poking at it.
I actually have a bunch of data specifically for VLB/PCI graphics that is not there. Will try to post soon.
There is also few other threads around here about this matter and they suggest the same, more or less.

Tetrium wrote on 2020-05-29, 12:02:

I'm not sure about VLB being inherently faster than PCI though. VLB was a different approach compared to PCI and it certainly had its drawbacks.
Do you have a link to any kind of benchmark results for the graphics card data? Now I wanna know 😜

I did watch some youtube videos about this subject and came across a video made by HighTreason (pardon my potential misspelling of his name). He found that, in his case, VLB was indeed a bit faster.
There was also another video but I haven't gotten around to watch it (yet).

Personally I think it will mostly depend on the components picked and what software is used.
The 486 era was a really exciting time! Many different standards existed parallel to eachother and the implementation and build quality could vary wildly compared to now.

Cheers 😀

The original post was like those rental DVDs that you didn't have to return because they became unreadable after being exposed to air for a couple days.

boxpressed wrote on 2020-06-03, 03:06:

The original post was like those rental DVDs that you didn't have to return because they became unreadable after being exposed to air for a couple days.

For shame, I showed up with popcorn after the dvd killed itself!