Xtra nostalgia value, of course. Apparently nostalgia for nasty VLB+PCI mobos with lacking performance. I don't think I've ever heard anything good spoken of PCI+VLB boards.

There is a lot of price gouging going on now with hardware of this vintage. A couple of years ago you could find quite a few auction lots of 486 mobos for very cheap. Some sellers started to experiment with higher prices and others caught on.

I am glad I got my entire 486 for free. I would not have bought one, especially not for this outrageous price. And since I received my VLB VGA card, I somehow remember that I wasn't very happy with VLB back in the old days. I think I returned my card back then because it proved incompatible somehow. I really don't recall what I got after that.

Somebody paid $200 for an Asus VL-EISA board on ebay a couple of days ago. I've made some pretty decent cash selling old PC junk on ebay in the last year, but $200 is a hell of a lot for a 486 board of any kind.

Don't know what is interesting on this one mobo. Usual 486 mobo - ok PCI with isa and vlbus isnt common, but its usefull only for crazy people like me who want to know difference between isa, pci, vl-bus graphic cards - but these people usualy get this kind of HW for free or very low price (got mine for free). Ebay price is crazy.
Think more interesting would be that mobo with eisa - id personaly like to have MB with EISA, VL-BUS and PCI 😁
Recently i found 486MB with Asus Media Bus. Thats interesting useless technology, have even card for it, but no use for that MB.

Won't live long with that battery on it

Well, you solder it out and use the onboard connector for an external one.

I have payed ~90eur for the same board some years ago. Why? Because it was a boxed new-old-stock one.
Mine also has this battery, no sign of leaking at all, I think it is not prone to leaking, seems a bit different than the older ones that are 2.5 times bigger...

My experience: 16 of 16 of this kind of battery leaked eventually. As your board was new, the battery had not been cooked so far (mainboards don't have a proper charging cirquit and continuously let current flow through it). That could be the reason why yours hasn't leaked yet.

This is a very good board for a 486, but it has a few drawbacks: The battery needs to be replaced. The CPU socket is placed very inconveniently (block two ISA- and one PCI slot). I would have paid 10 €, not 50. But that's german ebay for you...

swaaye wrote:

Xtra nostalgia value, of course. Apparently nostalgia for nasty VLB+PCI mobos with lacking performance. I don't think I've ever heard anything good spoken of PCI+VLB boards.

My 486VIP board has low performance? I don't believe that. I think it's quite speedy actually, what's wrong with a '94/95 socket 3 board and processor with the power for running most '98 games playably? 🙁

There are a couple of ways these boards may work.

1) VLB runs off of PCI. This is ok.
2) PCI runs off of VLB. This is not good. PCI busmastering basically doesn't work so you lose out on a big PCI advantage.

This board's chipset goes the lesser route.

The SIS chipset (Silicon Integrated Systems: 1039/4153) (9/4/95) --------------- […]
Show full quote

The SIS chipset (Silicon Integrated Systems: 1039/4153) (9/4/95)
---------------

Components: 85C496 and 85C497

SIS makes a separate chipset for 486-based boards which is commonly used
in systems which also have VL slots. Unfortunately, it sounds as though
the chipset implements PCI by bridging it to VL (instead of the other
way around), so PCI-based systems which have VL slots will suffer a
degredation of PCI performance. Still, however, boards manufactured by
AMI and Asus have been reported to work well with OS/2. There have been
five revisions of this chipset. A4 (the earliest one) supports IDE up
to mode 2 but apparently was not stable with caches on. B2 had
on-board IDE support but did not support mode 3 well. Revisions B3 and
later apparently work better. The varisous chipset revisions can be
identified by their labels:

A4 Version chipset: SIS 496 MU, SIS 497 MW
B2 Version chipset: SIS 496 NU, SIS 497 NS
B3 Version chipset: SIS 496 NV, SIS 497 NS
B4 Version chipset: SIS 496 NV, SIS 497 NU
B4 Version chipset: SIS 496 OR, SIS 497 OT

None of these chipsets support PCI - PCI bridges, so that the Adaptec
3940 will not work with any motherboards which use this chipset.

The Intel Aries (420EX) and Saturn II (420ZX) chipsets have higher quality PCI implementations. Of course these boards are usually old and don't support things like 5x86.

keropi wrote:

I have payed ~90eur for the same board some years ago.

The older crowd here likely payed hundreds of euros for a 486 board. Like me. I think I payed over 300 for it about 17 years ago. 😉

But from a practical viewpoint, you can get equal speed and compatibility as well as PCI with an ATX P1 board. But with ATX, replacement parts are a lot easier to find and a lot cheaper too. It must be pure nostalgia.

5u3 wrote:

But that's german ebay for you...

Come on. German ebay regularly spits out great stuff for next to free.

swaaye wrote:

The Intel Aries (420EX) and Saturn II (420ZX) chipsets have higher quality PCI implementations. Of course these boards are usually old and don't support things like 5x86.

Is there any information on how it works on the UMC 8881 or ALi M1489 chipset? I've seen several ISA+PCI (no VLB) 486 motherboards built on it.

swaaye wrote:

The Intel Aries (420EX) and Saturn II (420ZX) chipsets have higher quality PCI implementations. Of course these boards are usually old and don't support things like 5x86.

I've had the same opinion some years ago, based on info from the net and old magazine reviews. But when I got my hands on an actual Saturn board (Asus PCI-I 486SP3G), the results were disappointing.
The worst drawback was that the board didn't support anything above 33MHz FSB (this is an Intel chipset limitation). Then, as you already mentioned, support for non-Intel CPUs is poor. The PCI implementation isn't very fast or compatible either, despite the technological advantages.
In the end it turned out that the SIS 496/497 is easier to use, and quite a bit faster, if you use a late 486 CPU.

ux-3 wrote:

But from a practical viewpoint, you can get equal speed and compatibility as well as PCI with an ATX P1 board.

Some games/programs are not compatible with the Pentium architecture (mostly because of unorthodox 486 speed optimisations). Also, Socket 5/7 can not be slowed down as much as a 486 machine.

5u3 wrote:

I've had the same opinion some years ago, based on info from the net and old magazine reviews. But when I got my hands on an act […]
Show full quote

swaaye wrote:

The Intel Aries (420EX) and Saturn II (420ZX) chipsets have higher quality PCI implementations. Of course these boards are usually old and don't support things like 5x86.

I've had the same opinion some years ago, based on info from the net and old magazine reviews. But when I got my hands on an actual Saturn board (Asus PCI-I 486SP3G), the results were disappointing.
The worst drawback was that the board didn't support anything above 33MHz FSB (this is an Intel chipset limitation). Then, as you already mentioned, support for non-Intel CPUs is poor. The PCI implementation isn't very fast or compatible either, despite the technological advantages.
In the end it turned out that the SIS 496/497 is easier to use, and quite a bit faster, if you use a late 486 CPU.

ux-3 wrote:

But from a practical viewpoint, you can get equal speed and compatibility as well as PCI with an ATX P1 board.

Some games/programs are not compatible with the Pentium architecture (mostly because of unorthodox 486 speed optimisations). Also, Socket 5/7 can not be slowed down as much as a 486 machine.

And the Asus PVI-AP4 is even worse 😜

5u3 wrote:

ux-3 wrote:

But from a practical viewpoint, you can get equal speed and compatibility as well as PCI with an ATX P1 board.

Some games/programs are not compatible with the Pentium architecture (mostly because of unorthodox 486 speed optimisations). Also, Socket 5/7 can not be slowed down as much as a 486 machine.

Since this board is equipped with a 133 MHz Cpu, you may have some speed issues of your own. With my AMD 486/40, I can at least fake a 486/25 or 486/33 at the flick of a switch. Those DX4 CPUs have no changeable multi, do they? Or is it possible to drive a DX2-66 as regular DX-33?

ux-3 wrote:

With my AMD 486/40, I can at least fake a 486/25 or 486/33 at the flick of a switch.

Yes, and with disabled L1 cache, the speed is very similar to a 386. 😀

ux-3 wrote:

Those DX4 CPUs have no changeable multi, do they? Or is it possible to drive a DX2-66 as regular DX-33?

The multiplicator is changeable, but only between 2x and 3x (or 3x and 4x in case of some AMD models).
For an 1x multiplicator, you'll need a simple DX version as well.
Fortunately, on my board I can change between DX and DX4 in a few seconds (no jumpers to reset, automatic voltage detection).

5u3 wrote:

In the end it turned out that the SIS 496/497 is easier to use, and quite a bit faster, if you use a late 486 CPU.

Another consideration is whether PCI busmastering is even beneficial if you have a CPU as slow as a 486 and as little system/RAM bandwidth available as those 32-bit bus + direct mapped cache + FPM DRAM boards.