Figured I'd post this here, as it's pretty unique! If I didn't have so much stuff already I would grab it, maybe someone here will find it interesting!
http://cgi.ebay.com/VINTAGE-CYRIX-Motherboard … =item3cb1af84c6
Interesting item, but I refuse to buy from these "professional" sellers who don't even list specifications or test the products. I rather pay more for something from a enthusiast who knows what it is he is selling...
/rant 🤣
Why would you say it's unique? Anything special about it?
Yeah, other than the fact that it's supposedly NOS, I don't see anything particularly unusual about it. Looks like a standard late-model Taiwanese 386 board, with a 486DLC. (And I'm not sure I believe the claim that it's NOS, either, being that a new-in-box motherboard usually wouldn't have RAM and CPU installed.)
It seems like a decent enough deal, though, and would make a pretty nice system, assuming it works... but I agree with Mau1wurf1977 that the 'untested' part is a bit of a turnoff.
In my part of the world old stuff like this is all but gone, so anytime a reasonably priced set of oddball 386/486 era hardware shows up on ebay, I am tempted to make a purchase! I thought this item was unique and oddball because the Cyrix 486 DLC CPUs have always fascinated me, as they were basically a 386 on steriods with a little L1 cache thrown in for good measure. And considering what it would cost to come up with all these items seperately in what appears to be good condition (especially a matched Cyrix DLC CPU and Cyrix copro), $30 with free shipping isn't bad at all. I have purchased many retro PC items from this seller in the past and have never had a bad part yet, so whoever bought this combo will probably have a nice item to play around with. Also the L2 cache on this board is arranged unlike any other 386 board I have ever seen. 😎
I did notice the box is a Socket 7 board, so it's not the right box for these parts! 🤣
I heard that you need a software tool to enable the L1 cache on these chips? Any truth to this?
I have 6 different 386/40 boards. All of them have the cpu soldered on the board (pqfp if I remember well?), but just one of them has a second socket(apart from the fpu) to install a DLC cpu. However, all of them have the "Enable L1 cache" option in BIOS, even though the 80386 doesn't have any.
Yes as I recall, the 486 DLC needed software to activate the 1kb of CPU L1 cache. I don't recall many boards having any support in the BIOS for the internal cache on these CPUs, and I remember many early boards were unstable using the DLC chips because of the cache. When you could get one of these working right (like most early Cyrix CPUs), they were impressive for what they were!! They could give early 486 systems quite a run for their money, and were much cheaper.
I would assume that on a 386 era board L1 in the BIOS refers to the external SRAM cache. Markk, have you ever disabled the L1 setting on any of your boards and verified if the external cache is on or off? I will need to try this on my two 386 motherboards and see what happens!
386DX40 (nice nick btw 😉 ) , all my boards have two seperate settings, L1 and L2 cache, and in the deffault BIOS settings the L1 is always disabled. But I'm sure that it refers to cpu cache, as in some boards the setting is named "CPU Internal Cache Enabled/Disabled". But I've never used such a cpu. So I can't really tell if you need to enable L1 cache using software in all systems, or just in case your bios doesn't have that setting. It would be interesting though if someone has a running DLC to see how it's doing compared to the 386/40 . I would be very curious. In general my boards score about 68-69,5MHz Landmark CPU speed(and about 40MHz with cache turned off).
