I'd discount the first magitronics with the intel chipset, it has a dallas battery that is not easily replaced and looks to lack onboard cache/sockets?

The PCI-400-4 looks to be an okay board (if you can find the jumper settings), you can run a 3dfx card if you wanted and probably supports any 486/5x86/pod cpu, one thing to conisder is that its missing one cache module and the system reports no cache, you will have to find a replacement or its performance will suffer.

V4P895P3/SMT - does'nt appear to support 5x86/pod cpu's, otherwise might be okay http://motherboards.mbarron.net/models/486vlb3/v4p895v5.htm

The "vintage 486 motherboard" appears to be a pc chips with real cache, no mention of supporting newer cpu's
http://motherboards.mbarron.net/models/486pci/80486vip.html

I'd personally choose the Shuttle Hot 433 out of that lot, supports any 486/5x86/pod cpu, 256me ram, onboard ide/floppy, documented jumper settings

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/S/SH … OT-433-VER.html

How can a motherboard not support the POD ?
I thought it had onboard VRM and all the magic stuff ?

The PCI400 is a clone of the 4DPS juste after apparently, and the later has the cache and all.

But the Shuttle seems to have the best price/capacity ratio to me too actually 😀

Shuttle seller doesn't send to my country 🙁

Stark trolling and asking around your local community especially where there are people who tend to hang onto things much longer than most. Old people almost always have old things and time to time they have what you are searching for or along those lines. Thrift stores, churches, even dumpsters might have old comps but 486 era in general isn't going to be easy. Yard sales can have amazing finds, if there is nothing computing wise on display be sure to ask the people who is doing the yard sale chances are they got some old comps on hand that they never would have thought that anyone would want. If your luck is very very good you might get a Amiga pc 😮

In the local cash converter I found an amiga 1200 😀
But the older computer was something like a socket 939 🙁

This is just me personally - but I would stay away from (1) board with Dallas RTC chips, and (2) boards with VARTA batteries.

I almost think it would be better to go with a socket 7 board and get slower pentium chip. It seems to me like the pentium-era board were a lot better overall....

ncmark wrote:

I almost think it would be better to go with a socket 7 board and get slower pentium chip. It seems to me like the pentium-era board were a lot better overall....

This point has been debated to death around here over the years I assume. I've been trying to build the perfect machine for the 1990-97 time period and it's just not happening.

486DX2-66 - too slow for 95+ games, even DOOM chugs a bit
486DX4-100 / am133 - too fast for early 90's, even with turbo off, not fast enough for SVGA in Duke3d, etc.
Socket 7 - way too fast for early 90's, slow down programs are a pain and haven't worked well for me. Even disabling cache is painful and the results are not great (in my experience). But the hardware is more mature, decent PCI graphics cards are a dime a dozen and they have speed enough to deal with mid to late 90's DOS games.

I guess it depends what you want to play, but I think I'm finally settling on a socket 7 machine + a slow 486 or fast 386 for games with speed issues.

Yes there's no perfect machine. But the point is not to have the all around fighter.
As I said, i'm going for nostalgia as much as anything else. Dreamt of the DX4-100 when I was on a SX-33.

I'm going to play C&C, Red Alert, Doom1&2, duke 3D, warcraft 2, M.A.X. ... that kind of games.
If the 486 is too fast, i'll go doxbox. If its too slow, it probably means my multi gigahertz multicore multi GPU monster will do it. That's not the point 😁
Just want to manage to build my perfect 486. Maybe i'll not even run it more than twice a decade after that.

Plus, I can easily find pentiums 100+ for nothing, so its not even challenging 😁 Finding a way to bring that shuttle MB to france is funjnier 😉

Hello,

found a friend in the US who can receive the shuttle MB and send it back to me 😀
And I decided on the box : i'm gonna try to find a gateway 2000 elite tower, the kind they sold pentiums 133+ in 😀
Also found 64 mb (16*4) of EDO memory
And bought a new pentium overdrive from ebay (i already own an intel DX4-100)

This is beginning to take shape 😀

Disabling cache will work just fine.

Here a demo with an AMD K6-2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PtaXJp2iBY

I have a Super Socket 7 with a Pentium 133 and it can run at full speed, as a 486DX2 and as a 386DX.

But past that you have no choice but to build another machine (like a Pentium 3 box with Windows 98 and 3D cards).

A super socket 7 machine covers games from late 80s to early 90s quite well. Basically games ranging from Space Quest 1 to Space Quest 6, simple games to 3D games in VGA such as Wing Commander, Doom, Descent, System Shock, Comanche, and others.

From this period (which is MY main period) I haven't run into any game (that I knew as a kid) that don't run with the cache disabling trick.

With a Pentium 166 or 200 you can also cover early glide games like Tomb Raider and Wing Commander Prophecy.

Once you want SVGA (for games that don't support 3D cards) however then you need something much faster. The faster the better 😀

The odd thing however is that DOSBox handles these older games PERFECTLY. It's the newer W98 stuff that requires 3D cards that really can't be played well without the original hardware.

I'll play 486 era games mainly, I didn't have a computer at 286-386 era, so I don't have a nostalgia crush on those games.

Anyone knows what size of hard drive i'll be able to reach on the SHUTTLE 433 v4.0 MB :??:

I'm using a 2.5gb Samsung in mine. It support LBA for hard drives, so if I had to guess, I'd say 8gb.

Ok thx 😀

Received my shuttle motherboard 😀
Since it's pretty much all I have, can't really test it yet. (I also have 4x16MB EDO, 1x8MB FPM, 1 5x86 133 P75, 1 new POD 83, and probably 1 Intel DX4-100 in some drawer)

I'm now gonna try to find my storage system.
Does anyone know if a PCI 2.1 SCSI card would work on it ? (adaptec 29160N ? that kind)
Else what would the best card to work ?
I'd like to go like 9.1GB SCSI 10k HDD + 8x CDROM.

Here are today's orders :
- AHA 2940U2W PCI SCSI controler
- Intel PRO/100+ NIC
- in case, 3Com 905 NIC

First post update in progress, and i'll start taking pictures i think.

Today's order :
- http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255 … &mtid=824&kw=lg

On the day i give up ebay and go for the want to buy on CPU world and vintage computng, this appears ... X)

sunaiac wrote:

Today's order :
- http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255 … &mtid=824&kw=lg

On the day i give up ebay and go for the want to buy on CPU world and vintage computng, this appears ... X)

Neat a DX4.

Not A DX4, The DX4 😉
@feipoa: When you did your ultimate socket 3 comparison, did you try fancy tings with this chip ? (2x50, 2x60, 2x66 ...)