what it attracts me is that its size appears to be a m-atx board(although no ps2 keyboard or atx power input), rather than a baby-at board for those days.

really, i wonder if there are any atx or matx 486 boards, with or without ps2 keyboard and matx power input?

Was'nt ATX introduced with Super 7 and Slot pentiums?

Unisys made this tiny baby 486 computer. It has PS/2, VGA and Ethernet onboard and comes with a single ISA slot.

RacoonRider wrote:

Was'nt ATX introduced with Super 7 and Slot pentiums?

there are 430tx boards in atx form, i am not sure if there are also 430hx. and if final lot of 486 boards may be made as late as 1997, when socket7 still in its mid-age.

noshutdown wrote:

RacoonRider wrote:

Was'nt ATX introduced with Super 7 and Slot pentiums?

there are 430tx boards in atx form, i am not sure if there are also 430hx. and if final lot of 486 boards may be made as late as 1997, when socket7 still in its mid-age.

There was a 430HX board made by Intel. I think RG100 has one?

For anyone else who even toyed with the idea of buying that board, the guy wants 56 euros just for shipping (to N. America)!

I checked this one when i looked, but the price stopped me too, even if i'm french...

noshutdown wrote:

RacoonRider wrote:

Was'nt ATX introduced with Super 7 and Slot pentiums?

there are 430tx boards in atx form, i am not sure if there are also 430hx. and if final lot of 486 boards may be made as late as 1997, when socket7 still in its mid-age.

I got a rather large heap of atx style TX boards but I once owned a FX that was produced for Gateway that was atx. I wouldn't be surprised if limited numbers of HX made it into atx form as well. The only 486 boards that came even remotely close to atx are all industrial and very expensive. I know one company that is still making or has stock of new 486 boards that do use some onboard sd dram and atx power supplies but still limited to at from factor cases.

feipoa wrote:

For anyone else who even toyed with the idea of buying that board, the guy wants 56 euros just for shipping (to N. America)!

You guys are lucky in North America as most retro stuff comes from their, half the shipping quotes to Australia are insane, boxed mpeg playback card? $150USD, PS2 mouse? $117, on the other hand reasonable quotes for similar items are like $15-20, I cannot understand the huge difference considering If I bought the same item and had it shipped in North America they sellers aren't charging ripoff postage charges.

I would suggest making very good friends with someone in Europe and someone in the US. Use their place as an eBay dumping ground. Then in the next 0-20 years, if you so happen to visit Europe or N. America, pick up your goods. Alternately, have your very good friends ship your items to you by boat.

Even in Canada, I am raped to death on items shipped from the US, albiet not as bad as for Australians. I use the above noted methods for ridiculous eBay shipping costs.

There is no way it costs this guy 56 euro to ship 1 motherboard using french post to Canada.

So nobody has tested an ALi PCI socket 3 motherboard?

i am also interested in seeing how 486 chipsets from intel, via, ali, sis, opti, umc perform clock to clock against each other.

I'm pretty sure the VIA and OPTI are junk on the PCI platform. I suspect Intel is on the slow side, but I have high hopes for the ALi. I'd be willing to run a detailed chipset comparison, but I'm lacking VIA, OPTI, ALi, and Intel boards. I don't really want to pay anything for VIA and OPTI boards, but would spent a little on ALi or Intel boards, but not what the French guys is asking.

Its Abit AB-PB4 and Gigabyte GA-5486AL equivalents are quite good performers and also provide a dedicated PCI 1/2 divider jumper. The performance is absolute comparable to the fast SiS and UMC chipsets. They support EDO which makes them easy upgradeable. But both (all?) are lagging a PS/2 mouse port. So at least for me there are better alternatives because in 10 years or so the old serial mechanical mice may become rare. It's so nice to have a PS/2 port with an opical mouse attached but of course of the expense of the "100% authentic retro" seal 😉

sunaiac wrote:

I checked this one when i looked, but the price stopped me too, even if i'm french...

Oh, and I was stopped by the 3 memory slots, since I have 4x16MB.
But actually when my 486 is done, I might buy and try it.

@FGB
If it is not too much trouble, could you share a cachechk and speedsys screen shot of those two motherboards using an AMD X5-133?

What is that EISA looking slot on your Abit board? Have you tested it with ISA and EISA cards, or is it some sort of misc. expansion slot?

The absense of a PS/2 port is a big killer for me because I have my retro computers on a 4-port KVM w/audio that uses a PS/2 mouse port. I don't like having to switch mice every time I switch terminals, which is very often.
The nice thing about the UMC Biostar MB8433-UUD motherboard is that it has both 1/2 and 2/3 PCI dividers, which comes in very handly for 50/60 MHz FSBs.

@sunaiac
3 SIMM slots probably isn't a show-stopper for me. You could probably use two 64 MB SIMMs. Does the odd number of SIMMs imply that it will work with EDO RAM?

I have the PCX on another harddisk. Will post it here later. But these boards are in the same ballpark as the UMC/SiS boards.

Having three simms implies nothing but the Acer FinALi Chipset was the first 486 chipset with EDO support. Any board based on the FinALi chipset supports EDO.

The brown expansion slot an the Abit AB-PB4 looks like EISA but it's a PCI + ISA riser (PISA) slot. But I never tried it out with a riser card.

I was able to get a high resolution image of that ALi motherboard. The chipset date code is from Week 46 of 1999, which is by far the latest chipset datecode I've seen on any 486 motherboard. I wonder what the target industry for this board was?

feipoa wrote:

@FGB
@sunaiac
3 SIMM slots probably isn't a show-stopper for me. You could probably use two 64 MB SIMMs. Does the odd number of SIMMs imply that it will work with EDO RAM?

Why would it ?

As for the RAM, I already had 4 EDO 16MB modules 🙁

And really, 49 is too much, but maybe i can try to discuss the price ...

According to a product overview I found, the ALi chipset should support up to 1MB of cache and 128mb of RAM. Sounds like it should be a pretty interesting chipset. I've never had the pleasure of trying one before, but I remember somebody complaining how it only cached 32mb of RAM when in L2 writeback mode. Maybe that was board specific.

If you want to try something really funky, try to get a PCI 486 board based on the single chip "ALD" chipset.

http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.1 … 9&id=9016563532

http://www.aldtech.com/products/chips/93c488/c488spec.pdf