look at the quality: this board is junk. soldered l2 cache, only 2 pci slots.. real crap if you ask me. if this single chipset gained any reputation it would be known...
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wrote: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
A 2-PCI 486 board? Will that thing even load Windows? Does that board come with a Cyrix 5x86-120?
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
I'm not sure what kind of Cyrix CPU is attached, because the picture is too fuzzy.
I have no idea as to how well this chipset works. I do know that it at least made it to north american markets, probably sometime in 1997. I highly suspect it to be crap, but I am interested in testing the claims of support for "pipelined burst cache". Unfortunately this board is not fitted with the plb modules...but I have seen the ones that are. I wonder if it's a PCchips type experience...
"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium
wrote:look at the quality: this board is junk. soldered l2 cache, only 2 pci slots.. real crap if you ask me. if this single chipset gained any reputation it would be known...
It might have been an Asian market board that wasn't sold anywhere else. Once you start digging, you'd be shocked to see some of the things that weren't sold in N. America or Europe.
And according to that ALD specification sheet, it meets PCI Spec 2.1 and will accept 1 MB of cache. It claims to support pipeline burst cache and can access 256 MB of EDO RAM. I remember the PCChips M919 manual claimed it would also support pipeline burst cache in the future; what a load of baloney that was. The manual also mentions the support of Cyrix 5x86 burst write-back cycles (BWRT), but the later UMC chipsets supported that already.
The only advantages of this board over a UMC seems to be the PCI 2.1 support along with the claim for PB cache. The limit of 2 PCI slots is a major weakness.
I wouldn't mind testing one of these out if it had the PB cache, but I wouldn't pay more than $5 for one. Where did you see the models with PB cache?
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
It was also on taobao, but that was some time ago. At the time, I wrote it off as a possible fake.
My feeling is that the ALD boards must have been somewhat common in Honkong/Taiwan. I have seen numerous examples on different platforms (486DLC, 486DX VLB, 5x86 PCI)
update: according to their website, ALD was founded in 1998. So, that might explain why nobody has ever seen them. Nobody was buying 486s in 1998. The website is pretty hilarious. Though they still seem to update it, it looks like something very amateurish from 1998 with laughable photoshop images.
"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium
That sure looks like an interesting story. I would also test one board if available VERY cheap but I still don't believe that this is a quality board.
www.AmoRetro.de Visit my huge hardware gallery with many historic items from 16MHz 286 to 1000MHz Slot A. Includes more than 80 soundcards and a growing Wavetable Recording section with more than 300 recordings.
