the chipset said 486 though ...

look at the sticker on the ami bios chip closely, it clearly says "486dx isa bios", and it uses an opti 82c495sx chipset.
so i would say its more of a 486 board modified with a 386 socket to use the cyrix 486dlc processor, which also makes it 386 compatible.

no, not really. I own a similar board, the VLB slots only work with the 486 upgrade chip. use a regular 386 and the vlb slots dont work.

Ive used this type of board with a UMC chipset and every single vlb video card has failed to work, I believe the controller cards did work.

I had a board very simliar to this one. Same chipset with 2 VLB slots. The VLB slots worked with a 386 as far as I can recall. However, there was basically no performance advantage over a regular ISA slot with the 386. With the 486DLC, there was a slight advantage. With IBM 486DLC2 the VLB slots functioned as they would on a normal 486 system. On my particular board I didn't seem to have compatibility problems with any of the VLB cards I tried. I ended up going with a Mach64.

Now the IBM 486SLC2 board with VLB slots I had...that was a different story. As the CPU only had a 24 bit address bus and 16 bit memory path, there were only a handful of cards that worked with it.

I have an OPTi 495-SDL (82C495SLC) motherboard with 386DX-40 and 2x VLB slots, however the board seems a bit faulty or I dunno (3 beeps) :)

I have an ECS Panda386V with ALI M1429 chipset. No issues with using VLB cards of any type.