This thread is about the highly intergrated and compact PM-386VC 386 DX40 motherboard made by an unknown maker and belonging to an unknown system from an unknown company.

I bought an interesting CPU card with a Pentium 66 CPU from what I assume is someone who works on a recycling center in Spain. The CPU card was reasonable priced at 22 euro but the shipping was 18 euro which made the deal less good (I'm cheap, did I mention that) so I looked at the sellers other gods and added a few items. I payed 6 euro for this motherboard and the added shipping cost was nothing as I already had decided to buy some other larger items so I was already going to pay for a big box.

All items this seller sells on Ebay are "untested" and my experience with motherboards I bought from this seller in the past is that they seldom work out of the box but often work with a new BIOS, changed jumper settings or removed shorts. You pretty much get what you pay for with this seller but even when buying more expensive motherboards on Ebay I often end up getting boards with "issues" so I prefer to buy really cheap stuff.

The PM-386VC got it's name from the text that is written on the BIOS chip and some other chip. The label on the BIOS chip says PM-386VC64 to be exact as this motherboard was sold with 64KB cache memory. The motherboard has an intergrated IDE controller, a floppy controller, a parallel port, serial ports, a PS/2 keyboard jack, a PS/2 mouse port and a Cirrus Logic GD5422 video chip. The only thing missing to get a complete gaming system is a stick of 72pin FPM memory, a sound card and some drives. The cache memory can be upgraded to 256KB and the video memory can also be upgraded. There is a socket for a WEITEK 3167 math CO processor but I doubt the motherboard will accept a 387.

The PM-386VC. Notice the large empty DIP socket in the upper right corner, someone has stolen something! 😀 There is also at least one jumper missing.

This is the PX-V4II ISA riser card with 4 ISA slots.

When I first tested the motherboard I would only get BEEEEP BEEEEP BIIP BIIP BIIP which is the Phoenix code for setting the CPU speed and the POST analyzer card showed 01 which is the Phoenix code for testing the CPU. At least it shows some kind of life I thought. There is an 80 MHz socketed crystal for the CPU so why dosn't it work?... Wait a minute, that empty socket looks RTC sized... The only RTC I managed to find in the current mess was this somewhat mangled Odin thingy but it worked and the motherboard came to life.

The RTC in it's socket.

This is the Phoenix BIOS.

I also booted the system with a floppy to see if the floppy controller worked and it did.

I do not have more time to mess with this motherboard today but I will continue later.