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Acer V20 486 PCI/VLB motherboard

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First post, by feipoa

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Does anyone have any experience with an Acer V20 486 motherboard? It came in a case I bought, which I plan to use for a socket 4 system (either an Acer V12 or Intel Batman's Revenge board).

The V20 came cacheless. It appears to support both VLB and PCI and is based on a chipset I haven't see before, the ALi M1429G / M1435. It will be interesting to see if this board suffers from VLB bridging slowdowns. I haven't seen any builds based on this board so I'm wondering if it wasn't popular due to performance or stability issues.

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Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 1 of 2, by amadeus777999

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This one looks very nice.

If this is an OEM board then the BIOS might be an obstacle to have it running as well as it can. I have no idea if the Ali chipset can go toe to toe with the UMC and SiS heavyweights... have you run any tests?

Regarding OEM bios - the Compaq board I'm currently using has such horrid timings that equipping it with cache makes it slower. If you start it with a fsb of 40 it uses even more timid timings - one can only change the board's fsb on the fly to have good timings... even though it's an UMC888x based one.

Reply 2 of 2, by feipoa

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Brief update to this thread, and for anyone who considers buying one of these Acer V20 motherboards, the memory timings are slow, to say the least. A quick cachechk comparison with an Am486DX4-100 and another VIP board, the M919, reveals,

Acer V20
L1 = 100 MB/s
L2 = 39.8 MB/s
RAM = 22.8 MB/s

M919
L1 = 104 MB/s
L2 = 56 MB/s
RAM = 37 MB/s

And there was a similar return with Speedsys,

Acer V20
L1 = 61.1 MB/s
L2 = 32.5 MB/s
RAM = 20.9 MB/s

M919
L1 = 94 MB/s
L2 = 47 MB/s
RAM = 37 MB/s

Unfortunately, there aren't any BIOS options to adjust the cache/RAM timings. And it uses some custom Acer BIOS, so AMISetup won't run. CTCHIP34 doesn't have support for this chipset. So unless you have a thing for Acer motherboards, there is nothing remarkable about this motherboard.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

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