Never heard of it... out of interest, why does it really suck? Apart from the 5V vs 3.3V thing, and the max RAM of 192MB vs 256MB (both insane for 1993/1994 standards) I thought they were pretty similar in their ancient sluggishness.

Because most of the Mercury chipsets are buggy, and don't even support L2 cache in writeback mode. I can't recall if it affects L1 cache also. possibly. In any case, write through cache on a Pentium system is ridiculous.

I may of or may not of seen a socket 5 with a 430LX on ebay before. That said I wouldn't of bought one, Id be more interested in HX socket 4 rather than LX socket 5. 🤣

Did the Pentium60/66 have any chipsets other than Mercury, SiS501/-2/-3 and Opti's offerings? Were there custom ones made by Compaq?

The only Socket 5 motherboard with Mercury chipset I know is the MSI 586MC2 (MS-5106).

Another chipset for Socket 4 is ALi Aladdin M1449/M1451 e.g. to be found on GA586AL.
FIC built a motherboard (PA-1000T) based on VIA VT82C505/VT82C535 chipset.

BastlerMike wrote:

The only Socket 5 motherboard with Mercury chipset I know is the MSI 586MC2 (MS-5106).

Interesting, I'll have to look that one up.

There were actually quite a lot of Socket4 chipsets, but they were mostly failures and ended up bankrupting the manufacturers. It would be nice if vogonswiki could be updated to list all known socket4 chipsets.

In addition to those already mentioned, I have also seen Socket4 chipsets from Forex and UMC.

OPTi had at least four different Socket4 chipsets, all equally crap.

I have a socket 4 board with ALI chipset.. Still need to remove the battery and test it 🤣

I think I have a Socket 5 board manufactured by AIR with the Mercury chipset. I'm struggling to find the model name without pulling the board out of storage. IIRC, the board may have VLB and PCI slots, too. It's also tricky for me to find a list of AIR boards that were released. IIRC, there was an antiquated East Asian website with dated pictures that had an image of the board - anyone recall the site?

I think the site you are referring to is Japanese. I don't recall the address, but I am certain I have visited it because it had pictures of all kinds of weird high end boards.

Not sure if it was this site, but one similar to it:

http://www.funkygoods.com/mb/index.htm

Maybe this one:

http://home.att.ne.jp/alpha/pcboard/frame.htm

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I think the site you are referring to is Japanese. I don't recall the address, but I am certain I have visited it because it had […]
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I think the site you are referring to is Japanese. I don't recall the address, but I am certain I have visited it because it had pictures of all kinds of weird high end boards.

Not sure if it was this site, but one similar to it:

http://www.funkygoods.com/mb/index.htm

Maybe this one:

http://home.att.ne.jp/alpha/pcboard/frame.htm

Thanks for the links. I think it may have been the bottom link, although I can't see the AIR board I was referring to. There are AIR boards linked, but they don't have the slot configuration. My board has 5 ISA slots, 1 or 2 shared VLB slots and 3 PCI slots.. Thinking about it more, it may have the Intel Aries chipset rather than the Mercury chipset...

EDIT:
Found it. This is a Socket 3 board and not a Socket 5 board.

Yeah, I don't think there are any Intel chipset based Pentium boards with VLB. They were really pushing PCI. Almost everybody else in the chipset business was focused on VLB.
So it seems to me that after the P54C chips came out, there was a period of time before the Triton chipset was available, and the 430LX Mercury became the low end offering for Socket5, where the 430NX Neptune was more workstation class, supporting 512MB and SMP.

Now what would really be interesting is to see a dual Socket4 board using the Neptune chipset. I am not aware of any dual Socket4 boards that had intel chipsets. Infact, dual Socket4 seems pretty rare. I probably have one of the only consumer offerings (Acer J3 Project backplane). Actually, come to think of it, I don't think Neptune is even capable for supporting dual Socket4, because the 5V Pentiums don't contain the logic that allows dual CPU operation, and since Neptune was designed for P54C, it assumed such logic was already in the CPU.

Socket 4:
https://www.ultimateretro.net/en/motherboards/5115
Socket 5:
https://www.ultimateretro.net/en/motherboards/428

These are the only boards with Intel chipset + VLB + Pentium of some sort that we know of.

Dual socket 4 w/ Intel chipset:
https://www.ultimateretro.net/en/motherboards/2834
https://www.ultimateretro.net/en/motherboards/4200