Any barebones 486-class motherboards? \ VOGONS

Any barebones 486-class motherboards?

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First post, by megatog615

Posted on 2024-03-30, 01:40

megatog615 Offline

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Are there any socket-3 motherboards that have as little integrated features as possible? Essentially the board would be close to an industrial ISA/PCI backplane except it would have a CPU socket, cache, minimal chipset, RAM, and BIOS. Does such a thing exist? It would make for a truly customizable system. NO onboard disk controller, etc.

And yes, I did think of searching on theretroweb first, but realized that lack of features is difficult to search for.

Reply 1 of 2, by TheMobRules

Posted on 2024-03-30, 02:22

TheMobRules Offline

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I'd say most of the pre-PCI 486 boards that are not intended for OEM systems would satisfy that condition. The only integrated I/O "feature" would be the keyboard connector and you need to add in graphics/sound cards as well as multi I/O controllers for serial, parallel ports and drives.

Later boards with PCI started integrating many of those things into the board itself, but you may be able to find the odd PCI-based board without IDE/floppy or I/O. Though I don't think it would be easy to find one of those.

Reply 2 of 2, by Shponglefan

Posted on 2024-03-30, 03:35

Shponglefan Offline

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Pre-PCI those are quite common. I think all of the Socket 3 boards I have that are ISA or ISA+VLB lack drive controllers and built-in I/O (other than keyboard).

Of course, then you have to give up a slot to install a separate I/O controller. So it's not really a win in my view...

Pentium 4 Multi-OS Build
486 DX4-100 with 6 sound cards
486 DX-33 with 5 sound cards

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