I had a 486 EISA that had a scsi eisa, a video eisa, sound ISA, ethernet ISA, IDE-I/O ISA and modem ISA. Filled 6 slots and am not sure what you would fill the other two with.
Guess you could try a dual video and dual sound card thing, need to make sure you can get the EISA configs for what ever you use.
Personally I learned to dislike EISA over time and dumped all but one board, still have a dual Pentium 200 EISA board w/dual onboard Adaptec scsi and onboard video, and currently sits idle 🤣.....

I'd fill it with sound cards, but that's just me. 😁

I feel like the only reason EISA exists really is for fast SCSI storage and the only context that that makes sense is Netware servers and wannabe Network OS. So SCSI card, network card(s) and possibly a bunch of serial cards for remote access with some sort of video for local maintenance is what I'd probably think of as peak EISA utilisation, authentically.

Some 486's have built in I/O but neither of the 2 motherboards you mentioned do so you can fill the 2 VLB slots easy

VLB1 I/O controller
VLB2 Graphics card
ISA1 NIC
ISA2 SB16
ISA3 Soundcard 2 (due to hanging note bug, etc)
ISA4 SCSI

That's 6 filled up pretty easy without useless stuff (SCSI is debateable)
Last 2 are a bit harder for "real reasons"

Horun wrote on 2024-09-16, 02:54:

I had a 486 EISA that had a scsi eisa, a video eisa, sound ISA, ethernet ISA, IDE-I/O ISA and modem ISA. Filled 6 slots and am not sure what you would fill the other two with.
Guess you could try a dual video and dual sound card thing, need to make sure you can get the EISA configs for what ever you use.
Personally I learned to dislike EISA over time and dumped all but one board, still have a dual Pentium 200 EISA board w/dual onboard Adaptec scsi and onboard video, and currently sits idle 🤣.....

What about stuff like a floppy controller? Does that come by default with the the IDE/I/O card?

Also, I've seen something like the OptiVision OptiVideo MPEG-2 Decoder Genlock EISA card which apparently lets a 486 PC play back videos (takes the load of doing that off the CPU) but I have no idea how these work in the slightest.

Last but not least, since such a machine (especially with 256 MB RAM) could probably run Windows 95, how about a USB controller? I know it might be tricky to get it to run under Windows, but I hear it's possible.

I love EISA boards as well, especially those that also have VLB or other proprietary local buses. I have a couple of them and they're probably my favorite boards. I would use:

• VLB graphics card
• EISA SCSI or IDE controller, depending on your storage options (these usually include a floppy controller)
• EISA network card
• ISA sound card(s) including MPU-401 compatible adapter if you need them
• ISA multi/IO card for serial/parallel ports
• The rest you can fill as you wish, that MPEG card you mention sounds interesting

For storage you will find many SCSI EISA controllers... I have an interesting Ultrastor 24F that supports 3 floppy drives! EISA IDE is much more unusual, only one I managed to find was a Tekram EISA caching IDE controller, I've heard there are also from DTC but never seen one of them in the wild.

I just realized dedicated MIDI cards were also a thing, like that Roland card that uses 8-bit ISA. You hook them up to your regular soundcard. Now that I think about it, Descent did have the option of selecting a dedicated music card, for example. So while it may feel like a 386-era thing, it'd certainly be right at home in a 486 build, especially since EISA is backwards compatible.

I'd probably go for a mix of SCSI and IDE. SCSI could be for a large (for the time) HDD and 250 MB ZIP drive (I feel a great option for data exchange in lieu of USB), while IDE would handle the CD-RW. And maybe another HDD, that one could be for the DOS/Windows partition for instance.

I hear the optimal number of VLB cards one can use before compatibility issues start cropping up would be 2, so I'd definitely go for a video card and an IDE controller card there. EISA would be the SCSI controller, network card and I/O card (if I can find one) , which leaves 3 more cards - one could be an ISA soundcard (maybe AWE32 or something else nice), and the aforementioned Roland midi card. That would just leave us with one more expansion slot to fill, I wonder what card could be used for that. If there were EISA-based USB implementations, that would be ideal, but oh well haha

EDIT: Oh, if all else fails I could also get separate I/O and IDE/Floppy controller cards. I know the multi-cards take care of both functions at the same time and save expansion slots, but I'd kinda like to do the opposite thing here after all.. although I do realize I'd be missing out on the improved speed EISA affords, since I doubt there are non-multi options from the EISA period. More and more functions were becoming integrated, only to make it to the mainboards in the ATX era not long afterwards.

Storage: Adaptec 2740W or 2742W (highly recommended, exceeded my expectations, close to 20 MB/s with over 18 MB/s in my tests)
Network: 3Com 3c597-TX (a need?, a disappointment, far away from 100 MBits and below 20 MBit/s in ally my tests)
Graphics card: VL of course

Oh, maybe I could use a Gravis ACE too! How do these work btw? Do you need to connect it to your SB through an external passthrough or something?

Spiffles wrote on 2024-09-16, 05:54:

Also, I've seen something like the OptiVision OptiVideo MPEG-2 Decoder Genlock EISA card which apparently lets a 486 PC play back videos (takes the load of doing that off the CPU) but I have no idea how these work in the slightest.

When you open a video, the graphics video card displays a black box where the video should be. The MPEG card connects through either the VAFC connector on the main video card, or through the VGA connector and displays the video in the black portion. AFAIK.

It's not adding to bus traffic much except for chunks of the compressed video data.

There's video capture cards out there as well that operate similarly.

Spiffles wrote on 2024-09-16, 07:38:

Oh, maybe I could use a Gravis ACE too! How do these work btw? Do you need to connect it to your SB through an external passthrough or something?

This would be a good choice. Gravis + SoundBlaster + Roland is pretty much an ultimate early 90s sound setup.

The Gravis ACE is just a standalone sound card. You'll need something to mix audio, either an external mixer or running through the line-in of another sound card.

Typically the IDE controller will also include serial so no need to double up unless you wanted COM 3-4 for some reason.

I left the Gravis ACE (or any GUS) off my build as are crazy expensive but if price is no limit then yes add this and a Roland LAPC-I
Thats all 8 filled! 4 being soundcards.

Disruptor wrote on 2024-09-16, 07:18:

Storage: Adaptec 2740W or 2742W (highly recommended, exceeded my expectations, close to 20 MB/s with over 18 MB/s in my tests)
Network: 3Com 3c597-TX (a need?, a disappointment, far away from 100 MBits and below 20 MBit/s in ally my tests)
Graphics card: VL of course

EISA Wide SCSI adapters are rare (and expensive), lots of standard 50pin like 2740, 42, 42T avaliable though for very reasonable....added: somewhere I have an eisa scsi but cannot find it.
Yes a VLB graphics is better than an EISA one...

Yes most ISA IDE I/O have IDE, floppy and com +lpt....

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-09-16, 15:02:

This would be a good choice. Gravis + SoundBlaster + Roland is pretty much an ultimate early 90s sound setup.

The Gravis ACE is just a standalone sound card. You'll need something to mix audio, either an external mixer or running through the line-in of another sound card.

Yea the problem is that Roland is just a MIDI controller card, I'd still need an external MIDI device for handling the actual generation. Both together probably work just as much as all the remaining components put together haha

Disruptor wrote on 2024-09-16, 07:18:

Storage: Adaptec 2740W or 2742W (highly recommended, exceeded my expectations, close to 20 MB/s with over 18 MB/s in my tests)
Network: 3Com 3c597-TX (a need?, a disappointment, far away from 100 MBits and below 20 MBit/s in ally my tests)
Graphics card: VL of course

For best performance a VLB graphics card is (much) better, both because it . But if we wanted best performance we wouldn't be using EISA in the first place. A 486 PCI system would run rings around EISA (and beat VLB due to more things like NICs available on PCI). So an EISA system by definition isn't an exercise in maximizing performance.

So I'd say go for EISA VGA; ATi Mach32 is fastest, but I'd go for a QVision 1280 as most EISA-specific.

What I would do on VLB is multi-I/O (even though the legacy stuff just goes through ISA there).

VLB graphics for sure.
EISA-SCSI Raid for HDD Storage, I would use a DPT.
Adaptec EISA SCSI for CD and/or tape storage.
EISA Networking Ethernet (3Com, Intel), token ring (Madge) and/or FDDI (DEC, SK-Net).
EISaMulti serial (DIGI)
ISA soundcard if the SCSI RAID is not noisy enough.

Too bad utilizing all of the EISA slots isn't really feasible outside of server use where you might have multiple NICs and SCSI controllers. I built my MCCI SuperEISA based system back in 2004, and most of that time only 2 EISA cards were installed. With the VLB slot, there's no need to use EISA VGA, which isn't all that impressive anyway. For a time I had the SuperMac Spectrum/24 installed, which is an EISA card you can daisy chain to your VLB VGA. This is a dedicated 24-bit graphics accelerator. It's only useful if you have a VGA card with a sucky acceleration engine...like an ARK1000. It's also useful if you want to run 50MHz bus, as the good 64-bit VLB VGA cards usually don't support faster than 40MHz.
The Optivision MPEG2 decoder cards would be a pretty cool option if only a software package could be found. I've been looking for 16 years, and haven't found any. Without the software the card is completely useless.
Also, please not that the MCCI SuperEISA only has *one* VLB slot. You can just stick your optical drive on the SCSI controller. If you can't find a decent SCSI CD-ROM drive, then you can use something like SCSIDE to hook up an ATAPI unit.

Welp, the gimmick did seem interesting at first, but now I think I'd be swayed more towards VLB/PCI. That might be superior for a 486 build and the cards are generally cheaper and more easily accessible anyway. 2 Vesa cards, 2 ISA peripherals and 4 PCI slots on top of that sounds much easier to fill in.