My family had a cheap VLB 486 board back when they were current. PCI was out but those boards cost more.
We had a lot of trouble with that system but the VLB disk controllers seemed to work okay. I didn't notice any random disk corruption, but if it was in fact happening then it wouldn't entirely surprise me.
We never had any VLB video card, but had 2 VLB IDE cards (only one at a time). The first was a cheap $20 card which didn't boot reliably, but it seemed to just be a defective card.
The 2nd was an EIDE VLB card, allowing use of larger hard drives. It supported 16.6MB/sec PIO Mode-4, and that seemed really fast at the time.
I used it with a WD 1.6GB. It worked fine without any drivers, but in order to get faster performance it needed a TSR loaded at boot. I remember being impressed with how fast it was with the TSR. At times, the hard drive sounded like the static noise from a dialup modem and it would load things much more quickly than if the TSR wasn't loaded.
Before either of those we had an ISA IDE card, which always worked fine. I do remember these old cards being a jumper hell, but I didn't mind it. I had much better experiences with jumpers than "plug-n-pray" software configuration in those days.
With jumpers you definitely need the instructions though. I'm not sure if I have the documentation for any of those cards anymore, so if I dug any of them out and tried to use them today, I might be in trouble.
I remember some upgrade we did where the printed instructions actually included a procedure to reinitialize something on a hard disk. I don't remember if it was the VLB EIDE card or something else. The instructions actually had us typing a short .COM program in debug.exe and then running it. Certainly an amusing thing to put in a user manual - but it *did* fix the problem we were having, whatever it was.
#1) Anyway, I can't deny that 486 was more trouble than any other system I've used, though not because of VLB in my case. It was just a really unstable cheaply made motherboard, lots of jumpers, some obscure BIOS settings, and I didn't know much about what I was doing back then. If I had a quality 486 board today, I like to think I'd have an easier time, but I might be surprised.
From today's perspective, a 486 is definitely a lot more archaic than a common Pentium. The latter will still work with a lot of common, fairly modern hardware, but a 486 board loses that. No ATX form factor, AT power supply needed, DIN keyboard, BIOS is not flashable, unlikely to have PCI, likely not to have an onboard IDE controller (and if it does have, it won't work with anything > 540MB). Lots of jumpers to configure, likely to use those old barrel batteries or a Dallas RTC chip. Lack of video options or card options in general (lacking PCI). Probable difficulty with finding a usable combination of drive controller and hard drive that will work.
Stepping up to the Pentium era makes so many things a lot more modern.
#2) Super Socket 7 with an NVidia AGP card was frustrating. You can eventually figure out what hoops to jump through to make these setups work, but it's not something that wants to work. When it does work, then it might underperform. I eventually found a combination of drivers that performed significantly better than other combinations did. I'm not sure why, but it was a marked difference. I might be rebuilding that system eventually, hope I still remember what to do with it.
Although it wasn't really "difficult", I had an HP slot-2 machine (2nd hand) that by default didn't enable bus mastering on PCI slots. I had my hard drives plugged into a PCI card that needed it enabled. Without it enabled, the system would lock up during the BIOS startup procedure. Any time the BIOS wasn't configured correctly for some reason, I had to pull the computer out, get the cover off, unplug the card, reboot into the BIOS, enable bus mastering on that slot, shut back down, and then plug the card back in. I got really sick of that.
I also got sick of the 5 minute boot times. It had the slowest boot of any BIOS I have ever seen, and the agonizing memory "test" could not be skipped. Planning to use your computer soon? Need to reboot for some reason? Go get a drink.
kanecvr wrote:Another example is my Abit BE6-II - BSODs in win98 with GF4 titanium cards if chipset drivers are installed. In XP it will sometimes work, other times freeze at the login screen. It's also picky about ram. Only one of my 7 256mb modules runs on it, and less then half of my 128mb sticks. The compaq only works with hyundai / hyinx and samsung modules.
In contrast my MVP3 based A-open AX59 PRO just works and it's easy to set up. It works will all my ram, and I can safely install via 4in1 4.43 with forceware 4x.xx and it's trouble free. Same for my Soyo SY-6BA+ - intel 440BX, takes almost any ram and AGP video cards I put in it. No lockups, no bsods, no drama whatsoever.
The ABit BE6-II was manufactured with very awful capacitors. Have yours been replaced? If not, they could be to blame for how it's behaving. I think almost all the ABits of that period ended up in the trash because of cap problems.