Craigslist, eBay and Amibay....

My local CL has nothing except overpriced C2D Macbooks and P4s-Sandy bridge machines 😒

Made a post on amibay and vcfed as well. eBay ones are mad expensive

I got my 486 boards from other retro entusiasts. Perhaps some users will write you an email in order to help point you to an sales add somewere. They are hard to source and I used a couple of years getting my two boards.

Unless You are expecting to get one very cheap, the Ukraine Ebay sellers are where You will find the majority of them.

Imperious wrote:

Unless You are expecting to get one very cheap, the Ukraine Ebay sellers are where You will find the majority of them.

Be 100% shure that you read the description on the items. A lot of them are not working, yet on sale for some kind of "sadistic" reason. Or just for the sake of getting a quick Buck.

oeuvre wrote:

3COM 3C905

Ahem. I hope you won't mind me interfering here, but I have one of those cards and I never could get it working in DOS. I had much better luck with an ISA card. Just saying. You would probably get it to work, but you can't say I didn't warn you 😁

I've gotten my 3C905 to work fine in DOS actually, even got on IRC with it. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

I got a couple of those 486-PCI boards from eBay, one was from the Ukrainian sellers a while ago (it was considerably cheaper than it is now), packaging was sub-par (no anti-static bag, it came wrapped in paper and cardboard) but it made the trip across the ocean safely and has been working very well, it looks pretty much brand new.

The other one I got in an auction, I was the only bidder and got it for less than USD 20 including shipping, but it is a rare case, it was mislabeled as "496 system" or something like that so it didn't get much attention 😁 .

On the other hand, a few weeks ago I was watching a very nice MSI board, but the auction skyrocketed to about 100 dollars!!! 😲

So my suggestion would be to keep your eyes open and most of all have patience if you can't get anything locally, prices on eBay are inflated way out of proportion for these things nowadays but there are still reasonable sellers around if you resist the retro urge!

I think this is the cheapest on eBay right now.

Look at this on eBay

I found a GA-486VM for $53 but made an offer for $45. Hopefully he bites.

If you plan to run the FSB at 40 MHz or higher, I find that double-banked cache works bes (9 cache sockets instead of 5).

Browsing through eBay, these are the boards which seem most appealing to me.

GA486AM/S (I own this board as well)
http://www.ebay.com/itm/GA486AM-socket-3-PCI- … Y4AAOSwanRXgSfL
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Magitronic-GA486AM-S- … FkAAOSwQoFWQUa5

Chaintech 486SPM (I own this board as well)
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/222029943491

M-Tech R418 (unique in that it has 32-pin and 72-pin RAM sockets. A vogons member successfully added ps/2 mouse capability to this board)
http://www.ebay.com/itm/M-TECH-R418W2-Socket- … h8AAOSwKtVWz431

Unbranded UMC 8881/8886 board
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-486-motherboa … P0AAOSwzJ5XaO4h

Unbranded ALI M14971489
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Socket-3-AT-486-Mothe … SYAAOSwIjNXJbKo

i never take 40fsb into consideration as both pci and cache are out of spec, i would either go for 50fsb with pci divider and relaxed cache timing, or stick to 33fsb with fastest timing. i also dislike rtc, ps2 mouse is preferred but not critical, what to suggest?

So I kinda scrapped the idea of getting one with PCI slots since I do not want to spend that kind of money. But I did get that GA-486VM + RAM + 486DX2 66 + multi I/O card + ISA modem + Genoa 8500VL VLB card for a total of $50 shipped. Bought a 3COM 3C509B-TPO ISA card for cheap and scored a floppy drive + serial mouse from an IRC buddy for the price of shipping. Total came to just shy of $70.

You should have checked on eBay as there is a steady supply of them from Russian and Ukraine at decent to half decent prices with some being bundles for $60 a pop. Now days just the board often costs lot more in western countries with some being priced over $100 before shipping.

I did get them off eBay and I spent a fair amount of time looking on there and found the cheapest Ukraine and Russian boards were said to be not working.

Total for $70 for all that including a serial mouse and floppy drive which I did not have, I think it was a fair price.

$50 for a Gigabyte GA486 AM/S v2.21 is a fair price. If the seller was US- or Europe-based, I would be concerned there was something wrong with the board.

Anyone perhaps tell me if the Genoa 8500VL Rev G has 1MB or 2 MB VRAM? What's the highest resolution + colors it could display? I think it is based on a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5426

Thanks

feipoa wrote:

$50 for a Gigabyte GA486 AM/S v2.21 is a fair price. If the seller was US- or Europe-based, I would be concerned there was something wrong with the board.

You have read wrong 😉

It's GA-486VM board, like this one:

kixs wrote:

feipoa wrote:

$50 for a Gigabyte GA486 AM/S v2.21 is a fair price. If the seller was US- or Europe-based, I would be concerned there was something wrong with the board.

You have read wrong 😉

It's GA-486VM board, like this one:

I was commenting on my own board recommendations and ebay prices, not what the poster ended up with.