Never owned EISA mobo.
It will be great if you can post some performance metrics.
Otherwise - this looks like it will be quite an interesting build.
Keep us posted !

null

I also recently acquired a 486DX-50 system.
I posted some of my benchmark results in this post: Intel 486DX 33 MHz vs Intel 486DX 50 MHz.

Would be interesting to see how your system compares.
However, as mentioned in my post, it doesn't beat a 486DX2-66.

One of my earliest computers from back when was 486 put together from repaired sis 461 VLB motherboard that someone damaged traces and processor was a gift for me from a guy in my hometown for my college. This was AMD 486DX 40. Got the Tseng ET4000 w32p hercules VLB. One of my most successful overclock was 50MHz. Played Doom rather well.

Cheers, Pentiumspeed

this build is fucking rad, love the discreet logic on the motherboard

Thanks. I will definitely post some results once the system is tuned. For now I am investigating some low VGA scores. Surprisingly the Winner 1000 cards returns identical or even little lower scores in EISA slot as opposed to ISA (and unsurprisingly well below an average VL-Bus card). I'd expect it to be the other way around. So investigation and ECU hacking ongoing...

I wish I could see the pictures, but they are blocked by the great firewall of China.

I seem to have a similar experience with the Winner 2000 in my VL/EISA 486 board. Not sure if the problem it the bus or the card. Try a Compaq Q vision maybe.

What advice would you give to some looking to build an EISA card based computer ?
I know most cards are hard to find and expensive.
What cards work vanilla with Win95b/Win98se ?
Is it hard to get to work in DOS ?

Intel486dx33 wrote:

What advice would you give to some looking to build an EISA card based computer ? I know most cards are hard to find and expensi […]
Show full quote

What advice would you give to some looking to build an EISA card based computer ?
I know most cards are hard to find and expensive.
What cards work vanilla with Win95b/Win98se ?
Is it hard to get to work in DOS ?

In general the main problem is that all cards need to be configured before they can be used. So you need to boot from floppy, run ECU (eisa configuration utility) that works with the motherboard and supply a .cfg file for the card you want to use and assign resources. Once you do that and save it to NVRAM the card is initialised at boot and can be used.

With Windows 95 the limitation is that EISA isn't fully compatible with their take on plug£play. Windows can usually see the EISA devices and read configuration, but you won't be able to change settings like you can for ISA P£P or PCI cards

I guess EISA is more suited for DOS or Windows 3.1 environments.

EISA cards (controllers, NICs) aren't that rare. It is only EISA VGA cards that are rare. Presumably it's because EISA was targeting primarily servers where graphics performance wasn't that important. So the market even when EISA was a thing was tiny.

mpe wrote:

In general the main problem is that all cards need to be configured before they can be used. So you need to boot from floppy, ru […]
Show full quote

In general the main problem is that all cards need to be configured before they can be used. So you need to boot from floppy, run ECU (eisa configuration utility) that works with the motherboard and supply a .cfg file for the card you want to use and assign resources. Once you do that and save it to NVRAM the card is initialised at boot and can be used.

With Windows 95 the limitation is that EISA isn't fully compatible with their take on plug£play. Windows can usually see the EISA devices and read configuration, but you won't be able to change settings like you can for ISA P£P or PCI cards

I guess EISA is more suited for DOS or Windows 3.1 environments.

EISA cards (controllers, NICs) aren't that rare. It is only EISA VGA cards that are rare. Presumably it's because EISA was targeting primarily servers where graphics performance wasn't that important. So the market even when EISA was a thing was tiny.

Where can one et these config files?
Is there a website ?

The .cfg files came on floppy disk with drivers.

There are also pages like this http://66.113.161.23/~mR_Slug/EISA/ which have .cfg files for pretty much anything.

VERY cool rig! I had zero exposure really to EISA and Microchannel, and I find this fascinating to learn more about. Thanks for the pictures and the details.

Pretty awesome build.
Controller cards with the cache upgrades are always cool, even if not that uncommon in the enterprise sector.
but that video card! I've NEVER seen the duel bus option like that before, I love it!

There's also the Winner 2000, which is the same card but with 4MB VRAM, and also the ATi 8514 Ultra (not the Graphics Ultra), which was ISA on one side and MCA on the other.

I've always wanted to build a EISA system but I've never come across an EISA board in my retro computing adventures and they always seem to be overly expensive or are of some proprietary form factor without a case on eBay. I'd love to test out this ATI Mach32 EISA video card I've had kicking around here.

Most of the EISA boards were proprietary because the OEMs were the ones pushing the standard.

The only EISA machines I have are Compaq Deskpro XL systems, a 486DX2-66 and a Pentium Pro.
Thing is, they have PCI as well.
So it would be a downgrade to use EISA cards 😀
Besides, most of the functionality is integrated on the mainboard (via PCI), such as LAN, SCSI, IDE etc.

Nice build. I might have a spare EISA Anylan, if you have a matching hub/switch (Anylan is not compatible with Ethernet) otherwise you need to look for a 3C595 which is quite rare. I probably have a PM2022 with floppy as well but recommend to use a wide SCSI controller if you really want to use the RAID functions. Besides some common boards like the Adaptec controllers, 3C579 , Compaq Qvision, EISA boards and cards are hard to find meanwhile. I started collecting 20 years ago when some of the equipment was still in use. Really time to get my website up and runnig again...
eisapc

Loved reading about this, thanks for the info! I just bought a EISA system myself and I am learning to use it.
I have a DX50 as well with Mach32 EISA VGA card and EISA SCSI card with CDROM and 2gb SCSI HDD.
It also has a crappy Vibra ISA SB16, which I will be swapping out at earliest convenience.

Sadly no VLB slots on my motherboard so it remains to be seen whether I can use this for much gaming, but it's cool nevertheless!
I have ordered a SCSI2SD for it so that I can get files on and off it more easily, but it must come from the UK so who knows when that will arrive.

I would like to use it for retro gaming, in particular point and click adventures of the 90s such as Indy4 and Loom.