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ASUS ISA-386C memory board, does anyone own it or have a photo?

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First post, by vetz

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I have an ASUS ISA-386C board and it's been a quite decent motherboard in terms of stability. Nothing fancy on features.

It does have the possibility for an 32-bit memory board. I have never seen a picture of this board. Do anyone own it or have a picture?

The memory board for the ISA-486 is alot more common.

EDIT: Found this page in the manual.

The attachment image_2026-08-15_180959481.png is no longer available

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Reply 1 of 5, by Horun

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Hoping someone does have some pictures too as I do own a Asus ISA-386C, but never found anything on the memory card for it.

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 2 of 5, by rasz_pl

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ASUS ISA-386C already has 8 simm slots so expansion board seems kinda redundant. Looking at PCB expansion slot is wired to same signals going to SIMM sockets meaning most likely no weird electronics on the expansion board, just more SIMM sockets and some buffers like 386RC-16 in my sig. Unlike stupid boards like this
Micro Express ME 386-SX ME 386SX 066-3.1-0889 RAM card
or this
Laser 386M - 386 M/B
with another full memory controller on the addon and ram plugged into slow X-Bus

btw time has eaten away pictures of your build 🙁
Time for a new 386 build with some nice components

https://github.com/raszpl/sigrok-disk FM/MFM/RLL decoder
https://github.com/raszpl/FIC-486-GAC-2-Cache-Module (AT&T Globalyst)
https://github.com/raszpl/386RC-16 ram board
https://github.com/raszpl/Zenith_ZBIOS Zenith Z-386 MFM-300 ZBIOS disassembly

Reply 3 of 5, by majestyk

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The "rabbit" chipset can handle up to 16MB RAM. If you are using 1MB sticks you would need the additional memory board. If the onboard SIMM slots provide the address lines for 4MB sticks you wouldn´t.
The 64KB onboard cache is sufficient for caching all 16MB RAM (write through policy of course).

Reply 4 of 5, by vetz

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majestyk wrote on Yesterday, 16:17:

The "rabbit" chipset can handle up to 16MB RAM. If you are using 1MB sticks you would need the additional memory board. If the onboard SIMM slots provide the address lines for 4MB sticks you wouldn´t.
The 64KB onboard cache is sufficient for caching all 16MB RAM (write through policy of course).

You sure about that? Says in the manual that up to 64mb is supported.

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Reply 5 of 5, by majestyk

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The data sheet on theretroweb says so:
https://theretroweb.com/chipset/documentation … 16331477959.pdf

It´s possible there were later revisions of this chipset that supported 64MB. But if the 64KB onboard cache (soldered) can only cover 16MB RAM the benefits of more RAM would probably decrease.
I have numerous mainboards with this chipset and never managed to get 64MB running.

In the manual ASUS lists the following chipset components:
85C310D
85C320F
85C330C

Maybe the "D" variant does the trick supporting 64MB RAM. I can´t remember having seen single characters printed on the chips, only strings like "FTQ", "ETQ"...

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