I believe the UMC chipset are quite good? Featured often in very expensive mainboards.

In my opinion SiS made the best 486 chipsets. UMC was always found on low end boards, but it offered pretty good bang for the buck. I think the main reason people on VOGONs highly regard the UMC chipset is because it was pretty common on late model PCI 486 motherboards, and thus supported more features specific to the 5x86 chips

I think UMC chipsets generally offer more features for tweaking performance settings, my sis does not have an option for 50mhz for instance.

I would say between the SIS and UMC their is not much difference, depends on what you value more in a board.

SIS 496/497, 3DFX cards do run.
UMC, Usually more FSB options, volt settings, IN MY EXPERIENCE, if you wanted to overclock a AMD 5x86 to 160-180-200mhz, go for the UMC board,

I would suggest finding a board with a coin cell battery, that about sums it up

dirkmirk wrote:

I would suggest finding a board with a coin cell battery, that about sums it up

And a PS/2 mouse port.

How about OPTi 82C895? An interesting thing, it works with 5v 486 up to DX2 and VESA bus AND I saw it with a 386DX-40 once.

Actually, I don't know much about the later OPTi chipsets. I think the 895 was the premium version of the 495. I had no idea there were 895 boards that accepted 386 chips. I'd love to get my hands on one of those. I'd also like to know what the OPTi 486 PCI chipset was like. I think it was the 82C802. Never seen one in action.

82C895 was their last generation 486 chipset. Opti never had a 486 PCI chipset. All mainboards with the chipsets 82C802, 82C895, 82C571, 82C596 (aka "Premium") use the VLB-->PCI-bridge "chipset" 82C822 for the implementation of PCI functionality.

To find the best UMC and SiS motherboards, you generally have to test and pick through the mess.

Here are some of my thoughts on this.

1. Give up on the notion of 1 MB L2 cache and a working PS/2 mouse port. You get one or the other. Just because a board has a PS/2 port on the PCB, that does not mean it was every implemented in the BIOS. Shuttle 433 boards come to mind.

2. Just because one motherboard (of the same revision) works very well at the fastest BIOS settings, another identical board may not. Sometimes the chipset revisions are slightly different, small improvements were not documented, or I've even seen some PCB mods to the same revision motherboard.

3. For running the board at 33 x 4, the SiS seems to have slightly faster memory read speads (42.9 MB/s SiS vs. 39.4 MB/s UMC), but if you want a SiS board stable at 40 x 4, the memory read speed drops to 39.4 MB/s if you want the board stable. For 40 MHz and above, find a UMC board which works well on the fastest timings at 40 MHz. Not all UMC boards will work with a 2-1-1-1 cache setting at 40 MHz, but some will. Many UMC boards also work well at 50, 60, and 66 MHz. If you ever wanted to get a Cyrix 5x86-133, a UMC board is required for 2x66. It may be that SiS motherboards automatically add a 1/2 PCI multiplier when used at speeds at or above 50 MHz. If this turns out to be true, then I suppose you could also run the SiS at 66 MHz. I've yet to test this. I have seen some SiS boards with the same clock generator chip which is found on the 66 MHz capable UMC boards.

4. If you want to use all the fancy features of the Cyrix 5x86, these all seems to work well on UMC-based motherboards built in 1996. Some 5x86 features don't work on pre-1996 chipsets. I have not yet tested the full feature set of the Cyrix 5x86 on a SiS board, but in the worst case, it is usualy the unimportant Cyrix features which do not work. This work is heavily backlogged.

5. Do not assume finding a board which supports EDO RAM is the better board. I have found that often EDO RAM doesn't work reliably on the fastest BIOS settings. Sometimes good FPM, usually the less slots the better, will work on the fastest settings. I have never seen improved benchmark scores when using EDO over FPM RAM on a 486. If someone has this evidence, I would be interested. Supposedly, you can see up to 10% improvement with EDO, but it must get cancelled out somewhere...

6. If you want to run a 3DFX Voodoo3 3000 on a 486, you'll need a SiS. I have not yet determined if a RIVA TNT 16 MB will work on the UMC boards in Windows.

7. You do not need to find a motherboard with a coin cell battery. There were many great boards with a real-time clock module, which can be either replaced, or modded for a coin-cell battery. It is fairly effortless to replace the RTC and put in a socket for future RTC. These RTC's are still made new by MAXIM for around $10 and last around 17 years.

I hear there's rumours on the internets that EDO DRAM only gives a performance increase if you use it with pipelined burst cache. Never tested this theory though.

Has anyone experience with an ALI chipset 4/586 setup?

Just bought what I thought was a complete 286 desktop which ended up having this board in it: -

http://museum.ttrk.ee/th99/m/E-H/33066.htm

A Gigabyte GA5486-AL ... it would be fair to say that I was slightly surprized, as even the seller didn't know what they had. Will have some fun with it, test etc when I get the chance.

I recall a post with this board within the past few years. I think it was user's nick was something like "chinny22". The memory throughput was behind what SiS 496 and UMC 881 offer, however I seem to recall that user's tests being poorly documented. The Abit and Gigabyte board which hosts the ALI PCI chipset will likely be the better resale boards due to the branding. What CPU do you indend to run? I'm very interested in your results with timings maxed out.

As an addition to my previous comment in 2012, UMC 8881 boards do, in fact, work well with Voodoo2 cards.

On Speedsys? I should be able to quickly put something together, CPU would be an AMD 5x86 ADW133, the Cyrix chips I have can't beat anything higher than 40-50Mhz unfort, having said this board looks like it was made for and would better suit a 133Mhz Cyrix chip.

Of the UMC 8881 board, what is the highest performing graphic system that can be supported now throwing Voodoo 2 in the mix? Will a Matrox G200 be comparable or fare better?

Why do you think the ALI PCI chipset is better suited for a Cyrix 5x86 over and AMD 5x86?

For the fastest PCI graphics card on a SiS 496 or UMC 881-based motherboard, refer to this comprehensive study, Modern graphics on a 486 . The short answer is that these more modern graphics cards depend not only on the chipset, but also on which CPU you use, as well as which operating system (NT4 vs. w9x) and which graphics driver version. For the UMC 881, I think a Voodoo2 pared with a Matrox G200 (if using a Cyrix 5x86), or a Voodoo2 pared with a GF2 if using an AMD 5x86 or POD.

You may also be interested in this thread, which compares GLQuake running on a 486 with Voodoo2/3 and a GF2. A brief comparison of Voodoo-Quake results on a 486