I just got a QDI US491P3 VESA local bus motherboard going! 😀
The board is from one of the "untested " motherboard lots I bought.
The board has some "fixes" but not because of corrosion, I think they are factory fixes eventhough they look really shoddy. In any case I tested everything, different memory, 3 different ISA (S)VGA cards, a different CPU and lowering the FSB from the 40 MHz that was set but nothing worked. The motherboard did show some life and the Diagnostic Post card stopped at "FF22" but it would never post. There is no jumper to clear the BIOS settings on this board and the battery is soldered.
I finally gave up but I thought that I should remove the battery eventhough it looked pristine in case it will be years before I try again, after desoldering the battery I thought I would try to get the board to post a final final time and it posted. 😀
Why the heck did they not implement clear RTC jumpers on these old boards with soldered batteries?
Edit
After letting the board spend half an hour in the BIOS setup while I was doing something else I loaded BIOS defaults and saved, the board would save the settings fine even without a battery but I had to power off to connect a floppy drive so I could boot DOS and now the board wont post again. How I love old motherboards! 😜
And after much tinkering... the board still wont post again, it stops on different codes depending on which VGA card and slots I use, "1312" "0014" "0020" "00FF" "FF22" "2222" "2016" "2221" "2C26" "2260" and many more interesting codes.
Well at least it isnt totally dead, it has posted once and it does stuff when it gets power... Im going to try other cache chips some day... in a few years... or decades...
/Edit
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.