I have a VLB 486 purely for nostalgia reasons. PCI is a bit more practical, as PCI video cards are much easier to find and most 486 PCI boards have onboard IDE, floppy, serial and parallel so you don't need to track down a separate I/O card.

VLB tends to be a bit more finicky to get working too. Although some early PCI boards aren't great either (if you're trying to run Win9x watch out for boards that have the CMD640 IDE controller as they have a nasty data corruption bug, although its usually OK under DOS).

Really, I think you should just build what you want, that's kind of the whole point of this hobby 😀

I wouldn't plan on using a Voodoo3, none of my 486 boards would post with it installed.

I went PCI in 1996 and I never looked back.

I'm partial to PCI boards myself, but I love VLB for it's place in history. Usually I say buy what you want, because in the end you're the one that's going to have to live with it, but make sure you do your homework on it too.

It comes down to what the board options are too... for example, personally, I'd take an asus GX4 over a PC Chips M919 for the same price, dispite the lack of PCI on the asus model.

If you were going for a benchmark system, then I'd have a different system of advice, but seeing that you're building around a 66MHz (the mainstay of the 486 boards IMO) I'd stick with whatever is more stable. Good luck.

Thanks all for the advice. The fact that I do have a somewhat limited budget is what led me to consider going PCI instead, along with the numerous benefits. And yes, I'm going to avoid PC Chips like the plague. Its going to be a DOS/Win3.11 machine, and I'm not running any Voodoo cards on it (that's what my P3-500 is for, with its pair of Voodoo 2s).

I do understand the bit about nostalgia; I never had a VLB system, or even a 486. Went straight from a 286 I inherited from my high school to a Pentium 150 back then.

VLB has one major advantage over PCI: There is very little stuff for it around, so you don't waste your life tinkering with it all the time. I have a VLB 486 and after I got a VLB S3 in addition to the ISA ET4000, I was done. Never changed it since. Last line of defense when a game won't play anywere else.

VLB might have another advantage, depending on other system components:
if you plan on overclocking, or are "forced" to overclock FSB because you have something like a DX2-80 running at factory spec speed (2x40 MHz),

then the VLB card,in most cases, will run without problems. (You need to increase VESA wait state from 0 to 1, though.)
On the other hand, PCI cards in most 486 boards (I met) will automatically fall back to cca. 20 Mhz, significantly reducing performance.

VBE version support and refresh rate forcing is another matter, here most PCI cards have the upper hand with superior drivers.

TheLazy1 wrote:

I wouldn't plan on using a Voodoo3, none of my 486 boards would post with it installed.

It works on my Lucky Star LS486E and does run Direct3d/Opengl games, not that its very practical, the SIS 496/497 chipset does work with a voodoo3 in my experience, if your game their is an untested board for sale on ebay for a reasonable price(if it works).

ux-3 wrote:

VLB has one major advantage over PCI: There is very little stuff for it around, so you don't waste your life tinkering with it all the time. I have a VLB 486 and after I got a VLB S3 in addition to the ISA ET4000, I was done. Never changed it since. Last line of defense when a game won't play anywere else.

This is true. It usually doesn't take long to find the best possible combination of add in boards for VLB simply because there is not a lot to choose from in the first place and most manufacturers offerings were very similar. Once you find that perfect combination you pretty much leave it alone because there probably isn't going to be much out there that you overlooked when you built the system in the first place. PCI adds a bit more flexibility in choosing components, especially video cards, but you're not going to want to put a hugely-powerful-for-the-time-period video card in a PCI 486 system anyway because the 486 is so horrible at running most 3D accelerated games. For 2D games on a 486 system, a VLB or ISA video card will still work fine.

As written above.

For a 386/486 (except for a seriously overclocked high-end 486) the primary requirements are speed and compatibility in DOS and perhaps Win 3.11.
The choice of monitor (CRT vs LCD) can also be a deciding factor - if using a CRT, a graphics card with a very good DAC is needed for higher resoultions. For an LCD, an inferior card might suffice, provided it has enough RAM for the required resolution.