You don't necessarily require non PnP cards to function on a 386 motherboard (which is what the Ti 486DLC CPU plugs onto).
However, I don't recall of any 16-bit IDE controllers or 16-bit ISA Graphics cards that are PnP. Only 16-bit sound cards later on became PnP (from around 1995 onwards).

On my first PC (which just happened to be a Cyrix 486DLC 40 MHz - essentially the same CPU you have) I started out with a non PnP Aztech Sound Galaxy sound card, but later on upgraded to a Sound Blaster AWE64, which worked quite happily on that motherboard under pure DOS (although, I wasn't able to use the Waveguide synthesis in Windows due to its requirement of at least a Pentium 90 MHz).
In order for a PnP card to function in a non PnP environment (like DOS), you require a PnP configuration manager (there is Intel's ICU or Creative's CTCM & CTCU), but most sound card manufacturers (that had PnP sound cards) bundled the necessary utilities with their sound card software.

If your intention is to only play games from that era (which on a Cyrix/Ti 486DLC would probably be up to around early 1994), then you do not require a FPU, since no games from that era (there might be one or two examples) utilised the FPU. Back in the 80's & early to mid 90's only CAD programs and some business applications utilised the FPU to speed up mathematical calculations.

If you do want to pair an FPU with your CPU (which I did with my original PC from the start) then the Cyrix FasMath Cx87DLC-40QP is the one you're looking for (note that the clock frequency of the math co-processor should ideally match the clock frequency of the CPU, which in your case is 40 MHz). Cyrix also made FPU's for the 386 line of CPU's, but I'm not sure whether the Cyrix FasMath CX-83D87-40-GP (which was the FPU released for 386 CPU's) will work with a 486DLC. I have been able to pair my Cyrix FasMath Cx87DLC-40QP with an AMD 386DX 40 MHz without any problems.

This should be your motherboard: https://th99.bl4ckb0x.de/m/A-B/32657.htm
Quite a resourceful site for finding schematics and jumper settings for an array of old hardware (https://th99.bl4ckb0x.de/)

I would, however, remove the battery immediately when you receive it (even if it still appears to be working), to avoid it leaking out.
Rather buy an external battery holder.
The best way to remove it (I've had great success with this) is to just use a de-soldering tool with a vacuum pump (they cost around $10).

My Cyrix 486DLC 40 MHz CPU runs quite hot (so hot that when even idle, I cannot keep my finger on it). In comparison, an Intel 486DX 33 MHz (which runs more or less on par with this CPU) runs very cool.
Although not officially released with any heatsinks or fans, I would recommend either just placing a small fan close enough that blows over the CPU or try to mount a small heatsink on top of the CPU (if you can manage to secure the heatsink to the CPU and is still able to fit it into the socket).

I would not recommend trying to overclock this CPU. In order to do so, you will have to replace the crystal (something I've never tried and have no desire to do so), since the motherboard would not have any jumpers allowing you to overclock the Front Side Bus.
If you want more speed, then rather go for a proper 486 solution (like a 486DX2 66 MHz).

Congrats on the board. It looks nice 😀

Manual is probably not really needed as it's pretty simple board. It supports 386DX and 486DLC (maybe even 486SXL) processors. You can select 25, 33 and 40MHz operation via jumpers. Cache is already at the maximum (128KB).

BIOS is the only question at this point. Some boards have many options in the advanced menu - take a picture of it if you can.

FPU is only a matter of choice. Not much software or games really demand it - you'd probably already knew if it did (Autocad, Falcon 3.0... the list is pretty short). The software that doesn't need it there will be no difference.

There's no need to desolder the battery, just move it from side to side without applying too much force and faster as you go until it comes loose.

I installed a 387 FPU(ULSI) in my 386, in normal use I never saw a difference, it does however let you run QUAKE at less than 1 frame per second! 😉

BSA Starfire wrote:

I installed a 387 FPU(ULSI) in my 386, in normal use I never saw a difference, it does however let you run QUAKE at less than 1 frame per second! 😉

My 386DX 40Mz with a 40Mz 387 runs Quake demo1 at 1.7FPS. 😀

Thanks everyone for the great replies!!

jesolo wrote:

You don't necessarily require non PnP cards to function on a 386 motherboard (which is what the Ti 486DLC CPU plugs onto).
However, I don't recall of any 16-bit IDE controllers or 16-bit ISA Graphics cards that are PnP. Only 16-bit sound cards later on became PnP (from around 1995 onwards).
-snip-

Jesolo, I never knew that , I allways thought non PNP cards caused some compatibility problems,If I knew that I would have just thrown a SB16 at it, none the less I have a Sound Blaster Pro 2 coming with the board, it is a bit more period correct 😀

I will keep an eye open for a Cyrix FasMath Cx87DLC-40QP for a later purchase , the one on fleabay seems a bit excessive when you factor in shipping costs.

YES!! , that looks exactly like my board , thank you for finding it, at least now I have some bearing on what the jumpers are for , I see it does have pins for a dedicated battery, so I will remove the old one and use those 😀 , you dont have to worry I am fairly good with a soldering iron 😀 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSq3rTp4ub8 this is me salvaging the previous board from corrosion , it works fine, but sadly some of the traces under the ISA slot are dead meaning every second isa slot doesnt work, I just never had the time to fix it properly.

I will see if I can find a heatsink for it els, I will thermal epoxy one on.

Overclocking was just a after thought, I like to push a system to its limits after I build it, do some benchmarks and scale it back, I dont run any of my systems overclocked 😀

Kixs wrote:

BIOS is the only question at this point. Some boards have many options in the advanced menu - take a picture of it if you can.

FPU is only a matter of choice. Not much software or games really demand it - you'd probably already knew if it did (Autocad, Falcon 3.0... the list is pretty short). The software that doesn't need it there will be no difference.

I will take some pictures when I get the board, thanks you 😀

Funny you should mention Falcon 3.0 I have a boxed copy of it, probably not the end of the world if it doesn't play tho as it will work in one of the 486ses anyway

BSA Starfire wrote:

I installed a 387 FPU(ULSI) in my 386, in normal use I never saw a difference, it does however let you run QUAKE at less than 1 frame per second!

I might just do it for the fun 🤣

It's nice to have a complete system with FPU and all... Falcon 3 would probably run quite OK with just a FPU emulator - your system with 486DLC is quite fast after all.

About FPU, you can use any 386 FPU with the DLC. I also believe that there is no real difference between 387DX and 487DLC versions of the same type (IIT 387 vs IIT 487dlc and with Cyrix Fasmath versions too).

The motherboard just arrived:

FaSMaN wrote:

Hi All
The only two questions I have had some mixed answers online with is , a 387 FPU upgrade worth it, the current board has a Ti 486DLC , so will getting a Flouting point-unit greatly improve my speed in games,is it maybe required for some games, or should I just ignore it completely?

Boards with that OPTI 82C495XLC chipset sometimes have or do not have cache chips, the pictures shown show they do. (those are the 4 socketed chips closest to the BIOS), Opti lists it as a 486 chipset http://www.opti-inc.com/html/products.html . The 83C206EQ (markings mismatch?) is a 386/486 Chipset. There is a PDF http://pdf.datasheetarchive.com/indexerfiles/ … HI000109887.pdf for the 82C495XLC/82C206, though not the MB itself.

486's that sit on 386 motherboards are effectively "386's" as far as the board and most software is concerned. I wouldn't bother looking for a FPU as you likely won't find one, as games didn't typically use FPU instructions until "3D" started being used around 1996. The chipset PDF above says "386 mode" for co-processor.

The chipset supports up to 64MB of ram... good luck ever finding 8x8MB 😀 Even back in the day, the most common found was 1MB modules.

http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/ … rence_Guide.pdf

Provides an immediate upgrade to 486-class performance for 386 footprints • TI486SLC/E is up to 2.4 times faster than a 386SU386 […]
Show full quote

Provides an immediate upgrade to 486-class performance for 386 footprints
• TI486SLC/E is up to 2.4 times faster than a 386SU386SX at same clock
frequency (Landmark 2.0 = 107 MHz, Norton SI 6.0 = 52 at 33 MHz)
• TI486DLC/E is up to 2 times faster than a 386DX at same clock frequency
(Landmark 2.0 = 130 MHz, Norton SI 6.0 =66, PM MIPS = 14 at 40 MHz)

Chances are the MB is already configured about as well as it's going to be.

16mb 30 pin modules do exist, and you can buy them on ebay (but they aren't cheap). Apparently 8mb 30 pin SIMMs do exist, but all the 30-pin SIMM motherboards I've seen never list support for them (where as some do officially support the 16mb type). In any case, there's no point as your board only supports 128kb cache, which means 32MB is the most RAM that can be cached when in write-through mode (16MB for write back)...not to mention no DOS software that runs on a 386 will take advantage of that much RAM.

About math coprocessors....I have heard that there are certain FPUs which do not like certain steppings of 486DLCs. I believe it was mostly the early DLCs that had this issue. To avoid this problem it's best to get later production date parts. A late model DLC should work with anything though. As far as I know there is no difference at all between the Cx87DLC, Cx487DLC, Cx387DX+ or Cx83D87 other than the label.

So I think there is something really strange with this board, firstly the memory that came with it was mismatched making it not post , after dig trough my bins of memory I found two different sets of 4x 1mb that work fine 😀 (all matched)

But here is the problem

The board now posts , but beeps every 3 seconds , refuses to see the IDE controller or spin up the hard drives 😒

PS I removed the BIOS battery, also tried different memory , booting it without a HDD controller still makes it beep

You will not believe this, this darn HDD beeps , if you apply power to it every few seconds it beeps 🤣

I have never in my life seen anything like it

Is it a short beep every 3 seconds or a long beep every 3 seconds?
Some motherboards will post, but will not continue to boot due to the fact that no CMOS battery is present. You might need to connect an external battery.
Since you removed the battery (and the old battery may long since have died), the BIOS may have lost its "proper" settings.

If you are familiar with the Advanced CMOS settings, then ensure that your Internal Cache (or Cyrix cache) is enabled and that your AT Bus Clock selection is CLK/5.
Also check your DRAM and Cache Wait states as an incorrect setting might cause your system to hang.
Some BIOS'es have an Auto Config option that you can enable for the time being to see if that solves your system instability.

If you are not that familiar with BIOS settings, what you could also try is to go into the BIOS and load the BIOS Setup Defaults, save and exit.
Just check your Standard CMOS Settings, which lists your hard drive settings, which floppy drives you have, etc.
Make sure that your hard drive parameters are still correct.
If not, then you can try the "Auto detect hard disk" utility in the BIOS to see if it can pick up the correct settings for you.

Don't worry I figured it out, it was the @&%£#@ HDD itself making a beeping sound (stuck heads I think) that sounded allmost identicle to the PC speaker ....

Anyhow , that was a 500meg HDD, only other one I have is a gig and it appears that the CMOS sees it wrong , ontrack also doesn't want to start as it says there isn't enough memory ... But all of that is a problem for tommorow , tonight I want to get some rest 😀

Chances are that your BIOS (which dates back to 1992) doesn't support hard drives larger than 504 MB (even if it does "read" it correctly in the BIOS).
You could to try to enter the 1 GB HDD's CHS parameters manually in the Standard CMOS settings and see if it boots up, but I'm doubtful.
If not, then you will have to install a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO) to overcome the limitation.
The Ontrack version that you're using might require more memory (as I recall, some of them require at least 4 MB of memory and some goes up to 16 MB).

My fellow Vogons might have some other solutions to offer, since I've always used "period correct" drives in my older PC's.
I do recall that Phil (http://www.philscomputerlab.com) has some nice reviews on his website of various Disk Manager utilities (look under the "Storage" tab).
EZ-Drive 9.03W seems to be a good option for older PC's.

Decided to invest some time into it again today, the Reason why On-track didn't work is there simple over the top GUI that requires too much memory, I installed it onto my HDD from another computer, once installed it worked great ,when I moved the HDD back to the 386 😀 , I am using 8MB so your right this version must need 16 cause it has the whole look like windows interface thing going for it...

Dos install was a dream, windows 3.11 was fine, my only bug so far is the serial mouse only works on dos not windows 3.11 , even tho windows configuration is right... Will figure it out in the morning.
The CT 1600 sounds amazing, even got a few minutes of Another Word in before bed time!!

Next step is config.sys and autoexec.bat optimization , and finally some benchmarks , but from what I can see its a fast little 386 🤣

Any FPU (aka NPU) will do the job. Just make sure you have updated your Win3.1 files, if you use it.
Oh, and there was a FPU guide.. Elianda mentioned it a while ago.. Wait, I got it!

I've added a later version for your convenience.

The board is the Shuttle HOT-317 PGA or OEM version of this board. A nice litte board. Have one in my collection as well. The revision of my board has the 495SLC chipset and does work well with either 486DLC and SXL chips.
I hightly recommend to set the ISA divider to "4" in the advanced BIOS menu to speed up the graphics performance (REALLY fast ISA cards like: ET4000, Trident 8900D-R, Cirrus or WD9C3x highly recommended!). With fastest timings and a card of the list I just posted you will get more than 21 fps in 3DBench 1.0. (this is about the score a "real" 486 with 33MHz gets).

// edit: I just took a closer look and observed, that the cache on your motherboard is not properly configured. It uses 20ns cache for the TAG (the ISSI labeled chip) and 15ns for the cache data (the Winbond-logo chips), but it has to be vice versa or better said: The TAG has to be a 15ns part while the data chips can be either 15ns or 20ns for operation at the fastest timings in the BIOS. Also the TAG should be 64KBit and not 256KBit as the one on your board. So if you run into any cache/memory related trouble, remember this advice.

Here is a picture of the board I own:

My only problem now is that I cant get the mouse to work in windows, I have my comms set as follows Com 1: IRQ3;3F80 , Com 2: IRQ4;2F80 , I have manually configured windows with the correct port addresses aswell as ran setup and tried both the Logitech driver as well as the Genuis and microsoft Drivers, all of them dont seem to work.

I dont think its the IO Card as I tried a different one and it does the same, the mouse also works on the P1 system I built a few weeks ago.

The dos mouse driver sometimes stops working if I start windows and run edit directly afterwords...

Its strange, and driving me a bit nutty...

Jo22 wrote:

Any FPU (aka NPU) will do the job. Just make sure you have updated your Win3.1 files, if you use it.
Oh, and there was a FPU guide.. Elianda mentioned it a while ago.. Wait, I got it!

I've added a later version for your convenience.

Thank you!!

I am still waiting for the FPU to arrive , I am just waiting for it to get to me 😜

FGB wrote:

The board is the Shuttle HOT-317 PGA or OEM version of this board. A nice litte board. Have one in my collection as well. The revision of my board has the 495SLC chipset and does work well with either 486DLC and SXL chips.
I hightly recommend to set the ISA divider to "4" in the advanced BIOS menu to speed up the graphics performance (REALLY fast ISA cards like: ET4000, Trident 8900D-R, Cirrus or WD9C3x highly recommended!). With fastest timings and a card of the list I just posted you will get more than 21 fps in 3DBench 1.0. (this is about the score a "real" 486 with 33MHz gets).

// edit: I just took a closer look and observed, that the cache on your motherboard is not properly configured. It uses 20ns cache for the TAG (the ISSI labeled chip) and 15ns for the cache data (the Winbond-logo chips), but it has to be vice versa or better said: The TAG has to be a 15ns part while the data chips can be either 15ns or 20ns for operation at the fastest timings in the BIOS. Also the TAG should be 64KBit and not 256KBit as the one on your board. So if you run into any cache/memory related trouble, remember the I just wrote.

I am very happy with the board so far 3DBench has a nice stable FPS of 20 without any optimization which is awesome to say the least

Thanks for noticing the cache problem, I will look for a replacement 15NS Tag that is for 64Kbit , but so far I havent found any negative effects from it 😀

Here is a photo of my card , note this was before I set the jumpers so some of them will be wrong in the photo