meljor wrote:

2 things that are not correct: in bios there are settings for irq for 4 pci slots, i only have 3 slots on my board.

This should tell you already that the BIOS is not the correct one for the mainboard. And that's also why your PCI slots are not working.

Then i'm hoping that someone has a correct bios for it because i can not find it anywhere 😐

Sounds like your PCI routing table in the BIOS is messed up. Can you post a photo of the board? The M918 is the board with the ALi BIOS, is that right? I have this motherboard in a box; it is a piece of junk. I also have the M915 (dead) and M919. Post a photo and I'll dig out the board and copy the BIOS.

feipoa wrote:

Sounds like your PCI routing table in the BIOS is messed up. Can you post a photo of the board? The M918 is the board with the ALi BIOS, is that right? I have this motherboard in a box; it is a piece of junk. I also have the M915 (dead) and M919. Post a photo and I'll dig out the board and copy the BIOS.

It's a ALI chipset board with AMI bios. Thank you for uploading! Does your board have real cache or fake? Mine has real chips. This is the photo from my own board:

hmmm.... I have a pentium motherboard that does this... I wonder if its a bad bios?

Attached is the copy of the AMI BIOS from my M918 v1.2. I'm not sure which revision of BIOS this is.

Any reason why you want to use the M918? I did some testing on this board many years back and found that the cache and/or memory throughput was pretty bad. The only way to even get a visible response from the L2 cache in Speedsys was to set the DRAM memory timings very slow, otherwise, it appears as if there is no L2 cache installed. At first I thought it was an issue specific to the ALi chipset, but I didn't have this issue on other brand boards based on this chipset. It might be worthwhile for me to test the other brand BIOSes on this board.

My cache is real, I checked it with an SRAM tester, though it is from a brand which I've never seen before, KIMS. I have also tried other SRAM.

Well, with the bios i had i did a quick test (with isa card) and speedsys gave 41.98 speed index for 486 dx4-100 Intel cpu (not so bad) 85 mb/s for L1 35mb/s, for L2 and 30mb/s for memory so yeah, difference between mem and L2 is pretty lame and nearly non-existent. This is with the fastest bios settings.

Scores are not high overall but i never get the extreme high scores with any board i try, not even with my Gigabyte 486am/s. But that one IS faster, that's for sure.

Now i tried your bios Feipoa (thanks again!) and it is acting even weirder: Still posts only with isa card but now it won't even boot. As soon as it should show the very last screen and start from floppy the screen turns black. Even after setting the slowest timings, disabling caches and setting fail-safe options.

It DOES give irq options for only 3 pci slots in bios as it should but otherwise it is even worse. Anyway, in both cases the board seems defective as i can not get a picture from the pci slot. Too bad.

I didn't really want to use it (maybe sell it) but every 486 board is worth saving imho, and pci ones even more. We like the fastest and best stuff but some people are just very happy with at least SOME parts that work. Anyway, it will not be sold in this state but will end up on the ''maybe i will adress it later again'' pile, which is getting bigger 🤣

Thanks for the help, greatly appreciated!

The GA-5486AL contains the same chipset as the M918. How about trying the GA bios in the M918? I have attached the GA BIOS.

Will try, who knows 😎

Works exactly the same with the Gigabyte bios (award instead of ami!), so i think there is something wrong with the board unfortunately and pci simply doesn't work anymore.

Memory needed to be set one notch back with the gigabyte bios, otherwise it would lock up. So i set it at fast instead of fastest and did a quick run of speedsys. The outcome was about the same as with your m918 bios (tiny bit slower on the memory) so it has nothing to do with the bios, it's the board that's quite slow. At least we've learned something here 🤣

Thanx again for the help!

From my experience with this M918 and the Gigabyte, it seems that ALi boards may not be all that great for L2 and/or memory speed.

Its best just to stay away from PC Chips motherboards. I am sort of hoping that their notoriety will eventually bring their product collection value.

What PCI video cards did you use exactly? Perhaps they are just too modern for a 486 board. Do they work in another 486 system?
I had a similar problem with a Radeon 7xxx PCI and a Socket 7 board.

Tried a couple ofcourse, mostly S3 (virge/trio) and also a G200 pci and a Nvidia 128, didn't help.

Board is gone now. Have to say goodbye to stuff that doesn't work, otherwise i keep going back at it and it will keep wasting my time 🤣

Took it to the recycler 'eh? Good riddance to that piece of junk. I don't know why I hold onto mine.

meljor wrote:

Tried a couple ofcourse, mostly S3 (virge/trio) and also a G200 pci and a Nvidia 128, didn't help.

Board is gone now. Have to say goodbye to stuff that doesn't work, otherwise i keep going back at it and it will keep wasting my time 🤣

feipoa wrote:

Took it to the recycler 'eh? Good riddance to that piece of junk. I don't know why I hold onto mine.

To me that seems like a waste.

A broken non-repairable motherboard is good for spare parts and can save many other boards! 😀

Skyscrapper, that is a good point. I actually stopped throwing away my dead motherboards about 12 years ago. Now I have an overflowing box of motherboards for spare parts. It comes in very handy.

Edit: Although the low quality of components on that board might be your last resort for replacement parts.

meljor wrote:

Tried a couple ofcourse, mostly S3 (virge/trio) and also a G200 pci and a Nvidia 128, didn't help.

Board is gone now. Have to say goodbye to stuff that doesn't work, otherwise i keep going back at it and it will keep wasting my time 🤣

Shame...

Not sure where in the Netherlands you're located, but if you hit something like this again I wouldn't mind having a crack at it for you 😀

I've own this motherboard, the PC Chips one. It has real 256k cache.

It has the previous bios version of 1995. Should I install the latest or to try the Gigabyte one?

Everything works great, I have an S3 Virge Dx with 4MB installed, 32 MB RAM, ESS1868F the cheap one of BTC, that doesn't have gold connectors like the one I use to my MMx build.

It has an AM486DX4 120 MHz installed, but I don't know if I can downclock it to 66 MHz?

Man..

don't throw it away.. there are simple issues why it doesnt work, maybe a small scratch, a loose solder joint...