So we have:
Sis 471 chipset
Button/coin cell battery
Soldered cache chips (probably real?)
3 VLB slots
4 30 pin simm slots
4 72 pin simm slots
The thing that surprised me the most is the 4 + 4 simm slots. I had always seen 4 30 pin + 2 72 pin, but never 4 + 4. Does anyone have any idea?
Right click > Open image in a new tab/window for HUGE size
Closest I could find to this is a Lion Computers Value VLB/+, but it's far from a perfect match: https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/L/L … -VALUE-VLB.html
Life isn't long enough to re-enable every hidden option in every BIOS on every board... 🙁
Am386DX-40 wrote on 2021-03-12, 21:43:Soldered cache chips (probably real?)
Definitely not. Soldered DIPs = fake cache 99% of the time and this is no exception.
At least the traces go somewhere so you can fix that if you have the patience.
If you can provide us a POST string or a BIOS dump maybe we could identify the brand of this board (although it might end up being an obscure chinese/taiwanese brand of some sort)
Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative
I don't know, these chips actually look like they have a chance of being real in this case. One counter-observation is the fact that the BIOS is socketed; on fake cache boards the BIOS wasn't socketed to prevent you from swapping the BIOS and unmasking the deception.
This doesn't look like a PC CHIPS board.
Best way to decide the matter would be to remove the TAG chip and see if it still boots with the L2 cache enabled. If it still boots (and displays '256K Cache Enabled' or something to the effect), then the cache is probably quite fake to begin with.
Life isn't long enough to re-enable every hidden option in every BIOS on every board... 🙁
Well some did solder the bios but not all of them. And also not just PCChips did that.
I actually have a board with the same "cache chips" and not by pcchips either
(and they're definitely fakes).
Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative
What size was the meteorite that left the crater on the cpu socket ?
There seems to be the "P8" code on the BIOS chip sticker, so I believe it could be an AZZA mainboard.
Azza also used 3V lithium cells very early and they had mainboards with soldered cache chips like the quite similar "4SGS-3VL Ver.3.2" model.
I recently read that at some time in the 90ies there were more than 400 mainboard manufacturers in Taiwan.
