Don't own one, but would want to, for exactly the same reason you do.

It was an insane mix of high end (dual channel SDRAM, advanced GPU core) and low end (integrated graphics, So7 platform) features coming too late to compete in the performance stakes, too expensive to beat bottom-feeding SiS and Via IGP designs and too untested (particularly the GPU) to get the big companies interested.

I'm pretty unhappy with the dearth of good benchmarks from the time of its release, particularly around what happens when you use the dual channel SDRAM without using the IGP, so would love to experiment myself. So if you happen to find two after all these years...

One thing I heard is that the PC Chips boards sold mainly in Brazil. I did in fact once see an M583LMR for sale there, but the seller didn't want to ship outside the country and my non-existent Portuguese wasn't up to changing his mind.

Although there is basically no documentation online, there are images of the 5ALI61 Plus with the ArtX chipset.
There were also 2 other boards that used this chipset, the PowerColor P561A and the SuperTek ST-A7586B.
Both are pretty obscure like other ArtX boards, the PowerColor has a BIOS and a board image online while the SuperTek only has a BIOS image on Ultimate Retro available. (https://www.ultimateretro.net/it/motherboards/9408)

That's excellent info, thanks for updating the thread with it!

So that pictured board is dual channel sd ram? It has three slots though?

Got a vague recollection of maybe coming across that chipset in an Acer NLX/LPX type machine, smaller form factor with three card risers... though not a complementary recollection... seem to recall that they barely ran the supplied ME install, most flakily, and drivers didn't install on 98, and didn't exist for XP... some acquaintances were struggling with them barely post-millennially, and they were such pigs and caps were going bloaty, that I said best thing to do was get a "normal" case and throw ANY other parts into it.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-04-26, 03:35:

So that pictured board is dual channel sd ram? It has three slots though?

It's not uncommon for the era, there used to be dual channel DDR boards for Pentium 4 and Athlon XP systems that also came with 3 slots instead of 2 or 4.

Garrett W wrote on 2022-04-26, 08:33:

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-04-26, 03:35:

So that pictured board is dual channel sd ram? It has three slots though?

It's not uncommon for the era, there used to be dual channel DDR boards for Pentium 4 and Athlon XP systems that also came with 3 slots instead of 2 or 4.

so if you install 3 it drops to single channel?

Yes, that was the case with such boards. Presumably the case here.

Possibly there's some wiggle room for applied smartassery, like how you can get some pentium boards to work with two single and one double banked SIMM, two 4MBs and one 8MB for instance.

explorerdotexe wrote on 2022-04-25, 13:47:

Although there is basically no documentation online, there are images of the 5ALI61 Plus with the ArtX chipset.
There were also 2 other boards that used this chipset, the PowerColor P561A and the SuperTek ST-A7586B.
Both are pretty obscure like other ArtX boards, the PowerColor has a BIOS and a board image online while the SuperTek only has a BIOS image on Ultimate Retro available. (https://www.ultimateretro.net/it/motherboards/9408)

Small update, but the PowerColor P562A was also added to UR so you can go and have a look at it there too (https://www.ultimateretro.net/en/motherboards/11274). It's ArtX chip has a heatsink, don't know if that was common or not with this chipset.

EDIT: There is also a page for the Acorp 5ALI61 Plus (https://www.ultimateretro.net/it/motherboards/11284), but it doesn't give us any more info than what we already know.

Nice catch!

Found something that may be a similar thing to the Aladdin 7 chipset, the SiS 540. It's single chip unlike the Aladdin 7 but like the Aladdin 7 it does have an iGPU which is the SiS 300, and based on the Wikipedia the 3D was likely ok for non 3D-intensive apps and maybe some games. Another thing this chipset has in common with Aladdin 7 is obscurity. A search for this chipset on UR gives 5 total results (and of course PCChips is in the results with 2 motherboards).
VIA did also make the VIA MVP4 which was basically the MVP3 with no AGP and a Trident Blade 3D card onboard, however even though it was more common than Aladdin 7/SiS 540 I don't think it falls inside the same category of the previous two since there really wasn't that much different from the MVP3.

Nice find. I didn't know about the SiS 540, but I did have an SiS 530 board for a while. I also had an SiS 630 socket 370 board about 20 years ago which integrates the SiS 305, more or less the same chip. Performance is actually decent for a 2000-2001 IGP, roughly equivalent to Riva TNT or TNT2 M64. There's a catch of course and that is drivers which are unfortunately of dubious quality. I think V-Sync is engaged at all times as well, which is a real bummer. OpenGL is also another story entirely with awful support. Thankfully you can use stuff like SCITech's wrapper which does wonders for the hardware and end user of the hardware.

In any case, I think both this and the MVP4's Blade 3D are interesting, but they are somewhat documented by now and judging by the specsheets should be, hopefully, left in the dust by the ArtX chip on the Aladdin 7 boards. I wish we can find at least one board for sale 🙁

I see a empty agp footprint on that board…

explorerdotexe wrote on 2022-05-06, 16:15:

Found something that may be a similar thing to the Aladdin 7 chipset, the SiS 540. It's single chip unlike the Aladdin 7 but like the Aladdin 7 it does have an iGPU which is the SiS 300, and based on the Wikipedia the 3D was likely ok for non 3D-intensive apps and maybe some games. Another thing this chipset has in common with Aladdin 7 is obscurity. A search for this chipset on UR gives 5 total results (and of course PCChips is in the results with 2 motherboards).
VIA did also make the VIA MVP4 which was basically the MVP3 with no AGP and a Trident Blade 3D card onboard, however even though it was more common than Aladdin 7/SiS 540 I don't think it falls inside the same category of the previous two since there really wasn't that much different from the MVP3.

Tbh, it's not even remotely like the Aladdin 7. SiS 540 is just a minor revamp of the SiS 530, so with a newer SiS VGA core, but otherwise the same support for onboard L2 cache and single channel SDR-SDRAM. The Aladdin 7 had the weird ArtX core, no cache controller and dual channel SDR-SDRAM.

Please check out this link it delivers some new info on the matter. There is even a benchmark demonstrating that ArtX graphics being on par with Voodoo 3.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/tech-retrospe … socket-7/185717

Bruno128 wrote on 2022-06-23, 20:46:

Please check out this link it delivers some new info on the matter. There is even a benchmark demonstrating that ArtX graphics being on par with Voodoo 3.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/tech-retrospe … socket-7/185717

on par with Voodoo 3

Wow, that's pretty impressive but probably not too surprising from the same team that made the graphics for the GameCube.
Has to be said that Voodoo 3 has the advantage of being it's own PCI card while the ArtX was only released as an iGPU on Socket 7 motherboards, so who knows what performance would be on a more powerful CPU (although i'm guessing the artx gpu was probably engineered to make the most of a higher clock K6-II/III).

Woah, I totally missed this! This is beyond awesome, thanks for sharing! This took place just a few weeks ago, perhaps we could ask the person making the post about more details. I personally would have liked to see how single channel memory impacted CPU and GPU performance. I'm also not entirely certain the choice of games was great. SimCity 4 and Deus Ex are extremely demanding games for CPUs of the era and are unplayable on any K6 hardware IMO. But, it's still a revelation to see clear photos of the board, scanned manual(!) and benchmarks when we knew next to nothing about all that.

And hey, that's another board to add to the list!