What do you mean by "Not the one cheap version"?

OPTi was probably the biggest 486 chipset vendor. Multiple models froms ISA only via short-lived OPTi Local Bus to VLB and PCI. About as mainstream as you could get. VLSI was big in 386 days but already pretty unusual in 486 systems.

Both OPTi and VLSI made Pentium chipsets, but their first attempts were horrendous - OPTi tried to offer a compelling upgrade path for people with VLB hardware by tacking a VLB bus onto their early Pentium chipsets. It worked, but they were incredibly slow. VLSI did some big OEM deals, a lot of early IBM Aptiva systems had a VLSI Lynx chipset. It offered similar features to the i430FX but with lower performance. OPTi finally managed to get a decent chipset out for Pentium, the Viper-M, but it was too little (again i430FX feature parity with lower performance) too late. There was talk of SDRAM and even AGP support in newer chipsets, but basically both OPTi and VLSI left the PC motherboard chipset business.

Yes, that was the opti VLB feature for Pentium. I call this bastard design.

Again, how is the performance with VLSI and Opti for 286, 386 and 486? Compared to other chipsets that worked with 286, 386 and 486?

Cheers,

For the 286 at least, VLSI produced by far and away the fastest chipset designs, next up is possibly Headland.

I'd say Opti probably had the better parts in the 386/486 era though.