Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-04-21, 08:27:

Hello, I was wondering if it makes sense to buy an umc socket 5 board with asynchronous L2 cache, with sockets like the 486.

I know reading around that it's obviously slower than the intel 430fx, it supports 66mhz fsb only and apparently it also lacks the ps2 header.

Is it interesting for anything such board? Or just good as collectible?

What's the model number?
I reckon there aren't many boards like that made though. Socket 5 didn't last long at all.

It's one of the slower 's7' boards (Socket 5 is essentially an early Socket 7, most likely no support for split rail CPUs and very limited CPU multipliers). It could be interesting in underclocking the FSB perhaps??

But the real question is, can you use it? You have an AT case to house it in?

The model is the Gigabyte 586AM, quite obscure, there isn't the gigabyte page anymore.
That's the motherboard: https://www.ultimateretro.net/it/motherboards/2729

I won't use it in any build, I would buy it because of the cpu sold in the bundle (the cost is very similar to buy the cpu only).
I was wondering if it has any special feature, other than being probably the last umc chipset for motherboards.

The RTC is socketed which is nice (optional cr 2032 holder you could possibly populate) maybe a upgradable voltage regulator/hestsink? It appears to have a COAST socket, and onboard ide/floppy all of which aren't anything special for a Socket5/7 build but nice to have. Make a fantastic vanilla AT P100 build, or something hilarious to try to run a K6-2/3 on. Gigabyte quality so if you want a Socket 5 board to test out components with and to use to help trouble shoot it could be a solid little board.

Socket 5 is pretty cool IMO. Especially with a P75/90. Get some early Pentium vibes. Problem is, all those non-Intel Pentium chipsets are usually slow compared to something nice like Intel Triton. I believe UMC was one of the faster of the bunch though. Maybe only 3-5 fps behind Triton based motherboards in games. I have a VIA based Socket 5 board with a P90 in it, now that is snail city. Even slower then a 586-133/160 in Doom.

Your mileage can vary widely with these UMC board. The slowest two (non-UMA) So5/7 motherboards I ever tested were UMC UM8890 boards (Chicony CH-890A and Biostar MB-8500UUR); they were so slow I suspected they had 32b-wide 486-style memory access, with RAM benchmarks scoring less than half of i430FX. However others here have had much better results, so I can't explain the anomaly other than to say YMMV.