I'd recommend the M919 motherboards even though they have their own world of cons (no ps/2 for example)

For the speed question, back when I had my 486, rather than using the turbo settings I found disabling the internal cache to be the most effective way to slow it down for games that needed it. I used a couple of utilities, icd.exe to disable and ice.exe to enable it again when I was done playing without having to reboot. I see the .exe's for these here:

http://www.ustr.net/files/

These worked fine on my intel 486 but didn't seem to work on the cyrix compatible that I had, just as an fyi.

As for which bus, I would probably look for one with PCI since if you can't find a BIOS upgrade for the mobo for large drive support you should be able to find a PCI hard drive controller fairly easily.

GL1zdA wrote:

Is the VLB slot important?

If you don't already have a VLB video card or plan to use one in your system, consider it optional.
It's easy to find ISA/VLB mainboards, but they usually come with several drawbacks: Most of them don't support 3.3V CPUs and hardly one comes with onboard (E)IDE and I/O controllers. VLB cards are fragile, many of those still around are defective.
A good PCI board may be more difficult to get, but you'll have none of the problems mentioned above.

GL1zdA wrote:

I saw also some with ISA and PCI slots and one VLB slot, but someone doubted, whether the PCI slots aren't connected through the VLB.

Depends on the chipset, but yeah, most of the "VIP"-boards have crippled PCI performance because of a lame VLB/PCI bridge. In real life this doesn't matter much, because proper host-bridged 486 designs are not much faster.

GL1zdA wrote:

Or will the turbo button in most cases just lower the multiplier to 1x and will this be enough (the CPUs I would use run at 33 MHz bus speed)?

The only way to get a x1 multiplier is to insert a 486DX CPU instead of a DX2 or DX4. The turbo button usually activates some waitstates, disables caches, or (in very rare cases) slows down the clock on the system bus.

GL1zdA wrote:

I tend to prefer Intel chipsets: 430TX for the Pentium or 440BX/GX for the P6, but were Intel 486 chipsets better than the ones from third parties? I know first Intel chipsets (for the 386) where slow, but what about the 486 ones?

The Intel Saturn/Aries chipsets are decent (best PCI throughput, but lousy support for non-Intel CPUs). Stay away from their earlier stuff!

Other good PCI chipsets: SiS 496/497, ALi M1487/1489, UMC UM8881.

In my opinion, real 486 motherboards have VLB slots (but stay away from the PCI/VLB combo boards). My favourite 486 boards have a combination of EISA and VLB slots, but it's hard for me to recommend since they're very hard to find now. The quality of SCSI and NICs for EISA is superb, and the bus mastering is much better than the majority of PCI implementations. The only downside is that there aren't many decent graphics boards for EISA, which is why you also need the VLB slot. Since good VLB graphics boards are not exactly easy to find these days either, finding a PCI board might be the way to go since you'll have more choices. Generally I don't like PCI 486s since the quality control wasn't as good, but there are a few decent ones out there.

For a VLB board, I would go for the SiS chipset, and for PCI the ALi, SiS, and UMC chipsets are all decent, but I really favour the UMC because of the larger cacheable memory area and support for PCI dividers...those features may not be important to you though. I really hate OPTi boards. Who ever told you that OPTi was good? Do yourself a favour and avoid them. I don't care much for intel chipsets either, they're not too fast and have limited features.

You should really just forget about integrated EIDE with large drive support because you'll really be limiting your choices of good motherboards. In my opinion getting a SCSI controller is the best way to get around this problem. They're cheap and easy to find too. Support for 3.3V chips and writeback cache isn't really important unless you want to run a Cyrix 5x86 or POD83. You can get a 3.3V VRM that will let you run am5x86 in just about any 486 board ever made. The writeback support will provide a small performance boost, but sometimes it can cause trouble with DMA. Many of the PCI boards claim to support it, and there are a few VLB boards that do it too, but I think it's usually more trouble than it's worth.

Have to agree with previous replies....

If you want to use an amd 5x86 it's better to stick with a later socket 3 PCI board and use the latest BIOS version which often cures ATAPI and LBA problems and gives better 5x86 support.
Personally I've tried the amd 5x86 on "late" VLB boards as the ASUS V/L 486SV2 GX4 with the latest BIOS version without any 100% success

Note that if you wanna upgrade the BIOS most bios chips on these boards aren't flash chips so you have to hire guys like www.biosflash.de

I think it will be hard fidning another board/brand that has the nice phoenix BIOS I have on my ECS UM4980 board.... 🙁

The cons with just using a 486 machine is that some games.....especially games prior to 1991 can run too fast or crash even if you try all "tricks"
I use a 25-33mhz 386DX machine for those games
If you have plans to run mid 1990's games I recmmend a 100-166mhz
Pentium 1 instead since there's alot of SVGA games in that period and any socket 3 CPU will be too slow

Like a previous poster said..try and get an EISA/VLB board....have an EISA/ISA board myself and they are bombproof!
Mine just has a lousy 485DX 50mhz, hehe

I just got two 486 motherboards, bought via eBay :

1) 486 Motherboard MP4-P4U885P3 V2.0 PCI UM8881F with a AMD DX4 120MHz,

The above picture is not the exact ditto version of my motherboard, but pretty close.

and

2) VL/I-486SV2GX4 Rev 1.8 486 Motherboard ISA VLB Socket3

I'm still experimenting with the CPU combinations and clock settings. I have with me a i486DX2-66 CPU, a i486DX4-100 and AMD amDX4-120.

I'm awaiting for a i486DX-33 CPU and a i486SX-25 CPU to arrive. And the Winbond ISA I/O controllers.

And also awaiting for another 486 mobo to arrive too : PVI-486SP3

I'll post the pictures of my best working 486 setup when it's ready.

Again, the "best" 486 motherboard will depend on what you need to get out of it.

For the PCI based system, I have a S3 Trio 64V+ and a S3 ViRGE cards.
For the VLB system, I have the ET4000/w32p card.

Amigaz wrote:

2. Someone shown this awesome BIOS where you could set the CPU speed in 16 intervals, which made it a perfect choice for games requiring a slower CPU.

Yep it's one of Amigaz's system! 😉

Sigh...I'm still not good at posting pictures...dunno why the pictures are repeated above..

Malik wrote:

Sigh...I'm still not good at posting pictures...dunno why the pictures are repeated above..

You got an ECS UM4980 motherboard??!! 😳

The Asus board's you got are great...have in mind though that the GX4 board is rev 1.8 which means there are no BIOS updates for it...only for rev 2.x boards and up

btw. you seem to have gotten a very nice bunch of motherboards...good brands and good models 😎

Amigaz wrote:

You got an ECS UM4980 motherboard??!!

Nope, I was referring to YOUR system. I think I've seen your Phoenix bios screens in of the threads. 😀

Amigaz wrote:

The Asus board's you got are great...have in mind though that the GX4 board is rev 1.8 which means there are no BIOS updates for it...only for rev 2.x boards and up

Yeah,unfortunately so. I guess I have to wait and see about my yet to arrive Asus SP3 mobo.

Malik wrote:

Nope, I was referring to YOUR system. I think I've seen your Phoenix bios screens in of the threads. :happy: […]
Show full quote

Amigaz wrote:

You got an ECS UM4980 motherboard??!!

Nope, I was referring to YOUR system. I think I've seen your Phoenix bios screens in of the threads. 😀

Amigaz wrote:

The Asus board's you got are great...have in mind though that the GX4 board is rev 1.8 which means there are no BIOS updates for it...only for rev 2.x boards and up

Yeah,unfortunately so. I guess I have to wait and see about my yet to arrive Asus SP3 mobo.

ahh...yeah, have a Phoenix bios on my ECS UM8810 motherboard also but it completely lacks the 16 step slowdown feature the ECS UM4980 board has
There was an UM4980 board for sale on US Ebay a couple of weeks ago...nobody bought it

There are a few EISA+VLB mobos on ebay right now, going for a few hundred bucks!! No thanks. 😀

This one looks good:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Everex-motherboard-EV1821 … 1QQcmdZViewItem

It's Everex. Everex never did anyone wrong. It has the magic SiS chipset too.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

This one looks good:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Everex-motherboard-EV1821 … 1QQcmdZViewItem

It's Everex. Everex never did anyone wrong. It has the magic SiS chipset too.

Ohh..man! now you made me buy that board, 🤣 😁

Full AT! *must get another full AT tower* 😜

Wonder what those 2 memory slots are on the left hand side of the CPU and simm slots....

Haven't found any info about this board.....seems old Everex made stuff is hard to dig up on the net

I like the asus pvi-486sp3. A good all-round board with nice features (pci, isa, ps/2, vl bus, sis chipset supporting wb caching) and stability.

IMO it's important to go for a popular board as you find lots of help in google groups (e.g setting up multiple cards, getting games to run) and any compatibility problems have already been well documented (rather than you stabbing in the dark).

kreats wrote:

I like the asus pvi-486sp3. A good all-round board with nice features (pci, isa, ps/2, vl bus, sis chipset supporting wb caching) and stability.

Agreed. And don't forget the nice layout (CPU socket doesn't get in the way of the expansion slots), flash BIOS (with updates available from Asus), and the automatic CPU voltage detection (very nice if you want to switch between slow and fast 486 quickly). This is one of the best SIS 496/497 boards available.

I've had a few 486 mobos. Back in the day, I went from a ISA only board that came with a OEM sys to a MTI R407e mobo with VLB+ISA. But I really prefer the boards with PCI because, if they work well, they support most (if not all) Socket 3 CPUs and also work with most PCI cards (meaning lots of options.)

Here's my MSI MS4144 board. SiS 496/497 chipset, 256K cache, 64MB 72-pin SIMMs, and a AMD 5x86 133 @ 160. I don't really use it because I hate being stuck with only a serial mouse. I really wish it had PS2 ports.

but it has!! that big AMIKEY 2+ chip on the bottom left is for PS2 mouse support!

keropi wrote:

but it has!! that big AMIKEY 2+ chip on the bottom left is for PS2 mouse support!

Hmmm...

Well the board obviously has an area for dual PS2 ports, but this one is wired up for that AT DIN. Not sure what to do about it.... Would be pretty sweet to take that off and put a pair of PS2 ports on.

I have a feeling there are some missing resistors and stuff for the PS2 traces.

Swaaye, I really like that heatsink on your MSI board. To me it appears that you used a large socket7 heatsink and used a special clip. Did you fashion the metal clip yourself?

Amigaz, if you need the EISA config file for that board I have a generic one for SiS chipsets that should work just fine. I am also using an everex EISA board with the same chipset, only mine is baby AT formfactor. I suspect that the full sized board you bought can use either 72-pin SIMMs or 30-pin SIMMs, and perhaps even together. I have a TMC EISA board like this too.