First post, by Old Thrashbarg
I ran across this thing while browsing eBay, and it didn't seem to be attracting much interest, so I threw in a bid just for the hell of it. Ended up winning it for about $15 shipped.
I took a bit of a risk on it, since this was the sole picture and the description was quite light on detail, but I figured for the price it was worth a shot. It doesn't seem to be in bad shape, though I can't see the condition of the barrel battery at the top edge. Assuming the board works, it should make for an interesting thing to play around with.
For those that don't know, these Octek Hippo DCA boards are a bit... odd. The 'DCA' stands for 'dynamic cache architecture,' and basically they don't include the standard SRAM cache like most 486 boards do. Instead, they can take a special sort of 'EDRAM', which has its own little bit of cache built into the RAM chips and working as a sort of buffer. The premise was that it would functionally reduce the memory access times down in the range of 15-35ns for the entire memory area, rather than just for the first 256KB you'd get with regular SRAM L2.
I'm *hoping* that the three SIMMs included with my board are that EDRAM.
The story I've heard is that these boards were ridiculously fast in actual usage when equipped with EDRAM, but because the popular benchmarks of the time would fit into the 256K L2 of a regular board, the benchmark results showed the Octek boards to be no different and sometimes even slower than a regular 486 board. But I also remember Octek having a rather aggressive marketing team, so I dunno how much truth there is to that. Guess we'll find out when it arrives, and I get the chance to put it through its paces.