First post, by megatron-uk
If you were putting together a fast 486, would you go for VLB, which was available for a long period of the 486's reign, or go for a very late 486 board with PCI instead? ... and why?
I have the following machines:
16 MHz 286
200 MHz Pentium Pro
3.04 GHz P4
The 286 is a bit limited in what I can do with it, and the PPro is a bit fast (and overkill!) for the majority of Dos games, so I was planning on swapping out the internals of the 286 with a 486 motherboard. There are two that I have my eye on:
board 1: Soyo SY-4SAW/2/W5 486 with 3x 16bit ISA, 3x PCI, 1x VESA, 4x 72pin simms. Onboard ide/floppy, ps2 header, serial, parallel, SIS chipset & 256kb cache (supports 512kb), max 256mb.
board 2: TMC PAT48PG with 4x 16bit ISA, 3x VESA, 2x 72pin, 4x 30pin, Opti chipset & 256kb cache, max 128mb.
Clearly the Soyo represents the 'end game' of the 486 line and shows where future motherboard design was heading with most IO features integrated onboard... but is it too close to the next designs (Pentium, K5/6) and considered a 'slow pentium' design instead?
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