Hello and welcome to vogons 😀

A picture would help me to identify your board.
But if it's a PC-CHIPS M918, it's basically a clone of the Gigabyte GA-5486, also based on the Acer FinALi chipset, a chipset with EDO memory support. I have this board so I'm able to answer any question you may have.

Here's a link to the Gigabyte board:

http://www.amoretro.de/2012/02/gigabyte-ga-54 … rd-486-pci.html

If you want to overclock the chip you simply have to raise the FSB to 40MHz. Are there any jumpersettings printed on the mobo? You might have to raise the voltage from 3,x to 4V to make the CPU run @160MHz.

Regarding the soundcards:

Just put in any (good) ISA soundcard with a wavetable header and the DB50XG attached. It no big deal to get it to work, you just need a compatible card.
But avoid SoundBlaster 16 cards, they have a bug that lets the Midi notes hang when the daughterboard plays simultanous with sound effects. Not all cards are affected (depends on the DSP version used on these cards. Version 4.04 , 4.05 (on early CT1740, CT1750) are unaffected. All other models have the bug and the bug will be more or less evident, depending on the game you play.
Good alternatives are Yamaha YMF719 cards and cards based on ESS Audiodrive 1688/1868/1869 chips.

486 computers, regardless which speed, are not good to surf the modern 2.0 internet in a comfortable way. they are tooooo slow, even if you disable the ressource draining flash software.

Greets from Germany,
Fabian

Basically my current problem with this board is It will post fine but the bios is one month too old to fully support the P75 chip.

If I set it to DX4 Intel - it will work.

I need to know correct settings for 40Mhz. I've been through the jumper settings and whilst it has 40Mhz there, it only posts at 120Mhz... I believe this is due to lack of support.

Would you happen to have a BIOS for this thing? 😀

epicbrad wrote:

Basically my current problem with this board is It will post fine but the bios is one month too old to fully support the P75 chi […]
Show full quote

Basically my current problem with this board is It will post fine but the bios is one month too old to fully support the P75 chip.

If I set it to DX4 Intel - it will work.

I need to know correct settings for 40Mhz. I've been through the jumper settings and whilst it has 40Mhz there, it only posts at 120Mhz... I believe this is due to lack of support.

Would you happen to have a BIOS for this thing? 😀

1. Post a picture so I can assist you on any jumper question.

2. Which "P75" chip are you referring to? The AMD or the Cyrix? More precise input, please.

In case you mean the AMD chip:

If set to "Intel DX4" the CPU is in 3x multiplier mode. This results in 120MHz CPU speed (multi 3*40MHz bus speed). To enable the 4x multiplier, jumper it to DX2. The 2x multiplier mode is interpreted as 4x. Regardless what the BIOS says on the post screen, the CPU will run @ 4*bus speed. You can check it with CPUCHK. The board has also a jumper for the CPU write back cache strategy. This will boost the per clock performance up to 15%, in real world games the boost is still more than 5%.

1. Thanks for the welcome. I've used vogons just to look at stuff.. it's a great tool and I've finally decided to participate rather than watch from the sidelines. my first post was intended to provide others with that link which may help with configuration settings. further to this Thank you for bringing to my attention the cloned nature of this board 😀

2. excuse any shortness / errors as I'm posting this from my mobile phone.

3. before your response I got it clocked to 160 mhz using settings that were not documented. jp18 is reversed as opposed to the jumper settings it advises to post. I also managed to get it working as am5x86 which is meant to show as something else as per the manual which states I need a v3.0 bios. mine is a late 94 revision but not new enough. despite this it now works however ;

4. before tinkering with any settings I had it booting to a ripped win 95 hdd now it won't boot I suspect due to a boot disk having a bad sector virus (long story... caused me a lot of 386 build problems) so now I am tossing up between win 95 or 98se. I have 2x 32mb sticks of lg edo memory present. I would go higher but is there really any point?

5. is it possible to push this board to 180mhz?

6. I didn't know p75 cyrix existed? sorry I didn't know this. Would my IBM 100mhz cpu perform better?

7. I will thoroughly read how this thread has transpired over the weekend and post back accordingly. Thanks for response so far very useful. I will be happy to post photos soon from my camera phone.....

What's the best graphics card you can run in an ALi board like this? Does a Voodoo3 work? What about a RIVA TNT2?

feipoa wrote:

What's the best graphics card you can run in an ALi board like this? Does a Voodoo3 work? What about a RIVA TNT2?

I'll check this out tomorrow with V3 and TNT (DOS tests only - no time for more right now - I received soo much items and try to publish them on my website).

currently have an s3 trio 64 3d card *I think.* wonder if it's any good

epicbrad wrote:

currently have an s3 trio 64 3d card *I think.* wonder if it's any good

Pretty common graphics cards for the time.

It is interesting that your M918 has eight 32-DIP cache slots. Have you tried running 1024 KB of cache in there? I wonder if the M918 is any better than the M919? This looks like a very interesting motherboard.

FGB, can you see if it works with 1024 KB of cache and a Voodoo3, TNT, and TNT2? I'm very curious about the ALi 486.

eight 32-DIP cache slots

Yes thank-you for bringing this up - from what I have seen there appear to be more than 8 sockets on the motherboard for cache. I thought PCchips board had fake cache (I am somewhat uneducated on this as I still had an XT around the time of the 486)

#1. Where would I acquire this in Australia (My postcode is 3824) economically?

#2. What benefits will I tend to notice in the real world?

My intended post I've been mulling over in my mind has not yet come to fruition as I've been at work a lot, and I have so much to do around the house before I start to meddle with old fun stuff. So I'll probably try and post a picture sometime tonight for all to see from my SLR Camera rather than my phone so that way it's a nice Hi res photo (Forgive my photo taking skills)

There are quite a few Dos games I'd like to play on this card. One thing mentioned is a DG50XG Cable that goes to another sound card, please explain why I would do this? My card appears to have sound and midi built in? Why do I need to hook it up to another card and where do I obtain such a cable ? Can I sub a floppy cable instead etc? Will this work even if it's just hanging off? (It's all wire at end of day really....??)

I also wonder what the largest storage I can add on this will be? I have a few 10/20gb IDE drives I'd like to try. I won't be using my Ultra II CF Card (4gb) on this machine as I may save this for a newer machine.

Once it's all set up I will need to work heavily on my auto / cf.sys files for max conventional which I see there is quite an in-depth topic on this forum well worth a read. But....One thing at a time all the little steps make perfection.

Your real world benefits will only depend on how much RAM you have installed and what type of caching sceme you are using.

For example, if you have 64 MB of RAM isntalled, and you only have 256 KB of cache set in write-back mode, your Windows performance will reduce by about 30%. You'd gain that 30% back if you had 512 KB of cache. The real benefit to L2 cache is the RAM-cacheable range; you never want to exceed your RAM-cacheable range when in Windows.

So what would be ideal? I can install up to around 112mb (Missing my 4th matched LG module. So it would be either 16/32/64 or 96mb)

If i got 1024kb?

Happy to try it. I wonder If I can pinch cache from other boards?

1024KB is the maximum the Acer chipset supports. But 512KB should be fine with up to 64MB memory (4x16MB EDO or 2x32MB EDO). M918 comes in variations with soldered cache modules. These are F A K E and contain no cache. Please use SpeedSys or CacheChk to verify the amount of working cache in your board.

I don't understand what the question is regarding the DB50XG. This is a MIDI daughterboard to to be hooked up on the waveblaster / daughterboard header of an internal soundcard. You don't need an extra cable between the module and the soundcard. This is only required if you install the module into a front module for the 5,25" drive bay if you use the front module extension of the Terratec EWS64XL sound card.

@feipoa: I don't have the M918, so I can't test 1MB cache. The GA5486 I have has "only" 512KB support. But I don't know why the M918 should be better than the infamous M919.. I like the M919 more because of the UMC chipset and the VLB slot. OK, the proprietary cache slot is still a desaster. And I think as a very early PCI chipset the ALi has issues with higher bus speeds. Afaik there is no FinALi board with 50MHz support. They all end @40MHz.

FGB wrote:

1024KB is the maximum the Acer chipset supports. But 512KB should be fine with up to 64MB memory (4x16MB EDO or 2x32MB EDO). M918 comes in variations with soldered cache modules. These are F A K E and contain no cache. Please use SpeedSys or CacheChk to verify the amount of working cache in your board.

I don't understand what the question is regarding the DB50XG. This is a MIDI daughterboard to to be hooked up on the waveblaster / daughterboard header of an internal soundcard. You don't need an extra cable between the module and the soundcard. This is only required if you install the module into a front module for the 5,25" drive bay if you use the front module extension of the Terratec EWS64XL sound card.

@feipoa: I don't have the M918, so I can't test 1MB cache. The GA5486 I have has "only" 512KB support. But I don't know why the M918 should be better than the infamous M919.. I like the M919 more because of the UMC chipset and the VLB slot. OK, the proprietary cache slot is still a desaster. And I think as a very early PCI chipset the ALi has issues with higher bus speeds. Afaik there is no FinALi board with 50MHz support. They all end @40MHz.

The M918 has real cache chips, it's the M919 that uses fake ones.

sliderider wrote:

The M918 has real cache chips, it's the M919 that uses fake ones.

This is not true for every M918. There are revisions with fake-dip-chips. and as the TO didn't supply a picture of his particular board I think it's useful to mention. I was never talking about the fake rectangles on the M919 you are referring to. This is another different board.

I believe the early revisions of the M919's had regular DIP sockets. I wonder if those would work with 1024 kb of cache?

FGB wrote:

sliderider wrote:

The M918 has real cache chips, it's the M919 that uses fake ones.

This is not true for every M918. There are revisions with fake-dip-chips. and as the TO didn't supply a picture of his particular board I think it's useful to mention. I was never talking about the fake rectangles on the M919 you are referring to. This is another different board.

That and, fake-cache aside, I've gotten the impression that the vast majority of PC-chips boards were pretty unreliable and/or poor performing. (not just low-end/budget oriented, but cheaply/poorly made in general)

There are notable exceptions to this, but the only one I know of specifically is from the late socket 7 generation with the M571 (as usual, going by a number of aliases, including TX Pro, not to be confused with the older "VX Pro") which was a genuinely good quality entry level board for its time. (a few Vogons users have M571 based systems too)
Even then there's the exception of the very later model M571 boards with more typical PCChips problems.
http://redhill.net.au/b/b-99.html

Today I acquired LOTS of hardware. My best find so far was a MASSIVE full AT industrial PC case with a gigantic 300W AT PSU in it! and it has an odd looking dual 5.25 FDD system (3.5 & 5.25)

How is this relevant to this thread?

It means that I will be taking all my photos today, of these systems and the M918 as it has given me far more motivation to do so. And Will post them to my dropbox to upload here from my S3 phone.

So happy!

Several fliptop cases, Socket 7's and I believe another 486! So chuffed. You guys have no idea how rare it is to come across anything like this where I live...... But I still yearn for a good solid XT machine 🙁

I'm now nearing 25-30 systems. I'm going to need to start getting rid of some stuff soon.

And Later on in the evening once I find one of the 30 odd systems with a decent floppy drive working (frustrating in this house) I'll reformat the M918 system throw win 98se on it and I have some more questions about some more parts I acquired today (Not sure what Graphics / sound / disk cards I should use.... I want USB in it though for sure)

BTW it seems happy with 160Mhz so far...I tried the 50Mhz bus setting - didn't seem to like it.... Didn't even try to boot off HDD froze up.

epicbrad wrote:

BTW it seems happy with 160Mhz so far...I tried the 50Mhz bus setting - didn't seem to like it.... Didn't even try to boot off HDD froze up.

From all of my tests with FinALi based mobos, 40MHz is very much the maximum to get out of this chipset. When you try 50MHz, make sure you set the PCI Divider Jumper to 1/2, that cuts the bus speed for the PCI and the attached peripherial chips to half. The system might work then IF your chipset is capable of 50MHz bus speed.

Ok.

I am officially posting this from the 486. Currently I have 32MB EDO configured with a Vibra 16 PNP Sound card for full compatibility.

I had NO END of trouble getting a boot disk as even though I've got 30 desktops none of them had #1 OS Installed with a network card AND a working FDD......

So I connected up the original HDD thinking id give it another go... as when I first booted up the system I heard all kinds of bad noises (Fan, hdd who knows I've worked on so many systems I can't remember now) and it had win 95 on it. Grabbed my win98 disk tried to do setup from within 95. Said it can't upgrade.

Copied the win98 folder across, tried from dos mode- same thing.

Frustrated - I Deleted the entire windows target folder files and re-run setup. It took a few hours. And now it's working perfectly. I spent around 2 hours trying to get an RTL8019AS PNP isa card working but it just didn't seem to like anything. Trying to do things so quick I forgot to plug in the LAN Cable last attempt after manually setting up gateways etc (DOH!) and then put in the PCI 8029AS - and wala. I'm on K-meleon right now.

Now - Because I've taken 159 photos today, my phone is exhausted (I had to charge it about 3 times today!) - I have the photos on my dropbox account. They will be sorted out first.

Once I post BIOS photos - I need optimal settings. I had to push back to 133 Temporarily as it was unstable with a faulty LG 32MB ram stick Himem was complaining about (odd...)

Once removing the offending stick - I have 2x 16MB modules and back at 160Mhz - and Boy can I notice the difference. The system is on my ICQ whilst I type this and the only majorly laggy part was the hard drive / Ram combination. I think this will need all the ram it can get if I use it for basic internet searches on google / vogons. Vogons is very resource friendly for this 486! 😀

I'm stoked!

Now the next trick is to get my Yamaha chip card working with the Vibra - so Midi routes to the Vibra eliminating extra plugs. What cable to I use? Just a header? as in the CD Rom type?

Should I bother with 180Mhz? IS there any point? I think I'll just add more ram.
Once I had BOTH Cards working on the machine (Sound) and it doesn't crap out the network PCI Card, I will start installing Dos games and have some fun! (Only 1GB HDD to play with for now...)

On another note - does anybody have a copy of that magic floppy disk image that can boot to a CD? I'll write it with my 486.

Why is USB floppy drive so unreliable.....and modern systems with FDD.... TERRIBLE..... Older systems work so much better with floppy disk drives!

THANKYOU everyone, more to come.

I will post another new thread with all new hardware finds once I sort through around 4GB's worth of files! 😁:D:D