Can't provide more info on the actual board, but it looks like a very late 486 motherboard (1996/1997) and from my own experience they are pretty bulletproof.

can anyone else find any info?

Some jumper settings here:
http://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/archive/Ald/pci5400/index.html

I've always been very interested in these ALD boards, because not many people had them. I think they came out at a time when everyone else had abandoned 486s.

Did you know the ALD chipset can supposedly do pipelined burst cache? At least according to the manual. The picture of the board you showed us is using async cache, but one time I actually did find an ALD board with the PLB modules fitted. Unfortunately it was already gone when I went back to buy it.

I believe they actually did make their own chipset, and the user manual should be on the website.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I've always been very interested in these ALD boards, because not many people had them. I think they came out at a time when everyone else had abandoned 486s.

Did you know the ALD chipset can supposedly do pipelined burst cache? At least according to the manual. The picture of the board you showed us is using async cache, but one time I actually did find an ALD board with the PLB modules fitted. Unfortunately it was already gone when I went back to buy it.

I believe they actually did make their own chipset, and the user manual should be on the website.

i don't know much about this so how to indicate cache modes? does it depend on different types of sram chips installed, or decided by the chipset? which type does common 486 chipsets(intel, sis, umc, ali, via) use? i can only remember that most socket7 chipsets used pipeline-burst cache.

I have one of those boards, came without bios chip and sram modules, I've downloaded the bios from retroweb and installed srams but it still does not recognize the external cache.

Is there an alternative bios source that I can find another bios? This bios seems to fake cache functionality at all.

I eventually managed to get one of the ALD PCI boards that can accept the PLB cache, but like yours mine also does not have the chips installed and has the BIOS that fakes the presence of cache. I didn't get a chance to play with it much, because something went bad and the board is very unstable.
However, there is another user on these forums that got one with the cache chips fitted, and his cache is functional.
The downside is that after extensive testing it was determined that the board isn't really able to take advantage of the features of PLB cache and performance is rather mediocre.