To be fair to the M919, if you play with ANY 486 board long enough you'll find something broken. My PCI Aquarius (Which would have competed with the M919) has no problems with serial ports, cache or anything that the M919 does. But the PCI implementation makes it difficult to get some cards, such as an Ethernet adapter, to work at all. The MSI I have has a very nice PCI implementation, but is lacking in CPU support (No WB). The FIC is pretty bad and the Micronics (i420 based, I am probably selling it at some stage - not yet) has horrible CPU support (No POD, no 5x86 even with interposer, no nothing past DX2-66 - no 40MHz BUS), non-standard headers (read; pretty much no serial unless you want to solder your own) and I never got it stable long enough to test the PCI out properly... It's probably horrible too, the throughput was. One nice feature of the last board though, it does have 128K of REAL cache soldered onto it and takes regular chips to double that amount, memory is its strong point.
As I said earlier, the M919 is "just another board" to me, it has some horrible design quirks, but then so does everything else and therefore, logically, hasn't done anything in particular to offend me. Now that Biostar everyone loves, on the other hand, that did, but they were from a repairs standpoint as opposed to an operating standpoint so they don't really count for the purpose of this discussion. As for the Micronics, you probably think I hate it and you're right, but I sure loved trying it out, it was really quite fun seeing how easily it could be upset to a point it would not POST; Install Cyrix CPU (Oddly, these perform very well in this board) and... Woohoo! Install Intel OverDrive DX4 and... -LOW BUZZ- Oh, dear, it's not working; funktioniert nicht, gebrochen. Yeah, I use German words when something is really broken, they seem to have more weight than their English counterparts.