My PC Chips M550 worked flawlessly for years with 64MB of RAM and a Pentium 166 MMX . Before that, I ran a Pentium 150 at 187MHz in it with zero issues for at least a year before upgrading (sidegrading) to the 166 MMX .

I have seen at least three PC Chips M520 (Intel 430VX chipset-based) Baby AT motherboards in roadside or thrift-store PCs over the years. They all had a somewhat-large heatsink for the VRM, plastic around their IDE and FDD headers, CR2032 CMOS batteries, a physical PS/2 mouse port installed next to their regular AT keyboard ports, and PLB cache modules installed in their COASt slots. (In other words, fewer corners appeared to be cut compared to typical PC Chips boards.) They differed in PCB colour (two were an orangey-brown and one was green), but IIRC they and their COASt modules were all branded as Elpina, and they shared the same board layout. They seemed to work OK; it wasn't until years later I learned they were actually PC Chips products...

Meanwhile, there was a particular revision of the PC Chips M571 that a certain Red Hill apparently had good luck with; later on they had received a different revision with drastically worse reliability.

I liked my TOPGUN M575 (Ali Alladin IV+) featured with 1MB L2 cache, onboard sound and graphic bios. It was 30years ago.

Roman555 wrote:

I liked my TOPGUN M575 (Ali Alladin IV+) featured with 1MB L2 cache, onboard sound and graphic bios. It was 30years ago.

Yea the TOPGUN versions of the M560, M565 and the M575 boards are nice. In some benchmarks the PC Chips Alladin IV boards are the fastest Socket 7 boards (clock for clock) I ever benched. I own all three, the M560, M565 and M575 but only my M560 (512KB cache) is the TOPGUN version.

The M577 with VIA MVP3 is also nice, at least the two boards I own.

All PC Chips Intel chipsets motherboards are usually decent enough. I guess those are harder to fuck up by cutting corners! 😜

Second the good experiences with PC Chips Aladdin IV(+) boards. I once did a benchmark of RAM performance on some 25 Socket 5/7 chipsets, and clock-for-clock the single fastest board was in fact the PC Chips M560. That one only had 512kB L2, so I can imagine the M575 would be even faster. Not sure that one had onboard VGA though, IIRC it just had onboard "Soundpro" (C-Media) audio and otherwise was a very clean design.

Also disagree on the Duron-era stuff. Yes, if you went for the very cheapest of the cheap integrated crap - and bought that from PC Chips - you were truly asking for it. But the M830 (PC-Chips branded version of the ECS K7S5A) was rock solid and for a time the best performing Socket A board, despite also being the cheapest, at least after the first buggy BIOS versions with data corruption from the floppy drive and memory stability issues had been fixed. They remained a good budget option for some time after the performance crown had moved elsewhere.

I own 2 PC Chips motherboards, an M507 (with Intel i430FX chipset) & the M537 (Via Apollo VP-1 chipset). They may not be very high quality, but they're still working well all these years later, so that's something.

The M507 I've owned the longest, got it back in 1999 and it was used every single day up until around 2004. I even encouraged that thing to run with an AMD K6-2 CPU (a K6-2 500MHz, with bus underclocked to 50MHz, giving 300MHz). I can get the CPU running faster with a 66MHz bus, but instability issues arise in DOS. Windows works great at either clock speed though. The BIOS doesn't recognise the CPU correctly of course, it thinks I'm running an 80486 DX CPU, on a Socket 7 motherboard. 🤣 🤣 I've also had an AMD K6-III installed on it in the past.

I have faster Socket 7 & Super Socket 7 machines, but I'll always go back to the old M507 for nostalgia, to relive the old days. One of these days I might even get around to purchasing a COAST module for it, it has been running without any real L2 cache all of it's life.

The early 256KB M558 and as well the M577 are some of the higher quality boards they made, even if the former uses the Utron chipset.

I also have an M507, which shamefully attempted to con people with fake cache, but at the same time operates flawlessly, even 22 years later.

darry wrote on 2018-11-19, 00:45:

My PC Chips M550 worked flawlessly for years with 64MB of RAM and a Pentium 166 MMX . Before that, I ran a Pentium 150 at 187MHz in it with zero issues for at least a year before upgrading (sidegrading) to the 166 MMX .

Just got one of those M550 motherboards and i can't seem to connect anything to the usb ports. After digging around the internet, i found this:

http://th2chips.freeservers.com/m550/index.html#usb

Was wondering if you still have that board and can confirm any problems connecting anything to the usb ports... Thanks!

DoutorHouse wrote on 2020-09-02, 03:10:

Just got one of those M550 motherboards and i can't seem to connect anything to the usb ports. After digging around the internet […]
Show full quote

darry wrote on 2018-11-19, 00:45:

My PC Chips M550 worked flawlessly for years with 64MB of RAM and a Pentium 166 MMX . Before that, I ran a Pentium 150 at 187MHz in it with zero issues for at least a year before upgrading (sidegrading) to the 166 MMX .

Just got one of those M550 motherboards and i can't seem to connect anything to the usb ports. After digging around the internet, i found this:

http://th2chips.freeservers.com/m550/index.html#usb

Was wondering if you still have that board and can confirm any problems connecting anything to the usb ports... Thanks!

Unfortunately, the board is long gone and I never tried its USB ports .

darry wrote on 2020-09-02, 04:15:

DoutorHouse wrote on 2020-09-02, 03:10:

Just got one of those M550 motherboards and i can't seem to connect anything to the usb ports. After digging around the internet […]
Show full quote

darry wrote on 2018-11-19, 00:45:

My PC Chips M550 worked flawlessly for years with 64MB of RAM and a Pentium 166 MMX . Before that, I ran a Pentium 150 at 187MHz in it with zero issues for at least a year before upgrading (sidegrading) to the 166 MMX .

Just got one of those M550 motherboards and i can't seem to connect anything to the usb ports. After digging around the internet, i found this:

http://th2chips.freeservers.com/m550/index.html#usb

Was wondering if you still have that board and can confirm any problems connecting anything to the usb ports... Thanks!

Unfortunately, the board is long gone and I never tried its USB ports .

Thanks for the quick reply! Yeah, i'm starting to think that's the reason this pc came with a pci usb adapter... Apparently the onboard usb hub is recognized but doesn't seem to work... Oh well...

SW-SSG wrote on 2018-11-19, 04:08:

I have seen at least three PC Chips M520 (Intel 430VX chipset-based) Baby AT motherboards in roadside or thrift-store PCs
Meanwhile, there was a particular revision of the PC Chips M571 that a certain Red Hill apparently had good luck with; later on they had received a different revision with drastically worse reliability.

the M569/m571 pair was very reliable if you stuck to strictly AT motherboards
You could overclock the FSB above 100mhz and remain rock solid.

The m569 has onboard video and an impressive number of expansion slots.

They were very flakey with SDRAM sizes above 64mb unless you used the m569 bios then you could drop a 512mb dimm and everything was fine.
Ditto on edo stability, certain modules work other resulted in instability.

Now if you didn’t use the onboard video the memory issues went away.

The m569 was especially noteworthy because it was an ancient board that could be upgraded straight to a k6-2 450 without any real issues.

The boards were interesting if for no other reason you could pump in more than 3.5 volts (using undocumented settings) to original k5 and p54’s and get higher overclocks.

Ik have the M577 with VIA MVP3 chipset, and not a single hassle. Tried it with almost every socket 5/7/s7 CPU that's available and nothing refused or went unstable without me being the cause (like a Pentium 166 on 100x2 setting). Even some P200MMX CPU's at 100x2,5 trends too be stable, as well as a K6-2 400 @500. So there is room for OC.

I call performance and stability good and comparable to my Asus P5A-B.
Mostly I even favour the PC Chips for unknown reasons (maybe because I've got it for a longer time before I got the Asus).

My Highscreen Pentium 200 MMX has a PC Chips board I think. Going stable at 233MHz after years.

Just my 2 cents.

PD2JK wrote on 2020-09-02, 20:53:

My Highscreen Pentium 200 MMX has a PC Chips board I think. Going stable at 233MHz after years.

Just my 2 cents.

My PC Chips M550 motherboard has been working since 1998 or so... Never had an issue. First and only problem I had started some days ago, when i decided to finally try the onboard USB connector on Windows 98SE and it didn't detect any devices...

Some of their 486 boards were also very well built. PCChips did a lot of OEM/cut rate stuff (and most those boards are the bad ones), many were also sold by Amptron like the DX6900 v1.4 and v1.7, very good boards !

I've got an M919 (V1.5) board on the way from Fleabay. Hopefully the cache isn't fake, although the listing shows them to be socketed rather than soldered so I think I'll be okay on this one.

I wonder if PC Chips ever made video cards or other types of expansion cards . It would have made sense, IMHO .

I think PC Chips reputation was ruined by their use of fake cache on 486 boards back in the days, while trying to mislead consumer by modifying the BIOS code to show cache as real. It wasn't so much on reliability/stability of their boards, though their boards could range from good to cheap builds. Nowadays it became a peculiarity of that era though, and there are people who collect them for the presence of fake cache.