Uncreative Labs

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

So as my work on my ultimate 8088, 286, and 486 systems is nearing its end, suddenly a crazy idea popped into my head. I remembered that way back in 1996 at a computer show I picked up a P60 motherboard for $15. I thought it was a good deal at the time, but it wasn't until I got home that I realised it didn't have any PCI slots. It was a VLB-only system. I thought that I had thrown it away years ago, but several months ago when I was perusing the crap in the basement I stumbled accross it again.

It's a really old one. It has a 1993 AMI BIOS, an OPTI chipset, 16 cache sockets for 512kb, 4-72pin RAM slots for 128mb FPM, no integrated controllers.

I am thinking of assembling the ultimate VLB Pentium system. Here's my plan for it.

-512kb cache memory, 128mb FPM ram
-Powerleap adapter with Pentium 233MMX or POD133
-Adaptec VLB SCSI
-ATi Mach64 VLB graphics
-Creative AWE64G
-3com 3C509B 10mbps

I'm not really familiar with VLB adapters. What is the best IDE board made for VLB? Also, are there any other better SCSI adapters for VLB? I think that Mach64 is nearly top of the line as far as VLB goes as well. Maybe S3 964 is better. What do you guys think?

Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2006 5:36 pm

If you can run a 233mmx u ought to be able to run an AMD K6 500 Mhz Smile

I have one u can get cheap.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Yes, I actually just realised that I can use a K6 chip also. What's really great is that the K6-2+ and K6-III+ both have integrated L2 cache. This is good, since the L2 cache on my motherboard is already terribly slow. However, I don't think I am going to get 500Mhz out of this chip. I may be wrong, but I don't believe the K6 chips support multipliers beyond 6x. That means the best I can do is 400Mhz.

Also, finding one of these powerleap adapters might be harder than I thought. They seem to be quite rare.

Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2006 10:46 am

IIRC setting the AMD at 2x was not the same as 2x but = to a higher setting I forget which.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

According to the internets, 2X=6X on the K6-2 chips.

Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2006 2:52 pm

So 6 x 66 would yer max then ?

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Yeah, that's right. It should be good enough for me though. Besides, who knows if I can even find a socket4 adapter and if it will even work. I should start with a P66 and work my way up from there.

I have been doing some reading about OPTi pentium PCI/VLB combo boards. It seems they were really terrible. Infact, just about any board that uses both VLB and PCI tends to suffer from a lot of timing problems. Supposedly the PCI bus hangs off the VLB bus through some sort of bridge chip. Additionally, it just seems that VLB is sort of a 486 thing, and doesn't work very well on the Pentium platform. Though, I did see some posts from various people running pure VLB OPTi pentium systems that said they weren't affected.

VLB is quite strange. It seems that VLB doesn't work very well on 386 systems either, unless you are running a TI or Cyrix SLC chip.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I've been doing some research, and it sounds like my P5 motherboard is a TMC PAT45PVS V2.0. I have found the jumper settings for it too. I can't find any information that shows whether or not it was a good or a bad board. I expect it to be rather mediocre with an OPTi chipset. What's really interesting is that on the board you can actually see the unused traces for a 486 socket. It's a really crude Pentium board. I'm going to run it initially using a Pentium 66 without the FDIV bug. These are 5V chips, just like first generation 486s! I guess I'll need to get a pretty good heatsink and fan for it. I'm going to start it out with a Mach64 VLB and a caching EIDE controller. Eventually I want to put an S3 968 VLB card in there. it should be pretty interesting to see hot it works out.

Sorry for polluting the board with my Pentium crap. But, this pentium sucks so much it's practically a 486 anyway.

Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2006 9:12 pm

I think a 486 @ 133 beats p100 Smile