Is this Really "One of the BEST 486 Motherboards Ever Made"?  

Yes, I saw the BIOS update and really wanted to try it out. I decided that I'm so happy with the board that I didn't want to risk ruining it, so I haven't tried that update out yet. I might do so when the novelty wears off!

That’s quite awesome, considering I have a Pentium 100 with no concept of a CD-ROM boot.

@@PCRetroTech well you can always try the hotswapping method of flashing the bios. Take a blank ROM, before turning the board on, lift the ROM slightly so you can easily pull it out but not too much so it's still connected. Then turn on the motherboard, pick the new ROM, the new ROM file and a software named uniflash, remove the old ROM, put the new ROM in the board, then use uniflash to flash the new ROM. And you should be good with the new ROM :)

@@DxDeksor Yeah that sounds like a good idea. To be perfectly honest I noticed that the board supports 5V and 12V EPROMS, and I just didn't want to risk it. I've no idea if the voltage is set correctly, and there's no marking on the actual ROM to give me a clue as far as I can see. I'm sure I could figure it out, but I didn't find the time to look into it yet. There are many other things I'd like to do with this board. I did for example try all the possible jumper settings to see if there was a 60MHz FSB setting. It appears there is not, which surprised me a bit. I believe a later revision of the board has that.

@@PCRetroTech Get yourself one of those Mini Pro USB flash thingies and a spare flash IC. Then you can burn the ROM offline, keep the original safe and sound, and test your SRAMs to boot!

Thanks, will do!

Oh yeah! That'll rock!

Interesting details. I remember the boards from way back. I may have even sold a few of them back in the day.

I think these boards were popular, so it's definitely possible.

Agreed.

Indeed, I am thinking about making the investment. I've needed one often enough to probably justify it.

That would only be possible with a CPU that started up at 180MHz. I'd have to buy about 30 CPUs to find one. I don't think it is fair for everyone else if us RU-vidrs do stuff like that, so I've always said I'm not going to try and beat that score. If someone wants to loan me a CPU that starts at 180MHz I'll try it on this board, but otherwise CPU Galaxy is going to retain that title. I'm happy that I beat his 16.8 fps with an air cooled 5x86 at 160MHz. Or rather the board did. I did relatively little in this case, compared to what I normally have to do to get the most out of a board!

@@PCRetroTech That's probably due to using 32MB of RAM instead of 16MB ... Quake slightly scales with available RAM.

Yeah it is much easier with the right equipment. I had a high temperature solder sucker and a hot air gun. Having said that, even I was surprised at how easily this one came off.

He was all polite about it, he just had a very unusual way of doing business. Each to their own I guess.

“Storage surcharge” - what a total Melvin. Haha If you want more for the item, just charge more for the item. Sheesh. Dude’s making it out like a phone bill.

@@nickwallette6201 Yeah, my guess is his accounting allowed for certain, err, taxation contingencies.

I certainly will.

I bought too many 486 boards in the end. Whilst it is nice to have a selection I think a lot of people are in the same boat as you and would prefer a nice Socket 7. So if I ever do decide to move these boards on, it might not be so easy.

@@PCRetroTech Might be easier than you think. Socket 7 boards are HIDEOUSLY expensive, and realistically you don't need one. If you've got a 486 you can get to work and something like an AMD Duron or Geode, you can cover both sides of the socket 7 era pretty cleanly. You can still disable caches on a 486 with setmul to slow it down, and running the faster k7+ chips that still work in win98 will do all you need for pentium-era games since most of them were no longer tied to CPU speed. (Some still were, but most of those have patches.) They don't make such great DOS machines, but most of the games that wanted a Pentium got win9x versions. Pentium II and III systems are just stupidly expensive, just like socket 7 now.

Same for me, except the other way around. That's the great thing about retrocomputing. We can experience the other side of things.

Fantastic! That's what I love to hear! Thanks for the feedback.

I agree, I'm bringing out my 5x86 tonight and seeing what I can get!

@@HeavyD6600 Awesome. I look forward to hearing about the result. Don't be too surprised if it is not this high. This board was amazing, and it has literally taken me a few years to get a result like that with any board!

Having just moved myself, I can sympathise. One always expects it to be far easier than it is. Fortunately I didn't lose anything really valuable this move. I'm sure I'll go looking for some of the stuff I did lose eventually though.

@@PCRetroTech been doing that (getting what i lost) mostly over the last year, found a place in town that has a treasure trove of old Parts, old motherboards drives etc. even snagged a LS-120 drive from there a few months ago.

@@CaelThunderwing Nice! I am jealous already.

@@PCRetroTech if you were in the states, i'd give the name n number of the place, the shop owner's ok w/ shipping but i dont think he's cool w/ international shipping sadly.

In all the benchmarks I'm doing, the sound is just off, so there's no cost there I think. Actually the soundblaster doesn't always take work away from the CPU. If you are doing real time mixing it's a poor choice. The GUS is apparently better for that. But I understand the point you were making.

It's just a desoldering gun. There are lots of equivalent brands depending where you live.

It's just a lot faster on a Pentium. It will run on a 486 though.

The only 486 board that cames to my mind with that is the pcchips m919

That sounds like a COAST module. "Cache On A STick" (I think). Usually they are something you find on a Socket 7 (Pentium board), but I see Deksor knows about a 486 one.

Interesting. I did not know that was a problem with this board. I thought it was a PC Chips board that had the fake cache. Certainly my board had real cache. Always worth checking I guess.

Nice! Not quite free if you traded something for it. But I know what you mean.

@@PCRetroTech well pentiums are far more common and easier for me to come by. 486s are rarer so it's fine

@@PCRetroTech YOU KNOW TRIXTER?! OMG! i literally worship him xD

@@PCRetroTech my board is version 4.0 btw

Just to add... I have an Asus PVI-486 SP3 rev1.8.with 512k cache at 2-2-2-2 settings (most aggressive is 2-1-1-1) Everything else in bios is set to most aggressive/fastest.

I didn't change the screen size. It's the default when you run this benchmark.

@@PCRetroTech Hmm. I'm confused... I thought the benchmark was run by doing the following: Launch quake by typing the command "quake -nosound" Then hit the tilde "~" Then type "timedemo demo3" Are you doing it another way?

@@tofuguru941 The benchmark is part of the Phil's Computer Lab benchmark suite. I'm running it by selecting the option in that benchmark. Whatever community you are following for your info on the Quake benchmark isn't the community I'm following. If they are doing things differently, you'll have to apply an adjustment.

@@PCRetroTech ahhhhh! I remember the Phil's computer lab package of benchmarks. On vogons. Thank you, I think I have it downloaded somewhere on my socket 3 machine. Gotta check the folders. Thanks for reminding me 👍👍👍

I'm in the USA? That's news to me.

@@PCRetroTech weren't you saying how it took forever to get there from France?

@@thewhitefalcon8539 To Germany.

@@PCRetroTech Oh okay. I am also in Germany. I'm surprised that shipping from France took a while and I'm also surprised you didn't take the train.

@@thewhitefalcon8539 I'm not sure what you mean. That would be much too expensive.

The short answer is that I don't know. I bought them new old stock, so they would never have been used. Or possibly they are fake and have had the batteries replaced with new ones in China. I'd love to know the answer myself actually. I was slightly surprised when I discovered they actually worked after buying them. To be honest, this is one part I don't mind being faked. They look great and they seem to work.

@@PCRetroTech I went the opposite route - bought a new new stock 12887+ from Digikey for my PS/2.

@@fnjesusfreak Yeah that seems to be the more common route. I vaguely recall reading somewhere Y2K compliance was one of the differences, but didn't get around to checking that.

@@PCRetroTech Yeah, I can’t say I understand why someone would go with NOS on something with an expiration date - especially if what you are replacing is already a 12887. (Some people are really concerned about that extra 8, but I haven’t run into any problems at all yet.) Now, not adding a socket? That’s just madness, sir! ;-)

I'm not actually sure on the revision, but I know it isn't revision 4. That accepts 1mb of cache and has a 60MHz option as far as I understand. But I did see a lot of people making a fuss over ps2 mouse. Could you mention why that is such a highly desirable feature? I just plug in an AT keyboard and don't know any different. Apparently quite a few people really like this feature for some reason.

@@PCRetroTech I guess depending where you live, ps/2 mice are easier to find than serial mice, also maybe it takes less processing time to have a ps/2 mouse instead of a serial one. Lastly from what I know you can increase the polling rate of ps/2 to a higher frequency (default is 40hz), I noticed this when playing FPS in windows 98. The game itself ran at 60fps, but turning the view was "laggy". One I found a piece of software named "ps/2rate", I could set the polling rate to 200hz. This made the "laggy" turning issue to vanish. Now the latter is probably not why people are interested in having a ps/2 mouse on a 486 😅

@@DxDeksor Wow, serial mice must be hard to find in some areas because I bought them all. I have a massive big box of them, all different kinds. They must have been more common in certain countries I guess. On the other hand, maybe a really nice serial mouse is hard to find and people are after those. I guess Germany is good for retro hardware!

@@PCRetroTech yeah I didn't have trouble to find them either, but maybe some people have. I mean they haven't been produced in decades now, whereas ps/2 mice may still be in production somewhere, or at least USB mice with backwards compatibility

@@PCRetroTech Well the best 486 for me is the one that offers features like stability , speed , pci slots , support for fast 486 cpu's , ps2 mouse , actually if it's not the fastest i do not mind .But its always nice to have an optical mouse .

It took a while for PC to displace other platforms as the dominant demo platform. And yeah, I totally agree, it just became more about some 3D blob show rather than some really clever trickery. I can appreciate the work that goes into super fast 3D effects and I appreciate all the really cool effects you can do with limited hardware, so I get the best of both worlds in a way. The reason I liked these particular demos so much is they are really, really fast. There's no hardware acceleration here, it's just superb coding. Later on, it became too easy and demos (mostly) were more about creativity without limits rather than pure programming skill. Of course that's a very personal take on it and many people would strongly disagree with this assessment. And thankfully there are many superb counterexamples to all of this right up to the present day! Some people never gave up on pushing things to the absolute limit.

I wonder how they did it. Back then compilers were not nearly as good as today, so assembly was still worth using for speed. I guess most of them used integer maths, not into the FPU as standard era yet.

@@kuro68000 I have to be honest that when I look at these particular demos, even though I know a lot of mathematics and have quite a bit of experience with 3D stuff, I have NO IDEA how they did these demos. I would imagine they used the FPU where that made sense, but I think I agree with you that integer maths might have been better. Certainly by the time late era 486 came along there was enough time to update each pixel on the screen in one frame. But if you look around at the sort of stuff being done in games at the time, these really stand out as super impressive. Games without 3D accelerators had maybe a few hundred polygons. But these demos have thousands. For sure there is a lot of precomputation, but it's not like they had time or memory during precomp to prerender all the scenes. I'm going to have to disassemble some of these at some point to find out how they did it.

@@PCRetroTech In my experience it's usually about "cheating" as much as possible without it being noticeable, so for example you select a shape that is made of entirely convex polygons, or limit rotation axis so you can pre-compute/half compute some of the hidden face removal. As you say, much faster than games of the era. I had a quick look and couldn't see source code for any of the three you showed, shame as that would have been really interesting. So were FPUs common on 486s? I'm still coming up to speed on the era which is why your videos are so interesting, but I thought most 486s didn't have them. On the Amiga side most demos would not use an FPU, they would do everything with integers and carefully select magnitudes to avoid it being noticeable. Even on CPUs that had FPUs it was much faster to do integer maths, with e.g. an integer multiplication being faster than an FPU one even if the FPU was on-die.

@@kuro68000 all 486dx had integrated FPUs, the 486sx had the FPU disabled.

Looks a bit like it. But I think in reality it is just a geometric object that is nonconvex and with lots of curved surfaces to show off their lighting and rendering algorithms.

Yeah I really like the Voodoo cards. I will do a video on programming one of those eventually.

But why not get a Pentium by that point..? 486+PCI is something I never understood, it just feels wrong to me.

@@8bitbubsy True. Pentium, unlike 486, has a powerful FPU, so there is no point in such configurations. Even at the time of the appearance of the 486 + PCI bundle, it was more experimental equipment than something for everyday tasks. In some cases (for example, with the slow 486DX2-66), a good PCI card can speed up old games like doom and Duke3D.

I would guess cost was the main motivation for companies to do this. That's always been the case, 286 was still sold when 386 came out, 386 was still sold until 486 came out. I know in 1995 I had a 486 because I couldn't afford a Pentium, so it certainly jibes with me. On the other hand, whether I could have afforded a Shuttle Hot back in the day I don't know. Maybe they did paint themselves into a corner and that's why the boards are so rare. But given how highly sought after they are nowadays, that could also be the explanation.

@@8bitbubsy 486 is never made for 3D gaming. Its just to weak for it.. Better to go with a first gen pentium.

Yeah they sure can be a pain. It's good I was easily able to replace it, and it was the only issue I had with this board. :-)

The original delivery was scheduled months ago, not in the festive period and of course there is an elevator. Besides, they actually can't guarantee they are giving it to the right person unless they come to your door, so all the companies do that here as standard practice. If they want you to come down, they will actually ask over the intercom, so all good. :-) I used to try going down, but if I go down the stairs they go up the elevator and vice versa, and it causes more lost time for them, so I had to stop doing that. Of course, I always tell them exactly which floor to go to so it takes them seconds at most. I personally think delivery drivers really should be paid more for what they do!

Ha ha, yeah. I come from Australia, and we have some funny pronunning sometimes. :-) I'm never going to be able to get over that habit.

It's called "accents" and yours isn't the only one on the planet

It helps to know that the word derives from the French verb “cacher” (cash-hey) which means to hide.