So one of the things I wanted for the 486DX-50 was a VLB video card. I bought one, a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5424, and it came with…, a whole computer! A very nice one at that, namely one with a 486DX2-66 CPU and a case with a LCD display and turbo button. So this leaves me with some options. Maybe I should just switch over to this new PC altogether. But there’s one small caveat. There’s absolutely no information to be found about the motherboard. It has written YANG AN YA-1 9324 E114139 94V-0 on the back. It has what I think is a 8-bit ISA card with some chips and jumpers on it that has the designation Tean T1 94V-0 on the back.

I wrote this post over a couple of days after receiving the new PC and I have been busy trying to find more information about the motherboard. It turns out it most probably is made by SOYO. I’ll provide the settings here also for future reference:

It has 256 MB cache and 8 MB RAM.

The specifications are:

• 8x (Winbond) W24257A-20 256Kb SRAM. The datasheet states that supported access times are 10/12/15/20 nS (max.)
• 8MB RAM (30-pin modules):
  • 4X 1MB (Cubig with Mitsubishi M5M41000BJ-7 chips)
  • 2x 1MB (Siemens HYB514400AJ-70)
  • 2X 1MB (NEC MC-421000A9BA-80)

I don’t especially like the active cooling on the CPU, but maybe I can replace that with a quieter solution. It also has the original battery still on it, so that should be replaced. I have a CR2032 replacement on the way. It also has a VLB IO card on it. This one doesn’t have a graphics on it, which probably is a good thing when combining it with a dedicated video card, although the IO-board from the 486DX-50 has a jumper to disable the VGA IRQ, that doesn’t seem to do the trick. The new IO-board also has to IDE connectors, which probably is a nice thing to have when combining a CF-card adapter and CD-ROM drive.

The whole PC does seem very slow however. So before I switch to this PC, I should try some different settings. Also, the 486DX-50 has a nice XTIDE ROM. I want to look into that. Anyway, after trying out my CF card that I got working earlier, the second partition isn’t recognized anymore. And also not on the 486DX-50. I’ll try again later. Lots of things to think about…