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WTB: EISA motherboard with VLB or PCI slots

N

njroadfan

Veteran Member
Joined
Jan 21, 2011
Messages
1,642
Why? Because I want to play with one. I've played with Microchannel, VLB, and PCI... but never an EISA board. A 486 board with EISA and VLB or PCI would be nice. I'll take a Pentium board with EISA and PCI as well, although they are harder to come by. Fullsize AT form factor is ok as I have a case that can fit the larger boards. I'd prefer some RAM with the board as most annoyingly require parity. Oh, and a disk with the CFG files and EISA tools for the board would be nice too. :) My budget is $35.
 
Best bet is to look locally for a vintage 486/Pentium server. For example the early Compaq Proliant servers up to the Pentium pro were EISA some with PCI as well.

If $35 is with shipping then you will spend a while looking over ebay listings to find a motherboard. I check for EISA stuff on ebay every week and they are just not that common anymore except for the $200+ BIN auctions.
 
Shipping separate of course. I am checking ebay (its a bad habit), one can always be hopeful. Whats weird is that all those years going to computer shows, I never thought to seek out a EISA machine. Than again the servers tended to be overpriced... some things never change!
 
Stone said:
I think I have a couple of EISA Hard/Floppy controllers if you get that far.
Click to expand...

They made EISA IDE controllers? Hmm... although I do have a VLB I/O EIDE card already. I see a few boards have built in IDE, but oddly enough they seem to be connected to the ISA bus, not VLB or EISA.
 
njroadfan said:
They made EISA IDE controllers? Hmm... although I do have a VLB I/O EIDE card already. I see a few boards have built in IDE, but oddly enough they seem to be connected to the ISA bus, not VLB or EISA.
Click to expand...

The ISA bus should have been fast enough for all PATA devices until about 1997. The ISA to PATA connectors were cheap and tested so using them seems the correct move. Now, it probably doesn't matter; one probably needs a more modern expansion card because the really old drives are getting difficult to locate.
 
Sometimes those "best offer" buttons do work on those $200+ BIN ebay listings. I just picked up a Micronics full-AT EISA2 VLB motherboard wtih 2VLB slots, built in I/O, socket 2, and a flash BIOS. It also seems to have been used in some Gateway systems so the EISA tools were easy to find.
 
SCSI (mostly 50 pin a few wide with or without floppy controller) are the most common EISA cards, they did make IDE cards (I have a caching IDE card in one of my 486 EISA systems).
 
dorkbert said:
I think I have an EISA VLB (OPTi) board lying around. and a few network cards and SCSI cards (Adaptec and Buslogic) But alas no config disks or manuals...
Click to expand...

I'll have to see if this board works, then I'll go card hunting. From what I've seen, Shuttle and Mylex made Opti based VLB/EISA boards. I've only found the config disks for the Shuttle boards.
 
Motherboard is installed in a case and working. EISA tools work, although they really REALLY hate my VLBus I/O card (I get a NVRAM save error). Its likely trying to do bus mastering which is disabled for VLBus. Oddly the manual only states that the jumper to enable bus mastering is for SCSI VLBus cards. No big deal, I'll just use the SIIG ISA I/O card I have (onboard I/O only has 16450 serial and basic bi-directional parallel).

Whats really annoying is that this board can't shadow the BIOS or video ROM if it has more then 16MB installed, so slow floppy access and text screens in DOS. I found a driver to speed up the video, but nothing for disk I/O so far, although the SIIG enhanced LBA BIOS seems to be faster then the onboard Int 13h routines. This is a moot point under Windows due to 32bit Disk/File Access of course.
 
Now that I got the board up and running, on the lookout for the following EISA cards:

-3Com 3c597TX 10/100 NIC
-Adaptec AHA-2740W WideSCSI controller (floppy-less variant preferred)
 
kb2syd said:
Can't you use wide scsi devices on a narrow scsi bus? It has been a long time so I don't remember.
Click to expand...

Yes, but you need an adapter that correctly handles the excess signals. Don't want them reflecting back to the drive and confusing the issue. http://www.cablestogo.com/product.asp?cat_id=109&sku=09522 The last set of 68 pin SCSI drives I bought cost $15 each; it bothers me to pay twice that just to hook it to a slower controller. Though I admit EISA wide controllers do seem to be rarer than the PCI equivalents.
 
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