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EISA 486 motherboard

Filin said:
First board is already sold. Another EISA board available for sale

https://www.ebay.com/itm/143166424887
Click to expand...

Interesting. I wonder if there was any benefit to the EISA/VLB combo (akin to PCI/AGP). You could run NIC and controller (SCSI ideally) on the EISA bus w/ bus mastering and video off of VLB.

BTW: What is being censored on this pic?

s-l1600.jpg
 
Pre PCI some of the most stable SCSI and network cards were EISA while the best video cards were VLB so a high end workstation would need both (or just a server). Bandwidth is good to have.
 
Unknown_K said:
Pre PCI some of the most stable SCSI and network cards were EISA while the best video cards were VLB so a high end workstation would need both (or just a server). Bandwidth is good to have.
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I agree in theory it sounds great like the marriage between PCI and AGP. I am just wondering if in practice it worked as well. EISA had a pretty good bandwidth on its own and at least benchmarks I have seen in PC Mag show only minor improvements between VLB vs EISA graphics cards (i.e. same manufacturer/model different bus). To be sure VLB had the edge on graphics but VLB was always such a hack I got to wonder if gluing it on an EISA system would have created instability problems or not that negated any benefits.
 
There are only a few EISA video cards out there, dozens and dozens of VLB tailored to OS/Apps, gaming, high end 24 bit graphics, and CAD work.

VLB was dicey when you ran the CPU FSB bus at 50mhz or used all 3 VLB slots with cards that did not get along. When you offload everything but video to the ISA/EISA bus things are pretty easy going. Most VLB systems just had a simple IDE controller and Video card and a couple makers did those functions on a single VLB card.

Now finding an EISA/VLB board is kind of hard on the cheap, I only have one but it rocks. Just EISA 486 boards are more common and I have a few of them.
 
Unknown_K said:
Now finding an EISA/VLB board is kind of hard on the cheap, I only have one but it rocks. Just EISA 486 boards are more common and I have a few of them.
Click to expand...

I have a couple EISA only boards and I think one or two EISA/PCI boards. I have to admit these are the first ESIA/VLB beasts I have seen. I wonder how many manufacturers there were and if there were any "crazy boards" out there. The second one listed looks like it could support 128MB if you had the memory add-in board which for the time period would have been a ridunculous amount of memory.

Correction: it looks like a max of 64MB. 32MB on the MB and probably 32MB on the add in card...
 
The second board for sale is almost certainly "mini EISA", and there is a small chance that the VLB slot could be proprietary local bus (apparently some used the same connectors and placement as VLB) due to the board being from 1992.
 
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