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LINUX flies...Pentium a valid option...
[1] 1 Selecting the SL-586 and Short List of Motherboards
[2] The 2 Evaluating the Motherboard: SL-586
1 San Li SL-586VP and the Short List
Prior to my brother George purchasing the board, my initial encounter of this promising board took place toward the end of November 96 during a lunch time trip with George to a small computer store run by a Taiwanese couple. This was the only store that stocked this board in Toronto. Before visiting this store, I had consider purchasing boards by either ASUS or Gigabyte.
ASUS boards were carried by most vendors for people looking for a premium product. This is a result of their underground reputation and reliability with 486 boards running VESA local bus when most people could not get it right. I have been told that their early success with VLB was in strong measure due to their decision to go with the SIS chipset.
Gigabyte was also being advertised as a Magitronic board and seem to quite popular amongst dealers. I have seen many different revisions of the same board floating around. This is a good thing if you know which revision to look for.
My brothers original 386 board was a DTK unit purchased in 1990 when there were only a handful of board companies. We found out that they still existed but had some weird relationship with a company called Gemlight. There was also a nice board made by Amptron that many of our friends had found to be stable and reliable. My short of list of recommended boards given to my brother prior to evaluating the "San Li" boards where as follows in order of "personal" preference:
The above statements are purely my own views based upon my personal experience with the companies/products and through discussions with friends and colleagues. I apologize to those involved if any mistakes or mis-information is contained in the above. R.C.
2 Evaluation of SL-586VP
2.1 Inital Impressions
To re-iterate, my little brother, George, found this nice looking board on his own with what looked like the meanest and biggest heat sink that I have seen to date. It seemed like a legitimate challenger to the heat dissipation task facing many motherboards when powering up a current hungry Cyrix PR200+. The manual for the board claimed it supported both 75 MHz and 83 MHz bus speeds but did not explicitly state support of the Cyrix PR200+. Cavaet Emptor. Prior to George's purchase, I was asked by him "surf and confirm" how reputable this yet unheard of "no name" was (remember, I bought a 486 board with fake L2 cache Ram that I am using to this day). My little investigation found this board being distributed by the following companies:
Photronic...non
working link (Oct 1997)
DataWorld
...non working link (Oct 1997)
Famous Magic-Pro
MP-586ITX
FKI Voyageur
I located two different web pages of two different companies, each claiming to have fathered the SL 586VP (Photronic and Dataworld), I got back to George and told him that his dream board might be "illegitimate". He did not care and went out the same day to buy the board complete with a IBM PR150+ processor and 32MB of EDO RAM that gets treated better than the dog. How's that for a happy ending. While at it, he also upgraded his 340MB hard drive to a 2.1 Gigabyte unit. It was a shame that he is running Windows 3.1 only. We set up the system at his place and tested using PC hardware compatability using the Linux/PC compability boot floppy: I know he sleeps well at night these days.
The "San Li" home page has changed its internet
address recently and has updated its stable of boards to include the new
"TX" chipset from Intel. Today is October 1997 and I have just
managed to figure out its new address. The SL586V-plus board is now at
1.2 with updates to handle the higher power dissipation of the M2 and
K6 chips via switching regulators. One of the distributors has an updated
spec of this board while the new "San-Li" site is under construction.
2.2 "San Li Technology Co., Ltd" background:
My "surfing" revealed that this company had existed since 1988 in Hong Kong. They are ISO-9002 certified. They supply OEMs with Mainboards and Video Cards that are sometimes re-labelled and sold under various different brand names. I eventually found out the true identity of the manufacturer via a BIOS page put out by Wim. Relative to what I thought were my requirements... I liked what I saw:
On my home page, I mentioned that the best "motherboard page" around was Tom's . The man has style and a good feel what makes for a attractive home page. I find the main page a little large at 175K (that is about a 3 minute load for most you the first time you "surf" his page) but becomes tolerable thereafter thanks to Netscape's cached files. I'll have to excuse Tom, becuase it is a tremendously useful page that is chock full of useful content. (Tom you have to weaned off your Windows 95 centric world and branch out a bit and become more Linux/Unix proficient ... you are missing out on a lot in the Linux world.)
One of Tom's activities is doing hardware reviews of Motherboards. He wrote a slightly less that stellar review of a close and some might say "poorer" cousin of the SL-586VP called the SL-586VT-II. That board is based upon the "VIA VP-1" chipset that is gaining popularity. It openly supports the 75 MHz bus speed required by Cyrix P200+ processors as well as something called "Linear Burst Mode" native to the Cyrix processor. Tom has a rather heavy bias towards running boards at what Intel would refer to as "overclocked" rates. A perfectly good board that does not run with his processors and his latest and greatest 50ns RAMS could potentially get a bad review. Such a thing, I think, sort of happened to the SL-586VT-II. The SL-586VP uses the Intel VX chipset and is actually a bit more feature laden than the VT-II.
Meanwhile back on the farm (as they say at Gateway), ATI began an initiative to see whether these higher bus speeds of "75 and 83 MHz" would impact the compatability of ATI video cards on overclocked PCI buses . Potentially, existing motherboard designs could generate the PCI clocks by having the memory bus speeds to generate 37.5 MHz and 46.5 MHz bus speeds. PCI 3.0 anyone ? I informed "San Li" of our companies plans and we decided to "board swap" with them whereby they would incorporate beta testing of our latest cards on their systems and we would do the same with our video boards with a SL-586VP board sent to us "graciously" by them. Anyways I'll cut to the chase and summarize my findings of this board evaluated at my workplace and at home one weekend ( Sad to say that I had to return the board to my employer...it was a joy to use ):
2.4 SL-586VP Findings
Finally, if putting my money where my mouth means anything
to anyone, I went out and purchased a SL-586VP for my home use. The dark
horse cometh and conquered.
This is one amazing board using the latest Intel TX chipset from Intel. It has switching supply regulators that do not require massive heat sinks typical of Linear regulators. The board should be more reliable because of less heat. I bought on Tom's recommendation and am not sorry that I did. Switching regulator are almost a necessity for any of the +PR200 chips such as K6 and PR233MX chips due to the larger amount of current and power required from the voltage regulator....this spells lots of heat for older linear regulators. Board is extremely stable and has yet to crash.
