Thankfully the COASt module was reverse engineered and reproductions are available. I made a video about it titled "M919 Fake Cache and Reproduction L2 COASt Modules." Sadly I haven't seen them on eBay in a while, though I believe it was an open source design so hopefully someone else makes and sells them again. More info is on Vogons in a thread titled "Lets make new M919 Cache sticks"
Most of that stuff seems to be in the US so shipping to Europe is always a pain unfortunately. Might be a nice pcb project. Still glad to have this board. Looking forward to exploring it some more. The desktop case from your video also resembled the one I have with this pc.
Clint here commenting from the Blerbs account? I wish that meant that channel is going to be a bit more active again, I appreciate those laid back videos.
The infamous famous PCChips M919! one of my fav boards because when they are setup properly and got their L2 Cache module they are superb performers.... that when you manage to find this rare proprietary cache module.The M919 got an undocumented 60mhz bus clock setting too afaik, when you want to do a decent Am586 overclock to 180mhz at 4volt. But anyways, this board and also previous models (i.e M912 VLB) with fake cache onboard are legendary history.
@ Well, there were plenty things that PCChips has done in the past that were very questionable and somehow a scam, but i must say, i own several boards of them, different platforms, cannot complain about the quality they delivered. At least the 386 to Pentium II era. The boards i have, are great performers, and the M577 has an outstanding quality in my eyes.
@@CosmoRiderDEhad a pc chips m741lmrt slot 1 and socket 370 weird mobo ! Had 8MB SiS620 / 630 vga. Also owned a m810lmr 7.1 which ran SiS 730 vga onboard very bad performance but very cheap board. Was very picky with memory.
Configurations like that usually happend because somebody upgraded a machine but eventually got a new PC. So they would plunder the best parts, like maybe an early 3D graphics card and put it in their new Pentium II, which had onboard sound so they left the sound blaster behind. Then they dug out the old original VGA card, put it back in to have a working system and gave it to their little brother.
I’ve come to love the PCchips motherboards, due to their quirks. It’s quite badass that they kind of got away with the cache issues for quite some time. :p
That videocard in combination with a 100 mHz cpu is such an odd combination. That motherboard/cpu combo could happily run Duke 3D if it was paired with a nice VESA compliant SVGA card. I guess the original owner probably didn’t care too much about graphics performance as that card is more fitting of a 286/386 system. I tried to run Duke 3D on a 33 mHz 486 back in the day and it could barely run at a playable speed (kids these days are a bit spoiled with framerates, back then you where happy that you could run the game at all and play it) but at least I had a Paradise SVGA card because my dad wanted high resolutions when he originally bought the computer in late 1992.
My first PC was a Cyrix 486 DX2 80 MHz, 8 mb of RAM and a 1 mb SVGA card. And it struggled with Duke3D. After buying a new PC (Pentium 133) Duke3D started flying. How much difference a new computer made back then.
It's an odd choice because the machine originally booted directly to Windows. Screen redrawing would have been really sluggish vs a budget pci video card.
I like how the silkmask on the boards where white with reasonable text size. Today you get dark-grey on dark-something with 1mm font size and some puny flyer which does not even explain the pinheaders.
My first PC (a new 486 DX2-66 VLB) had that same 3 button mouse, but without the printing on top, also rebulding that one now and updating it abit (Pentium, Socket 7), and that exact same CD-ROM is what i have chosen for the build :))
Okay... that's a new one for me: I didn't know some motherboard vendors were slapping fake sram cache back in the day. That's nuts, but if buying a board at a computer show, you'd look at that board and think it was cache equipped. I'd have been pretty angry to get home, boot it up, and find out I didn't have any L2 cache.
Yeah it has fake cache modules. You can tell because the chips are larger than the real ones and the traces lead nowhere. I've encountered a couple of these boards and it's always a trip. Lol
fRom memory I bought one of these motherboards off a friend as It enabled me to go pci cheaply from my vlb system, so it started vlb and I bought pci cards. The faking of the cache worked fine with a dx4/100 but mine had previously gained a cyrix 5x86/100 and when that was installed it wouldnt fake the cache properly and would only boot if the external cache was disabled in the bios.
Very interesting computer. It reminds me of when I read a magazine where they mentioned "Overdrive" processors, low-cost alternatives to the first Pentiums. And this AMD AM 486DX4 was among them. I would love for you to install a CF disk using an adapter and try to install Windows 3.11 on it.
I like vidéos about those old PC hardware. My first PC was built over a Hippo VL+ motherboard, no external cache. Now I prefer to play with older hardware like C128 or Amiga500
Haha, the moment I heard you say that the mobo was PC Chips, I groaned, I had a feeling of what was coming next. Sure enough, seeing those obviously fake looking "cache chips" confirmed it. I never knew about this controversy back in the day, even though I am almost positive I have owned at least two or three motherboards with fake cache like this back then. I was the kind of person looking to maximize performance while on a budget, so if I saw something advertised as having fast cache at a reasonable price, I probably would have bought it. Of course back in the day we didn't have widely available fast internet, social media, etc. so information didn't spread as rapidly, so I'm not surprised that this controversy remained relatively obscure until nowadays. Some of the "fake chips" boards actually do have properly laid out traces, so you could desolder the fake chips and install real cache chips in their place. But you would usually have to also flash a new hacked BIOS on the board, because the BIOS on these boards was hacked to secretly disable cache while still displaying the "xxx KB CACHE PRESENT" message even though no cache was present. A while back the UA-camr CRG did this (retrofitted real cache on a fake cache board) on one of his videos.
PCchips was a cuss word in the second half of the 90s. I remember refusing every third order at a certain time, when somebody asked me to assemble a PC (as a teen and some years later I made my pocket money with that) with particular CPU/RAM specs and an inadequate budget, because it meant a PCchips or a ZIDA/Tomato board, and I was just a boy, not a retailer with a warranty department to mess with those highly integrated and similarly buggy wonders of technology. So I lost customers who would be a royal pain, opting to take fewer orders but from people who were willing to pay some extra for quality (that at those times meant Gigabyte, Abit and Chaintech mostly, because Asus and consumer-grade Supermicro, Intel, or Tyan boards were sort of for VIPs with wild cash). The irony was that at some moment I ended up with a PCchips board myself because it was a freebie that was burn-in tested and proven as working. At the first opportunity I switched to an original Intel board. But never I seen as many BSODs of Windows NT as with that abomination.
Nice board! I had something like this back in the day. I was too poor for a real pentium 60 (dodged the bullet there 😂) and bought a and 5x86-133 instead. Doom and quake ran pretty good!
Great fun as always ☺ About the beautiful "Syntha" computer shown at the end, do you know who manufactured those cases? My first computer had one just like it but without the Mhz display. AMD 386 DX40. Loved that case and its fancy door. 😆
How did the Video card & sound card switch possitions ? The video card was closest to the PCI stots, but when you took the cover off, the sound card was closer to the PCI slots ??? Is there some trickery at play here or what ? 🤣🤣🤣
Has any tried jumping the traces from the fake cache to the pins from the proprietary cache slot with real chips I think it would work fine if can find the pinouts. Especially since the traces has decent looking vias
That’s a dead end. The traces are just meant to look impressive. There is no telling what those chips REALLY are, if there’s anything in them at all. And basically zero chance that the traces that ARE there, would go where they needed to go, if you could find SRAM in that package. You would almost certainly have to break all the trace connections, and add budge wires for all the relevant pins. At that point, you’re way better off spinning a new PCB to go in the COASt slot.
very similar to my old mobo, i had a cash stick though and i remember umc chipset, 4 simms , white ide connectors and similar number of expansion slots, even the bios is the same i had 2 8mb sticks of memory and 133mhz amd cpu and i didn't know a thing about computers :]
0:25 Damn! 3½, yellow* 5.25 and 16X CD-ROM. Where's the barn and anything left? *Yellow means OLDER ! Not = smoker(hrrmph!) - Dear Younglings♥ 11:06 WOW! Fake cache already on socket 3! Did wonder about that COASt slot....(2X128KB + 256KB a bit much in the day) 13:10 My Problem today with my(moms)first TULIP 486 (at least no fakes - just proprietary) 😕
Did someone replace the known good hard drive with private data on and replace it with something that had nothing on it worth keeping and creating a buggy install as it was going to be left on the kerbside.
Ahhh, the legendary PCChips fake cache boards... such a wonderfully ridiculous piece of computer history. I've got one floating around that I've kept precisely because it is so dang ridiculous.
You have to put a modern PCI graphics such as voodoo3 or even maybe fx series and install w95 and see how it performs games such as quake2 maybe 3, will be a fun video fur sure.
It depends on what the problem is. Reading the info on HDD Regenerator, which is kind of similar to Spinrite, a lot of drive defects are weakened magnetization on the platters. HDD Regenerator does a low-level read, as repetitively as needed to read the bit, then re-writes it, refreshing the contents of all 'bad' sectors. If there's actual physical media damage, that can't be repaired. But based on how much success I've had recovering drives with both utilities, at least with then-current drives 15ish years ago, the majority of drive defects do seem to be magnetic rather than physical, and repairable/recoverable with those utilities. DEFINITELY worth a try with this drive. Actually, HDD Regenerator/Spinrite should be tried BEFORE chkdsk/scandisk, as once those mark a sector as bad, it would be difficult to un-mark them as bad/restore the data to readability in the FAT.
I dealt with that BIOS back in the day. It wasn't terrible, but the traditional keyboard-navigated BIOSes were much better. Give me those any day, all day.
Thankfully the COASt module was reverse engineered and reproductions are available. I made a video about it titled "M919 Fake Cache and Reproduction L2 COASt Modules."
Sadly I haven't seen them on eBay in a while, though I believe it was an open source design so hopefully someone else makes and sells them again. More info is on Vogons in a thread titled "Lets make new M919 Cache sticks"
saw your video back then. I kind of scan youtube for videos about this particular board hehe.
If I could just find/get one for a Tulip* Socket 3 😞
*Yup! Dutch they AR#%were.
Most of that stuff seems to be in the US so shipping to Europe is always a pain unfortunately. Might be a nice pcb project. Still glad to have this board. Looking forward to exploring it some more. The desktop case from your video also resembled the one I have with this pc.
When I watched that part I was very surprised that no one had made one. Good to know they are available.
Clint here commenting from the Blerbs account? I wish that meant that channel is going to be a bit more active again, I appreciate those laid back videos.
The infamous famous PCChips M919! one of my fav boards because when they are setup properly and got their L2 Cache module they are superb performers.... that when you manage to find this rare proprietary cache module.The M919 got an undocumented 60mhz bus clock setting too afaik, when you want to do a decent Am586 overclock to 180mhz at 4volt. But anyways, this board and also previous models (i.e M912 VLB) with fake cache onboard are legendary history.
Infamous garbage from hell
@ Well, there were plenty things that PCChips has done in the past that were very questionable and somehow a scam, but i must say, i own several boards of them, different platforms, cannot complain about the quality they delivered. At least the 386 to Pentium II era. The boards i have, are great performers, and the M577 has an outstanding quality in my eyes.
@@CosmoRiderDEhad a pc chips m741lmrt slot 1 and socket 370 weird mobo ! Had 8MB SiS620 / 630 vga.
Also owned a m810lmr 7.1 which ran SiS 730 vga onboard very bad performance but very cheap board. Was very picky with memory.
I remember those Funai CD Drives!!!!
Wow such a cool spread of time periods in one motherboard... Nice, looking forward to part 2. Keep up the good work.
Configurations like that usually happend because somebody upgraded a machine but eventually got a new PC. So they would plunder the best parts, like maybe an early 3D graphics card and put it in their new Pentium II, which had onboard sound so they left the sound blaster behind. Then they dug out the old original VGA card, put it back in to have a working system and gave it to their little brother.
That sounds like a good explanation. I've certainly passed on a bunch of hand-me-downs over the years.
Nice computer system. Nice to see you work on it. Enjoy it. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands
I’ve come to love the PCchips motherboards, due to their quirks. It’s quite badass that they kind of got away with the cache issues for quite some time. :p
Thanks, looking forward to the comparison video.
That videocard in combination with a 100 mHz cpu is such an odd combination. That motherboard/cpu combo could happily run Duke 3D if it was paired with a nice VESA compliant SVGA card. I guess the original owner probably didn’t care too much about graphics performance as that card is more fitting of a 286/386 system. I tried to run Duke 3D on a 33 mHz 486 back in the day and it could barely run at a playable speed (kids these days are a bit spoiled with framerates, back then you where happy that you could run the game at all and play it) but at least I had a Paradise SVGA card because my dad wanted high resolutions when he originally bought the computer in late 1992.
My first PC was a Cyrix 486 DX2 80 MHz, 8 mb of RAM and a 1 mb SVGA card. And it struggled with Duke3D. After buying a new PC (Pentium 133) Duke3D started flying. How much difference a new computer made back then.
It's an odd choice because the machine originally booted directly to Windows. Screen redrawing would have been really sluggish vs a budget pci video card.
What an interesting machine - such wildly different age parts!
I like how the silkmask on the boards where white with reasonable text size. Today you get dark-grey on dark-something with 1mm font size and some puny flyer which does not even explain the pinheaders.
My first PC (a new 486 DX2-66 VLB) had that same 3 button mouse, but without the printing on top, also rebulding that one now and updating it abit (Pentium, Socket 7), and that exact same CD-ROM is what i have chosen for the build :))
Okay... that's a new one for me: I didn't know some motherboard vendors were slapping fake sram cache back in the day. That's nuts, but if buying a board at a computer show, you'd look at that board and think it was cache equipped. I'd have been pretty angry to get home, boot it up, and find out I didn't have any L2 cache.
Yeah it has fake cache modules. You can tell because the chips are larger than the real ones and the traces lead nowhere. I've encountered a couple of these boards and it's always a trip. Lol
Oh, the BIOS is hacked so it lies about how much cache you have. You won't find out you didn't have cache just by booting it.
@@CptJistuce Wow, thats even sleazier… but I will give them credit for thoroughness.
I'm really looking forward for the next video for this system. This kind of hardware ticks all my boxes!
fRom memory I bought one of these motherboards off a friend as It enabled me to go pci cheaply from my vlb system, so it started vlb and I bought pci cards. The faking of the cache worked fine with a dx4/100 but mine had previously gained a cyrix 5x86/100 and when that was installed it wouldnt fake the cache properly and would only boot if the external cache was disabled in the bios.
As soon you it was determined that you had a PCChips motherboard, I immediately thought of fake cache!
nearly 30 years later i think its kind of cool to own one of these boards with fake caches in any vintage collection
Haha. Okay, so I am halfway through the vid. Thought "what a neat bridge PC." Then you said PC Chips, and then Write Back. I knew what was next!!
Seems to be in pretty decent shape for being found in a barn with or without fake chips
It's Europe. A mild, dry climate. Good for storage.
Very interesting computer. It reminds me of when I read a magazine where they mentioned "Overdrive" processors, low-cost alternatives to the first Pentiums. And this AMD AM 486DX4 was among them. I would love for you to install a CF disk using an adapter and try to install Windows 3.11 on it.
I like vidéos about those old PC hardware. My first PC was built over a Hippo VL+ motherboard, no external cache. Now I prefer to play with older hardware like C128 or Amiga500
Haha, the moment I heard you say that the mobo was PC Chips, I groaned, I had a feeling of what was coming next. Sure enough, seeing those obviously fake looking "cache chips" confirmed it. I never knew about this controversy back in the day, even though I am almost positive I have owned at least two or three motherboards with fake cache like this back then. I was the kind of person looking to maximize performance while on a budget, so if I saw something advertised as having fast cache at a reasonable price, I probably would have bought it. Of course back in the day we didn't have widely available fast internet, social media, etc. so information didn't spread as rapidly, so I'm not surprised that this controversy remained relatively obscure until nowadays.
Some of the "fake chips" boards actually do have properly laid out traces, so you could desolder the fake chips and install real cache chips in their place. But you would usually have to also flash a new hacked BIOS on the board, because the BIOS on these boards was hacked to secretly disable cache while still displaying the "xxx KB CACHE PRESENT" message even though no cache was present. A while back the UA-camr CRG did this (retrofitted real cache on a fake cache board) on one of his videos.
Great part one, looking forward to part two of the video 🙂
PCchips was a cuss word in the second half of the 90s. I remember refusing every third order at a certain time, when somebody asked me to assemble a PC (as a teen and some years later I made my pocket money with that) with particular CPU/RAM specs and an inadequate budget, because it meant a PCchips or a ZIDA/Tomato board, and I was just a boy, not a retailer with a warranty department to mess with those highly integrated and similarly buggy wonders of technology. So I lost customers who would be a royal pain, opting to take fewer orders but from people who were willing to pay some extra for quality (that at those times meant Gigabyte, Abit and Chaintech mostly, because Asus and consumer-grade Supermicro, Intel, or Tyan boards were sort of for VIPs with wild cash).
The irony was that at some moment I ended up with a PCchips board myself because it was a freebie that was burn-in tested and proven as working. At the first opportunity I switched to an original Intel board. But never I seen as many BSODs of Windows NT as with that abomination.
Very nice Find. you gotta love those fake Cache chips on PC chips motherboards.Thanks for the Video.
Nice board! I had something like this back in the day. I was too poor for a real pentium 60 (dodged the bullet there 😂) and bought a and 5x86-133 instead. Doom and quake ran pretty good!
Great fun as always ☺ About the beautiful "Syntha" computer shown at the end, do you know who manufactured those cases? My first computer had one just like it but without the Mhz display. AMD 386 DX40. Loved that case and its fancy door. 😆
How did the Video card & sound card switch possitions ?
The video card was closest to the PCI stots, but when you took the cover off, the sound card was closer to the PCI slots ???
Is there some trickery at play here or what ? 🤣🤣🤣
Through the magic of television :)
The infamous PCCheaps board!
You can tell they really got their use out of this machine; they wore out the first hard drive, and then wore out the second
Has any tried jumping the traces from the fake cache to the pins from the proprietary cache slot with real chips I think it would work fine if can find the pinouts. Especially since the traces has decent looking vias
That’s a dead end. The traces are just meant to look impressive. There is no telling what those chips REALLY are, if there’s anything in them at all. And basically zero chance that the traces that ARE there, would go where they needed to go, if you could find SRAM in that package.
You would almost certainly have to break all the trace connections, and add budge wires for all the relevant pins. At that point, you’re way better off spinning a new PCB to go in the COASt slot.
well equipped motherboard i/o wise, wish I had one
very similar to my old mobo, i had a cash stick though and i remember umc chipset, 4 simms , white ide connectors and similar number of expansion slots, even the bios is the same
i had 2 8mb sticks of memory and 133mhz amd cpu and i didn't know a thing about computers :]
Did lack of video ram affect the games of the day or was it only applicable to screen resolution .
0:25 Damn! 3½, yellow* 5.25 and 16X CD-ROM. Where's the barn and anything left?
*Yellow means OLDER ! Not = smoker(hrrmph!) - Dear Younglings♥
11:06 WOW! Fake cache already on socket 3!
Did wonder about that COASt slot....(2X128KB + 256KB a bit much in the day)
13:10 My Problem today with my(moms)first TULIP 486 (at least no fakes - just proprietary) 😕
Those are very common from back in the day. Looks like early to mid-1990s.
Ah yes, the "faith cache" 😁 ya just gotta believe!
The VGA card and Sound card swapped places?
Glad I'm not the only one to see that !
And where's the problem with that? They're ISA cards after all, they don't care which slot they're in.
@@senilyDeluxe It's just called a continuity error. Calm down.
Wow, I never heard of the fake cache before but I'm not surprised. Guess I never purchased these types of boards back in the day.
Did someone replace the known good hard drive with private data on and replace it with something that had nothing on it worth keeping and creating a buggy install as it was going to be left on the kerbside.
Ahhh, the legendary PCChips fake cache boards... such a wonderfully ridiculous piece of computer history.
I've got one floating around that I've kept precisely because it is so dang ridiculous.
Like and Subscribed.
I saw this ad as well :p
LGR has the same motherboard
No Barrel Battery = Beautiful!
Maybe necroware could make a L2 cache module 😊
PCI video cards do not always get along with all PCI motherboards.
So it's not just me who mounts hard drives with half their screws like that then. The good old days of making it work for you.
Oddly the DX4/100 CPU was actually a DX3/99!
Good 😊
Anyone spot the continuity error with the slots the cards were in :D
The actual question should be: Did the first owner of that system nearly 30 years ago get ripped off because of the fake cache?
Almost certainly.
It would be really funny to decap those fake cache IC's to see what is inside, fully empty? some other IC's rebranded? :D
It has been done 30 years ago by a guy who had access to a dentist xray. The chips were empty
Very cool motherboard. Shame the fake cache ruins it a little.
6:05 Great old graphics
You have to put a modern PCI graphics such as voodoo3 or even maybe fx series and install w95 and see how it performs games such as quake2 maybe 3, will be a fun video fur sure.
I would run Spinrite on this drive to see what you can recover! It is the MUST tool for any vintage computer user!
I've often wondered if Spinrite can revive a half-dead disk like this one or if it's just snake oil.
It depends on what the problem is. Reading the info on HDD Regenerator, which is kind of similar to Spinrite, a lot of drive defects are weakened magnetization on the platters. HDD Regenerator does a low-level read, as repetitively as needed to read the bit, then re-writes it, refreshing the contents of all 'bad' sectors. If there's actual physical media damage, that can't be repaired. But based on how much success I've had recovering drives with both utilities, at least with then-current drives 15ish years ago, the majority of drive defects do seem to be magnetic rather than physical, and repairable/recoverable with those utilities. DEFINITELY worth a try with this drive. Actually, HDD Regenerator/Spinrite should be tried BEFORE chkdsk/scandisk, as once those mark a sector as bad, it would be difficult to un-mark them as bad/restore the data to readability in the FAT.
❤❤❤
at last, an azerty keyboard! ;)
yes
I need a old pc to eun Windows 95, but can't afford it they are too much
These Seagate Medalist ST3660A HDD were not reliable. My finished his life sudenly after 5 yeats of work.
sounds like hard drive is failing
3:51 BIOS with mouse? This computer was cool before the UEFI noobs came along.
I dealt with that BIOS back in the day. It wasn't terrible, but the traditional keyboard-navigated BIOSes were much better. Give me those any day, all day.
Dude just throw a new hard drive in it
Did you? Yeah, law of headlines strikes yet again.
Yes you got ripped off 😔.
Fake cache lol
I don't even understand why they even bothered adding those fake cache chips on motherboards.
Its a scam to make more money.
I lost over 500k on crypto, and you feeling "ripped off"
Don't spend what you can't afford to loose.