After fighting with a really cheap 486 M/B [*] I'm about to spend
some money in buying a new one with PCI. Since I have the CPU, just
the lobotomized board is all I need.

I've seen a nicely manufactured [&] 486 that has 4 PCI, 1 VLB, 3 ISA
with Intel chipset. An IDE controller is on the M/B (although I don't
have IDE), and there is a PCI daughter card with an NCR 53c810 SCSI
interface. The SCSI bios is already on the motherboard.

My questions are:
- does netbsd work well with the NCR PCI scsi? I currently have
  an AHA 1542CF which I know is the bottleneck (my DEC RZ26 disk
  is definately faster than the 1400K/s I currently get)
- I assume that the PCI scsi does NOT have the 16MB limitations
  that the AHA1542 has? 
- what are people's general feelings with PCI & NetBSD? For a long
  time I have been contemplating going EISA for SCSI, but if this
  proposed setup will _rock_ I'll be a very happy person.

I have to go straight to PCI scsi if I buy this board. The reason:
I have 4 ISA cards (enet, scsi, sound, serial), and it looks like
PCI SCSI is the cheapest (with most to gain) method to go.

PS: Cost is AU$215 for M/B, and AU$110 for card, which combined
is still cheaper than a new AHA1542CF (AU$340) at cheapo rates.
So I hope to get faster performance for Less.


[*] It's a really cheap malaysian or indonesion m/b. Surface mount for
most parts still eludes them. So does a working BIOS/chipset combo.
NetBSD can't reset the machine, one of the items in the BIOS can't
be selected (video shadow) cause when you move the cursor, it changes
to `system shadow'. And, I would like to get OS/2 Warp running, which
it won't do on this M/B. Note that on a slightly different motherboard
with everything else the same, OS/2 2.{0,1,1GA} all worked. In short,
the current M/B is a crock of shit.

[&] `Nicely manufactured': I.e., it's surface mount all the way, it's
not made of that really shit PCB that the cheapo malaysian factories
are fond of, and it's made in Taiwan, which seems to make the best
boards around (according to my Electronic Eng. mates) A lot of the
stuff is designed in the USA and robot manufactured in taiwan r.o.c.

-- 
Luke Mewburn, <lm@werj.com.au>

``This is the central trick of the censor: to exaggerate the importance of the
  challenging speech, to suppress it, and to deny the suppression.''
    -- 'Guilty Secrets; Free Speech & Defamation in Australia', Roger Pullan