Compatible emulators

Description

Motherboard published 35 years ago:

M-396B (c) 1991 Ilon USA, Inc.

The Ilon M-396B is a standard Baby AT form factor motherboard, typical of 386DX workstations from 1991. It utilizes a robust design based on the PC-Chips motherboard architecture, featuring a chipset optimized for 386-class memory management. The board hosts an 80386DX processor (typically clocked at 25, 33, or 40 MHz) in a PGA socket, with a dedicated socket for an 80387 math coprocessor. It features eight 16-bit ISA expansion slots and supports up to 32 MB of system RAM via eight 30-pin SIMM sockets. An L2 SRAM cache matrix is also present, generally configurable for 64 KB, 128 KB, or 256 KB of high-speed cache.

- TRIVIA -

PC-Chips Ancestry: Like many "Ilon USA" boards, the M-396B is a direct relative of the PC-Chips M3xx series. Even though it was marketed by a US-based entity, the BIOS strings often reveal identifiers like "PC CHIP-F," confirming the board was engineered and manufactured in the massive Taiwanese production facilities that defined the low-cost PC market.

AMI BIOS Flexibility: The board typically uses an AMI BIOS, which was highly valued at the time for its manual configuration settings. Enthusiasts could tweak memory wait states and cache timings—a critical feature for getting "stable" performance out of the wide variety of low-quality SIMMs and 386DX-40 chips available on the grey market in 1991.

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