Talk:VESA Local Bus

message: Someone pointed out a board they found on Google that appears to be an Am386DX40 with a VESA slot 
After checking the VLB standard signals, it seems there are provisions for use on the 386 also; But obviously only with a 386DX since the SX doesn't have a full 32 bit address and data bus.66.68.118.47 (talk) 21:27, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  VESA on a 386 

message: the VESA Local Bus didn't have the electrical ability to drive more than 1 or 2 cards at a time.
: Is this really so? I've got a 486 sitting next to me with three occupied VESA slots. This article needs a bit about VESA slots in Pentium motherboards, but I don't know much about that. Crusadeonilliteracy 09:54, 27 Aug 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Unlike PCI or ISA, VLB was based heavily on the 486s memory bus and was very difficult to adapt to the Pentium's bus due to the many differences between them.66.68.118.47 (talk) 21:27, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that this is misleading. Odd that 3 at the most is marked citation-needed.  Look over at the picture in the same section - there is a picture of a motherboard with 3 VLB slots ;).  I'd say the citation-needed should at least be removed. 68.47.228.146 (talk) 16:21, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  More than one or two slots at a time? 

message: i'm sure i read that there were also issues in implementing vlb for 486 chips that used a 33mhz FSB is this true and if so shouldn't it be mentioned in the article? Plugwash 17:01, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  33mhz 

message: The article doesn't say anything about when it was developed, by whom, what it replaced etc. The whole article just talks about it being replaced by PCI. Why did this exist in the first place? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.114.134.22 (talk) 
:I'm not sure on the details myself but I belive it was introduced because ISA was no longer sufficiant for the new graphics cards that were coming out and EISA wasn't really that much of an improvement. A quick soloution was needed and the quickest one availible was to put cards on the 486 memory bus. Plugwash 12:53, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That's a good question, and while I can answer it informally, it should be addressed (and sourced) in the article.  Anyhow, IIRC, VL-Bus came about in 1992, and made available 32 bits for the graphics interface (or rarely, other devices), as opposed to the 16 bits available on the ISA bus.  This was at a time when hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and their bandwidth demands were just beginning to appear for PCs.  There was supposedly a 64-bit extension as well.   20:39, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dates 

message: Although it's mentioned in the "See Also" of this article, in fact I don't see VESA Local Bus listed anywhere in the List of device bandwidths page.  And I don't know what its values would be anyway -- AFAIK, it should add up to around 133 MB/s (32 bits at 33MHz nominal), but I'm not sure.   20:39, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Link to Bandwidth page 

message: Were there ever any VESA Local Bus cards other than Video cards? 
I never remember seeing any, yet you could get motherboards with more than one VLB slot, so presumably other device types must have existed? 
81.135.39.190 (talk) 22:13, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: There were many different devices that could run in VLB slots, video cards were just the most common. Other devices like IDE controllers and I/O cards were also fairly common. 66.68.118.47 (talk) 21:02, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text:  Some VL-bus based non-VGA cards I saw: 10mbps UTP ethernet with SMC91C92 chip, the "Iwill Side" multi/IO VL card with IDE, floppy, serial, parallel and SCSI controller (Adaptec 6360Q chip) onboard, a noname multi-I/O VL card with IDE, FDD, serial, parallel ports and 4 x SIMM-72 slots for expanding the motherboard RAM. Apparently TV and video recording (MPEG) cards also existed in VL-bus format but they were rare and pricey. 188.143.7.252 (talk) 22:51, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  VLB for non-video devices? 

message: This seems rather biased, and I think it could do with review and better citation, rather than what is probably one person's foggy recollection, that I can doubly refute both by reference to other articles on the same subject, and my own experience.
Case 1: PCI article ... the standard came along in 1992, probably about the same time as VLB itself and not too long after MCA. It had plenty of time to get established even in the early days of the Pentium. Only being established in the soho market by 1996 is nonsense.
Case 2: Reference to Triton chipset ... is very Intel-biased and narrow focus. There were plenty of other manufacturers making IBM-compatible motherboard chipsets at the time, in fact it's arguable that Intel themselves were relatively minor players in the scene they had helped launch, unlike the resurgence they've enjoyed of late. AMD were offering a serious threat to them, and pretty much anyone might be responsible for the ICs providing the low level service on your motherboard. Intel's offerings were actually remarkably conservative compared to the state of the art and certainly through the 420, 430, 440 era it seemed to take them forever to catch up with innovations that everyone else had been enjoying for ages, including SDRAM in DIMMs, large maximum RAM figures, decent large/fast L2 caches, over-8gb HDD support, UltraDMA, low voltage CPU sockets (this one possibly so they could keep selling "Overdrive" CPU adaptors?) and then the ubiquitous Socket 7 (and Super S7 which they avoided completely by going to CPU slots), AGP, ATX, etc. Reasonable enough if you were selling modest-performance but highly-reliable workstations to corporate customers, but unlikely to set a home user's pants on fire. And arguably with the Celeron (the continuing descendant of the 486SX), lower performance examples of their integrated graphics and sound, etc it's a model they've been happy to keep pushing ever since, even alongside the actual market-leading parts.
Case 3: The 486 my family bought in mid-late 1994, which was an entirely normal midmarket example of the breed (but still costing a princely £2000 at the time!). 66mhz 486, 8mb of FPM, 540mb mode-2 HDD (initially PIO-4, but we found out how to twizzle things in the BIOS), 2x CDROM, 16-bit soundcard, 15" SXGA monitor... and a 2mb PCI graphics card, on a motherboard with a decent chunk of L2 cache, a fully integrated drive and serial/parallel port controller, plus two other open PCI slots, three open ISAs, and *NO* EISAs, VLBs or MCAs. And the great majority of new PCs around at the time followed a similar pattern. In fact, amongst a rake of various upgrades we've bought, and other old surplus machines I've owned or used since, from a 286, some 486SXs, 5x86 overdrives, Pentiums (and Cyrixes, AMD K's...) from 120mhz on up, to i5s, I've not actually seen any of those slots up close and for real. There was a single solitary 386 PS/2 at my school which presumably had MCA in it, but I never got to lift the lid.
Honestly, PCI came along and ... that was it. Basically killed EISA, MCA and VLB stone dead overnight for anything other than maintaining compatibility with existing parts and using up leftover ICs/Boards/slot parts. As soon as motherboard manufacturers, system integrators and graphics/storage card designers learned about it and managed to get suitable designs together, they switched all their new models over to it instead of bothering making stuff for what were a trio of instantly obsolete standards. I think I've only ever even seen one advert for a VLB card - the Matrox Mystique - in one of the very first (still 1994) PC magazines we bought, and that was itself also available in PCI form, so you could use it to either upgrade an existing machine, or put it into a new one.
Not in common use until 1996? You've got to be kidding me. We had P200s by then. The beta versions of Quake were already out in the wild. MMX was looming on the horizon. Any computer with an older bus standard was already either relegated to desk-job duties, or trashed. 193.63.174.254 (talk) 17:49, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Legacy section 

message: There are a bunch of dead links and [citation needed] notes all over this article. I'm going to clean them up as much as I can, if anyone else wants to assist drop a mention as help is appreciated. Some of the [citation needed] are going to be hard, like the note on the slang name for VLB was Very Long Bus. I know I remember hearing it and even saying it as a joke years ago but I doubt I'm going to find a scholarly reference explaining that (and it's kind of self evident why IT guys called it that....it's a darn long bus especially compared to what else was common back in the mid 1990s, ISA and PCI). I might just rewrite that sentence to explain it was a slang term and cite a source of it's use. I'll see what I can dig up, let me know if anyone else monitors this page and wants to assist. Kc7txm (talk) 20:19, 27 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you think we can remove the  maintenance template alert at the beginning of the article? All four citations needed sections were updated and the four dead links have been sourced. Is there a consensus on removing the alert vs adding more citations? Kc7txm (talk) 22:23, 27 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: What do you think , we have 8 working citations on the page after filling in all four citations needed, should I pull down the  maintenance template alert? Kc7txm (talk) 08:08, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Look good to me – good job! --Zac67 (talk) 17:04, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks , citations needed alert removed from the VESA Local Bus article. Kc7txm (talk) 19:57, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citation work 2019