Leopard LX © 199? Alaris
The Alaris Leopard LX is a compact 486-class motherboard designed to be a "cost-effective yet stable" solution for the mid-90s PC market. It is primarily based on the Opti 82C496/82C497 (Eagle) chipset, which provided a more integrated and reliable environment than the chaotic chipsets found on cheaper boards. The Leopard LX features a 237-pin Socket 3, supporting a wide range of processors including the Intel 486DX, DX2, DX4, and the AMD 5x86. It typically features a mix of VESA Local Bus (VLB) and ISA slots, providing a balance between high-speed graphics support and legacy peripheral compatibility. It usually supports up to 64 MB of RAM using four 72-pin SIMM sockets and includes an onboard L2 cache (typically 128 KB or 256 KB) soldered directly to the board or provided via a COAST (Cache On A Stick) module.
Alaris' IBM Connection: Alaris is often remembered by enthusiasts as the company that produced motherboards for IBM's "Blue Lightning" and "SLC2/SLC3" series of upgraded systems. The Leopard LX shares some of this "IBM-adjacent" design DNA, focusing on component longevity rather than the aggressive, often unstable, optimizations found in PC-Chips products.
VLB Stability: Because Alaris prioritized board quality, the Leopard LX is renowned in the retro-community for having one of the most stable VLB implementations. It rarely suffered from the signal noise issues that plagued the PC-Chips M912, making it a "gold standard" for users wanting to run a VLB graphics card like the S3 Vision864 without system instability.