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by accrual 313 days ago
Yes, the earliest mainboards I know of with on-board I/O including ATA is around Socket 5, the first mainstream Pentium boards. Some slightly older Socket 4 boards (circa 1994) have on-board I/O, but they weren't as common.

My 486 and earlier systems have all I/O provided by ISA cards, other than the 5-pin DIN keyboard port which was standard since the original PC.

2 comments

I remember my dad's Dell 486P/33 from 1991 had integrated IDE, but that was a fairly high-end machine at the time (the forerunner of their "Precision" workstation range).

Details here: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/dell-system-486p

But, yes, most bog standard machines would've had a separate "SuperIO" card containing serial, parallel, and IDE interfaces until the mid 90s.

Wow! Very impressive board, I had no idea. It's kinda cool how we can directly see some of the chips that would be on the SuperIO card but directly on the mainboard. Thanks for sharing.
White box systems didn't really acquire onboard I/O til the late 486/early 586 era, but it was pretty common on name-brand systems to integrate IDE/floppy/serial/parallel and usually video.