First post, by justin1985
Not that I really needed yet another Windows 98/XP era PC, but I saw this little NEC slimline PC pop up on eBay, and couldn't really resist it. I was drawn to the combination of really compact size with beige and also both full size floppy and optical drives - which doesn't seem a common combination!.The blue accents seem fun too!
It has an MSI MS-6786 rev.2 motherboard, which looks like it was a pretty common OEM board of the time, with the ubiquitous VIA KM400 chipset. The DVD-RW looks like it was probably a replacement, and I'll try to swap it for a beige model - but I wonder if it originally had a blue cover? There is also an internal powered mono speaker which seems interesting - DC power runs off the optical drive Molex connector, and a CD-audio type cable with only two pins presumably connects to the motherboard - it isn't connected, but I guess it goes to "JPHN1"?
I've never seen a motherboard with so many bad capacitors though! The majority are bulging and many oozing from the top - although it does boot. I just looked at RS and it would cost about £20 to replace all of the capacitors, which seems quite a lot for a motherboard that wouldn't be worth much more than this on its own. I do have a spare ASRock board with the same chipset so it is tempting to just swap that in instead, although a little bit sad to lose the NEC boot logo splash screen.
The Athlon XP 2800 seems like a good CPU for this era? The spare ASRock board has an Athlon XP-mobile 2400+ in it - I wonder if it would be worth swapping that in, to be cooler and easier on the PSU if I'm going to be adding a GPU?
It looks like there is a decent selection of low profile AGP cards for this era which would work nicely to build this up into a late Win98/ME/early XP system like a GeForce MX440 or FX5200 - or even a Matrox G550?
I'm also on the trail of a low profile Creative/Ensoniq AudioPCI card for better DOS compatibility (otherwise the VIA 8235 south bridge will hopefully work with SBEMU?)
