Hi there. I would like to share with you the building of my latest PC.
It was last summer, that I bought an XT type board, with a socketed NEC V-20 cpu. Basically this is an improved 8088. Mine runs at 12MHz, but with turbo off it runs at 4.77MHz, which is like the first IBM PC.
The seller described the board as new(something I didn't think was possible), and when it arrived I was surprised to see that it was new, indeed! It had no dust at all, no signs of wear, and all the sockets seemed new. Here's a pic of the board when I got it.

I placed 8 dip memory chips I had from an old trident vga that broke(1MB total), and used a regular 16bit ISA multi i/o controller, and a C&T old VGA(also 16bit ISA), and it works fine! Although the floppies I tried were all of them 1.44MB, it only recognizes 720kb disks. I suppose it's limited by the BIOS, but it's ok.

Now, a couple of weeks ago, a good friend of mine gave me an old HP Vectra Pentium 3 system, which was in a slim desktop case. It worked ok, but I really didn't need another P3 system, so I've been thinking to modify the case and the PSU so as to fit an AT type motherboard in it. I had a back plate to fit that covers the whole space of the ATX-type connectors, and leaves just a hole for the AT keyboard connector.

What was really strange about this system, is the fact that the PSU it has, says it's only 120W, which seems to me a little low for a P3 system.

I suppose it might have been made specifically for that m/b. I didn't think it would be enough to power another ATX board, but I believe it is going to be perfect for my V20 board.
So I decided to cut the cables, and connect some spare AT power plugs I had, and also a switch to power the system.

I was really lucky, as in the back there was a covered hole for some optional thing, I don't know what, where the switch I had could be very easily fitted!
The front power switch, which is of the momentary type, like all ATX power switches, will be used as a reset switch.
So here is the case so far :

I have cleaned it very thoroughly(the front was disassembled and all the plastic parts have had a bath!), and fitted two 5.25" bay covers I had, as it had nothing there. Actually they wouldn't stay in place, so I used some hot glue, and there you go. Now they won't move even if you punch them!

The original P3 m/b had a tiny speaker soldered on it, so the case had no speaker at all. I was glad to see that it had a place for a large old type pc speaker in front of the PSU with some holes underneath, so I put there one I had.

Next I place the board in the case. I have modified a large single connector it had for the front panel, and it worked ok, but the minor problem I had, was the lack of a turbo button. It's not that great, I could leave a jumber on it's connector, but since I had a turbo light, I needed a button. So I came up with a solution that would allow me to have a switch, but it would be placed somewhere that would not change the look of the front view. So....

Then I fit the VGA card and the controller, and also this baby I had bought :

It's an AST SixPakPlus card. I bought it mainly for the real time clock, something this board didn't have, but it also has a couple of serial ports, and a joystick one. And also it had arrived with 56 4164 dip chips, that would give an extra 384kb of conventional memory(for those really old pcs, that had much fewer than 640kb of ram). So I decided to have 512kb on board ram( I needed the other chips for my vgas....), and left only 18 chips on the AST card, so as to have a total of 640kb.(The rest of the card's memory cannot be used beyond the 640kb limit, but anyway, I didn't need more than 640kb on this machine).

Notice how big the AST card is. It uses all the available space for a card...

I power up the PC to test it, and works as expected.Then I close the case. Here it is finished :

The HD led won't light, as there is no HD at all. The bios doesn't support an IDE HD. Perhaps a possible future addition will be the XT IDE card, but for the time being, I'm going to rely on floppy disks. The white spots on the lower left side, are there because of the two stickers it had. One for Pentium 3 logo and one for the win2000. It also has a sticker with a key for win2000 pro on the right side, but I haven't removed it yet...

Here's the back side :

On the middle there is the black power switch, and on the right is the red turbo switch.

Now, I'm lucky to have two very old keyboards, that have a switch to select between PC and AT, as regular AT keybords won't work on this board. So let's boot the PC.

I have no config.sys/autoexec.bat files yet, and I also don't have the AST card utility in my disk, that's why it doesn't have the correct date/time. Using that utility, first you set the correct date/time and it's stored in the card, and after that everytime the PC boots, it restores the values by loading it in autoexec.bat.

I run the landmark speedtest in both speeds :

In the turbo off mode, it is really SLOW!

Just for fun, I thought I should run 3DBench..... And got results I sure didn't expect!

Wow! My pc is a 386 killer!!!!
(I'm kidding. It's just version 1.0c and it's not very accurate. As a matter of fact, I left it like that for 5 minutes, and when I got back, it had changed to 17,4 fps, by itself.... Afterwards I run version 1.0.......)

No matter what version you run, it takes about 4-5 minutes to complete!

So that's my new PC. I know it's not that great, but I always wanted to have one like that. I may leave it like this, or maybe after some time, I'll try to convert it to an XT! That is yet to decide....