That's a "primo" 486 setup you got there. Been looking for something similar on ebay and such but they ask for a lot of "coin" - plus most of them look like they've been taken to the woodshed.

Nice setup, old IBMs are pretty well built, even if they don't have the most exciting specs. I've got a PC 330 which is also missing its plastic sliding cover ... irritating isn't it!

Anyway, here's the IBM guide to withdrawn desktops from '94-'00, your PC340 should be on about p13-14. It should help figure out what you need.

http://www.lenovo.com/psref/pdf/dwbook.pdf

The layout looks so much like my Packard Bell!
Souped up Packard Bell
BTW, my system has no L2 either, not even the ability to add it. It does not hurt performance much at all though.
Beautiful system, congrats!

...I'm not sure your system is fast enough to warrant a virge card (as in there won't really be much of a difference using a faster card). As for video memory, the only thing an extra 1mb of ram will give you is higher resolution support, not more speed. The 5435 performs somewhere along the lines of the Trio64 anyway, and it's a very compatible card for dos games, so I'd recommend you keep it. There usually is a way to upgrade the video memory on these IBM machines by adding two chips to on the motherboard in rectangular brown sockets (usually somewhere near the video chip).

I like this "pizza box" size cases. Not much room to expand but I find the dimensions pleasing to the eye for some reason.

I got a Virge in my 486 (no onboard video) my thinking was I can play with S3D on one of my faster PC's for a bit first, but as kanecvr said it offers no real benefit over a trio in my 486 and don't have any other pci cards to use. I can see how the extra ram would be nice as your playing with different gui's though and gaming doesn't seem t be your main focus.

NT3.51 was a interesting choice, Our family 486/66 got NT4 when it was downgraded to family typewriter, slow bootup, but was quite well behaved once loaded up, moreso then 95 anyway.

I'd scrap the floppy and get a Gotek, installing OS's is so much faster, simply due to the better reliability and changing disk is as simple as a button press. (I do miss the sound though)

I'm afraid maybe my opening paragraph in the OP was confusing -- this system is not a 486, it's a Pentium 166. I'm referring to another system when I'm talking about my 486 😀

JidaiGeki wrote:

Anyway, here's the IBM guide to withdrawn desktops from '94-'00, your PC340 should be on about p13-14. It should help figure out what you need.

Thanks, man. I know what part number I'm looking for but it looks like it's impossible to find. One day, maybe...

kanecvr wrote:

...I'm not sure your system is fast enough to warrant a virge card (as in there won't really be much of a difference using a faster card). As for video memory, the only thing an extra 1mb of ram will give you is higher resolution support, not more speed. The 5435 performs somewhere along the lines of the Trio64 anyway, and it's a very compatible card for dos games, so I'd recommend you keep it. There usually is a way to upgrade the video memory on these IBM machines by adding two chips to on the motherboard in rectangular brown sockets (usually somewhere near the video chip).

The games this machine will be running are primarily Windows 95 games, of which I have several that take advantage of 3D acceleration (Incoming) and/or require 2 MB VRAM (Anno 1602) while still running fine on a P166. Also, to drive this monitor properly I need some decent resolutions in Windows. 2 MB would let me run 1152x864x16 which is okay.

For DOS games I have my DX4/100 which runs almost all DOS games I care about (that, too, has 2 MB VRAM just because I had spare chips -- in that case, though, I acknowledge that it's entirely unnecessary for the most part)

So that's why I think a first-generation 3D accelerator with 2 MB would be useful for this system. 😀

chinny22 wrote:

I like this "pizza box" size cases. Not much room to expand but I find the dimensions pleasing to the eye for some reason.

Yeah, it's a pretty box, and I love the moderne (Didot/Bodoni?) typeface on the "Personal Computer 340". So 90's classy!

chinny22 wrote:

NT3.51 was a interesting choice, Our family 486/66 got NT4 when it was downgraded to family typewriter, slow bootup, but was quite well behaved once loaded up, moreso then 95 anyway.

I love playing with old operating systems, and some of them still do not virtualize well in 2016 so real hardware is the only option for an authentic experience. When this system is done I'd like it to quint-boot Windows 95, NT 3.51, BeOS, OS/2 Warp and OpenSTEP. 😀

I find NT 3.51 cool because of the coginitive dissonance of a rock-solid, 32 bit operating system capable of long filenames, networking, running Windows 95 software, real multitasking, SMP etc... but with the Windows 3.1 interface 😲

chinny22 wrote:

I'd scrap the floppy and get a Gotek, installing OS's is so much faster, simply due to the better reliability and changing disk is as simple as a button press. (I do miss the sound though)

Yeah, Goteks are great, no doubt... but... I'm all about authenticity, so I do want that real floppy drive 😀 The CD burner, CompactFlash drive and Ethernet card already solves most of my convenience issues.