For many years I have been wanting to build a 386DX 40MHz system like the one I had long ago. Through a series of lucky finds on ebay and craigs list I now have want I wanted.

Here is the breakdown of the equipment...

Case: Baby AT cases go for way too much on eBay but as luck would have it a guy in my local area had one new in box for $20.00! I had to jump on that deal quickly so I told my boss that I had to leave work early due to an emergency. 🤣

Motherboard: I hated the fact that 386 motherboards had the CMOS battery soldered on the motherboard as I did not want to deal with that but I was lucky and found a new FIC 386 LEO motherboard that was modded to use removable CR2032 batteries and has a full 256KB cache. It was a BIN eBay auction which I immediately purchased.

CPU: The awesome AMD 386DX 40MHz processor!

Video Card: SIIG MVGA-AVGA3 1MB ISA video card. It uses the Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429-86QC-B chipset which works very well. I acquired it for a reasonable price on eBay.

I/O Card: Digital Research Super ISA Multi-I/O controller (model: DRISA). Paid a little extra for this but its new in box.

Sound Card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Pro 2 CT1600 ISA sound card. This one has had ALL its caps replaced with new ones so it works great and will continue to do so for many more years! It was a BIN on eBay which I immediately purchased.

Hard Drive: Compact flash drives are the way to go for this. For convience I paid extra to get one the was mounted to fit in a 3.5-inch bay facing the front of the system for direct access from the outside the case. Changing out the CF takes just a few seconds to do. The motherboard only supports drives up to 500MB so I was able to purchase 5 very fast 1GB CF drives for under $20 so that gives me plenty of space. To make setup easy I configured one CF with DOS and Win 3.11 along with the drivers and setting up MemMaker then I imaged the CF using Drive Image XML. Now I can easily load that entire setup image into any new CF and I am up and running right away. This seems to be the best way to do this with the speed and convience of using CF along with how cheap they cost.

Floppy Drive: A floppy drive emulator is the best option in my opinion so I got the popular and affordable GOTEK unit.

Memory: My original 386 had a total of 4MB which worked out for just about everything but I decided to double that by purchasing eight 1MB 30-pin SIMM's for a respectable 8MB total. For the gaming I will be doing this will be plenty of memory.

Power Supply: Modern ATX power supplies (especialy those rated 80 Plus) are far higher in quality and protection than any AT power supply. Using a great ATX to AT power convertor that is properly designed (most don't work well or correctly) I have my ATX power supply properly powering the motherboard and everthing connected to it with no problems.

Other items: A PS2 to AT keyboard port convertor cable as PS2 keyboards are much easier to get than AT versions. A standard 3 button serial mouse. A Gravis Firebird 2 flight joystick as I had one of these in the past and loved using it on space and flight sims. And finally a nice custom AMD case badge that fits perfectly on the front of the case as there is an area there specifically for one.

Performance and stability is great as the only problems I have had is trying to remember how to configure all the different things in DOS. 🤣 Boot up time is pretty fast. Software load times are obviously great as well as things are much more fluid with this 386 system than the one I had many years ago. I am happy to say that this project has been a complete success!