Tseng ET4000AX based isa video card from 1992 or 1993

GW2760PX IO card with parallel, serial, game port, FDD and HDD controller from 1992

Sound Blaster CT1320C from 1990. This is an exception and I decided go for an older sound cards because this model is what I still used in my 386 PC in early 90s. I have sound cards from 1991 and 1992 as well but nostalgia won this time.

Here is couple pictures of when everything is already put in the case. I couldn't find date in any of the 3.5" floppy drives I have so I just had to choose one and hope it is close to correct time period.
I did put intel 386dx 33Mhz on the motherboard and there is 8Mb of ram. I am still considering if 8Mb is too much ram for that time period and I could cut it in half later. Also like I mentioned earlier when the summer comes I am considering trying to retrobright the front plastic of the case that it would be closer to the color of the floppy drives.

Brilliant little machine, you can't go wrong with a 386! As for RAM amount, I bought a new 386 PC in 1992, it came with 2mb RAM, I upgraded the following year to 4mb. You may as well leave the 8mb in there however, games won't really use it and it might be handy if you decide to play around with windows 3.1 stuff.

Here are some benchmarks that I just ran:

that's a really nice case :3

My dad bought a 386DX/33 with 4MB RAM, but upgraded it to 8MB shortly after, so that's perfectly reasonable for a 386DX, IMO. Definitely helpful if you use Windows.

A couple years later I got my own 486SX/25 with 2MB. That was painfully, woefully inadequate. I added 4MB a year or so later, and the total 6MB was good enough for most things. So I think 4MB might be a liiiittle tight, but if you were just using DOS, it would be fine.

SirNickity wrote on 2020-02-03, 19:23:

My dad bought a 386DX/33 with 4MB RAM, but upgraded it to 8MB shortly after, so that's perfectly reasonable for a 386DX, IMO. Definitely helpful if you use Windows.

I second that. Anything from 8 to ~24MiB should be fine, I think (check if cache size is large enough).
My papa did the same around ~'95. He upgraded his 386DX40 PC to 16MiB of RAM (using classic 30pin SIMMs).
Windows 95, when it got released, ran just fine on his PC. 😁

In addition.. From what I read in old magazines, little mail and file/printer sharing servers in small offices used to have got
more RAM that the usual PCs of the time, but were otherwise just bog standard desktop PCs.

That's why I think that this amount of memory is not un-period-correct at all.
If you want to stay on the safe side, though, just stop at 15 to 16MiB - the end of ISA address space.

Some BIOSes also have a "memory hole" option to exclude that region.
Some 16-Bit ISA VGA cards used that place for their linear framebuffers, I think.

Edit: Another type of users (each) used to operate with that amount of memory: Software developers and artists.
If you were to compile large projects or had to work with any kind of hard disk recording, free contiguous memory was important.

In my previous builds I went for fancy things like voodood 2 SLI and Geforce FX 5950 ultra in a P3 or midi modules like MT-32 and SC-55. I didn't have any of those back in the day.
This time I went for something that I realistically had back then except I only had 4MB of ram in my 386 in 1992. Just basic sound blaster for sound.

I do really like the case myself. It is a solid case with 4 solid rubber feet that have lasted past 27 years unlike in many other cases I have had. The case is easy to work with too. Could use retrobright and perhaps a case badge. I have never done retrobright and I don't want to risk damaging it. Would just leaving it in the sun when the summer comes make any difference? There was a conversation here some time ago about just using sun to bleach yellowed plastic.

Here's my 386, also very yellow! You can really see it next to the CRT monitor and against the 5 1/4 drive. To be fair I am curious if retro bright might be worth trying also, but at the end of the day it works fine and it's old, so looking old isn't really the worst thing in the world, call it "patina" and don't worry is my answer! 🤣

Lovely PC. 386 and yellow go hand in hand. Here is my SX-25:

Also, some benchmark results so you can compare with your own:

It seems to be almost exactly half the speed of your DX-33 with cache.

I really like the “ticking” noise from those old Connor drives but they did tend to develop bad sectors.
They use to sell for $1 per megabyte back in 1993.
So that 120mb. hard-drive costs $120

Also, I had a 14” Non-interlaced monitor back in 1993.

The yellow itself doesn't bother me much, but I wonder if it looked better if the floppy drives matched the case better. When I got the case, it had a 3.5" floppy drive that matched the color, but when I was pulling the floppy drive from the case that I could install hard drive the front plastic of the floppy drive was so brittle that it shattered to pieces. That is why I am worried about if the front plastic of the case could even handle retrobright.

Nice looking PCs you both have. I just installed my original wing commander from 11 360k floppy disks and pretty much half speed seems to be the correct speed for that game which is when I turn off turbo and it halves clockspeed down to 17Mhz.

Luckily my connor hard drive doesn't seem to have any bad sectors yet which is good considering it is 29 years old hard drive by now. I ran both chkdsk and scandisk in dos 6.22. The hard drive is slow but that is what makes it authentic. Using this pc I built has been a very nostalgic experience for me. I used such 386 until 1995 back then.

Baoran wrote on 2020-02-04, 16:34:

I just installed my original wing commander from 11 360k floppy disks and pretty much half speed seems to be the correct speed for that game which is when I turn off turbo and it halves clockspeed down to 17Mhz.

Good to know, I’ve been comparing the benchmarks of your DX33 against the Sx20 I’ve been working on and I’m about half your speed. I’ll try Wing Commander soon.

Baoran wrote on 2020-02-04, 16:34:

.. I am worried about if the front plastic of the case could even handle retrobright.

IME -- which is limited, but I've done a couple pieces -- it doesn't make it any more or less brittle, just cleans up the yellow. I suppose it could depend on your technique though. You're never going to get consensus on that, though. Unfortunately it appears there are zero qualified chemists and/or material scientists interested in speaking about the condition of 30-year-old plastic.

The only explanation I've seen was from someone who apparently had some chemistry background explaining that bromine reacts with UV, becomes a free radical, bonds to oxygen, and you get a yellowish tint as a result. With UV and hydrogen peroxide, that bond breaks, it bonds again with hydrogen, and your plastic turns back to its original color. I don't see how that process is going to affect plasticity, but there could very well be other things happening too.

At any rate, I just went to the hardware store last night and picked up a small plastic storage container. My plan is to black out the outside, install some UV LEDs, fill it with grocery store liquid hydrogen peroxide, and hope for the best. We'll see what happens.

well UV by itself is usually known to make plastic brittle if it is not inherently UV resistant... so I guess that plays a factor.
deliberately exposing it to more UV certainly isn't going to help with that, but I guess it doesn't really make much of a difference at this point anyways.