Hey folks,

I am actually getting out of the "old PC" hobby (I'm still into the Atari 8-bit and ST platforms, as well as the Amiga.. so it's too many old architectures for me at once if I add the old PC!), but I wanted to share some final specs of a RetroPC I cobbled together and used lightly over the last couple of years. My dad found the original PC sitting on a curb in a neighbors trash and so I drove out to pick it up, and added some legacy parts I had sitting around in bins to create this PC. (There was also a 486 board in a mid size case that my Dad picked up, but that was heavily corroded. It was also only a standard i486DX-33 so very common).

The pics are terrible, they're post-breakdown, but specs were as follows:

- Tekram Socket 7 - P5T30-B4E
- Originally found in trash with a Pentium 166 MMX, but upgraded to K6-3+ 450 ACZ.
- .. I used an aftermarket BIOS and selected bus speed 75 MHz to achieve a (typically) stable 450 MHz K6-3+ on S7
- SB Vibra 16S (my AWE32 in storage appears to have bad capacitors - would not consistently work, even at 66 MHz bus speed)
- Riva TNT2 M64 (some improved windows resolutions and also friendly with DOS)
- Generic 100 mbps Ethernet NIC
- Various RAM configs - initially in 'trash' config, it had 2 x 16 MB of FPM and 2 x 16 MB of EDO; I later upgraded to a single 64MB stick of SDRAM PC100
- dual CF to IDE adapter; 8GB and 4GB + USB Storage - it's what I had laying around
- Mitsumi CDRom drive (works!)
- 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives

Other items not installed but in the system at one point: Syba 4 port PCI serial card, Creative Labs CT4620 PCI sound card, "Analog devices 1816" Sound card

I found this chipset and board really cool as it supported both AT and ATX style power supplies. The OG AT supply did work but I didn't trust it, so I upgraded to ATX (see pics). I also liked that the board had both an AT style keyboard connector as well as USB onboard, allowing me to use both an old keyboard, and also USB sticks for easy file transfers to Windows 98.

Anyway, just wanted to share. If I do get back into the hobby of old PCs again, I have a 5x86-133 powerleap adapter sitting around, some RAM, so maybe a higher end 486 as the 486 is the class of PC I have real nostalgia for. (My "PC" progression was Atari 8bit platform --> Atari ST --> PC XT @ 8 MHz in parallel --> 486DX-25, and then a multinode BBS - PCBoard on the 486s later, surrounded by a bunch of 286's and 386SX's).

Keep up the awesome work Vogons! I love Phils' channel and also all of the benchmark information and data here - there's a lot of stuff I'm learning I wish I knew back in the day.

Thanks!

P.S. The choice of K6-3+ was not just to max out the platform, but it was also a really cool chip that would have been awesome to give new life to an old Socket 7 system.. so I wanted to see what it could do in person. I'm 99% sure it was held back by the slow CF speeds for the build I put together..