First post, by TLW728
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello everyone!
This is my first post on this forum. I've been an active reader for years but have never posted until now, so I hope you all enjoy my inaugural contribution: my first Pentium-1 build!
Firstly, I have some prior experience with retro computers. I own a dozen of systems that I've collected over many years, ranging from the original IBM PC 5150 to Pentium-4 and newer machines. However, until now, I've never owned a Pentium-1 machine. So, I thought it would be fun to build one from scratch.
I have an Olivetti M4 Modulo 90 machine lying around, which was incomplete. I plan to use it as the base for my new system:
The case is an Olivetti TIN/II, with a 200W AT style power supply, and it has no reset button.
The machine features a TriGem Torino motherboard: A Socket 5 motherboard with an internal floppy interface, two IDE interfaces, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, serial and parallel ports, and most importantly, an onboard VGA graphics card—a Trident TGUI9660 with 2MB of video RAM.
It also has 256KB of L2 cache, expandable to 512KB, although the chips are missing from my motherboard. It supports up to 4 ISA slots and up to 2 PCI slots.
The main chipset is a SiS 85C501, which supports the Pentium P54C architecture and up to 66MHz FSB. Currently, it comes with a Pentium-90 SX968 cpu (60MHz FSB). I plan to upgrade to a slightly more powerful Pentium-166 SY037, which will allow me to set a 66MHz FSB speed, although I'm unsure if a 166MHz clock speed would be attainable without some modding.
My primary use for this system will be late MS-DOS games and early Windows games that doesn't require 3D capabilities. For the final build, I'm considering the following specs:
• 512KB L2 cache memory to allow up to 64 MB of Write-Back cacheable RAM (currently fitted with 48MB)
• Pentium-166 processor (non-MMX) at 166MHz speed (if possible)
• SCSI system, instead of IDE, for hard drive, I will use an Adaptec AHA-2940UW
• IBM DDRS-39130 9GB SCSI hard drive
• Tandberg SLR 5 QIC tape drive, supporting from 60MB QIC tapes to 8GB (compressed) SLR QIC tapes
• Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold (with its SPDIF bracket)
• Samsung CD-Master Model SC-125 56x CD-ROM drive
• 3.5" floppy drive
• 100MB PCI Ethernet card
• Dual boot MS-DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11 with Windows 98 SE. At first, I considered Windows 95 OSR 2.5, but It hasn't built in support for the QIC Tape drive, so I discarded that option.
I hope you all find interesting this build, and also suggestions are welcomed! I'll provide updates on the building process as soon as I have some time.
