So I was at the thrift store today and I spot an old at style Desktop case. It was unremarkable, had both 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppy drives, and nothing else. Had a turbo button, no speed display. Nothing in the back suggested anything to get excited about. I couldn't open it, so I decided just to plug it in for shits and giggles, expecting some unexciting 386. It gave me a scrambled scrren the first time, second time, got to the post. Noted the words 486 PCI on the boot screen, and get a bit excited, but then see "UMC", which I've had bad experiances with. I left the thrift store to go take care of other business, but decided to go ahead and bite. So I get it home and get the case off and was shocked. It has 4PCI and 4ISA. It had an AM5x86 in it with 256K cache. It was actually jumpered correctly for FSB, type, and voltage, and all the jumpers were labled in clear white silk screen. I've since gotten the CPU fan to come back alive, and have discovered it accepts EDO ram, which I have 64MB worth of. I have learned the board is a Shuttle HOT-433, (one of the the 1-3 versions, the forth is different)

The only real fly in the ointment is the RTC is soldered directly to the board. It has traces for a battery and crystals, but I'm not sure if I can put them on. The HDD that came with it is also dead. I'm not sure if I have a flashable BIOS, and after hosing my $50 Soyo, I'm not taking any chances.

I plan to find and put in the 4 16MB EDO simms and I'm going to put one of my AWE32's and my Diamond Stealth 3D, the best card I have 3.x drivers for. It will have DOS 6.22 + 3.11 with WorkGroups. It shall be..beautiful....

I cannot beleive this thing just turned up. Coupled with the 22" Mitsubishi monitor I got the other day for 55 bucks, things are looking up, after all the heartache and wasted money I've spent trying to get a screaming 486 system, dealing with the Deskpro, the QDI, the Soyo, the M919, the various non working add on cards.