First post, by esbardu
Hi,
I'm new to the forum. I've been "playing" with hardware since I was 15th, back then I owned an Olivetti 386SX 16Mhz, 2Mb, HDD 40Mb, CD 2x + Sound Blaster Pro (1.0). Some weeks ago I needed to make room so I decided to check my old stuff and decide what to keep. I want to thank Vogons as during the last weeks I have read many threads and this was key for the success of this nostalgia project.
I checked all the HW in my storage room and found that 2 Pentium III motherboards were dead (one booted once but I'm afraid that something went wrong with the Power supply and finally I quit). I have also got a P4 HT that is not booting but I'm keeping it to check if it's a memory related issue. The good news is that all the good stuff was working fine, a brief summary of what I "found" in the storage room:
4 AT Cases. 3 Baby AT, one slightly bigger (photo attached).
2 ATX Cases: one quite modern and another one from the P2 years.
Motherboards:
- 486 AZZA Motherboard VL Bus (need to check the model)
- Amptron PM-8800
- Octek RHINO 6VX
- Superpower SP-A586B
- QDI Legend V
Processors
- Intel 386DX 25 (I haven't got any 386 mobos anymore)
- Amd 386DX/DXL-40
- Intel 486 SX 20
- Intel 486SX-33 (2)
- Intel 486DX2-S 66
- Pentium 100
- Pentium 120
- Pentium MMX 166
- Pentium MMX 233
- K6 233 (glued to the heatsink, I managed to get the heatsink out but the labeling went out too)
- K6-2 400
- Pentium II 333 Slot
- Pentium II 350 Slot
- Pentium III 550 Slot
- Pentium III 550 (socket to slot adapter)
Graphics Cards:
- S3 1Mb VL-Bus
- S3 Trio 64 PCI
- S3 Trio 64V+ PCI
- Diamond RIVA 128 AGP 1
- Ati Rage Pro Turbo AGP
- TNT2 AGP
SoundCards:
- Sound Blaster Pro 1.0 (the one from my old 386SX 😀 ).
- Sound Blaster 16 Value ISA
- Aztech ISA (not sure about the model)
- Yamaha Chipset ISA
- ALS 120 ISA
- Sound Blaster 128 PCI
- Vibra 128 PCI (2)
- Sound Blaster Live 5.1
- Audigy 7.1
HDDs, Floppy Drives, CD Units:
- Seagate 100MB, 400Mb
- Maxtor, Samsung , Seagate: from 4Gb to 8Gb
- CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, CD Recorders. Only interesting thing is a fully working Creative 2x.
- Only 3.5 floppy drives, unfortunately my old external Iomega died and I sold an internal 100Mb drive many years ago.
Monitor:
- LG 701S (only CRT I have). Again it was a gift as it was going to be recycled.
I decided to set up two systems but now I'm really thinking about keeping 3 cases and letting the rest go.
Setting up the 486DX2 (24Mb) was a piece of cake, a friend gave it to me 4 years ago as it was going to be thrown away. It came with a SB 16 but now it's fully working with the SB Pro (I had a DMA Conflict with the SB16 value) I also changed the disk for one, reasonably silent, 8Gb (limited to 2GB, it took me a while to find that I had to use LBA in the set up, otherwise system only sees a 500Mb HDD). It's running MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 (the OS I used to run with my old 386SX). I tested many games and everything works great. This setup is the same as my second PC.
Second rig that I decided to set up was the Pentium MMX 166 (48Mb), this is like my third PC 😀 . From the two Pentium boards the Amptron was the one fully supporting Pentium MMX. I really don't know what VRE is but supposedly the Pentium should be using the right voltage. The Octek can only work at 3.3v, this was from my cousin, I remember upgrading it to a Pentium MMX from P120, back then I really didn't care about 3.3v being too much for a Pentium MMX.
This second system is working fine, old games are playable in DOS mode disabling L1. I have installed Win98SE, HDD is a Seagate 7200.10 250GB limited to 8Gb. The old HDDs were noisier.
Now I have to decide what to do with the K6-2 motherboard and case, it's an AT case and looks great. Maybe I will go for only two rigs; the 486 and the K6-2 as with the K6-2 mobo I can go from the Pentium 100 to the K6-2 400.
I'm still listing the material and organizing the photos, I will upload additional photos tomorrow, would you stay with the K6-2 case or go for the older baby AT?. K6-2 case is really great to work with, a lot of space to swap the CPUs and play with the jumpers.
This is the new desk. 486DX2 case on the left standing and Pentium MMX case on the right.
Thanks to all for making this happen. Thanks to this forum I feel really younger now. At the end instead of getting additional room I have bought a new desk to place the old HW in a spare room 😀.
