First post, by jheronimus
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi, all
I found a guy who's selling a cheap all-in-one Presario 433, and this machine looks too awesome to ignore!
I was hoping there were some 425/433 owners here who could tell me about possible quirks.
The machine is stripped of most components (don't have any good photos yet, sorry). It basically only has a motherboard, a ISA riser card and a HDD. I have some SIMM modules and an ISA sound card for it, so it looks like I already have a lot of stuff needed to build it. Here are some questions though, so I could understand if this project is viable for me at all:
1) could it be that this machine had an external PSU?
I looked at the photos here and watched this video (the link has a timestamp where he shows the internals). I don't see a PSU or AT connectors on the motherboard, so I assume that either it has an external power brick, or the PSU is somewhere behind the CRT tube.
But if it's the latter case, is it a standard AT PSU and how does the motherboard get the power? If it uses a power brick, could anyone tell me what its specs are?
2) there is no floppy drive. If I'll get a regular 3,5 inch drive, remove its face panel and insert it, will it fit?
3) some of the reports mention that this machine can't use AT keyboards via a DIN5->PS/2 adapters. Is that true?
4) can I use any 486SX/DX chip (Intel/AMD), or is there any sort of vendor lock-in? I've never built a socket 3 machine before.
Also, does a 486DX2 or lower need either passive or active cooling? Would a Socket 7 cooler fit on it?
Google says that it doesn't, but I wonder if a smaller case would force me to use cooling.
5) would a dedicated ISA videocard be useless with an internal screen? I'm guessing, a GPU wouldn't be able to pass output back through ISA.
Thanks!