$20 dollars is a great price for that system. Having to drive 3 hours to pick it up, not so much. I would consider it if a really nice CRT monitor and other goodies were included.

I love the lines on that DTK case but it looks quite yellowed. That's not a deal breaker for me but you might want something more beautiful for your sole retro rig.

The Pentium 133MHz is a classic chip. It would be great for a 1996 system. In terms of potential upgrades, that motherboard is giving me an early socket 7 vibe. It probably maxes out at Pentium 200MHz. You would need an expensive overdrive adapter to run MMX chips if you want to got that route (I prefer non-MMX Pentiums myself). I don't see a COAST slot so you're probably stuck at 256k L2 cache. Not a huge deal, 512k L2 only gets you a little more performance. The CMOS battery is of the coin cell variety which makes it very easy to replace.

This system probably doesn't support PS/2 mice. If so, you'll need to use a period correct serial or bus mouse with ball. 😢

Edit:
Looks like lazibayer may have identified the motherboard. The motherboards he linked have a PS/2 mouse header. Very nice.

The board looks like PAM-0055I-E0, either Rev. 2.20 or Rev. 2.50.
They support 2.8V core voltage but you might have to remove the hard wired JP14.
Note the board has 3 SIMMs installed....

Never cared much for period correctness, I'm more of a utilitarian, prioritizing performance and compatibility. Here are the four computers I keep, gives me good coverage from the mid 80's and onwards:

Tualeron 1400, 512MB RAM, GF Ti4600, Voodoo2 (looking for another one for SLI), AWE32, Dreamblaster S1, TB Santa Cruz, W98SE. My main W98/DOS rig.

Pentium 233 MMX, 64MB RAM, S3 Trio v2/DX, Voodoo1, AWE32, Dreamblaster S2, W98SE. For the speed sensitive stuff that won't run on the main W98/DOS rig. Extremely versatile, can be tuned to the speeds of almost anything from an early 386 and upwards. Wired the FSB/multiplier jumper headers to switches mounted in a 5.25" bay cover to be able to configure the CPU frequency without opening the case, and wrote a .bat file to easily manipulate the TR12 test registers with Setmul. Will also look into the possibilities of disabling the L2 cache with a switch at some point, easier than doing it from the BIOS setup.

Xeon X5470 in a S771 modded S775 mobo, 4GB RAM, Radeon 7870 (looking for a GF670, 770, or some other G-sync capable GPU with XP drivers available to replace it), SB Audigy 2, Windows XP (and a few other OS:es, this one doubles as my test platform).

And of course my main rig; i7 3770k, 32GB RAM, GF1080, W10.

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ElectroMan wrote:

Thank you very much! I'll probably pick it up the next week. Also after some research the sound card definitely bears some resemblance with Sound Blaster 16, so it makes the setup even so slightly better. I also have found P233 MMX with decent board, but I would need to ship it from another city and it comes with S3 3d/2X AGP and ESS1868 - and I would need to replace them both. So I'll probably go with P133 and save stuff like System Shock and Half-Life for my future P3 machine.

A socket 7 mobo with an AGP slot could be something very interesting, you might regret it later if you let it go. You should at east ask for more details, or a hi res photo, so you can determine the model yourself. Also, there's no reasons at all other than pure nostalgia ones to choose a P133 over a 233MMX, if you specifically want P133 speeds, just jumper the 233MMX to 110 MHz or something like that 😀

Would that be an S3 Savage 3D? Might not be the best graphics card for DOS gaming compatibility wise, but an S3 Virge/GX2, a Riva TNT, or something like that to replace it, is cheap and easily obtained.

The ESS Audiodrive (ES1868) is in my opinion one of the best - if not the best - SB Pro 2 compatible chips out there. No need at all to replace that card. They usually got an onboard wavetable header too, very useful if you want to use some MIDI daughtercard later on.

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ElectroMan wrote:

Quite the contrary, I would really want to get Pentium 233MMX - it is my dream CPU for real! But I'm worried it would be very ha […]
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kaputnik wrote:

there's no reasons at all other than pure nostalgia ones to choose a P133 over a 233MMX, if you specifically want P133 speeds, just jumper the 233MMX to 110 MHz or something like that 😀

Quite the contrary, I would really want to get Pentium 233MMX - it is my dream CPU for real! But I'm worried it would be very hard to replace Video with parts available here and I thought ESS1868 to be on the low end of quality. Well, even high end sound cards is a highly subjective matter - definitely need to hear it first. I found S3 Virge/DX with 4mb of memory on board, so potentially could replace the stock one.

Would you consider this card to be an ok for DOS/Win9x or mostly Dos one? What is the best Dos/Windows card for this platform in your opinion? I don't necessarily mean most powerful, but best compromise between Dos and Windows performance/compatibility wise.

I'll contact seller in the morning, but since it presumably comes with AGP card, it should be super socket 7, right?

I believe you can even see usb ports! And the tower looks very clean, though quite simple.

I'm running an ESS1868 on my current 486 build and it sounds great (subjectively, of course) and good for DOS compatibility so far.

I would just grab both 😀. HX is nice to have, socket 7 in ATX form factor as well.
Do not worry too much about video. S3 is very compatible, and TNTs are plentiful (AGP at least). Voodoos are harder to find and that HX board just begs for a Voodoo 1 or a Banshee if you are really lucky.

ElectroMan wrote:

Quite the contrary, I would really want to get Pentium 233MMX - it is my dream CPU for real! But I'm worried it would be very ha […]
Show full quote

kaputnik wrote:

there's no reasons at all other than pure nostalgia ones to choose a P133 over a 233MMX, if you specifically want P133 speeds, just jumper the 233MMX to 110 MHz or something like that 😀

Quite the contrary, I would really want to get Pentium 233MMX - it is my dream CPU for real! But I'm worried it would be very hard to replace Video with parts available here and I thought ESS1868 to be on the low end of quality. Well, even high end sound cards is a highly subjective matter - definitely need to hear it first.

I found S3 Virge/DX with 4mb of memory on board, so potentially could replace the stock one (S3 3d/2X AGP - i've read it has a lot of issues).
Would you consider this card to be an ok for DOS/Win9x or mostly Dos one? What is the best DOS/Windows card for this platform in your opinion? I don't necessarily mean most powerful, but best compromise between DOS and Windows performance/compatibility wise.

I'll contact seller in the morning, but since it presumably comes with AGP card, it should be super socket 7, right?

I believe you can even see usb ports! The tower looks very clean, though quite simple. And the price is just $15, though I'll probably will have to add $15 more to motivate seller to ship it and ~$25 in shipping fees.

Those ES1868 cards may not look like much, and sure, they were sold as a cheaper alternative to a genuine SB card, but they sound fantastic - a lot less noisy than contemporary Creative cards - and the SB compatibility is more or less flawless. Also, the driver is small, and seems a lot less buggy than the contemporary Creative ones. In my opinion they simply did almost everything right when they designed them.

A Virge DX is basically as good as it gets if you want DOS compatibility. It will however occupy a PCI slot you might want to use for something else. An AGP Virge GX/2 got the same 2D core if I remember it right, so DOS compatibility is the same, usually they output a somewhat sharper and generally higher quality image, and it will obviously not occupy a PCI slot.

The definition of SS7 is kind of floating, but that would be my guess too. You might not be lucky enough to get a 100MHz FSB capable mobo, but it's should at least be something that can go higher than 66MHz. If I were you, I'd just take a gamble and grab that computer, even if the seller can't give you any specifics about the mobo.

kaputnik wrote:

Those ES1868 cards may not look like much, and sure, they were sold as a cheaper alternative to a genuine SB card, but they sound fantastic - a lot less noisy than contemporary Creative cards - and the SB compatibility is more or less flawless. Also, the driver is small, and seems a lot less buggy than the contemporary Creative ones. In my opinion they simply did almost everything right when they designed them.

Pretty much. In fact, I don't believe they have any memory footprint at all once loaded. The only thing I'd like to find is a compatible mixer utility that's a little nicer.