One of my dump find PCs was a three foot tower. I am wondering what to do with it. Options are:
XT system
286 -16
386DX-40 (what's in it now)
486
socket 7
Maybe find the biggest baddest, BX chiptset or one of those rare slot A athlon boards.
If that's a 386 in there, the form factor is probably AT or Baby AT (prehaps AT, these big towers often accept full sized AT boards) so you won't really find a slot A that would fit in there. I know that some socket 478 existed in AT form factor, but they are stupidly rare. The best option that comes to my mind if you want performance is to find a slot 1 board in AT form factor and put a pentium 3 in it (or a fast celeron if you got an i440LX chipset like me)
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I'd second Deksor here - find a big AT 440BX board. A dualie if you can. Or maybe a Slot 2 Xeon board, if you can find one in AT (IIRC they were all ATX, but you might luck out). It is, after all, a lot easier to put an AT board in an ATX case than vice versa.
Main Box: Macbook Pro M2 Max
Alas, I'm down to emulation.
Care for a photo 😉
Pentium Pro (Dual) comes to mind.
Requests are also possible... /msg kixs
wrote:If that's a 386 in there, the form factor is probably AT or Baby AT (prehaps AT, these big towers often accept full sized AT boards) so you won't really find a slot A that would fit in there. I know that some socket 478 existed in AT form factor, but they are stupidly rare. The best option that comes to my mind if you want performance is to find a slot 1 board in AT form factor and put a pentium 3 in it (or a fast celeron if you got an i440LX chipset like me)
wrote:I'd second Deksor here - find a big AT 440BX board. A dualie if you can. Or maybe a Slot 2 Xeon board, if you can find one in AT (IIRC they were all ATX, but you might luck out). It is, after all, a lot easier to put an AT board in an ATX case than vice versa.
It is indeed a full AT tower, complete with the full size AT PSU.
There are indeed Slot 2 AT motherboards, one of my old schools used to have a bunch of those computers for the drafting class. (They also used to have a bunch of these cool Tangent PCs with built in speakers, can't find one anymore). Anyway, those AT Slot 2 boards are almost as hard to find as AT style Athlon boards, but I am reasonably convinced I have seen one. Had a Duron 1100 in it, as I recall.
Hell, those AT style BXs aren't as numerous as I thought they were.
I'll try to get a pic when I get home.
The ne plus ultra here would be an AT-style dual Athlon MP, but I'm within epsilon of certain that those never existed. If they *did*, though, it'd be either Tyan or Supermicro that made 'em.
Main Box: Macbook Pro M2 Max
Alas, I'm down to emulation.
