Yep, that's a Triflex alright. Basically an old (1993-era) high-end server chipset shoehorned into a desktop system. 2 years older than de SiS 5501 in the DEC, with slower performance to match - but it should be able to handle as much RAM as you can throw at it. Clear documentation is hard to find, but I believe that in a 6-SIMM config it should do 192MB and be able to cache it all (just like the i430LX).

So, it all boils down to how much you need. For DOS and Win 3.1 16MB is enough and 32MB is almost overkill. In that case, go DEC. If you want to run Win9x though, you want as much as you can get and then the Compaq would be a better idea. Given you want DOS/3.1, just stick with 32MB and the DEC 😀

Out of interest: what video chip does the Compaq have? I can make out the AT&T RAMDAC and 4 (512kB?) DRAM chips to the right of it, but not the video controller. It doesn't look familiar which makes me curious...

So after all that, I now have a new contender for this build. While visiting my parents over the Easter weekend, I found out that the mini tower I built to use in grad school was still rusting and mouldering away in a dark and damp corner of their 120-year old basement. I had always assumed it was long gone! The tower is a bit worse for wear with quite a bit of yellowing and some rust, but it has a cool turbo numeric display and a Pentium 133 on a GA-586HX Socket 7 motherboard. I had long ago stripped out all the drives and cards, but there there was still 112MB of ram installed in it -- that motherboard can cache up to 512MB of ram. I blew out 20 years of dust, dirt and dead bugs and loaded it up. It started up with no problems, even the original Odin RTC is still functioning. I'm putting the DEC and Compaq aside and going with my old Pentium 133 GA-586HX, with 112MB ram, the Cirrus Logic CL-GD5446 PCI video, and the CT2800 Sound Blaster Vibra 16.

Now I just have to find the original hard drive from the thing, which is in a box somewhere and probably still has all my files from back in the day on it.

So, an update.

I finally got my system up and running with the GA-586HX and so far it seems stable, but I first had a bit of an adventure with disk-on-modules. A lot of my retro hardware is currently in inaccessible storage due to renovations, so I only had one sub-2 GB HDD on hand, an old Conner drive in my Compaq Deskpro. I intended to use a DOM for this build anyways, so I wasn't too concerned, but I only had two 40-pin DOMs, the rest were 44-pin. The first was an old used US-made Simpletech 256Mb module, the second was a new 2GB LeiDisk I ordered from China for this build. After the LeiDisk arrived I opened the plastic clamshell case out of curiosity, and I was glad I did. I've never seen such shoddy SMD solder work before. There was even a solder bridge across two components, which fell off when I poked at it. I plugged the thing in anyways, expecting at best nothing and at worst smoke, but the computer recognised it. I installed dos with no issues, but that is when the problems started.... every other IDE device, whether on the same IDE interface or the second one gave me problems. CD-Rom drives would be recognised by the system, but I got I/O errors when I tried to use disks in them. Floppy disks that I knew were good wouldn't work in this machine. Sometimes on post the names of the drives would be garbled and the system would hang. Seeing as this computer had sat in a damp basement for almost 20 years I was starting to think there was something wrong with the motherboard, but I decided to pull the Conner from my Compaq to test it. With the Conner installed everything ran fine but very slow. So I decided to give the Simpletech DOM a go. That module had been tested, set up, and loaded with software with an old XP box, so I knew it worked. But when I put it into this build, while it was found by the BIOS, the computer gave me an I/O error and would not boot off of it. If I booted off of a floppy, I could access the Simpletech DOM with no issues and all of the other IDE devices worked fine. I messed around with BIOS and jumper settings for a while, and was about to give up when I decided as a last-ditch attempt to try FDISK, delete the partition and re-initialise the DOM, and success!

I'm really pleased with just how super-fast the computer boots with the Simpletech DOM. Everything is really snappy compared to running the system with the old HDD. Now I just have to do something about all the rust on the case...

Fimbulvetr wrote:

I'm really pleased with just how super-fast the computer boots with the Simpletech DOM. Everything is really snappy compared to running the system with the old HDD. Now I just have to do something about all the rust on the case...

I did the same on my S7, but not with a DOM, it is one SD to IDE, and everything just worked flawlessly, and super fast, at first i was reluctant CF-IDE and SD-IDE because some people with some system had some issues (like reading erros on ms-dos) but i tested those in 3 systems(my dx4-100, 2gb sd card; my compaq lte 5300 with a 2gb CF card, and my S7 Pentium 133 with a 16gb class 10 sd) and i didn't had any issue.