PWA 4000WB. Looks like an Everex model name to me. It's a pretty sweet board...TTL logic. No chipset. 128kb cache. Plus you have a DRx2 33/66 in pristine condition with original heatsink. That's rare. That case is amazing too.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-07-26, 11:57:

PWA 4000WB. Looks like an Everex model name to me. It's a pretty sweet board...TTL logic. No chipset. 128kb cache. Plus you have a DRx2 33/66 in pristine condition with original heatsink. That's rare. That case is amazing too.

Tried to find any information about it but couldn't find much more.

It has some quirks that has to be taken care of, many of them might be related to the dead battery. The harddrive is dead (clicks of death) and it doesn't allow me to make any changes in the bios, I just get various beeps from the pc-speaker when I press any key. But it boots happily from a 3,5" disk and managed to run some tests and benchmarks.

The case has a history of its own. My first PC had the same case for many years, it ended up with a Pentium 133 in it before it got converted to ATX and still serves as a backup server that my father still uses.

So I did another build with the same case design that I converted many years ago... now with a slightly faster components.

This one will be kept original as long as possible, the only modification made is that i have borrowed the front panel.

What bios is there ? Is it Ami ? Award ? Other ? Custom ?

Phoenix.

I can upload some pictures when I have assembled it again.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-07-26, 11:57:

It's a pretty sweet board...TTL logic. No chipset. 128kb cache.

That seems to be the penalty to being to market early with so much cache. The design costs of that board must have been enormous, look at the nearly 30(!) GAL/PAL custom logic chips (recognizable by the paper label indicating the program). The production costs of a board that big are also considerable. There were 386DX chipsets in 1990, for example I remember the Intel 82385 cache controller in the Compaq Deskpro 386/20 made in 1988 already. But that cache controller only support 32K of mainboard-level cache. I also thought about the Intel 82346 system controller, a rebranded VLSI 82c330 (aka TOPCAT), but at least the Intel version was announced in 1990, so not finding it on a board produced in 1990 makes sense. The C&T CS8231 also comes to mind, but I couldn't find the release date readily available.

It's interesting that you find 2 50ns-delay lines (with 5 taps each, as usual, so 10-20-30-40-50ns) for memory timing generation. This might be a hint towards bank interleaving. So I guess that board was top notch in 1990.

Intel did a addendum detailing how to double 32K to 64K using 385 cache controller. I seen that document long ago on line I was googling about 385.

PS GAL and PAL are the weakest point and they sometimes overheat and fail prematurely. I lost a ATI wonder card that was driving TTL montior to this since this one used six PAL ICs. Hot enough to cook the PCB under each of them.

Cheers,

I got it running again but I haven't changed the battery.

Postscreen

Bios

The only thing i can do is reboot the computer with ctrl-alt-del. Anything else just fills the keyboard buffer and ends up with a lot of beeps.

I will try with another battery as soon as I find a good replacement for the 3.6v that was in it.