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IBM PC 5150 [Ebay - worth it?]

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First post, by norolim

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Not sure if posts like this are allowed here. If not, please let me know and delete.

Anyway, I'm thinking about buying a 5150 and was recently looking for offers on auction services and other places. THIS listing on ebay caught my attention, especially because it's shipping from Italy and I'm in Europe. I don't have too much experience with those early IBM systems, so I thought, I'd ask for advice. Could anyone here please have a look at it and share their opinion? I have my doubts about it, but I'd like to hear what other, more experienced, people have to say.

What I don't like about it, is the hard drive. Although, 5150s were not supposed to have them, I know there were some HDs with low power requirements, that could work with the stock PSU. This one has the original 63W PSU and the Seagate ST-124 installed in it is not the low power one, form what I managed to learn. In some circumstance it may consume as much as 30W. So the obvious question is whether this system will be stable with this configuration. I doubt it.

Has anyone got any ideas? Can you see anything else wrong with it? Thanks of any help.

Reply 1 of 3, by SW-SSG

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norolim wrote:

... This one has the original 63W PSU and the Seagate ST-124 installed in it is not the low power one, form what I managed to learn. In some circumstance it may consume as much as 30W. So the obvious question is whether this system will be stable with this configuration. I doubt it.

The label on the lid of the HDD points to needing at least 2.2A on the +12V rail and 0.9A on the +5V rail, which calculate to 26.4w and 4.5w respectively. That's more than 1/3 of the PSU's total wattage, but the HDD should pull that much current only on startup (spin-up and initialization). Unless the PSU internals have degraded significantly over the years, the machine should be stable with that HDD inside.

Reply 2 of 3, by Jo22

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My first thought was the same. Also, changing the CPU may also help to reduce power usage a little further (on the 5v line, at least; diff. ~400 mA ?).
The i8088/NEC8088 was made in HMOS, while the later NEC V20 was made in more advanced CMOS.

Anyway, just saying. I'm using an aged Nixdorf PC with a huge 5.25" HDD
and an NEC8088 + i8087 combo - The system runs stable so far.

Here's a quick comparison.

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/8088/Intel-D8088.html
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/8088/NEC-D8088D.html
Maximum power dissipation ?
1.7 Watt (2.5 Watt according to some intel datasheet)

vs.

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/V20/NEC-D70108C-5.html
Minimum/Typical/Maximum power dissipation
0.05 Watt / 0.15 Watt / 0.3 Watt

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