Any pictures? If it's free I'd say take it and worry about tossing it out later if you don't like it.

obobskivich wrote:

If it's free I'd say take it and worry about tossing it out later if you don't like it.

+1 ISA CL video card are pretty good performer for 386 and a socket 3 motherboard with vlb is always good to have at hand (if there is some voltage regulator around the cpu socket it is definitely worth it).

Edit :
if it really has some onboard IDE controller like you said, it may be one of the last revision for 486 with late 94 or early 95 bios so definitly keep it (a good range of cpu support)... The worst thing could be fake cache on the board.

darksheer wrote:

Edit :
if it really has some onboard IDE controller like you said, it may be one of the last revision for 486 with late 94 or early 95 bios so definitly keep it (a good range of cpu support)... The worst thing could be fake cache on the board.

Eh?
Many many 486 boards have onboard IDE. My 486/33 with a 1992 BIOS date has onboard IDE

But take it! Its free and if anything the CPU/cooler/ISA cards are worth it

I grabbed the system from the electronics dump, with only a few people giving me very weird looks.... 😐 I'll post some pictures tonight and disect the system, family life has kept me from cracking it open but I'll play around with it this evening and let you know what's all in it.

Off memory I don't recall seeing a sound card, it had 4 edo slots with only 1 occupied, it had the 16bit ISA Cirus Logic card, (could it be SVGA?), and the CPU was definately an Intel 486DX/33. Onboard IDE and 2xPS2 ports as well.

Video card is a Cirus Logic CL-GD542X 1MB... is this VGA or SVGA capable? The PC boots up just fines... so far, no harddrive but I have a 430mb seagate I can use. There was only a single 4mb edo installed, no sound card.

Surely it is SVGA capable. With the exception of frankenputers, all 486s should have SVGA of some type

Yes it should be SVGA capable - I had a PCI 542x card (1 or 2MB I don't remember) and it could do SVGA and XGA.

The 2 daughter boards on the bottom are from Condoplex and looking them up seem's like they are for condo security units. So, I'm going to assume it was my condo that through this system out.

The motherboard looks pretty solid. It probably won't have much in the way of adjustable BIOS settings, but the build quality and stability should be quite good. Looks like it's 3.3V ready too.

I just noticed it doesn't appear to have any L2 cache installed. That will degrade performance markedly

smeezekitty wrote:

I just noticed it doesn't appear to have any L2 cache installed. That will degrade performance markedly

How much so..?

dave343 wrote:

smeezekitty wrote:

I just noticed it doesn't appear to have any L2 cache installed. That will degrade performance markedly

How much so..?

Quite a bit. Depending on the nature of the program it will probably slow the system down to 15-80% normal speed
Lack of cache makes the speed less consistent and makes memory heavy programs run up to several times slower

smeezekitty wrote:

I just noticed it doesn't appear to have any L2 cache installed. That will degrade performance markedly

Egads. Just took a better look and yeah - I'd install cache forthwith. 🤣

I'm assuming I can pick up some cache on ebay, but what kind am I looking for? and how much? 128, 256? thx.

dave343 wrote:

I'm assuming I can pick up some cache on ebay, but what kind am I looking for? and how much? 128, 256? thx.

You're looking for SRAM DIPs to populate those open sockets above the CPU. 256k would be a good place to be. You'd need to know a little bit about the motherboard to know how much it can support and what configuration settings need to be adjusted. Here is an example from Statson.org (this is NOT your motherboard): http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/A/AT … 6-33-CACHE.html

Ask Mau1wurf1977, he'll give you a link where he gets all his new 256K cache modules.

CL5429 ISA graphics card... in a slot with that VLB just waiting to be filled... My first PC had a CL5428 VLB - and in the era before 3D accelerators, it wasn't bad (looking from a windows angle, it had hardware cursor and hardware blitter).

If you have a stable full of systems, maybe line up a VLB card and put the ISA CL5429 to one side for an ISA only system - it's probably the highest Cirrus Logic chip that is on ISA.

NEVER leave any 486 system in the trash, its all worth it to grab it along.
Even early pentiums.
Keep looking for other 486's that are tossed out, and p1's for the vga and ram or the complete system. 😉
some early p1 systems also have async sram dip style installed.

Matth79 wrote:

CL5429 ISA graphics card... in a slot with that VLB just waiting to be filled... My first PC had a CL5428 VLB - and in the era before 3D accelerators, it wasn't bad (looking from a windows angle, it had hardware cursor and hardware blitter).

If you have a stable full of systems, maybe line up a VLB card and put the ISA CL5429 to one side for an ISA only system - it's probably the highest Cirrus Logic chip that is on ISA.

Got a 5434 on a diamond speedstar ISA 2mb 😀