Yesterday on the afternoon I had an idea, I decided to change the processor from one of my vintage retro machines and the one I chose had an AT motherboard which is a standard that I wasn't familiarized with, so I decided to give a try just for fun and curiosity

To make a long story short, when I recieved the 486 machine that I showed on a previous post one month ago, also I recieved a Soyo socket 370 motherboard with bulging caps and also some Socket 7 processors 3 were Pentium I's (120/150 and 166) all of them with bent pins that I will take care from and two IBM branded Cyrix 6x86 (One is a 6x86 P120+ and the other one is a 6x86MX PR200 being the last one the one which the machine has installed)

Cyrix CPU's are very rare in Argentina because most of the AT systems that everyone used were Intel Pentium or AMD K6, Cyrix was in low/middle class machines for people who didn't have the money to buy the CPU's from Intel or AMD (I was born in '95 so I don't have that much idea about this)

So I decided to give up and try one of the Cyrix's so I took the more faster one of them and installed on the board which is a Tekram P5T30B4-E and it took me a long time, almost 4 or 5 hours to fully dissasemble the machine, swapping the processor (Going from a P266MMX to the Cyrix) and then put it back together oh god, was a painful task to do, but well I'm glad that the machine works extremelly well without any issues, and the only two that I had was that the ratio jumpers were on the wrong spots and I couldn't find the manual for the board so I needed to view the charts that are printed on the PCB to found the correct ratio for the CPU that in this case, was 2.0x and also the CPU heatsink and fan was like a kick in the butt to install because I was extremely worried because of the socket clips being so fragile and I needed to put a lot of force on one end just to install it and the board has 18 years old so the plastic could be broken easily if I didn't install it with care so, that was taken care of, also the best thing is that I learned the way how computers were built on the 90's before Intel developed the ATX standard which is used today in most systems, they were painful to configure with the so called "jumpercity" and the connectors being the AT plug which took forever to me to install it (At least I did remember which is the correct way to plug it, black wires go in the middle)

Here are some pics that I took yesterday before and after the processor swap, I was using a Trident 8900 ISA video card but then it was swapped by another Trident a 9600 PCI (I wasn't able to took photos of the machine taked apart because it was my very first time, I've never done this before, keep in mind that this is my 1st experience with AT machines)

After this when I installed the processor I needed to mess around with the ratio jumpers because it was set incorrectly because when I turned on, the keyboard LED's were stuck on, which pointed me that the ratio jumpers were wrong so I changed them and turned on normally so that was progress

Then I installed Windows 98 FE (and then I upgraded to SE) on the 2GB Quantum Noiseball and it recognized everything and seems to work just fine and without issues and later today I installed some games and the performance is very good for a low/middle class processor