As I posted earlier in this thread, I saw this PC for sale online for a very reasonable price of $10; I drove out and bought it, thinking it would be a boring Pentium MMX 166 build with an S3 Trio card. I didn't really care, I was just after the inverted AT case, something I had never seen before done in an AT PC.
I took it home, and noticed that it wasn't a custom built PC, but rather a PC produced by a local OEM (Aidata) with the model number Multima 133. Curiously I opened it up, and the contents kind of surprised me. This PC is rather far from its original configuration, and has been upgraded extensively in the 4-5 years it has been used.
The modetherboard has been replaced with a ZIDA Tomato LX98-CT, one of the more popular Celeron motherboards of the time IIRC:
The CPU is a Celeron 400, a rather popular overclockers CPU (though what it's doing on a 66MHz motherboard, don't ask me.)
The system had 3 128MB SD-RAM sticks installed, rather large for its time, and this leads me to believe that the configuration was used all the way into the Windows XP era.
Now onto the expansion cards, starting from the most boring. A VIA VT6212L USB2.0 control card; I didn't have one of these, and could use them in one of my USB 1.1 Pentium systems.
An 8-bit ISA modem. The chipset appears to be 28.8Kbps but the model number lookup returns a 33.6 Kpbs part, probably software accelerated somehow. Takes me back all the way to the times of 4KB per second downloads of disk games. I miss the times of dialup BBSs so much..
The sound card is a Genius brand ES1868F Audiodrive. It has both an IDE header and a wavetable header. ESS Audiodrivers are a chipset I like as much as true OPL3. I owned an ES1897 card but wanted an ES1868 as well (Although I don't really know the difference between EX18XX chipsets and would love to learn), so this was a great find.
And finally the graphics card, a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, a variant I hadn't seen before as it has no TV-Out. It's likely an OEM card from an HP/Compaq/Dell or similar PC and bought second hand for this build. Another proof that the PC was used up until the Windows XP era as I don't see many people selling these off before then.
All in all, a pleasant surprise for $10. Now I need to restore this Aidata Multima 1333 to its original configuration (Pentium 133) as a fun side project. It's a welcome project too, since my AT 486 build failed and I need a decent DOS PC anyway, this will do just fine I would think.
Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.