I have been messing with a 286 computer from the "huge lot".
Some items and systems from the lot comes with notes. This system had a note saying that it was untested, that the battery had leaked and that the corrosion was partly removed.
The system had no video card and no floppy drives. (many 5.25" floppy drives, video cards and sound cards are missing from the systems, probably because those are easy to sell and ship.)
The battery was still present and so was alot of corrsosion. I forgot to take a picture of the whole motherboard while it was outside the case but it's marked "B1412", it's equipped with a 12 MHz Intel 286, a 10 MHz 287 and 1MB DIP memory.
Here is a picture showing most of the motherboard now back in the case with battery and corrosion removed and with a Trident ISA video card added.
The performance isn't bad at all for a 12 MHz 286.
The BIOS setup for this motherboard really really sucks. It would not let me activate the 287 FPU. I could not change the amount of expanded memory (the motherboard supports relocation of the upper 384k). The relocated 384k memory was detected, a mismatch was found at POST but I could not rectify this in the BIOS setup. Changing other settings as HDD type, floppy drives, display and such worked. The only way around this other than ignoring it was to disable the extra memory and that took some trial and error as I could not find a manual for the board.
The start disk I have been using lately has DOS 8 on it and won't work with a 16bit 286, most of my floppys are in storage. After failing to find a working start disk and thinking I would have to resort to writing one with my not very trustworthy disk eating USB floppy drive I remembered that I actually got hundreds of new (to me) used unsorted random disks in a box. The first disk I happen to pick up said "Start Boot Disk 6.22 + F.Setup", I should buy more lottery tickets...
The start disk worked fine but what was this "F.Seup"? It turned out to be "Friendly-Setup Utility for the AT", a nice generic BIOS setup utility that let me set the options I couldn't change with the built in BIOS setup... Now I could reactivate the last 384k memory, I could use the 287 and everything was rainbows and unicorns.
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.