We had this case at home when I was young(er), but with a 66MHz Intel DX/2. I have been looking for it for quite a while! Congrats on finding one, and I like that you have made a video on it! (Now there will be more people looking for it, yay! 😉)

I did get the desktop version a while back, so there is a whole family!

Also, a bigtower version was seen in this thread of Dutch advertisements: Randomly scanned old hardware ads from 1987-2002

😲 Im scared seeing that coke in between the open case and keyboard! its a beautiful case

AMD's DX4-100 being cheaper than Intel's DX2-66 (49$ vs 59$ in sep 1996)

AMD CPU’s where popular with budget computer builders because they cost 1/3 the price of an Intel CPU’s.
But I never had any luck build with AMD CPU’s I must have been doing it wrong because I don’t have these problems today. So I always just purchased Intel CPU’s.
I found Intel CPU’s to be dependable and reliable and compatible with most hardware.
My AMD builds always had problems and would always crash the computer.
But I like them now. They perform okay.

BinaryDemon wrote:

I haven’t tried on vintage hardware but mpxplay (dos) claims it only needs a dx4-100 for mp3 playback

Indeed it will work, as I have done it on my own 486 build, a near-exact recreation of my previously-mentioned childhood system. As I recall though, I needed to download a special version of mpxplay optimized specifically for the 486 to get it to play properly. Of course, turning off Turbo immediately murders it. 🤣

I was also able to find an MP3 player (Can't remember the name, but it was not WinAmp) that worked adequately under Win95 on that system, but I had to disable stereo playback (didn't need to re-encode the MP3 files, just a settings change in the player), and it had trouble playing any MP3s higher than ~256kbps (it'll play them without skipping...just not at the right speed).

As a semi-related aside, I'd say my Compaq Presario 2200 with a Cyrix MediaGX 180 is the absolute slowest system I have capable of playing back MP3s without any issues under Windows. Figured it's semi-related since the first-gen MediaGX is basically nothing more than a souped-up 5x86, which itself is just a faster 486.

Contrary to apparently the popular opinion, I find 16MB RAM and a 486DX4-100 aplenty for a usable work experience in Win95

I totally agree, I gave 95 a second chance on my DX4 and actually I wasn't disappointed. It seems like some 486 setups perform better than others. (My 1995 5x86 felt slower when I tried it)

torindkflt wrote:

As a semi-related aside, I'd say my Compaq Presario 2200 with a Cyrix MediaGX 180 is the absolute slowest system I have capable of playing back MP3s without any issues under Windows. Figured it's semi-related since the first-gen MediaGX is basically nothing more than a souped-up 5x86, which itself is just a faster 486.

Weeeeell.... That's not quite true though. For the AMD, the 5x86 is just a faster 486, but this is Cyrix architecture. Their 5x86 is actually based on the 6x86 architecture. Architecturally, it is more similar to the Pentium than to the 486, although it's limited to the same instruction set as the 486.

Well depending of which MediaGX do you have, it may support MMX, improving audio decoding performance further.

Keep in mind these aren't our main PC anymore.
Back then we asked them to perform Office, gaming, and worst offender internet duties all while anti virus and whatever else also running in the background.
By comparison now we get to run bare minimum software, and what is installed is nice mature optimised software with most bugs ironed out.

We upgraded our DX2/66 to Win95 with the original 8MB, it was ok but Netscape would slowly eat up all the ram.
This got upgraded to 16MB and was better.
Towards the end of its life as a 2nd PC it had 64MB and NT4. It was slow to start but once at the desktop made for a good stable Office 97 PC (while someone else played games on the faster PC)

I am interested in acquiring exactly that CPU for a retro DOS-based workstation. I bought recently a K6-II 475 MHz too, for another rig for Windows 9* or even 2000. I'm really hyped right now...

I guess dates are wrong… hard to find the market release, but…

Intel dx4 - 94q2 (they focused to the mobile market)
Intel dx4 odp - 94q4
Amd dx2 80 - 94q4
Amd dx4 100 - 95q1
Amd dx4 120 - 95q3
Intel dx4wb 95q4
Amd 5x86133 - 96q1

What I have learned over the years of using a 486 computer.

If you have a 486-dx4 orAMD 5x86 or 1st gen Pentium CPU you are better off running Win95.
You want to have at least 8mb of Memory.
You can do more with Win05 and the computer will run better because Win95 has better drivers and supports more hardware
Out of the box.

If you have a 486dx2-50 or slower I would just use DOS and Win3x.

For the 486DX4 or higher a PCI motherboard will achieve the highest benchmarks.

Also I would use the Fastest CDROM being a 52x

I finally bought some months ago an i486 dx4-100 and a FIC 486-GAC-V motherboard to put in, now I only need some 72-pin fpm modules of RAM (preferably a sum of 64mb, I guess), a PSU, and a LPX compatible tower case. Some basic ideas that I got are putting a Soundblaster 16 ISA card, MS-DOS 6.22 as main OS (PC-DOS might be great as well), and one adequate video card for this build, I don't which one yet. Also, a pair of MIDI modules from Roland (MT-32, SC-88 Pro) in advance for a greater DOS gaming experience.