OMG that looks like the 150mhz P-B machine I had years ago. I overclocked it to 200mhz and used it for far too long after it became obsolete. I replaced it with a 533mhz K6-2 system, that's how long in the tooth it was getting by the time I upgraded. 🤣

I also had a weird memory config in that thing. I think I had 48mb of RAM in it because I couldn't afford to upgrade it all the way to 64. 🤣

I always liked OEM systems. Very nice machine 😀 Happy gaming.

Is that the case where the cards mount upside down?

Wow, a really cool machine!

🤣 people are saying nice things about the scourge of retail PCs during the '90s. The good old times of ridiculous proprietary motherboard form factors.

I personally never liked OEM systems,all those proprietary motherboards,lack of advanced bios settings etc.

I had a Force 1999CDTW in the same case back in the day (P-133). Ran a Voodoo 1 card in it. Which motherboard does it has (look at the last 4 digits of the BIOS revision)? The "Hillary" PB650 board was crippled by the lack of L2 cache. This one might have a COAST slot though.

This brings a smile to my face - and a lot of fond memories. Ooohhh the things my uncle and I did to that poor little Legend 486DX 33. Silly things. Dangerous things. Nearly disastrous things (like the time we inserted secondary cache chips backwards and almost didn't notice, or the time we tried a new video card and forgot to disable the on-board video chip). But I also learned quite a bit about how computers worked and behaved, and that little desktop became essentially my testing lab. In that regard it was a good trooper, taking punishment over and over and giving me valuable results, experience and knowledge; I also must have shorted it out at least 3 times - and every time it came back to life as if nothing ever happened 😁 . Too bad it's no longer around - it was donated to a local church in 1997, never to be seen again.

Nice, I used to call these Jean-Luc Picard-Bells 😁

Yeah, the cards mount upside down. Only reason I keep it around other than because I have the recovery discs and all the original bundled software is because it was designed by Frog Design who also designed cases for NeXT, Sun and Apple. I ran one of their A950-TWR machines with a Powerleap + K6, 64mb ram and an ATI Xpert 128 until 2004.

Which motherboard does it has (look at the last 4 digits of the BIOS revision)? The "Hillary" PB650 board was crippled by the lack of L2 cache. This one might have a COAST slot though.

The A940's didn't have a COAST slot. The later A950's did thankfully.

Edited: All these different models are reminding me how awful the naming system was for these systems.

Nahkri wrote:

I personally never liked OEM systems,all those proprietary motherboards,lack of advanced bios settings etc.

True, but is this really such a big deal?

On the plus side are excellent stability and the lack of options are good for beginners. Also on 486 machines you usually always get PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors. A feature only very few 486 motherboards offer.

I have an Acer OEM 486 motherboard with riser card. It does ISA, PCI and VLB and takes CPUs up to the IntelDX4. For retro games, what else does one need?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

excellent stability

Clearly, you've never used a Packard Bell 😁

Stiletto wrote:

Clearly, you've never used a Packard Bell 😁

I never had a problem with mine back in the day. Well, aside from the weird setup with two hard drives acting as one, but that was fixed by replacing the drives. I had a NIC, AWE64 Gold, an ATI All-in-Wonder (2D, capture card), an Orchid Righteous 3D Voodoo 1, and a SCSI card crammed in there too. The motherboard was made by Intel, not exactly a fly by night company. In many cases, you could flash the Intel version of the BIOS over the OEM one and get more settings options, but this was still the era of jumper settings. I don't recall the PB650's BIOS lacking in setup options though.

Had a Multimedia S606 back in the day. Same case, but mine was 233Mhz with 32MB RAM and some form of PCI ATI Rage card. Dunno about other Packard Bell models, but I never had any issues with that rig.

Just don't try upgrading it. I had to hack the crap out of mine just to be able to get a hand inside it without scraping up my knuckles. They riveted in a lot of unnecessary bracing, to deter people from upgrading, presumably. They wanted you to throw the machine away and buy another one rather than keep using it with newer parts inside.