VOGONS


First post, by toastdieb

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So I'm finishing up my first "from-scratch" 486 build (as in, starting from an empty case and a mobo, instead of just upgrading/restoring a prebuilt unit) or at least it's as finished up as any good PC ever is, haha. We'll start with photos - apologies for the size of these, as well as for the poor lighting in some of them.

The case. NOS AT from Summer '95, bought from ebay. I like the looks, turbo button and LED display of this guy. I hate everything else about it, haha.
It's Cyrix ST! I installed this guy because if something went wrong and the CPU got fried somehow, I wouldn't miss it too much. Eventually I'll replace it with the Intel DX4-100 I actually picked up for this build.
Cache chips. These came with the mobo and appear to be vintage, so thankfully I get to avoid dealing with sorting out fake cache chips from real ones, at least for now.
Mobo, ATX PSU, ATX-to-AT adapter, 30-pin SIMMs and video card installed. This was to test that the mobo would POST after the first one was a dud. Izzy says hi.
This kind of seems to defeat the purpose of the CPU fan.
Cable management is when you manage to fit all the cables in the case.

Part list:
Case - NOS AT Case from ebay. Not sure of the brand. Box says "DALLAS" on it, the front panel says "PEARL CASE" on the back of it.
Mainboard - WinTech MV035F, AWARD BIOS. 8 ISA, 3 of which have VLB. Supports up to 128MB RAM, provided via 4 30-PIN SIMMs or up to 3 72-PIN SIMMs. No onboard I/O except keyboard.
CPU - Presently installed is a Cyrix ST486DX2-66GS. This is to be replaced with an Intel 486DX4-100 once I get around to it.
PSU - Yes.
Memory - Pictured are 4 4MB 30-pin SIMMs of unknown provenance. Presently, I have installed 2 32MB 8x36 60ns parity 72-pin SIMMs from Kingston.
Video - Diamond SpeedStar Pro VLB, 1MB
Audio - Soundblaster 16, CT2940. No OPL3, Yes IDE.
Controller - DTC 2278E VLB Multi-I/O. 2 40-pin IDE, 1 34-pin floppy, 1 9-pin serial, 1 25-pin parallel, 1 25-pin serial and 1 game port.
A: - Mitsumi 1.44MB 3.5" Floppy
C: - Maxtor 270MB 3.5" HDD
D: - StarTech CF-to-IDE w/ 3.5" bay mount
E: - Samsung 48x CD-ROM

This machine is running MSDOS 6.22 and DeskMate 3.05 (because hilarity), not sure yet if I'm gonna install Windows 3.x or not. The "goal" insomuch as there is one is to run early 90s DOS games better than my Vectra VL2 4/100 can, but I have also been contemplating adding some network capabilities as well, so we'll see.

Reply 2 of 3, by toastdieb

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I really like the style of the case, but it feels a little flimsy in terms of the construction. There's a lot of flex when it is being moved around, especially now that it's loaded down with drives. The caddy is only held in place by the three pictured screws as well, so if I have the tower on its side to tinker with things, it sags quite a bit.

I somehow didn't have the correct cables/connectors to wire up the LED display earlier, so hopefully I'll get that set up tonight, as well as running some benchmarks so I can show off, haha.

Reply 3 of 3, by toastdieb

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Was extremely busy when I got home, but I was determined to get the LED display set up and run a benchmark last night, so these photos were all taken at about 3am this morning, right before I went to bed/woke up for work, haha.

First power on after hooking up the LED display. I guess this case was manufactured on top of an Indian burial ground or something.
TOPBench results! ~197, so right at the level of a Cyrix DX2 clone. Who could have guessed, haha. No photo but it scored 57 when de-turbo'd, which came back as comparable to a Cyrix DX2-80 downclocked to 25Mhz.
LED configured! According to CHKCPU, the turbo button in this build drops the clock speed from 66MHz to...64MHz. I suppose this mobo has it set to disable cache as well considering how even the least resource intensive tasks and games run like molasses when it is pressed. Anyway, it seemed disingenuous to configure the LED to display the standard 66/33 readout, and setting it to 66/64 seemed really dumb, so I just configured it to show the TOPBench scores instead.

While I was doing all this, I started having issues during POST with my memory and hard disk randomly failing tests. I could continue boot anyway and run memtest86 and everything would come back okay for the memory test failures, but I swapped both sticks anyway for different ones out of the same set, and that seems to have stopped it failing the POST check. In the event of the hard disk failures, if I rebooted it would be fine and would boot, and there have been no problems accessing C: nor any weird noises, but I'm probably gonna go ahead and replace the HDD soon anyway. While I was replacing the DRAM, I realized I set the jumpers incorrectly for the L2 cache (was only using one bank) so I fixed that too.

Next up on the list is configuring peripherals, installing some QoL utilities, and I've decided to go ahead and add network support as well. Unfortunately that will all have to wait for a little while, until I finish winterizing my office and moving in my new old desk - the lady has kicked me out of my base of operations in the kitchen and the office floor is very cold and uncomfortable nowadays, haha.