A while back I had started this post Fixing a basket case Dell 466/L where I needed some help troubleshooting a Dell 466/L motherboard that appeared to have been stored at the bottom of a lake since it was new in 1994. The computer was then infested by mice for good measure before being bought by me for a hefty price on ebay where it was then shipped with very little padding and handled by a bunch of apes before arriving at my door with a broken and sheared off faceplate....how nice!

Any sane person would have sent the thing back for a full refund, but its me we are talking about 🤣.

The machine had all the options I was looking for, a 486, both 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppy, a CD drive (even a period correct Creative one!), and a soundblaster 16 (or so I thought) and to top it all off it was made the day I was born in early '94 so I kinda felt bad for it and thought I could repair it!

I got good tips on the other post but got busy and didn't get back to working on the computer for a while.

ended up accidentally destroying the motherboard when i tried removing one of the corroded ICs with a heat gun. my hand slipped when the chip came lose and I accidentally knocked some nearby SMD passive components loose...Oh well! i think the mobo was a gonner anyway.

After spending a couple hours on Ebay I found a very similar motherboard in the UK and had it shipped over. once installed it came right to life!

I was able to play around in the bios and could almost boot from the HDD but the screen goes blank after installing the mouse driver, it seems to boot fine from a floppy though.

So now that the thing isn't totally dead like it was I need to locate some parts to finish up or at least make complete this machine.

First, the i486 DX2 gets super hot. im not sure that these require a heatsink but it would sure make me feel a lot better having one. I have seen pictures of a couple different ones that these came with but not all of these seem to have them, I would like the stock dell one that is long and flat since it is a horizontal desktop form factor and a regular tower style might be too tall and interfere with the expansion slots plus it would need to be able to clip onto the CPU since the socket does not have the mounting ears.

next I need a pair of drive mounting rails to keep my cd drive locked in place, the markings on the ones for the stock floppy drive are Dell part #25102 Rev A02. ill post some pictures but they are beige and have locking tabs on the front end. the next things are mostly wish list things that I really want to buy but are not must haves per say.

I would like the Dell vram module that adds 512k to the on board 512k for 1 meg of video memory and the cache upgrade daughterboard but I don't know how common they are. I know of a few vram modules online but cant find a cache module and the heatsink/heatspreader and drive rails I cant find anywhere.

If anyone has a parts machine with these or knows where I can find them I would be very interested. Eventually I would like to get a stock keyboard and mouse but that will be for another day. here is a summarized list:

Heatsink/Heat spreader w/mounting clip
Drive mounting rails
Vram upgrade
Cache upgrade

https://imgur.com/sfawLof
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