VOGONS


First post, by 0kool

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It's a local auction and it's ending soon. Very few bids, currently a few bucks.
Is it 386 or just older 486 board? No obvious leakage. What about the form factor - it's not quite squared - does it mean it comes from some brand desktop? Anything special about it? Other components?

The parts appears to be slightly older than my general interests, and I don't want to pick it up just for the sake of collecting - unless I could build something decent from them.

Thanks!

Reply 1 of 13, by dionb

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Board is babyAT, but a long one. Should fit in all but the smallest minitowers. Socketed 386DX (or 486DLC). Mid-period 386 (not the >100 component count of early ones, but also not the later little boards with soldered DX-40). Some cache and RAM installed. No idea about cache, but RAM looks like 8x 1MB parity. The only marginally odd bit is the extra ISA slot in front of the bottom one. That may be some kind of local bus, or alternatively just another ISA slot at non-standard location for some proprietary hardware. But the rest of the components make it clear this thing worked like a regular 386 board.

Apart from that:
- pretty standard ISA Trident VGA (can't see the exact model, but it's not going to be fast) with minimal RAM.
- nice little ISA SCSI controller with floppy drive and bootROM.
- Intel 10Mbps Ethernet card, good solid thing with good driver support.
- minimal little serial/parallel card
- some Quantum HDD, hopefully one that works and can be hooked up to the SCSI card

Assuming it all works, you just need to add CPU (and PSU, case and keyboard) to get this up and running. As for whether that is "decent", depends entirely on what you want to do. Personally I'd snap it up, if only because I have a much more exotic 386 board that isn't working and want a known-good comparison to check components in.

Reply 2 of 13, by Nvm1

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It clearly is a 486 motherboard, not 386 looking at the socket. An early model, with only ISA slots and some cache.
It looks pristine, for all the rest Dionb pretty much summed it up.

Reply 3 of 13, by tayyare

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Mainboard is probably a 386/486 combo board (there are two sockets of different size - the smaller one could be Weitek socket?). SCSI card is most probably an Adaptec 1542b. Quantum looks like a 2GB SCSI variety. probably an Empire 2100s.

EDIT: The back seat ISA slot is probably MB specific memory expansion slot. I've seen those in 386's back in the days.

Last edited by tayyare on 2018-05-17, 12:56. Edited 1 time in total.

GA-6VTXE PIII 1.4+512MB
Geforce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Diamond Monster 3D 12MB SLI
SB AWE64 PNP+32MB
120GB IDE Samsung/80GB IDE Seagate/146GB SCSI Compaq/73GB SCSI IBM
Adaptec AHA29160
3com 3C905B-TX
Gotek+CF Reader
MSDOS 6.22+Win 3.11/95 OSR2.1/98SE/ME/2000

Reply 8 of 13, by SW-SSG

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tayyare wrote:

... Quantum looks like a 2GB SCSI variety. probably an Empire 2100s.

Actually a ProDrive LPS, and a relatively old one too, judging from the two ribbon cables. It's likely between 50-130MB. Can't tell from the photos if it's SCSI or not, but these models were available in SCSI.

Reply 9 of 13, by tayyare

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SW-SSG wrote:
tayyare wrote:

... Quantum looks like a 2GB SCSI variety. probably an Empire 2100s.

Actually a ProDrive LPS, and a relatively old one too, judging from the two ribbon cables. It's likely between 50-130MB. Can't tell from the photos if it's SCSI or not, but these models were available in SCSI.

You are most probably right, my bad 😊

http://www.computer-retro.de/Festplatten.html

Quantum ProDrive LPS 52MB SCSI

GA-6VTXE PIII 1.4+512MB
Geforce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Diamond Monster 3D 12MB SLI
SB AWE64 PNP+32MB
120GB IDE Samsung/80GB IDE Seagate/146GB SCSI Compaq/73GB SCSI IBM
Adaptec AHA29160
3com 3C905B-TX
Gotek+CF Reader
MSDOS 6.22+Win 3.11/95 OSR2.1/98SE/ME/2000

Reply 10 of 13, by brostenen

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I'd say the controller is probably an Adaptec AHA-1542B or something like that.... (they are great)

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen

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Reply 12 of 13, by 0kool

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squiggly wrote:

Unless you are some kind of homeless bum who can't afford a cup of coffee, why not just buy it and find out?

1. I might be a homeless bum and you just deadly 😵 offended me
2. I might prefer an extra cup of coffee a day
3. It could be a very long ride to pick the lot
4. I'm not into collecting things I have no interest in (post #1)