Just by luck, I put my hands on a free 486 EISA motherboard a few weeks ago. It had a dead Dallas chip (socketed, hopefully) and I was waiting for the last few weeks for the new one that I ordered from Aliexpress to arrive.

Finally it arrived and I started working on it this past weekend. I took my capricious 386DX-40 apart, and rebuild it with the new 486 board. Configuration is as follows:

- CAF Technologies Inc E426 EISA motherboard
- Intel 486DX2-66 CPU
- 64 MB RAM
- SIIG VD1738 SVGA (CL GD 5429 2MB)
- Sound Blaster AWE32 PnP (CT3670 with 8MB RAM)
- 3Com Etherlink III NIC (3c509B Combo)
- Western Digital IDE/FDD controller with multi I/O (came from an HP Vectra 386)
- Adaptec 1540CP SCSI controller
- 3GB Quantum IDE HDD (Driven by Ontrack DDO, BIOS has 528MB limit)
- 3GB Quantum SCSI HDD
- 3.5" 1.44MB and 5.25" 1.2MB Floppy Drives
- LG 52x CD-ROM Drive

I don't have any EISA cards, so everything is ISA.

I installed MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 and everything seems to be working nicely, but I have the error messages below during boot, just before memory check:

EISA Configuration Checksum Failure
Sofware Port NMI INOPERATIONAL
Fail-Safe Timer NMI INOPERATIONAL

Since I never ever played with anything EISA before, I have no idea what do these messages mean. I vaguely remember that, there supposed to be some EISA configuration files that need to come with EISA cards, but all my cards are ISA. The board has 2 ISA and 6 EISA slots, NIC and SB are in ISA slots but all the other cards are in EISA slots.

In addition, which one would you prefer for this system and why?

- Sound Blaster AWE32 PnP or Yamaha Audician 32 Plus with Dreamblaster S1
- Cirrus Logic GD 5429 2MB or Tseng Labs ET4000AX 1MB