First post, by Socket3
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hello fellow retro computer enthusiasts. I rarely post on this forum (apart from a few replies to some threads where I thought I could be useful to others) but I've been a long time stalker.
Over the weekend I picked up a beige AT computer at a flea market. I bought it because I really liked the case design and I make it a point to buy AT cases with MHz displays whenever possible.
I got the PC from a middle aged man who was selling mostly assorted knick-knacks (paintings, old ceramic figurines, old russian and romanian radios, remote controls from several appliances, old russian power tools, random cables etc). Didn't bother to ask him where he got if from, but before buying it I looked at the I/O side and noticed it was packed with expansion cards - notably what looked like a voodoo card. Couldn't tell if it was a v1 or v2 and I din't have a screwdriver with me to open it up. Noticing that I figured the PC was yet another socket 7 computer, so I didn't bother opening it up as soon as I got home.
Yesterday I set aside some time and decided to open up this mystery PC. This is what I found (apart from an ISA SNC LAN card witch I removed):
A socket 3 486 class computer, with an unidentified (black PCB, 100MHz memory, 12MB of it) Voodoo 2 card, a Matrox Mystique 2MB with a Rainbow Runner module, 32MB of ram (2x8MB + 16MB FPM) and an AWE32. The mainboard is a MSI MS4144 - SiS chipset, not EDO support (tried, won't post with EDO), no PS/2 mouse header, but it does have an CR2032 battery holder. Bios is an American Megatrends GUI bios. The HDD was a 6 GB Quantum Fireball drive witch is unfortunately riddled with bad sectors. Odd that such a large drive worked in a 486 class PC - more on that later.
Moving the cables around while cleaning the PC (although it was pretty clean to begin with) I came across this:
A pentium overdrive yay! I removed the PSU connectors from the mainboard and the disk drives (and good thing I did) and tried powering the PC on. The PSU fan rattled on, and before I had time to grab my multi-meter and probe for voltages, BANG! Magic smoke. Shame, AT PSUs are getting rarer and rarer. The stock PSU was made by some SUNNY CORP, a 150W unit, made in china. After swapping the PSU with a 200w JNC I had around, the PC posted. Dead CMOS battery - replaced that, and tried booting, but because the HDD was in bad shape I didn't get very far.
I put the PC's original drive away and installed a clean working 4Gb seagate. Interestingly, this motherboard can detect HDDs up to 18GB. Never seen that before on a 486. It detected my MAXTOR 2R015H1 15GB drive w/o any trouble, but it would not detect a 20GB version (2R020H1) of the same drive (well it did, but it detected it as a 18.2 GB drive and would not read correctly from it).
I experimented with dos 6.22, and pondered installing win3.11 along side it - to run 486 stuff. But then I took a break and pondered the reason this machine is the way it is. After giving it another inspection, I found a label witch listed a hardware configuration:
It seems it's original configuration included 4MB of ram, a 210MB hdd, a 512kb SVGA card (probably ISA), a 200W PSU and it also came with a monocrome 14" monitor. It's wierd that they sold a SVGA capable PC together with a monocrome monitor - but that got me thinking again... the original buyer probably couldn't swing for a color monitor, and decided to buy one in the future - a common practice back in the day in my country. Also notable is that the motherboard section ("placa de baza") contains two serial numbers, and they are of different lengths - indicating that either the PC's original motherboard died under warranty, or more likely, the user upgraded the computer at the same company / shop that originally sold it to him.
I can only theorize what it started out as - considering here in romania PCs were very rare and expensive back when this was new, I initially believed this stared out as a late model 386 or 286. I that was because the parts table mentions a I/O and IDE combo card, and of course the small HDD and 512k video card. It could have started out as a ISA only 486-SX - those were pretty common here, more so than 386 and 286 machines.... so considering that, it stands to reason it originally began as a 25MHz 486SX or 33MHz DX.
What I find interesting is that this person upgraded this little PC to the limit of it's capabilities... a PCI motherboard, a pentium overdrive (the one on this 486 is a POD83), 32MB of ram - uncommon on 486 machines in their time, an expensive PCI video card, an AWE32, and a Voodoo 2 of all things! even the L2 cache! 4 of the cache chips - the first 128kb are made by Winbond, while the other 4 are EtronTech.
It seems to me this person tried to hold on to this computer as long as possible. This leads me to think the upgrades were many, and not purchased when they were new. Parts like the POD83, the Matrox Mystique, the AWE32 and especially the voodoo2 were very expensive when new - way over the financial possibilities of your average romanian in the 90's. Witch is why there was a strong second hand part market here. I firmly believe that these upgrades were bought when they were close to being obsolete, and for a decent price - that's what most of us did back in the 90's. It's sort of curious he did not upgrade the motherboard to a socket 5 or socket 7, but up to '97-98, most PCs running in romania were 486 class, the vast majority of them being used as word processors or for corel draw and buisness/office tasks. If he decided to upgrade in 97, a second hand socket 7 board was not easy to come by, and not cheap - so it makes sense to me that he stuck with socket 3. What I find remarkable is the fact that he manged to get a hold of a POD. These are rare now, and were rare back then as well. Maybe he was an IT guy? Maybe he had a relative who owned a PC parts shop? Or maybe he just got lucky.
What do you guys think? Any toughs on this? Have you ever picked up something like this (severly upgraded) while collecting? I'm eager to hear your opinions.
I'll also post some benchmarks in a bit.
