Its fairly simple to obtain an 486 system for cheap.

I've also noticed quite a number of 486 motherboards for sale.
386 and older motherboards seem to be getting more scarce.
I guess the latter are now so old that most people who had them, had by now gotten rid of them.

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OEM 486 systems are usually a better deal than building one yourself if you don't mind the possibility of getting one with a lot of proprietary parts inside that won't be as easy to find replacements for if something major stops working.

When they break there is always the next one.

Don't forget PS/2 mouse ports.

Such motherboards can often cost as much, if not more, than an entire OEM 486 that comes with PS/2 😊

Funny how people overlook this.

Maybe there aren't any more than normal, it just seems to me like there is a glut now.
$100 or $200 for an OEM 486 (best price I've seen) is not exactly cheap but I guess it is better than "not obtainable at any price". And then it is a great deal cheaper than spending ten hours trying to get a box built from parts working.

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Have to admit, when I started work one of my first machines was an AST Advantage with a DX2-50 in it. It was an absolute rock running OS/2 - slow, but would not die, whatever I did to it.

snorg wrote:

Maybe there aren't any more than normal, it just seems to me like there is a glut now.
$100 or $200 for an OEM 486 (best price I've seen) is not exactly cheap but I guess it is better than "not obtainable at any price". And then it is a great deal cheaper than spending ten hours trying to get a box built from parts working.

You can pay that much for a VL bus or PCI 486 motherboard by itself, which is why the OEM systems are such a good deal. It'll probably cost you another $70 or $80 for a case with a power supply and you still have to buy RAM, a CPU, video and sound cards, a hard drive, network card, and other odds and ends that are going to push the price of your homebuilt system up over $400.

My tip if you do not want to pay much for a motherboard, memory and CPU bundle, go for a "5V CPU only" VLB motherboard bundle, they often go really cheap.

I just bought a nice VLB motherboard with memory and a DX2 CPU on Ebay 10 minuts ago, the price was £25.99 = 35 euro add a video card (10-15 euro), an I/O card (5-15 euro), a floppy drive (1-5 euro) and use some old ATX case from your basement with a 5 euro adapter and you are still below 100 euro even with the shipping costs.

If you go for the most attractive parts its not hard to spend 200+ euro on a computer that does the same thing a P100 woud do even better for less than half the price. I buy both the cheap end expensive though but I really like old hardware and the challange of taking aging tech as far as possible.