It's just a single board computer really - the ISA bus is just to physically locate it.

I had a couple of these once. Kinda nice as a simple way to upgrade an old pentium box. Only connects physically and not electrically to the board being upgraded - which becomes a glorified mounting bracket.

Guys at other forums usually call them "prom computers". I saw a 386DX-40 with one 72-pin SIMM slot and integrated I/O + PS/2 in this form-factor. The ISA bus was used to connect this to a platform with whatever equipment the machinery needs. It was like a giant razor stuffed with special controllers and stuff or a mobo with out CPU.

The guy here put such a computer into 5.25 bay and ended up with a 2-in-1 system: single-boarded retro PC and a modern PC in one case, with KVM switch to use single monitor and keyboard/mouse!

Another modding project, less cool, but still fun: http://www.phantom.sannata.ru/konkurs/2008/kt0804.shtml

Hmmm, I don't really get the point of this? Surely it wouldn't be any more expensive just to upgrade the motherboard and the rest of the components? You'd have to reconnect your disk drives and power supply anyway so its not like you'd save a whole lot of effort, plus you get the benefit of expansion slots.

Most SBC's connect to a passive backplane so you can add expansion cards, this one doesn't.
The only time I can see this is useful is if you had some weird case that wouldn't fit normal motherboards or you were trying to mod a small computer into a tiny case or something. As an upgrade to an aging system it doesn't really seem so great to me.

It's not for upgrade, but for complex machinery. These things control stuff like CNC lathe machines, for example.

DonutKing wrote:

Hmmm, I don't really get the point of this? Surely it wouldn't be any more expensive just to upgrade the motherboard and the rest of the components? You'd have to reconnect your disk drives and power supply anyway so its not like you'd save a whole lot of effort, plus you get the benefit of expansion slots.

Most SBC's connect to a passive backplane so you can add expansion cards, this one doesn't.
The only time I can see this is useful is if you had some weird case that wouldn't fit normal motherboards or you were trying to mod a small computer into a tiny case or something. As an upgrade to an aging system it doesn't really seem so great to me.

I agree. Like most upgrades of this type, you're probably better off just getting a whole new motherboard. My guess is this was made for computer phobic types that didn't want to do that, for whatever reason. Or maybe they wanted to hang onto their old gear.

This bit is in response to Racoonrider: normally, I would agree with you, most SBC systems were for industrial systems. This was made by Powerleap, though, which was a maker of aftermarket upgrades for end users. So I'm fairly certain this was meant to be stuck in a home PC. Probably once you've connected power and everything to it, you old PC no longer functions and this takes over everything.

Just to be clear - the old motherboard will be lifeless - there is no electrical connection, this board is the full computer. It isn't the same as an industrial sbc fitting into a backplane, this item is a self-contained sbc that just uses the original mobo as a mount. It won't have access to anything on the old board, or any boards plugged into the old board. As the ebay link says:

THE CARD CONNECTOR IS NOT ACTIVE AND HAS NO SIGNALS!!

I actually have one of these cards, but mine looks like a VESA card because it also supports PCI. It actually used to be my home web/ftp server for the LONGEST time. I still have it, the 850/100 pentium 3 and the back mounts. Its pretty cool, I have 4 pci slots and TWENTY isa. ^.^

So could you run one of these with no host pc ?

Just add a PSU and off you go! 😁

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_board_computer

But then where would you connect graphic and sound cards?
Edit: ok just read the specs, it is onboard.

Very cute, but not realy an upgrade.

Filosofia wrote:

But then where would you connect graphic and sound cards?
Edit: ok just read the specs, it is onboard.

Very cute, but not realy an upgrade.

Well, let's say you have an old 386/486/1st gen pentium. You don't want to junk your old gear, but it is old enough that an upgrade is going to require you updating everything: RAM, motherboard, graphics card, HD, etc.
A new system costs $1500 or $2000 (I'm going with that due to the vintage of this board, prices hadn't fallen to the point in the late 90s that you could get a complete new system for $300). So let's say the board is $500 (no clue what pricing would have been) and a new HD is about $200, you could have gotten a new system for about $700 (assuming you have a useable vga monitor).
Now of course it is not going to be as fast as a system that is built from the ground up with new components. And you probably wouldn't be doing much gaming with it. But I don't think it was aimed at that crowd, more at the guy with an old machine that wants to eke a little more life out of it but
doesn't want to junk the old stuff (although it is not being used as anything but a place to anchor the card).

So yeah, if you have high-end needs or the price of the card with cpu and RAM and what not starts to approach the price of a new system, then it makes no sense.

Just followed some of the links in the ebay ad, seller must have added them I don't remember them being there originally.

Anyway, the original retail price for this thing was around $200-$400, so if you have an HD and CD-ROM that will work (or you can get them cheap if you have an ancient machine) this might make sense if you don't care about graphics and don't mind being limited to a 1ghz pIII with no additional upgrades possible.

And quite frankly, it probably wouldn't be difficult at all to make something like this for today's market using an Intel Ivybridge cpu or an AMD APU, just with a PCI connector instead.

I imagine the reason you don't see something like this is it is simply more profitable to sell the end user a new box every 3-5 years than it is to sell something like this. I do worry a bit about the environmental consequences of all this old stuff getting landfilled or recycled in unsafe conditions (burning insulation off wires in the 3rd world, that kind of thing).

Yeah, you just dont see these any more because PCs are so cheap now. These are useless.

As I said, very cute as a curiosity but not really an upgrade 😉 , some people do get VERY attached to their stuff, if they had to work very hard as a teenager to gather the money to buy they first computer, or it was a present from someone important, etc .
With this board you would be buying the feeling that nothing changed (and in fact you would be looking at the same AT case, the same monitor, keyboard and mouse) and a Pentium III 1.0GHz can still be used today with Windows XP and 512MB RAM for email and office and such, so it must have been a hell of an "upgrade" back then.

It would be really neat if there was some kind of passthrough to allow you to use connected IDE drives on a different system when the board was not in use.

Filosofia wrote:

As I said, very cute as a curiosity but not really an upgrade 😉 , some people do get VERY attached to their stuff, if they had to work very hard as a teenager to gather the money to buy they first computer, or it was a present from someone important, etc .
With this board you would be buying the feeling that nothing changed (and in fact you would be looking at the same AT case, the same monitor, keyboard and mouse) and a Pentium III 1.0GHz can still be used today with Windows XP and 512MB RAM for email and office and such, so it must have been a hell of an "upgrade" back then.

I guess it all depends on how you look at it. Compared to a 1st gen Pentium system or anything lower, it is a huge upgrade but not compared to a modern bare bones system that you put together from components.

As you've said, its value is more in being able to have the illusion that you're still using your old gear. Probably the same reason we see people mod mini-itx boards into Mac Classics and that type of thing.

I don't know that I would buy this now, unless I had a really old machine and wanted to keep that feeling that I'm still using the old system.