Nice pickup. These were iconic machines of the early 90s. Gateway put both 386s and 486s in these cases before moving on to smaller form factor cases. I got a 486dx66 in this case myself. I think all the motherboards were made by micronics at the time.

There are a lot of these gateway 386 machines that are quite damaged from the onboard barrel battery (I think they used the battery up through the 486sx33, the 486dx66 came with a battery pack and no soldered battery), it's good to see that at least from the photos yours doesn't look like it got hit bad, and the fact it boots is quite promising.

The PSU is also a little funny on these, being an old uncommon style with the side switch, more of an 80s design, a little quaint when they were selling these in the 90s. Makes it challenging to find a replacement too, but if yours turns on, then keep using it 😁 and if it stops working, might as well keep it to get it recapped one day.

You'll also notice the raised gateway 2000 lettering on the case is in white. This traditionally had some black paint on the face and you will see that on most other gateway 386 and 486s that use this case, but it seems there was a short period of time around 1992 when the cases didn't have this. Considering the cases had this earlier and later, and this only effected things for a short period of time, it kind of feels like a factory error rather than a strategic decision by gateway.

You might find that the 5.25 drive is A:, in which case you might need to get a 5.25 bootdisk to install dos, or else see if you can swap the cables between the floppy drive. The bios on my 486 won't allow to change the boot order from A: to B: for the 3.5" floppy.

I'm not sure what bios is on the gateway 386s, but if it's like the 486dx66 I have, it may be a variant of the Phoenix bios. If it's Phoenix bios 1.0, I've had some trouble running ide to compact flash adapters on machines with those. I'll set things up correctly but just get generic fixed disk errors and won't be able to boot from the card. Ultimately if it's an issue, see if you have a network card with a bootrom socket on it and see if you can get a ROM flashed with the xt ide bios. That will sort that out immediately. You can also buy pre made kits/cards in places like eBay with the xt ide bios, but it costs a bit.

Other stuff... Looks like it might be pretty well tricked out already with cache and more ram than you'll ever need on a 386, and perhaps it has an upgraded CPU. I'd suggest installing the benchmark pack here https://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-benchmark-pack.html and running "hardware info", speedsys, and/or 3D bench to find out what CPU you have, what your other components are, and what speed rating you get in 3d bench. For a 386 I have with a 50mhz cyrix 486dlc CPU, 16MB ram and 128k cache, I get a 3d bench score of around 16, which is comparable to the score I get for another PC I have with a 486sx25 and no cache. If you have Phoenix bios, the default option may be for cache to be disabled! So be sure to check that out, it will be a great speed increase to enable it!

Looking forward to seeing more about this PC when you get around to it 😁

You must of course get a matching gateway monitor and keyboard now too 😁

dukeofurl wrote on 2025-12-01, 01:15:

Nice pickup. These were iconic machines of the early 90s. Gateway put both 386s and 486s in these cases before moving on to smal […]
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Nice pickup. These were iconic machines of the early 90s. Gateway put both 386s and 486s in these cases before moving on to smaller form factor cases. I got a 486dx66 in this case myself. I think all the motherboards were made by micronics at the time.

There are a lot of these gateway 386 machines that are quite damaged from the onboard barrel battery (I think they used the battery up through the 486sx33, the 486dx66 came with a battery pack and no soldered battery), it's good to see that at least from the photos yours doesn't look like it got hit bad, and the fact it boots is quite promising.

The PSU is also a little funny on these, being an old uncommon style with the side switch, more of an 80s design, a little quaint when they were selling these in the 90s. Makes it challenging to find a replacement too, but if yours turns on, then keep using it 😁 and if it stops working, might as well keep it to get it recapped one day.

You'll also notice the raised gateway 2000 lettering on the case is in white. This traditionally had some black paint on the face and you will see that on most other gateway 386 and 486s that use this case, but it seems there was a short period of time around 1992 when the cases didn't have this. Considering the cases had this earlier and later, and this only effected things for a short period of time, it kind of feels like a factory error rather than a strategic decision by gateway.

You might find that the 5.25 drive is A:, in which case you might need to get a 5.25 bootdisk to install dos, or else see if you can swap the cables between the floppy drive. The bios on my 486 won't allow to change the boot order from A: to B: for the 3.5" floppy.

I'm not sure what bios is on the gateway 386s, but if it's like the 486dx66 I have, it may be a variant of the Phoenix bios. If it's Phoenix bios 1.0, I've had some trouble running ide to compact flash adapters on machines with those. I'll set things up correctly but just get generic fixed disk errors and won't be able to boot from the card. Ultimately if it's an issue, see if you have a network card with a bootrom socket on it and see if you can get a ROM flashed with the xt ide bios. That will sort that out immediately. You can also buy pre made kits/cards in places like eBay with the xt ide bios, but it costs a bit.

Other stuff... Looks like it might be pretty well tricked out already with cache and more ram than you'll ever need on a 386, and perhaps it has an upgraded CPU. I'd suggest installing the benchmark pack here https://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-benchmark-pack.html and running "hardware info", speedsys, and/or 3D bench to find out what CPU you have, what your other components are, and what speed rating you get in 3d bench. For a 386 I have with a 50mhz cyrix 486dlc CPU, 16MB ram and 128k cache, I get a 3d bench score of around 16, which is comparable to the score I get for another PC I have with a 486sx25 and no cache. If you have Phoenix bios, the default option may be for cache to be disabled! So be sure to check that out, it will be a great speed increase to enable it!

Looking forward to seeing more about this PC when you get around to it 😁

You must of course get a matching gateway monitor and keyboard now too 😁

The motherboard does have Micronics branding on it and it uses version 1.10 of the Pheonix BIOS. By default the BIOS was set to have the 5.25 be Drive A and Drive B was disabled. Despite this it still allowed me to boot my windows 98 startup disk from the 3.5 drive. I suspect that the EIDE controller is overriding the drive configuration in the BIOS.

Thanks for the suggestion on the benchmark. I've got a CR2032 socket on order to replace the leaking battery so I'll give that a shot once i have it up and running. I'll be sure to post some screenshots of the results.

Anything below a 486/66 is bit slow for my taste but for $65 i would be grabbing it as well. Simcity is a must with the i387 installed!

Do you really need the 5.25 drive? I know I don't, I'd keep it for the looks though.

As dukeofurl said This era Gateway it'll most likely be a Micronics motherboard with a Phoenix BIOS. My similar 486 board is stable enough and an detect 8GB drives but will hang at post so I just went with 6GB drives
I got around booting from CF by using the original harddrive as C:\ for the OS, and the CF for data, games, etc

I'd add a network card for even easier transfers and agree with upgrading the soundcard. Other then that I'd say your good to go

chinny22 wrote on 2025-12-01, 02:29:

My similar 486 board is stable enough and an detect 8GB drives but will hang at post so I just went with 6GB drives
I got around booting from CF by using the original harddrive as C:\ for the OS, and the CF for data, games, etc

I was talking to a guy on Reddit who got 8gb cf to work with these large gateway 486s by using ez bios dynamic drive overlay. I have yet to try it myself though.

dukeofurl wrote on 2025-12-01, 04:02:

chinny22 wrote on 2025-12-01, 02:29:

My similar 486 board is stable enough and an detect 8GB drives but will hang at post so I just went with 6GB drives
I got around booting from CF by using the original harddrive as C:\ for the OS, and the CF for data, games, etc

I was talking to a guy on Reddit who got 8gb cf to work with these large gateway 486s by using ez bios dynamic drive overlay. I have yet to try it myself though.

Yes I've another 486 that's limited to 500Mb and was surprised how well drive overlay worked with my CF cards.
However I'm not booting off that drive either (I found I like spinning rust as the boot drive, otherwise it just doesn't sound right at power on)