That CX4235, sound wise, is still too good for a trash build. Get an IBM MWave or something, if you wanna ride the pain train that's your ticket. At least sound wise, because on the video front you nailed it. This is interesting cause a few months ago i had the idea to build a PC with the absolute worst parts i have around, but ideally would need to shop for even worse parts 😀

carlostex wrote on 2026-05-03, 12:52:

That CX4235, sound wise, is still too good for a trash build. Get an IBM MWave or something, if you wanna ride the pain train that's your ticket. At least sound wise, because on the video front you nailed it. This is interesting cause a few months ago i had the idea to build a PC with the absolute worst parts i have around, but ideally would need to shop for even worse parts 😀

I think IBM MWave is just plain cruel mate 😁 Just making those work, especially the modem combo ones, is an ordeal in itself.

songoffall wrote on 2026-05-03, 11:32:

So... here's what I came up with. […]
Show full quote

So... here's what I came up with.

I currently have my terrible sound card and my terrible graphics card.

So imagine a build like this:

Motherboard: PCChips M747
CPU: Intel Celeron 266 MHz (Covington)
Graphics: Realtek RTG3105iEH ISA
Sound: Crystal CS4235 ISA

This has to be the system everybody would hate. It's too fast for PC XT era games. It's too slow for everything else. It has great sound and video compatibility. Except the sound is bugged and terrible, and the video is glacial. I would expect it to struggle with Doom and Duke3D. And the cherry on top - the BIOS is the stuff of nightmares. And while the board has onboard audio and video that might be better than the two ISA cards I selected, we'll leave those headers unpopulated.

Believe it or not, both of my Realtek RTG3105iEH ISA cards came with computers they had no business being in - Pentium III and 400MHz Mendocino Celeron. This gave me the idea.

The SiS6326 on those is the "good" version, discrete, 8MB of dedicated video RAM and you have FAR too many expansion slots to correct it's onboard deficiencies.

Therefore I propose that ...
M741 M748
are worse, with integrated/shared RAM graphics, and a PCI/ISA shared slot, plus you have the thrilling possibility of filling the s370 with the lowest Cyrix III series chip. Which I think at 400, has only 3/4 the FPU grunt of a covington. If you get lucky, you may get one with less than 3 DIMMs populated, only 2, or even 1.

The PCB is also delightfully thin, letting it curl like a sheet of parchment.

There is maybe only one significant upgrade that will do anything for this board, a Powerleap Rennaisance.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-05-03, 14:58:

The SiS6326 on those is the "good" version, discrete, 8MB of dedicated video RAM and you have FAR too many expansion slots to co […]
Show full quote

songoffall wrote on 2026-05-03, 11:32:

So... here's what I came up with. […]
Show full quote

So... here's what I came up with.

I currently have my terrible sound card and my terrible graphics card.

So imagine a build like this:

Motherboard: PCChips M747
CPU: Intel Celeron 266 MHz (Covington)
Graphics: Realtek RTG3105iEH ISA
Sound: Crystal CS4235 ISA

This has to be the system everybody would hate. It's too fast for PC XT era games. It's too slow for everything else. It has great sound and video compatibility. Except the sound is bugged and terrible, and the video is glacial. I would expect it to struggle with Doom and Duke3D. And the cherry on top - the BIOS is the stuff of nightmares. And while the board has onboard audio and video that might be better than the two ISA cards I selected, we'll leave those headers unpopulated.

Believe it or not, both of my Realtek RTG3105iEH ISA cards came with computers they had no business being in - Pentium III and 400MHz Mendocino Celeron. This gave me the idea.

The SiS6326 on those is the "good" version, discrete, 8MB of dedicated video RAM and you have FAR too many expansion slots to correct it's onboard deficiencies.

Therefore I propose that ...
M741 M748
are worse, with integrated/shared RAM graphics, and a PCI/ISA shared slot, plus you have the thrilling possibility of filling the s370 with the lowest Cyrix III series chip. Which I think at 400, has only 3/4 the FPU grunt of a covington. If you get lucky, you may get one with less than 3 DIMMs populated, only 2, or even 1.

The PCB is also delightfully thin, letting it curl like a sheet of parchment.

There is maybe only one significant upgrade that will do anything for this board, a Powerleap Rennaisance.

Sounds like a "fun" board 😁 do you have a link on TheRetroWeb, bcs I'm ashamed to admit I failed to find it.

songoffall wrote on 2026-05-03, 15:26:

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-05-03, 14:58:

The SiS6326 on those is the "good" version, discrete, 8MB of dedicated video RAM and you have FAR too many expansion slots to co […]
Show full quote

songoffall wrote on 2026-05-03, 11:32:

So... here's what I came up with. […]
Show full quote

So... here's what I came up with.

I currently have my terrible sound card and my terrible graphics card.

So imagine a build like this:

Motherboard: PCChips M747
CPU: Intel Celeron 266 MHz (Covington)
Graphics: Realtek RTG3105iEH ISA
Sound: Crystal CS4235 ISA

This has to be the system everybody would hate. It's too fast for PC XT era games. It's too slow for everything else. It has great sound and video compatibility. Except the sound is bugged and terrible, and the video is glacial. I would expect it to struggle with Doom and Duke3D. And the cherry on top - the BIOS is the stuff of nightmares. And while the board has onboard audio and video that might be better than the two ISA cards I selected, we'll leave those headers unpopulated.

Believe it or not, both of my Realtek RTG3105iEH ISA cards came with computers they had no business being in - Pentium III and 400MHz Mendocino Celeron. This gave me the idea.

The SiS6326 on those is the "good" version, discrete, 8MB of dedicated video RAM and you have FAR too many expansion slots to correct it's onboard deficiencies.

Therefore I propose that ...
M741 M748
are worse, with integrated/shared RAM graphics, and a PCI/ISA shared slot, plus you have the thrilling possibility of filling the s370 with the lowest Cyrix III series chip. Which I think at 400, has only 3/4 the FPU grunt of a covington. If you get lucky, you may get one with less than 3 DIMMs populated, only 2, or even 1.

The PCB is also delightfully thin, letting it curl like a sheet of parchment.

There is maybe only one significant upgrade that will do anything for this board, a Powerleap Rennaisance.

Sounds like a "fun" board 😁 do you have a link on TheRetroWeb, bcs I'm ashamed to admit I failed to find it.

I should have put a comma or "and" in there to indicate I was talking about a couple of similar boards, and noted they came in some different versions...

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m741lmrt
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m741mrt
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m748lmrt
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchip … -m748lmrt-v3-3b

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-05-04, 01:19:

I should have put a comma or "and" in there to indicate I was talking about a couple of similar boards, and noted they came in s […]
Show full quote

songoffall wrote on 2026-05-03, 15:26:

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-05-03, 14:58:

The SiS6326 on those is the "good" version, discrete, 8MB of dedicated video RAM and you have FAR too many expansion slots to co […]
Show full quote

The SiS6326 on those is the "good" version, discrete, 8MB of dedicated video RAM and you have FAR too many expansion slots to correct it's onboard deficiencies.

Therefore I propose that ...
M741 M748
are worse, with integrated/shared RAM graphics, and a PCI/ISA shared slot, plus you have the thrilling possibility of filling the s370 with the lowest Cyrix III series chip. Which I think at 400, has only 3/4 the FPU grunt of a covington. If you get lucky, you may get one with less than 3 DIMMs populated, only 2, or even 1.

The PCB is also delightfully thin, letting it curl like a sheet of parchment.

There is maybe only one significant upgrade that will do anything for this board, a Powerleap Rennaisance.

Sounds like a "fun" board 😁 do you have a link on TheRetroWeb, bcs I'm ashamed to admit I failed to find it.

I should have put a comma or "and" in there to indicate I was talking about a couple of similar boards, and noted they came in some different versions...

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m741lmrt
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m741mrt
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m748lmrt
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchip … -m748lmrt-v3-3b

Oh boy. I've seen some terrible budget S370 boards, but these are just plain diabolic 😁 And I'm not surprised almost every motherboard that has come up has been PCChips.

My 486 was intended to be a troll build, as in "how unstable can you make it": a DX50 processor, multiple VLB cards, BIOS settings crispy. Turns out this thing is perfectly stable, so a troll build became a really nice build. the sound card picks up interference from anything and everything going on in the PC, but that might improve once I mount the HDD back in the case and close the case.

For bad performance on a 486 board, there's reputedly a 486-16 option that was very rarely seen, making the next up 20mhz look abundant, but those are pretty hard to find now. Whereas SX25s are around by the shovelful still I think, if they haven't all gone for gold scrap. Anyway, the mass market slowest 486 would be the SX25... or is it? 486 on 486 socket/platform. Cyrix as their first 486 socket 486 did a modified version of their 386/486 a Cyrix Cx486S 25,33,40 mhz.. but they only had 2kb cache so didn't perform much ahead of their 386/486 brothers, at about 0.75 IPC of intel 486. So 25mhz in those is gotta be a bit dire for a "full" 486. That would definitely be one where if you upgraded from an AMD 386DX40 machine you'd be disappointed. It was long said that "you didn't feel it" when going to an Intel SX25 from there.... which I think was due to the snapshot of software in use in about 1992/1993 ... the 486 "got faster" as code got optimised and there was less 16bit stuff. So it is generally regarded as mythical that the SX25 was slower than the 386DX40, but experientially at the time on older code, it could have seemed like it. Also if you scrimped on cache when upgrading, that would be holding the SX25 back. I could certainly see that performance envelopes of best 386DX40 systems to worst SX25 would overlap.

If you wanna commit to the worst 386 possible, I don't think I saw it mentioned that Intel had a bug/snafu in the early 386 and thus produced some buggy CPUs which were then marked for 16bit only. I think there was rumored to be a 12Mhz in those. Probably a real PITA to run when things detect a 386 and assume it is fully capable... instead of running their 286 code path.

This last post by BitWrangler makes me remember the horrid little thing called a Cyrix 486SLC, unlike the Cyrix 486DX which was an actual capable processor and the Cyrix 486DLC which fooled no one because it physically had to be put into a motherboard and everyone could clearly see it as the 386 replacement it was intended to be, the Cyrix 486SLC was shipped integrated into systems marketed as 486 systems (Actually I don't think that a socketed version even exists of that thing) even though it had horrible performance for a 486.

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-05-04, 15:23:

This last post by BitWrangler makes me remember the horrid little thing called a Cyrix 486SLC, unlike the Cyrix 486DX which was an actual capable processor and the Cyrix 486DLC which fooled no one because it physically had to be put into a motherboard and everyone could clearly see it as the 386 replacement it was intended to be, the Cyrix 486SLC was shipped integrated into systems marketed as 486 systems (Actually I don't think that a socketed version even exists of that thing) even though it had horrible performance for a 486.

Tbh I wouldn't blame Cyrix for that, 486DLC/SLC were marketed as upgrade paths for 386DX/386SX users respectively. I think the C in DLC/SLC stood for cache, and both supported 1kb L1 cache, unlike 386DX/SX.

There's a lot of ways to mess up a 486 motherboard so the L2 cache actually makes things slower, mostly with the Opti chipsets by not including tag RAM or the dirty bit.

songoffall wrote on 2026-05-08, 18:17:

Tbh I wouldn't blame Cyrix for that, 486DLC/SLC were marketed as upgrade paths for 386DX/386SX users respectively. I think the C in DLC/SLC stood for cache, and both supported 1kb L1 cache, unlike 386DX/SX.

I don't blame Cyrix either, I blame those who marketed those systems as 486es 😁, I did game development back then and we had some games we had with the minimum requirement of a 486 class CPU, the 486DLC was not that much of a problem, because:
1. It was a better performer than the 486SLC.
2. It was a socketed part and not integrated into the motherboard.
Both of them made them easier to support, the first one for obvious reason, we were able to produce a code that were able to detect that it runs on a DLC, so the games have adjusted some graphics properties so that it would still run mostly smoothly.
The second one, in case somebody still complained to our support, because of the socketed nature of the processor, the customer could still be asked to take a look at the computer mainboard (some of them actually did), and then they would realize they are using more of a 386 class system with an upgraded CPU.

The 486SLC however sometimes had so horrible performance that even detecting it and modifying the game parameters it still wasn't running too well on it, and because of the integrated into the motherboard nature of the chip we couldn't really say to them to check their motherboard even, because of the integration many times the motherboard also had 486 written on it somewhere, so convincing them that they not actually have a real 486 class system was a lot harder. So it was a pain to support.

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-05-08, 20:03:

I don't blame Cyrix either, I blame those who marketed those systems as 486es :D, I did game development back then and we had so […]
Show full quote

songoffall wrote on 2026-05-08, 18:17:

Tbh I wouldn't blame Cyrix for that, 486DLC/SLC were marketed as upgrade paths for 386DX/386SX users respectively. I think the C in DLC/SLC stood for cache, and both supported 1kb L1 cache, unlike 386DX/SX.

I don't blame Cyrix either, I blame those who marketed those systems as 486es 😁, I did game development back then and we had some games we had with the minimum requirement of a 486 class CPU, the 486DLC was not that much of a problem, because:
1. It was a better performer than the 486SLC.
2. It was a socketed part and not integrated into the motherboard.
Both of them made them easier to support, the first one for obvious reason, we were able to produce a code that were able to detect that it runs on a DLC, so the games have adjusted some graphics properties so that it would still run mostly smoothly.
The second one, in case somebody still complained to our support, because of the socketed nature of the processor, the customer could still be asked to take a look at the computer mainboard (some of them actually did), and then they would realize they are using more of a 386 class system with an upgraded CPU.

The 486SLC however sometimes had so horrible performance that even detecting it and modifying the game parameters it still wasn't running too well on it, and because of the integrated into the motherboard nature of the chip we couldn't really say to them to check their motherboard even, because of the integration many times the motherboard also had 486 written on it somewhere, so convincing them that they not actually have a real 486 class system was a lot harder. So it was a pain to support.

That should be considered fraud, but I remember too many incidents of misleading marketing like that from the era. Yeah, sucks to be those people and especially sucks to be the person who tries to explain to them that they bought a piece of crap.