VOGONS

386SX Build

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First post, by jmsajdak

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I am attempting to as close as possible to recreate the 386SX build my Dad and I did in what I think was the spring of 1994. There are a lot of specifics I can't remember anymore as it has been a LONG time since 1994.

Any ideas of what video card I should get? We originally only had VGA graphics as we reused the monitor from our Tandy 1000 RLX, so for this build I an only interested in VGA.

In My Possession
PCChips M396F RAV-2.1 Am386SX-40 (This was probably not the exact board we had but is from the right time frame and we did frequency build with PCChips boards in the late 90s so I figured it could have been close)
11 Bay Full Tower PC AT Case w/ Power Supply(We originally had a much smaller case but those seem hard to find, we did eventually have a case this size though that housed multiple builds)
Western Digital Caviar 2250 IDE Hard Drive (Don't remember what HDD we did have but this was the capacity we had, and let me tell you upgrading from the 40mb in our Tandy 1000 RLX to this we thought we would never fill it up-Spoiler Alert, we filled it)
Winbond W83757F SAB-757 (I have zero memory of what kind of HDD/FDD controller card we had)
Sound Blaster 16 CT 1750 Isa Sound Card With 34 Pin Sony CD-ROM (Pretty sure this was the setup we had for our first sound card and CD-ROM)
1.44mb Floppy Drive

Still have to Obtain
4x 1MB 30-Pin 80ns Non-Parity FPM Memory (We originally only had 2mb of RAM and I figure I can play with between 2mb and 4mb)
VGA Card
IDE Cable (Probably have one in a drawer somewhere)
Floppy Cable (Probably have one in a drawer somewhere)

Eventually Want to Obtain to Play With
387 Math Co-Processor
Upgrade to full 16mb RAM
100mb ZIP Drive (We had one of these at one point and it was a fun backup solution)

Reply 1 of 12, by Grzyb

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jmsajdak wrote on 2026-08-18, 15:41:

Any ideas of what video card I should get?

The most common choice for such machines were Tridents - TVGA9000 or TVGA8900.

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Reply 3 of 12, by Many Bothans

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Trident for sure would have been an era-appropriate pairing with a PCChips board, if not the most common.

Others to consider are cards based on Oak 87X on the lower end and Tseng ET3000AX on the upper.

Reply 4 of 12, by jmsajdak

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Many Bothans wrote on 2026-08-18, 16:07:

Trident for sure would have been an era-appropriate pairing with a PCChips board, if not the most common.

Others to consider are cards based on Oak 87X on the lower end and Tseng ET3000AX on the upper.

Thanks. I'll have to keep in mind the Tseng ET3000AX as in my head I am toying with the idea of a 386DX build to see what kind of power we could have had if money wasn't a limit back then.

Reply 5 of 12, by Many Bothans

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Sorry, typo, that should have been ET4000AX.

Reply 6 of 12, by keropi

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I would say that a humble cirrus 5422 or 5424 are also a great choice for this system and more compatible for the few cases where tseng cards are being weird about

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Reply 7 of 12, by douglar

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Grzyb wrote on 2026-08-18, 15:51:
jmsajdak wrote on 2026-08-18, 15:41:

Any ideas of what video card I should get?

The most common choice for such machines were Tridents - TVGA9000 or TVGA8900.

I built my 386 SX-20 in late 1991 with a 512KB paradise card. I upgraded to a 1MB trident TVGA8900D in the summer of 1992 and I kept that until I upgraded to a 486 and started looking for windows accelerators.

My 386SX-20 had award bios and a 64kb sram cache. It made the board competitive with my friends that had 386DX systems and was a pretty good performer for the $$. But so far, I have not been able to find that board again. Can't remember the chipset.

Last edited by douglar on 2026-08-18, 16:53. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 8 of 12, by AlexZ

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I found 386SX33 2MB RAM too sluggish, ended up upgrading to 386DX40 with 4MB RAM within 2 years. Later upgraded to 8MB RAM. Graphics card was Trident 9000 512KB. The biggest annoyance wasn't its slowness but CRT monitor that only did 60Hz at 640x400 and 56Hz at 800x600.

I stuck with it for a few more years until it got upgraded to Pentium 200 MMX. It was better for learning than 486DX66 as friends who had it just used to play games on it.

I would recommend 386DX/40 with 8-16MB RAM.

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Turion 64 MT-40@2.4Ghz,Gigabyte GA-K8NE,2GB,GeForce GTX 275,Audigy 2ZS
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Reply 9 of 12, by ldeveraux

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I totally get what you're doing any why, but for your own sanity I'd recommend a CF adapter over a period HDD.

Reply 10 of 12, by jmsajdak

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ldeveraux wrote on 2026-08-18, 17:15:

I totally get what you're doing any why, but for your own sanity I'd recommend a CF adapter over a period HDD.

As much as I want to strive for authenticity, I will probably go that route (I do have a CF adapter somewhere plus they are cheap on Amazon.)

I should take bets on how long it takes me to switch from HDD to CF, right now my estimate is before swapping to Disk 3 of Windows 3.11 installation. (I installed WFW311 on a 86box virtual 486 a month ago and damn we must have been patient back in the 90s to wait that long)

A couple of weeks ago I discovered there was still a PC here as work that had an actual HDD in it vs SSD and I had to do some maintenance on it and I wanted to hit my head against the wall the whole time working on it. Within 24 hours after working on that thing it had an SSD in it.

Reply 11 of 12, by AlexZ

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I used to have an old 2GB Western Digital IDE drive. It was noisy as hell compared to more modern IDE drives. It also had a few bad sectors (could probably use a low level format). Old 500MB drives were not great either. Only about 2-3MB sequential reading speed.

Pentium III 900E,ECS P6BXT-A+,384MB,GeForce FX 5600, Voodoo 2,Yamaha SM718
Turion 64 MT-40@2.4Ghz,Gigabyte GA-K8NE,2GB,GeForce GTX 275,Audigy 2ZS
Phenom II X4 965,Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3,8GB,GeForce GTX 780
Vishera FX-8370,Asus 990FX,16GB,GeForce GTX 980 Ti

Reply 12 of 12, by jmsajdak

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I actually kinda miss the noise. So much so that if/when I do the CF route, last week i bought a couple of HDD Clickers for this purpose.

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