Hi guys,

I picked up an old PC on gumtree the other day because it was cheap and only a few mins up the road. It seems like a strange beast to me but I don't know much about the era so thought I'd mention it here and see what people thought:

- Packard Bell "multimedia" desktop
- Pentium 233 MMX, socket 7
- AT PSU
- 64mb 30 pin RAM (4 SIMMS)
- Integrated IDE / S3 Trio 64 graphics
- One of those annoying OEM motherboards with the riser card, Intel chipset

Any thoughts? Is it rubbish? I can't find anything on the interwebs about it, the brand 'Packard Bell' doesn't exist here anymore (Australia). I thought the 30 pin RAM was interesting in that era machine. It'll be good for parts if nothing else. It's pretty damn ugly.

thanks!

Are you sure its 30 pin memory? I would have thought you'd needed 8 of those to make up a full bank on a Pentium. Can you post a pic? I've never seen a Pentium board with 30 pin SIMM slots, only 72-pin.

Is the riser card on the edge or in the middle of the board? If its in the middle its LPX form factor, if its on the edge its NLX.

It's nothing particularly special unless you want to build up a dos/win9x games box for example. Its a socket 7 machine which isn't terribly rare at the moment. If you don't want to do anything with it yourself maybe see if someone on overclockers.com.au wants it.

I think its 72-pins memory to. When you have an latest 486 system they are mostly 72-pins from the beginning.
Pentium system will mostly use 72-pins memory and sometimes using SD_RAM to. like PC 66 / PC-100

Wow I suck, that's 2 for 2 I've gotten wrong. It is 72 pin, 4 * 16mb. (the sticker on the front says 32mb but someone has upgraded.)

The riser is in the middle, here are a couple of pics.

Thanks for the reply's, I haven't looked at overclockers.com.au yet so will head over and check it out.

Pretty nice looking system; would definitely make a nice Windows 98 box. If I had that system, I'd install a larger hard drive and load it up with MP3s and old games. Would also be good for IMs, emails and IRC but I would not recommend trying to browse the web with it.

It would be fun to get something like that and build a fast Win 3.1 box.

This desktop case is really a looker, somehow reminds me of a Mallard steam engine.

It could look OK if the yellowing was removed, I've read (here and other places) about various ways of doing that but have never tried.

My main issue with this thing is that it's not designed to handle running on it's side. The CD drive doesn't have the little tabs to hold the disk, the CPU fan stops spinning, and the side of the case isn't flat. I don't have room to lay it down, plus I already have a nice HP Vectra which is similar in specs...

DonutKing - I've signed up to the Overclockers forum (AU), but I can't see a 'market place'?

Just so you know, styrofoam + DRAM = bad idea.

theRobin wrote:

It could look OK if the yellowing was removed, I've read (here and other places) about various ways of doing that but have never tried.

Personally i am not that offended by mild yellowness, its not so bad on this case imo. Whats really ugly is that half scrapped out sticker, get rid of that horror for god's sake! If you want to get into whitening, take a look at Retrobright. Ive been recently taught about the existence of this by DonutKing.

And yes, try to avoid mixing sensitive electronics with ESD prone materials like Styrofoam 😜

Remember these? This was the classic Dell home/office computer from 1998.

Its a Dell Dimension V400c. It came stock with a Slot 1, Celeron 400, ugh. I really only like the case and discovered that an Asus P3V4X would fit in nicely after tapping in new offsets. I also had to exchange the power supply and re-wire the case LED's and buttons. Proprietary stuff is always like that, but this mod wasn't too bad.

So after the slot 1 Asus P3V4X made a home, the rest was easy.

Slot 1 Coppermine, 1 GHz (1000/256/100, SL4KL)
512 MB ECC SDRAM
Nvidia GeForce FX5200EP AGP graphics
Yamaha XG sound
3Com 10/100 network
80GB ATA harddrive

...all stuff I had laying around.

The DVD-ROM's came with it!

I'm a little insulted with how the harddrive sits in there. Aside from a 386/486, this is my first non-dual Pentium box. Does this make for a fairly common retro gaming box?

wow that hard disk is a bit insultingly positioned maybe you should move it to one of the empty 3½ drive bays or something?

Thats the normal hard drive spot for those older cases that Dell and Micron used.

A couple of eBay purchases:

CPU: Intel DX2 overdrive @ 66Mhz
Motherboard: ASUS VL/I486SV2GX4
RAM: 16Mb (4 x 72pin Fastpage)
Hard Drive: 270Mb Western Digital IDE
Multi I/O VESA Card
Video Card: VESA Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 1Mb
Sound Card: ISA C-Media "3D onboard" CMI8330

I bought this thing because it was as close to my original 486 as I've seen in months of looking. Although my original had a less angular case which was larger and had a flip top lid (which I thought was great), this Ipex is at least a beige VLB desktop. I've had a quick play with it and it's all complete and very tidy. Kindof OEM I guess but not overly so - does anyone know about the IPEX brand? The relevant wiki article has been deleted. Anyway I don't actually need this for anything though because I also bought this:

CPU: Pentium 233MHz MMX
RAM: 32Mb (2 x 72pin EDO SIMM's)
Hard drive: 3.2Gb IDE
Motherboard: ASUS VX97
Video Card: ARK / Legend 64MT PCI
Soundcard: AWE64
AT style case and PSU

I really like this thing. It's a compact little AT case which is amazingly clean inside - no dust anywhere, not even in the PSU! I swapped out the 200MMX it came with for a 233MMX, replaced the strange modem-come-soundcard it came with for an AWE64, removed the yellowing with a bit of napisan, and I've been enjoying some Duke3d, dark forces, stonekeep, etc in pure DOS and authentic MIDI. It's a really nice little DOS games machine, but of course any suggestions for improvements are welcome!

Ah that was from that guy in Vic Park?

I got my Acer 486 from him 😀 I saw the auction but didn't. Happy to see it goes to a good home 😀

Yeah Jeff I think his name is? He's had a couple of others listed too. If only he'd listed that 486 six months ago when I decided to re-live my youth, he could have saved me a significant amount of time and money!

I remember your post about that Acer 486, it gave me confidence to buy a similar machine, but mine turned out to be a bit of a stinker. The BIOS had far fewer options than yours and the motherboard had far fewer jumpers - although it still has the 4mb onboard RAM. Anyway the PSU crapped out after a couple of hours and it's sitting in the shed now, hopefully ashamed of itself.

Thanks for not bidding 😀

badmofo wrote:

...Anyway the PSU crapped out after a couple of hours and it's sitting in the shed now, hopefully ashamed of itself.

I have to admit, that made me chuckle out loud. I love that Ipex case with the asus motherboard. That is just BEGGING to have a Cyrix 133 slapped in it to make a 486 beast.

The Pentium is a nice machine. Nothing worth writing home about but something I would still keep around.

badmofo wrote:

The BIOS had far fewer options than yours and the motherboard had far fewer jumpers - although it still has the 4mb onboard RAM. Anyway the PSU crapped out after a couple of hours and it's sitting in the shed now, hopefully ashamed of itself.

Well the Acer OEM BIOS has basically zero options. You can't disable resources, all that has to be done via jumpers.

I like these OEM machines because they are usually robust and stable. I'm not after speed, I got SS7 and Slot1 parts for that 😀

Getting a complete PC is quite cost effective. Only problem: There are hardly any on the market 😀

Initially I wanted to get some nice UMC chipset boards from Germany (like the ones RG100 recommend), but they always went for EUR 100+ and that's without all the other bits.

I'm in love with that IPEX case; it is very clean white all around. Nothing like a nicely matching case to catch my eye. Is that 6 case LEDs I see? Whatever for?

I too had an Asus VX97. It is quite a well built board. Also running it with a P233MMX. Plopped in 128 MB of RAM and gave it to a relative 7 years ago.

Did somebody say Cyrix?

If you're in the US (or don't mind shipping) I can recommend these:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Unisys-Cwd4002-mini-D … =item3a59242ccc

They only have 1 ISA slot and it's short, but come with PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard, Ethernet and are compatible with 486DX4 CPUs.

So cute these little machines 😀

I remember seeing that 486 on ebay and thought it looked very nice I'm still hoping to stumble on a 486 or older being chucked out but I think I missed out after discounting stuff at the time 🙁 oh well one day....