Got the parts and have been doing lots of play...er work on it. Everything looks like new, but smells faintly of cigarette smoke... just glad it's not caked with the smell or tar. The fan for the cpu was coolermaster and REALLY badly failing - sounds like there's sand in it, bushings must be totally shot. The fujitsu 8.4gb drives fail DBAN tests miserably, but everything else works great and looks great too!
I had problems with the cirrus logic AGP card and puppy linux, but I really don't care about that card at all, as I am already using my ATi rage128 in the PC and everything is good.
I seem to not be able to set the motherboard to 50MHz FSB, someone said I should be able to, but I cannot find the DIP settings anywhere on the net. Works well at 66MHz though, and the CPU multi is completely locked ignoring all motherboard multiplier settings lower or higher than default (4.5). The CPU looks brand new and honestly does look like a retail one, but it does not have the intel stock number on it, so that might remain a mystery for far longer.
The system seems to have a bug on hard-reset, it beepblasts, I can eventually get it to restart, but it sees only 128MB ram... so like most old boards of that era, I will just stick with ctrl+alt+del soft restarts or poweroff-poweron restarts.
I have yet to install anything but DOS 6.22 on it, but soon I will have 95c and xp on it.
I am waiting for more income to buy some proper era u2w SCSI drives for it, last month I happened across a killer deal on an adaptec AHA-2940U2W 80Mbps SCSI 1st gen LVD card, which also has a 50 pin fastSCSI SE channel. I really hope I can find a good SCSI CD drive for this for cheap. That would truly make this a top of the line 1998 gaming computer 😀