First post, by Shodan486
Hi all after long pause of mine. Been doing some modern stuff now like virtualization, networking etc., but "The itch of retro" has stroke me once again (to be honest, my friend just gave me 5 boxes of old HW - Sound cards, NICs, VGAs, even PCI and ISA SCSI controller board - plus couple of old magazines, so I just HAD TO do something with my retro stuff) and I, again, pull out my old "Multimedia" 486 rig, just to improve anything that could come up to mind.
The "Multimedia 486" PC:
Mainboard : ASUS PVI-486SP3 Rev 1.2 // BIOS 0307
CPU: Am5x86 133MHz @ 160MHz // 40MHz FSB
RAM: 32MB 70ns 72pin SIMM // 2-1-1-1
VGA2D: Matrox Millenium 2MB PCI
VGA3D: Voodoo 2 12MB (probably OEM) PCI
Storage: 73GB 3.5" Seagate Cheetah 15K RPM 63Pin SCSI @ AHA-2940UW PCI
230MB 3.5" Fujitsu M2512A 80Pin SCSI @ AHA-2940UW PCI
52x 5.25" CD-ROM Acer
1,44MB 3.5" FDD Teac
Audio: SB16Vibra with Radio tuner ISA
NIC: 3Com Etherlink III 10Mbit ISA
PSU: 200W NoBrand
Misc: VideoBlaster VT300 ISA
5.25" Fan Assembly
Slot Fan Assembly (above Voodoo2 card)
P200 CPU Fan
Some photos:
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First of all I wanted to share this with you, any suggestions or hints whatsoever are welcome. My last goal is to get hold of Millenium II, even that may be a little useless in such a machine, but nevertheless I wish to try this out. The soundcard could be better, I guess many of you have your opinions on this, but to clarify my primary usage of this rig - Win95 games. Not strictly, but that has always been my intention with this particular build.
It's a sweet setup, for Win95 environment, has no flaws...well, it has a minor one 😁. I would have never thought this, but these machines (rather setups) tend to produce huge environmental heat. I live in Slovakia. Slovakia's become a big shithole of something like a subtropical area with temperatures like 33-40 degrees Celsius in the recent years during summer, which not only gives ME hard time to stand it out, but also these computers(?).
Well I'm speaking in the terms of the CPU only now. This conclusion (that the CPU's the one with a problem) was not easy to come to - the computer behaved fine a couple of months ago (that was the time of my other occupation), I can't come up with a singli thing now. But these days, when the outdoor temperature is like 35 plus/minus and I'm sitting in a room with my bro and his OC'ed core2 duo with Radeon7850 OC edition, the indoor temperature could be compared to the outdoor one and the components are exposed to this enviroment also.
I/O errors, CRC errors during installations; game crashes; corrupt files to & from network. First I thought it could be the PSU since it is pretty weak, but I remember trying out a wattmeter from my friend and it showed me something around 70-80 during load, but that was before the SCSI drive and the controller and the Magneto-Optical drive, so I'm adding a total of 60W max, which is still under the capability of the PSU. Thus the temperature was the last possible thing. Cables could not have been wrong since the NIC also behaved incorrectly - I tried the 7MHz options also - nothing). Thought it could be the HDD or the CPU. HDD is pretty hot, but excluded by letting the Quake menu playdemo loop for a couple of minutes and it crashed - it does not use the HDD after playing all 4 levels first.
So it was the CPU. Definitely had to be one. So I put my socket7 cooler on it with a 50mm fan on it, the heatsink is like a 1,5cm in height - AND IT STILL IS NOT ENOUGH!
Everything in Win95 is great for now, no crashes. But I have a game with a very sensitive install process with CRC checksumming (World of Aden: Thunderscape) - It copies around 300 files of total of 20MB to the HDD in DOS environment and it produced me around 140-160 CRC errors when regular heatsink for 486 CPUs was used (after long use of the computer that day - in the beginning, it produces almost no errors). Now I get under 10, no matter what - BUT STILL ! 🙁
Alas my brothers in arms (of 486), my question stands here:
Do you have similar problems with Your highend rigs based upon the 486 technology under the weather conditions similar to the ones described above?
MOBO: PVI-486SP3 Rev 1.2
CPU: POD-83
RAM: 2x16MB
VIDEO: Matrox Millenium 2MB/Voodoo2 12MB/Video Blaster VT300
AUDIO: SB Vibra16 FM
SCSI: 72GB 15k RPM HDD/YAMAHA CD-RW 16x/ZIP drive + FDD drive
NIC: 3Com Etherlink III
PSU: 230W Generic
OS: Win95 OSR2.5