Not exactly found, but I've saved these three computers from being dumped. My friend's father-in-law had it in his garage for a pretty long time. From the look of AT cases I thought that they will be from 286 to 486 but unfortunatelly not. He was running hardware (not PC hardware 😉) shop until 2000 when he closed it and moved the first two PCs away. Good to find out they still work and remember time (somewhat) correctly, they boot and have Win98 still running (with programs, data, annoying animated cursors and so on).
1. The top left AT minitower has a FAM 486 sticker on it (FAM is local PC builder, still in bussiness i think, we had lots of 286 and 386 machines from them at school), but apparently it was upgraded during it's life.
Motherboard is an i430VX socket 7 board - PcPartner (Vtech) MB520NH with DIMM/SIMM slots and some SIMM RAM. CPU is Cyrix 6x86 P150+. VGA card is Expertcolor S3 "Trio Virge" (exatly this one http://cdn2.goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2 … 11/IMG_0241.jpg) which is a bit confusing, from the bios sticker, I think it is original S3 Virge (86C325) not S3 Trio and has expanded video memory to full 4MB EDO. As you can see on the foto it has strangely bent backplate, clearly not the original one. Then there an unknown ISA sound card (but it still have packed drivers on it's harddrive, so I have to save it for clear install).
2. The desktop AT case looks older than the first PC, but in fact is better. It has FIC PA503+ board with MVP3 chipset (simmilar to my own PC with MVP3 board I built as new back in 1999 with K6-2) populated with Intel P233MMX CPU and 64 EDO SIMM ram (DIMM slots empty). Although there is an AGP slot, it had never been used. Graphics is S3 again, in this case it is Virge/DX with 2MB (not upgraded). It has is an unusable analog TV card, ISA sound card with analog devices chip, and realtek LAN card.
3. The midtower is a pretty cheap ATX case with CeleronD 2.8 GHz CPU and crappy 350W PSU (wondering that it had not failed already). It has ECS 865PE-A7 motherboard (so it's LGA775 with DDR and AGP8x), to my suprise all capacitors look OK. RAM slots were populated with only one 256MB DDR400 module. VGA is some basic TNT2M64 passive AGP card, audio and LAN is integrated, but there is philips DVB-T card. Apparently this also wasn't a gaming PC. While it is the newest of all three PCs it wouldn't boot. Seems that RAM is faulty and motherboard is memory picky. Tried one of my memory modules (256MB DDR333), also wasn't working in this first memory slot, but was working in the second one. Finally I've managed to populate it with two 256MB sticks (one DDR333, second DDR266 overclocked to 333 😀), they run in dual-channel in memtest fine without any errors. So the motherboard is OK. This PC has two harddrives - system drive is 80GB Maxtor, but it is dead (detected ok, but won't read anything), second is 40GB IBM/hitachi, seems OK, but very noisy. Never mind, I have lots of other IDE drives to use.
Originally I was thinking to keep only one of the PCs to built retro PC. But I think, I'll keep all of them (my wife doesn't know yet 😊 ). The first one would be for DOS games, I will put CPU and RAM from the second PC. The second one could be usable for Win98/WinME. I'm eager to buy and overlock K6-III+ which was my dream CPU when I had K6-2 and these plus CPU were impossible to buy here. And the third one? I thought, I will keep some parts and dump the rest, but I've never had 865PE computer (I had SocketA and Socket754 back then), so maybe I will use it as XP setup with some interesting AGP card.
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