Last week I posted some frustration at being outbid on something. Not for the first time being polite and responsive turned out a better strategy in the end. The higher bidder just stopped communicating with the seller at some point, so I got lucky after all.

Please meet the fastest 386SX out there:

Alaris Leopard rev C with IBM 486SLC2-66 and an IIT co-pro for good measure.

First job has already been seen to: removing the Varta time bomb. Fortunately the board has an external battery header, so hooking up the replacement is easy.

Also maxed out the RAM to 16MB. Tried to do the same with L2 cache but it didn't like my chips. Need to look into what's going on there. Still, 16kB L1 and 64kB L2 is more than most CPUs with 16b memory bus can brag of.

Next step is to benchmark my ISA and VLB VGA cards on it to see how they scale with this CPU/bus, then decide which to use with it permanently. Also (and relevant to that choice) I need to figure out what to do with the system as a whole. IBM design just begs for OS/2 I suppose...

Edit:
Cache problem was simple - with onboard 64kB cache it only needed a 64kbit tag. Replaced that with a 256kbit tag and it suddenly worked fine with 128kB L2 😀

imi wrote:

when one G200 simply isn't enough 🤣

pic

when one quad G200 simply isn't enough 🤣

I like how they one time think they need heatsinks and one time they don't

also rather nice surprise with this "mystery" PC, I didn't really know what I was getting but I assumed 286 and I wanted the EGA card anyways...
assumed correctly, and a nice one at that... in need of immediate battery amputation, there's quite nasty corrosion on the keyboard connector but the board looks like it may survive, the big trace looks a bit tarnished... hope there's no surprise on the underside though.

edit: how can I quote my own images?

Nice Morse Suntac motherboard!
No need to hurry with the battery removal - if it didn't leaked yet, it's not going to anytime soon. It's GP anyway and they don't leak or just get a little corrosion on the terminals.

well it did leak already, there's heavy buildup on the top of the battery and the keyboard connector, and the big traces on the board look a bit darker around that area... didn't get to it today, but it'll be the first thing I'll do tomorrow when I get home 😀

Intel486dx33 wrote:

Royal Mail from England.

2 NEW never used IBM Blue lighting’s

Nice ! Have never owned an IBM 486. So 3L 45p for airmail ? That is about $4.50 us. How much for the two DX2-66 ?

Box of 170 random new-old stock I/O shields for $21. About 12 cents a piece.

Quite a bit of variety of stuff in here. While some of it is for newer boards, there's a fair amount for motherboards made before 2005.

You can never have too many I/O shields when so many people sell boards without them.

^^ oh, so THAT'S where they all end up.

dionb wrote:

Last week I posted some frustration at being outbid on something. Not for the first time being polite and responsive turned out a better strategy in the end. The higher bidder just stopped communicating with the seller at some point, so I got lucky after all.

Please meet the fastest 386SX out there:

Alaris Leopard rev C with IBM 486SLC2-66 and an IIT co-pro for good measure.

One of these was my first "486" back in the day. I traded a Commodore 1084 monitor for this board and a 170MB IDE HDD. I get it home, swap out my 286 board and nothing! I eventually work out the somehow the only VGA card I had wasn't compatible with this board - I ran my new "486" with for a couple of weeks until I could scrounge up another VGA card.

dionb wrote:

Alaris Leopard rev C with IBM 486SLC2-66 and an IIT co-pro for good measure.

mine has the exact same botchwire, guess they came from the factory like that ^^
I don't have a matching FPU for it though.

yes the wire is a factory patch, I used to have this board as well

Scored a box of 11 brand-new (old stock) Pentium-III PGA 370 motherboards for $92, so that's just over $8 per motherboard.

These are OEM Gateway boards with 2 PCI slots, made by MSI, model MS-6312. Unable to find out much about this board online other than a lengthy thread suggesting that these boards are notorious for having bad caps. So I may end up with a pain-in-the-butt recapping project on my hands depending on what these look like.

Back panel is kind of lacking in ports - it does have 3 USB ports and a parallel port but is lacking a serial port and PS/2 ports. So I'll have to settle for Keyboard/mouse emulation over USB. Should be able to connect the 2 front ports in my case to the lone USB header, thus giving me 5 USB ports in total. Board does have a COM header so I can add a serial port if I decide to in one of the free PCI slot areas. The 2 PCI slots are just enough to set this up with a PCI sound card and video card. Has an Intel 810 chipset which looks to be friendly to PCI sound cards in DOS mode.

bmwsvsu wrote:

The 2 PCI slots are just enough to set this up with a PCI sound card and video card.

It has on-board VGA. Not sure what games you want to play on these, but the on-board video card may be good enough.

It has on-board sound as well...

dr.ido wrote:

[...]

One of these was my first "486" back in the day. I traded a Commodore 1084 monitor for this board and a 170MB IDE HDD. I get it home, swap out my 286 board and nothing! I eventually work out the somehow the only VGA card I had wasn't compatible with this board - I ran my new "486" with for a couple of weeks until I could scrounge up another VGA card.

Out of interest: which card didn't work?

So far I've run it with CL and S3 cards with no trouble at all. Having some issues with turbo LED - but turbo itself works fine, slooooooow with turbo off 😉

imi wrote:

also rather nice surprise with this "mystery" PC, I didn't really know what I was getting but I assumed 286 and I wanted the EGA […]
Show full quote

also rather nice surprise with this "mystery" PC, I didn't really know what I was getting but I assumed 286 and I wanted the EGA card anyways...
assumed correctly, and a nice one at that... in need of immediate battery amputation, there's quite nasty corrosion on the keyboard connector but the board looks like it may survive, the big trace looks a bit tarnished... hope there's no surprise on the underside though.

hardware33_03.jpg

edit: how can I quote my own images?

Hi Imi, nice PC and nice board! Think I have the same one here
Re: Suntac 80286 Mainboards

Can you also post pictures of the EGA-card and the case please? Whcih BIOS revision does the board have?

Caching SCSI controller for my upcoming EISA 486 build.

Wow. That is really neat. Is it both internal SCSI and external? My eyesight isn't the best.

Predator99 wrote:

Hi Imi, nice PC and nice board! Think I have the same one here
Re: Suntac 80286 Mainboards

Can you also post pictures of the EGA-card and the case please? Whcih BIOS revision does the board have?

yeah, I recognized it because you posted about it before 😀

I snipped off the battery and cleaned off most of the corrosion for now, interestingly enough the battery terminals themselves aren't really corroded but the keyboard connector needs to go probably and one of the AT power pins was corroded on the backside, also one trace on the back might need repair, otherwise it looks in good shape.

unfortunately there are no markings on the bios chips, interestingly enough they're factory marked on the chip directly, so I assume it's a very early version probably?
so that'll have to wait until I get around to testing it.

it also came with this nice matching full size MFM controller

the EGA card is another Genoa Super EGA Hi-Res, already got another variant of these, it is my first ever GPU of my first PC, I don't know which version exactly I only know the model from the original manifest I still have, in any case having different variants can't hurt 😀

the case... you're not gonna tell me now you made me pay more for it, are you? :p
it's nice, as I already had another one of these too 😀

I've been in a bit of a retro pc shopping frenzy lately...
Still being on the hunt for a decent AT midi tower case for my Tyan Trinity based SS7 build, I came across a nearly complete system on eBay (seller's photo):

This thing has a working Commate S7AX mainboard with an AMD K6-2 333 MHz, 128mb of RAM, an S3 Trio graphics card and some generic CD-ROM drive in it, missing only the hard disk. As a bonus, it comes with an iomega Zip drive, which seems to become my standard for exchanging data between retro PCs, because somehow nearly every pre-2000 build seems to be equipped with one...
Being the only bidder, I got the whole thing for 35€ + shipping which is not a terribly good deal, but still okay. Since I already have all components that I need for my build, the board + CPU will probably go back to eBay very quickly.

Other things I bought this week:
- The 30€ lot with the Rage Fury MAXX in it (arrived yesterday, card is in excellent condition and seems to work fine, might post some pictures later).
- Another lot with various VGA cards, network cards and optical drives, details remain unknown until the package arrives. Was only 10€ so I got it mostly because I was curious what the VGA cards are, and I am running short of network cards anyway
- An AWE 64 Gold for around 40€, which is well below the price these things tend to go for lately (60-70€) but still a bit to much to call it a bargain

imi wrote:

the case... you're not gonna tell me now you made me pay more for it, are you? :p
it's nice, as I already had another one of these too 😀

hardware33_06.jpg

Thanks, very nice!! No, I usually dont bid on full systems. Prices are too high and I dont have space left...

I received these 3 cards today. Was sure I made a good and fair deal by offering 50€: Voodoo2, Voodoo3 and a IDE-controller with ROM, will put a XT-IDE on it. All cards looking good, but 2 caps of the V2 broke during shipment.

But...what mistake did I make? 🙁 🙁 🙁