I was having a look on the second-hand adverts and I noticed an "XP PC for sale" with a very early 2000s looking case, for £15. Ok, might be worth a look. Then I noticed one of the pictures which showed it had a VIA CPU?

I've never heard of this so did a bit of googling - these chips are the first from when VIA bought out Cyrix, used Socket 370 and were a lower power CPU. More info here.

It's slightly odd that the XP image shows it to be running at 733MHz, which is "Samual 2" speeds, but it's described as an EZRA which is a later chip. Anyway here it is!

It was very tidy inside - no dust at all. The motherboard looked new! No ID marks on the motherboard either, though. The CPU looks soldered to the motherboard too, which wasn't the plan...

...Yup

To find out more about it, I put it all back together and fired it up - the previous owner had a clean XP install on there with all the drivers. Turns out, according to DXDIAG/CPUZ etc

ECS or PCCHIPS M787CL+
VIA Samual 2 CPU 733MHz 133MHz FSB
SiS 630E chipset / GPU with upto 64MB shared memory
512MB SDR RAM
"Maxima" power supply ("supports AMD Athlon and Intel Pentium 4")

Time to put W98SE on it.. the PC would hang when formatting the HDD at 16% which was quite annoying. Shame, as it too looks nearly new!

I've now got another HDD in there and W98SE installing. What am I going to do with it? benchmark it obviously 😉 With the built in SiS graphics, which I am anticipating to be woeful, and then put a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI or AMD 9250 PCI in there and see how the CPU compares to P3s.