Rebuild of my 486 system.
My recent project ended up with me rebuilding my old system, due to the CMOS battery leaking acid, really eating up some traces on the board.
As much as I had hoped to of saved my older motherboard, which was a TMC Research PCI48AF Version 3.0 board, I could not. Here are the traces on the old board…
Then the backside:
It looked a lot worse than this, before I cleaned up the corrosion it with vinegar and rubbing alcohol. It had one of those barrel shaped batteries, I would definitely recommend anyone with a classic working system, to be sure to have these changed out. Even if you are in the market for a motherboard, like if you were hunting around online, never overlook the battery, and see what possible mess it may have left. And if it still works, then it’s best to replace the battery immediately and clean up the corrosion. 😉
Now I had been using a AM5x86 CPU, which ran at 133MHz in here, as well as a ATI Rage LT Pro AGP 8MB PCI graphics card. Along with 32MB of RAM and 256k cache. I miss that old configuration…
However my next step was to find another motherboard, and fortunately, one came up, which is an Elitegroup Computer Systems, UM8810P-AIO. Which had a nice AMD DX4 100Mhz processor, and 64MB of DRAM. 256k of onboard cache. Which turned out to be pretty sweet, even came with an S3 Trio64 GPU.
So let the build begin! First picture shows both motherboards, UM8810P-AIO on the left and the PCI48AF on the right.
After getting all the components installed I decide to work on a little bit of wire management.
Then here I have it running Sim Tower, in Windows 3.1. 🙂
I then decided, that it’s complete, after having the video drivers installed in Windows 3.1, and everything in good working order, I can finally close up the case. 😀
I was originally going to put my ATI Mach64 in, but nothing would display on the monitor, the system would boot as it does, with out any output… but the S3 Trio64 works pretty well, so I can’t complain. The main reason from straying away from the ATI Rage LT Pro card I had in it with the older motherboard, was due to Commander King 4 having compatibility issues with it. Mainly with the rough horizontal scrolling in the game. Not an issue to worry about with the S3. 🙂
Also for anyone curious about the 72-pin SIMM RAM on the audio card, this is a SimmConn memory adapter with a 32MB SIMM installed. Expanding the memory on the Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold audio card, however, the card is limited to 28MB max total. Great for loading sound fonts. 🙂
Here’s a picture comparing two of the same card, one with and one with out the SimmConn module:
Rear view of the tower:
System Specifications:
AMD 486 DX4 at 100MHz
ELITEGROUP COMPUTER SYSTEMS, INC. UM8810P-AIO motherboard (Capable of 128MB of RAM, max!)
64MB DRAM + 256K Cache
S3 Trio64 86C764 PCI Graphics card. Not sure on VRAM amount.
3DFX Voodoo 2 3D Acceleration Card
Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold with Add-On SIMMConn Memory Adapter expanding the audio RAM up to 28MB!
2GB Transcend Compact Flash Card in place of a Harddrive, using a Syba Compact Flash to IDE adapter, that mounts in the rear brackets.
Memorex 52x CD-ROM/CD-RW Optical Drive.
3.5″ 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive.
5.25″ 1.2MB Floppy Disk Drive.
MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 with all the appropriate drivers installed.
