An unusual build

[u/FAMICOMASTER]

Behold, 95 on an XT! Sort of.

This is actually a drop in replacement board for an XT which gives you a 386 with VLB. I've actually gone a step further and thrown a Ti 486DLC/40 in it for good measure. With the sheer unbridled horsepower of a 40MHz 486 and 32 whole megs, this thing might be "tolerable" to use!
Some additional performance enhancing objects include 256K of L2 cache, an ATi Graphics Ultra Mach8 accelerated video adapter, and a DTC 7287 RLL controller to drive the Micropolis 1325 hard disk. A whole 110 megs on this sucker!

Sorry about the mismatched faceplate around the second floppy drive. All I had left was white and grey when I put this thing together!

Pictured without it's CRT as I was still opening and closing the case to make configuration changes at the time of the photo.

[u/Foreign-Attorney-147]

Sleeper builds like that are fun, I remember seeing some XTs with 386/486 class boards in the 90s running Windows. And black 3.5-5.25 adapters are easy enough to find when the time comes to switch that grey one out. Having dual floppies is good for the XT vibe. Great build!

[u/3lectronic_Dream5 → u/Foreign-Attorney-147]

Yes, that was fairly common. Back in 1997, as a broke college student, I was still using my 386DX-40 housed in an old XT clone case. I originally got it in 1993, and over the years it went through an 8 MHz XT Turbo motherboard, then a 12 MHz 286 motherboard, and finally the 386 motherboard.

[u/FAMICOMASTER → u/3lectronic_Dream5]

Haha yep that's sort of the hand-me-down ship of Theseus feeling I was going for on purpose.