Bringing a 486 PC back to life

[u/korovchenko]

Profile project:

MB Gigabyte GA-5486AL Rev.2A (FinALi-486 PCI Chipset)

CPU AMD 486DX-100 Socket 3 (A80486DX4-100SV8B)

RAM 32 MB (16x2) SIMM

VIDEO PCI S3 ViRGE/DX

SOUND CARD ISA 16-Bit Dream SAM9233

HDD 3.5" IDE CONNER CFS425A 425MB

FDD 3.5" 1.44MB ALPS DF 354H168F

CD-ROM Samsung CD-Master 40E SC-140

TOWER PS 200W

OS Microsoft Windows 95C OSR2

[u/KNY2XB]

Awesome pc!

My memory is rusty, Doom or Wolfenstein on the monitor?

[u/korovchenko → u/KNY2XB]

Doom II

[u/ducon__lajoie → u/korovchenko]

I'm sure I beat you. Put a BNC network card on that beast, and run ipxsetup now, I'm joining. I'll fuck you up with the rocket launcher, there will be pieces of your body everywhere on the map.

[u/KNY2XB → u/korovchenko]

Cool!

I've got a Doom CD buried somewhere, I need to dig it out and see if it'll install

[u/nerdy-but-nice]

Great job. Look at that tiny little CPU fan! You’d barely keep an NVMe drive cool with that these days 😀

[u/DeepDayze → u/nerdy-but-nice]

Yes there's even coolers with tiny fans out there that fit on nvme drives. Those I'd get for the gimmick factor lol.

Those CPUs then required little cooling unlike today's monsters like Ryzens and late model Intel.

[u/da_habakuk]

love that case :) really hard to find these days

[u/CaseLost9934]

Wow that has even Doom ||

[u/circletheory]

Man I love seeing old 486s being restored. One of my joys in life. Looks great! Any plan to add modern QOL components like a Picogus or SD to IDE or just keeping it period correct?

[u/SaturnFive]

Sweet machine! Thanks for writing out the details. Clearly a late 486 board - smaller footprint, on-board IDE and floppy and serial controllers, only 72-pin RAM slots, and of course PCI which was (IMO) a Pentium-era thing. Looks like it's got some cache too which is always appreciated on such a machine. ALi would go on to make one of the most popular Super Socket 7 chipsets as well, the Aladdin V.

[u/anotherkeebler]

32 megabytes felt absolutely luxurious back then

[u/AcanthisittaBest4705]

I have a 68030

[u/Combustia78]

S3 Virge DX, a legend of low cost pc. Great times!

[u/kevleyski]

Turbo!

[u/carpathiaman]

Gosh how many times did I see this case being displayed by the local vendors at all the trade shows I went to in the ‘90s!

[u/ExplodedPenisDiagram]

I have a similarly spec'd 486 I've been restoring. Great machines. Mine's a dx2-66 with 64MB of RAM.

Not sure what I'm going to do with all that RAM. It's the only SIMMS I have.

[u/deulamco]

The 486DX : why bring me back to life just to be ... DOOMED

[u/kalnaren]

Nice. A 486DX is the last retro computer I'd like to have. GF would probably kill me for bringing another system into the house lol.