386 PC, mainboard replacement

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This is the original mainboard the the PC came with, searching through The Retro Web, it is most likely an ECS 386S.

At the bottom right is a slot for a cache card which is mechanically broken and something in that general area has released magic smoke while testing the machine. It would not boot anymore since then and even before took several attempts mashing the reset button until it would boot.

This is the original Intel 80386DX-33 that was installed in the machine, next to a coin of roughly the same vintage for size comparison.

The new board has an AM386DX-40 soldered onto it, with an unpopulated footprint for a proper socket and an actual socket for a 387 nearby. The 387 that I installed here was pried off the original board.

The green can with wires attached is the BIOS battery from the original mainboard. Currently, it holds enough charge for the CMOS settings to persist (mostly), but the RTC tends to get stuck at the current date and time it had when the machine was last powered off.

The inside of the machine with the replacement mainboard and replacement PSU installed. A number of splitters and adapters are used, because the Flex ATX PSU transplanted into the AT power-brick case is lacking power cables.

The new mainboard is a J-Bond A430C-H obtained from an EBay reseller who had it sorted into the wrong category and was willing to part with it for less than €30 (shipping included).

With the much smaller mainboard and all of the hard drives removed, there is now a gaping void inside the case.

The case, by the way, has hinges and two convenient buttons that can be pressed to unlock it and swing it open. This contrasts to the original PC AT and other clones of that era that had way too many screws to fasten a U-shaped metal bracket that would slide off.

A Commodore PC-I can be seen in the background which appears tiny by comparison.

This contraption was screwed in through the bottom of the case, holding one of the many broken hard drives that I got with the machine.

The graphics card and super I/O board are also from the original machine. More specifically, I got the machine with a 2TheMax, MAX VGA 4000 card, sporting a whole 1M of graphics RAM and a TsengLabs ET4000.

Because of the vintage of the graphics chip and the VRAM size, I suspect that this is not the graphics card that the machine was originally sold with, but the previous owner might have retrofitted it at some point?

Given the fact that a 378 FPU that was installed (and knowing roughly were the machine came from) it might have served as some sort of CAD workstation in the past, warranting a graphics card with enough VRAM to hold a higher resolution framebuffer.


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