What would you do if...

[Bobfantastic]

...you'd just got your hands on an old pc, with the idea of making an HTPC out of it, when you realise that it's so old, the only parts you recognise are the PSU and processor?
Sounds silly, but please- anyone with any ideas what in the heck these things do let me know- I'm beginning to doubt whether it was worth me cutting open my fingers to get into the thing...

I've been reliably informed that this was used by a professional programmer in the early-to-mid 90s (the year, not the programmer), and that the machine was 'top of the range' at that time. So then, first off- the face. Looks normal, has a 'turbo' button which brings back fond memories of thinking that it made a difference...

Next, the ___(opposite of face). Starting to get a little weird... No motherboard connections and what appears to be a midi connector

Children, you may wish to hide behind the sofa at this point...



What the...? Every connection on the back panel is an added extra? There's a 'Designed in the USA' sticker on something? Motherboard power is supplied via 2 separate 6-pin connectors? I can spot the PCI connectors, one of which sports the following graphics "enhancement"
and I dont think I want to know about the removable ROM chips on it
however the other ports are alien to me. I've seen the massive black things (steady now) in a couple of old PCs before, but never four of them in there together.
And certainly not occupied by something...
This is apparently the sound card, although it was also hooked up to the CD drive as the controller (cable has been removed to give better view, it used to connect to the row of parallel pins on the extreme RHS of the card) and sports a pair of what appear to be SODIMM slots, although they're almost certainly not.
Whats really weird is the arrangement of slots on the motherboard... There are four of one kind, two of which are filled, with another slot of a different kind in the middle

and beside the processor (if thats what they calld it back in the day ) is this thing. Judging by the text scratched onto the motherboard, it's a "cache-slot" and can cope with either 256 or 512 massive Kilobytes of data. Surely that's not the CPU cache, is it?

I popped the lid off the processor, and it said (printed in ink) "Cyrix x86 P133", th fixture said "Socket 7".
Considering we're now up to socket 9xx, I think this could be even older than I'd expected.

So then, to summarise- is there anything worth keeping from this machine? It's so old I think the only useful parts would be the Heatsink (as a paperweight) and maybe the Creative card as a museum piece.
What do you think- would it or could it make a good HTPC?!

[IsaacKuo]

This looks like a rather typical Socket 7 system. That processor is a Pentium-compatable processor made by Cyrix. Early-to-mid '90s sounds about right; that machine would have been pretty hot stuff back then.

At 133mhz, it's far too slow for HTPC use.

[qviri]

Ah, brings back the memories. The video card will be fine for pushing 1024*768 to a monitor, if you have storage space you don't need, you can keep it as a back-up graphics card for testing dead PCs.

Also, the RAM makes for a fine keychain accessory.

Other than that, it's pretty useless unless you actually want to use it. It will run Win98 reasonably fast, and with a network card might let you do some browsing, but don't expect much. It would be just fine for playing music (well, maybe not FLAC/MP4, but MP3 will certainly go), but movies are right out.

[Candor]

I used to have a Cyrix. One thing that can be relatively certain is that it runs HOT.

We're talking about this thing like it was from the stone age. My god, I'm not that old am I? I remember I was drooling over one of these things when I was still running a 3x86. I got one for $1300, and it ran so hot that it died within 1 1/2 years. The fan just lost the will to live, and went out one night.

The effort to get that thing working well again would be worth far more than the final result: a loud, slow, hot, win95 machine.

[Bobfantastic]

That's about what I thought- incidentally, with regards to the computer running well again, it was running Windows 95 until this morning when it's previous owner pulled the HDD out and put a hammer through it.
I'll maybe just turn the case into a beer-can dispenser, that would be quite cool...

We're talking about this thing like it was from the stone age

Its a PC that could be pushing 15 years old. It is.

[BillyBuerger]

Oh wow, I love looking at this old stuff.

- The turbo switch did have a purpose. Although "Turbo" is maybe not a good name for it. Turbo on meant that it ran at it's rated speed. For my old 386, this was 25MHz. When turbo was off, it ran at 8MHz. Seems odd, but some software at the time was written to run on at 8MHz cpu. Run it at 25MHz and things happen way too fast.

- It's an AT case, not ATX. It had a keyboard port on the back. But everything else was either on an expansion card or ribbon cabled to one of the available port openings. Looks like there's enough room for an ATX motherboard in that case. But it would take a bit of modding to make the IO backplate area. That could be fun

- The two blue connectors at the top of the expansion slots are serial ports. They come in 9 and 25-pin variants.

- The PSU is also an AT form factor, not ATX. They used 2 6-pin connectors. And they usually weren't marked which one went where. So you had to be careful to plug them into the correct locations.

- I've got some old S3 video cards. At least it's PCI and not ISA (the black slots) The extra chips in there are optional video memory. Maybe from 2MB to 4MB?

- When CD-ROMs first came out, they weren't supported by the same bus as hard drives. So, it was either SCSI (expensive) or a proprietary thing like Create did with the Sound Blaster cards. I don't know if I've ever seen one in use though. Pretty cool. The slots there are for memory. Probably to increase performance of the onboard CD-ROM controller.

- The slots on the motherboard are for memory. 4 SIMMs and one SDR DIMM. Kinda like you see some motherboards these days that support DDR and DDRII memory.

- Yes, the slot next to the CPU is for the optional external CPU cache.

- Sockets currently are in the AM2 or T(775) variant for desktops. I'm not sure what socket 9xx you're talking about. The socket naming didn't go in order or anything. It was whatever they wanted to call it. Now it usually based on the number of pins on the CPU. Socket478, Socket939, Socket775, etc...

It definitely would not work as an HTPC. As was mentioned, it'll play mp3s.... that's probably about it. I don't expect is has more than 64MB of memory. Meaning you'd need a pretty light GUI to run it comfortably. Windows98 or a light Linux distro.

[jharne]

Fond memories indeed, and it even has the added cache card. But is that SIMM lots on the soundcard?

[jharne]

Thanks Google, can you belive it's the first time I've seen a Sound Blaster AWE32 IDE. I had a PRO and a 16 PCI, but this is the first time for a AWE 32.

[mb2]

hm. the fact that it has a hot processor pretty much makes it useless.. if it was cool/low power then it could work as a fanless print server, or mp3 player..

funny how we've only just reached the point at which pretty much every connector that thing has is obselete (a couple arguably). even fundamental concepts like fsb are marked..

while i haven't been to the dump lately.. watching a program the other night (about peoples bank details being stolen from HDDs from dumped PCs) apparently a lot of people are just leaving P3-class computers there.. and i'd bet the majority just need a reinstall or new hdd or something.. (or they might even still work) something like that would surely do fine for an SD HTPC.

[Bobfantastic]

jharne- yeah, it scared me as well! And it overhangs the motherboard by a good three inches, which seems like poor design to me.

mb2- the only things for salvage (besides a few new bits to play with) are the Molex extensions and some of the ribbon cables. The CD-audio lead is of an archaic design, the main PSU switch is built into the front panel (so the power goes through the PSU, out to the users finger, and then back through the PSU to the components), there's some sort of magnetic storage drive as well that I dont undertand. The town elder mumbled something about 'floppy drive' before they sedated him again.

Any more information on this machine, feel free to share- I'd forgotten (or possibly not been born early enough to know) the name of the ISA ports, amongst other things. However...
I think this PC has sealed it's own fate. It will never operate again, the whiny fan will not whine, the CD drive has been run by the sound card for the last time (thank god), and never again will a user press the turbo button in a effort to make it run Vista... Why you ask?

Three simple words.

[cAPSLOCK]

Welcome to the marvelous world of "OldEgg"
P3's seem to be the standard trash bin material nowadays, that's why I'm using one. Keeping a sharp eye out for when the northwoods hit the street

[jharne]

One thing to point out, there's only one removable ROM on the video card. The other two are addition ram chips. I had one, but could never afford the addition memory, all 1MB of it.

[IsaacKuo]

mb2- the only things for salvage (besides a few new bits to play with) are the Molex extensions and some of the ribbon cables. The CD-audio lead is of an archaic design, the main PSU switch is built into the front panel (so the power goes through the PSU, out to the users finger, and then back through the PSU to the components),

Oh, there's stuff to salvage! The best bits are the reset and turbo buttons--they can be used as power buttons for scratchbuilt projects (or if you convert this case to an ATX format). Next up is the PSU fan--it probably has an 80mm fan in it, which might turn out to be very quiet when undervolted to 5v.

Finally, the drive cage may be useful for hard drive suspension. One popular and easy option is to mount a hard drive in a drive cage, and rest the drive cage on foam on the bottom of the case. This allows airflow all around the hard drive.

[IsaacKuo]

Oh, I almost forgot--save all of the PCI slot backplanes. In particular, anything with a 25pin serial or parallel port can be useful. If you ever put together a scratchbuilt case, one thing that's annoying to do is mount the ATX backplane. I find it easier to mount the ATX backplane to the motherboard itself rather than to the outer case. There's an elegant way to do this using a 25pin backplane...a little hard to explain but it's really slick.

[McBanjo]

That's almost BTX-style, cool
It brings up memorys...

[HammerSandwich]

Fun thread!

I think I'd have scrounged an appropriate hard drive and used it as a gaming PC. That Cyrix chip and S3 card would FLY through Civilization, Doom, and Simcity. I mean the ones before they actually had version numbers, of course...

[Bobfantastic]

used it as a gaming PC

Moving swiftly on...

IsaacKuo- That's a good idea, I was planning to use the chassis for the HTPC but once I'd had a look at it I forgot.
I might well use the 5.25" bays in my current PC, since I'm not using any 3.5"'s.

cAPSLOCK- Roll on Core4Quadro!

[Graeme43]

That brings back the memories

...you'd just got your hands on an old pc, with the idea of making an HTPC out of it, when you realise that it's so old, the only parts you recognise are the PSU and processor? Rolling Eyes

[Chris Chan]

Muuwarahaaaaaa! LMFAO!!!! Cyrix?!?!?!??!?!?!?!??!!! But seriously I've seen older. I've actually seen one of the few socket 7 boards with Vesa, and I'm only 14. Our school got in a load of p1's donated. Funny, because there was a pwnage p2 lappy (4lb) in the bundle too and all the computers in school are p2-p3. I used to run a 200mmx as a backup box in early '06 before I goodwilled it due to space concerns.

[Cerberus]

My folks have you all beat. They still have their Northgate 316SX (i386 processor, 16mHz clock speed) PC from 1991. It uses 30-pin RAM modules!

They have since moved on to a Pentium-120 Acer Aspire desktop (long departed), a Pentium II-400 IBM Aptiva (now mine to tinker, trying to figure out how to put a better heatsink on the damn SEPP processor package), and now, a Pentium M Dell laptop.

[Longwalker]

Everything in thre is basically uselsss by modern standards. Cyrix chips had such poor floating point performance that they'd have a hard time playing high rate MP3s. With two LAN cards you could use the system as a Linux-based NAT router/firewall but with routers as cheap as they are these days there's no point.


As a point of trivia, the CDROM connector on the sound card is just an IDE port. It's not old enough to have a propritary CDROM interface. As for the sound card RAM slots, they are for hardware wavetable synthesis support. Hardware CDROM caching was a bit out of Creative Labs' league.

[Bobfantastic]

Thanks for that, Longwalker. It may have been useless at floating-point, but the Cyrix makes for an impressive coaster!
(I ripped out the mounting bracket for the CPU as well so that it wouldnt scratch my desk)

I'm now left with a real puzzler- what to do with the serial mouse included with this relic?
I've disposed of the gubbins inside, but I'm now out of ideas almost. Entertainingly, it used a PIC16C fo control so with a bit of effort I could make it do something else altogether, but I dont know what! In the mean time, I reckon I could fit a 1.8" HDD inside, and replace the serial lead with a USB. It would be absolutely pointless, I agree, but I like the idea of hiding a backup drive somewhere burglars wouldnt get to it (and by burglars, I mean family friends and feds)