Building a high end 386DX PC

Taking a look at putting together a high end PC built around the 386DX CPU

[fe]

My first PC was 386DX-33MHz too. with 4MB RAM, 100MB HDD, Hercules card and monochrome monitor but no sound card... Now I miss it so badly!

[clintthompson]

Great video and awesome vintage build. Also love the moment you said the control is much better you launch the car your driving into a police car. Prue Gold!

[quantumfoam]

I always look forward to your videos! 386 is an era that I have yet to explore. Right now I'm charting a course through VESA Local Bus land.

[slytheraccoon]

im not really into computers but hearing you talk about it is oddly relaxing
have a sub

[patrickbateman]

Very nice!! It takes me so much back to my childhood :)
Nostalgia for machines where you could really tell it was computing.

[GreySectoid]

Damn nice build, that would have been my dream machine in 92-93

[NesNyt]

U need parts of anything, got a warehouse full of 1980s components from housings to resistors. Nice videel

[yellowblanka]

Your footage of Wing Commander definitely illustrates a major advantage of DOSBox...being able to control the number of CPU cycles available at any time to dial in the right speed.

[upgrade]

back when western digital made video cards

[philscomputerlab]

With the turbo button, I'm curious if anyone has figured out if you can modify the bios or settings to change its behaviour. I believe it introduces wait states to make it slower?

[Smte]

Good choice on the WD90C31. I use to run the WD90C33 VLB variant in a former DX4 build and it was speedy with DOOM and other DOS games. They continuously trade blows with the ET4000/W32. Never had an issue using my WD90C33 with LCD displays. Sadly the VLB board died, and it was replaced with a 5x86-P75 / S3 Vision864 PCI build.

[jorgeandrade]

In 1993, my neighbor got a 386SX-33 Mhz, 8MB RAM, 40 MB HDD, no sound card. I was at his house every single day, I'd watch him play games for hours, I wasn't allowed to touch it, but I didn't care, I was witnessing history in the making, those 'puters were fascinating! I myself had only been "exposed" to an 8-bit MSX computer before that and my Atari 2600. 4 years later, I had a computer of my own, in 1997, it was a Pentium 100 Mhz, 32MB RAM, 1Gb HDD, CD-ROM, Soundblaster, the typical setup of that time I guess. I wish I still had that PC.

[mariobrito]

Great video! To be honest, I'd be pretty happy with the performance of 33mhz with cache off, it's a *bit* fast, but in my experience, not much. Also, it'll get slower with more ships on the fight (the simulator is basically just you against a bunch of foes, and it starts 1v1)

Awesome build you got there, kudos!

[Alianger]

Please show off more games from that era on this setup!

[roasthunter]

The first PC I bought was a 386 cost me £1350 which was about $2500 US in about 1991, came with an AMD 386DX 40mhz, Asustek motherboard, 4Mb RAM, 130Mb HDD on a cached HDD controller, 1Mb Trident Graphics card, floppy drive, 14" CRT. I upgraded it to 8Mb, added another 210Mb HDD, swapped the Trident for a Tseng ET4000, added a Cyrix Maths co-processor, Adlib compatible soundcard, CD-Rom drive. I remember throwing the motherboard and all the bits in the bin about year 2002, wish I hadn't now really.

[alvaroacwellan]

Btw I've tested many ISA VGA cards too and came to the same conclusion - the WD90C31 is a very good fast card. They also tend to play nice with LCD displays. Some of the ET4000s I tried (and all the Trident 8900D ones which are - surprise surprise - nice and fast too) exhibit jail bars sampled by the LCD ADC circuitry. On the other hand, (at least?) most WDC cards showed a nice and even picture.

....And I've reached the end - well, you can keep the CPU, it'll work just this fine underclocked with another (40-50MHz) crystal. If you have to go out of your way to get another one with lower rating - be assured it doesn't really matter.

[yakovleitner]

love it! and love Ultima VII. used to play it on my 486dx2-80, the game was too fast xd uhh i remember some games were picky about memory management programs, some needed it, some refused to run with it

[ibazulic]

Difference between 386SX and DX models is in the bus size: both processors are internally 32 bit (full 32 bit instruction architecture), but the DX model has also a 32 bit data and address bus, while the SX model has a 16 bit data bus and 24 bit address bus. So half the data throughput between DX and SX models, which has a tremendous impact on overall speed.

[kyky]

Someday I wanna do a 386 build with the exodos project

[Jerkwad]

Fun fact: The first-run batch of DX 33 chips had some defective CPUs. The one you have, marked with a double sigma, is ok for 32-bit software. The defective ones were marked "16-BIT S/W ONLY"