I’m not an intentional collector of x86 PCs. However, I have always kept a few PC’s laying around for the purpose of running legacy (MSDOS) software and as a host for legacy (ISA) hardware. In more recent years though I’ve come to appreciate these machines in their own right and so will likely keep them in the collection for years to come.
The machines listed on this page are presented in a purely random order.
Sphere P6SBU Pentium III – 500
I bought this machine in Sydney from a fellow collector in January 2024.
It’s a lovely one-owner tower in great condition, complete with original manuals and CDs.
Key specifications:
- Pentium III, 500 MHz
- Built on P6SBU motherboard by Sphere
- 384MB of RAM fitted (BIOS says this is comprised of 4 modules, but only 2 physical modules are installed)
- Hard drive is a 8.5GB SCSI drive with Windows NT installed, connected to the motherboard’s onboard SCSI controller. 3.23GB free space. I have internally disconnected this drive, and I’m now instead using a $50 32GB DOM with Widows XP Pro SP3 installed (see notes below for further details).
- Diamond Viper V770 ATX AGP 32MB video card, using Nvidia Riva TNT2/TNT2 Pro chipset
- 1997 AMIBIOS R1.5b
- Ricoh MP7060S SCSI CD-R/RW drive
- 48x IDE CDROM drive
- 3.5 inch floppy drive
- Microsoft Windows 2000 SP1 5183-270-3454174-09359 (installed on the disconnected SCSI hard drive)
- CPU is “x86 Family 6 Model 7 Stepping 2”
As received, this PC boots up very cleanly into Windows NT, with no obvious personal documents on the hard drive and with most games and other apps appearing to have been freshly re-installed.
Solid State Storage
In July 2024, I decided to disconnect the original SCSI hard drive (to preserve its configuration) and to instead install a new hard drive, and to install Windows XP Pro SP3. I first tried using an 8GB CF card plugged into a CF-to-IDE adapter, as this approach has worked well for me in the past on other Pentium machines running MSDOS or Windows 98. Unfortunately this did not go well. I tried 3 different CF cards and 3 different adapters, all without a successful stable install on Win XP. In the end I installed the operating system successfully on an 8.4GB conventional IDE drive (Samsung SV0842D), and repeated the process again successfully on a 17.2GB conventional IDE drive (Seagate ST317221A). It seems the SD cards are not capable of handling the high volume of read-write operations by Win XP, including both due to the swap file, and file manipulation during O/S installation.
I later (07/08/2024) tried repeating the Win XP installation on a 32GB DOM (“Disk on Module”) which is a miniature SSD that plugs directly into the IDE slot on the motherboard. Of course it came with no documentation. At first the BIOS didn’t recognise it (it said it was not ATAPI compatible) but when I flicked the switch on the DOM (which I now know is to select master or slave) to the slave position, the BIOS recognised the drive just fine, and I was able to load Win XP Pro SP3 and Quartus II 13.0 SP1 onto this drive without any errors or issues.
Video Card Problems
Once Win XP was installed, Device Manager showed me that the drivers needed updating for the video card. This was reported in Windows as being “Nvidia Riva TNT2/TNT2 Pro”. However, this is slightly misleading as I found out when I tried to use TNT2 drivers downloaded from the web. The actual board is a “Diamond Viper V770 ATX AGP 32MB”, which just happens to use the Nvidia chipset. I was unable to locate any suite drivers for Win XP (either in the box of CDs that came with this system, or on the web), despite many attempts. All available drivers seem to be for Win 95/98 only.
RAM
This motherboard used 168-pin DIMM SDRAM modules. There are currently 2 physical modules fitted (1 x 128MB, 1 x 256MB), totalling 384MB, and 2 spare 168-pin module slots. It appears that the maximum RAM capacity (per module) is 128MB per side. I say this because I purchase 2 x 256MB modules (which had all 256MB on just one side of each module) and when test on 08/08/2024 this motherboard only recognised 128MB on each module. A Google search revealed that some motherboards were only capable of recognising a maximum of 129MB per side of each module.
Current status
As at 20 July 2024 this machine needs:
- Another 512MB of PC100 168-pin SDRAM (2 x 256MB modules)
- AGP video card supported by Win XP Pro
- PCI Ethernet interface
HP Vectra VE PII-333
I’ve had this desktop PC for many years. It has 2 ISA slots which makes it very useful for legacy applications.
The internal IDE drive is disconnencted and instead I have an IDE-to-CF adpater fitted, and 2 CF cards. One is MSDOS 6.22 and the other is Windows 98. I interchange them as required.
Under Windows 98, I noticed on 24.07.2024 that the “USB Flash Drive” is not working and its shown with a question mark in Device Manager. The fix for this is described on this page. In summary you need to download nusb36e.exe from this page. You then (in Device Manager) delete all existing drivers under “Universal Serial Bus” controller, then run nusb36e.exe. During installation of the new drivers, the program identifies itself as “Maximus Decim Native USB ver 3.6” and states that it is only for Windows 98SE English. After installation, the USB controller and hub were recognised OK by Device Manager, but the “USB Flash Drive” was still showing with a question mark, and didn’t work. However up to here my tests involved a 16GB FAT32 thumb drive. When I replaced it with a 2GB FAT thumb drive, it worked fine. So I really don’t know if this driver was needed at all.