Aglenoth wrote:

Hello everyone I would love to build an 486dx4 based system, however i don`t know what parts to choose.

Which kind of motherboard do you have in mind? Pci or vlb?

That's like saying you want to cook a meal and ask which ingredients you need.

To get anything resembling a coherent answer (rather than everyone projecting their own ideas of what *they* would put into *their* 486DX4 system), you need to tell us what the machine is supposed to do, what you have available and/or what sort of budget you have to get parts, how patient you are prepared to be to get stuff, and what is important to you.

To give you an example, I have an IBM 486 motherboard from a PS/1 in a generic LPX case, with ISA-only riser. It currently has an IBM "Blue Lightning DX2" i.e. regular Cx486DX2 but I want to upgrade to an IBM 5x86, mainly to play about with it and to run my favorite 4x DOS games (Master of Magic, Ascendancy, Master of Orion). The motherboard has onboard video (Cirrus Logic GD5428), which is good enough, so all I need is a sound card and a network card. For sound I want SBPro2.0 support and if possible wavetable, although I have both an MT-32 and a Roland GM-supporting piano for external MIDI, so just a MIDI interface without hanging notes is good enough. Any ISA NIC should be OK; I might use my 3Com, or just go with an NE2000-compatible one. I don't want to spend significant money on this, and can wait as it isn't my primary project.

(now, I already have everything except the CPU, and I found that on the cheap in the same town my daughter goes to school, so I just need to wait till she comes here on holiday in 7 weeks' time to finish this)

See if you can write something similar for what you have in mind. Then we can come up with what would be best for you, not what we would do ourselves 😉

Aglenoth wrote:

Hello everyone I would love to build an 486dx4 based system, however i don`t know what parts to choose.

Dig into Vogons and read posts, is one thing you can do. The other is to ask about what motherboards people will recommend. Personally I would go for eighter a VLB motherboard or a combined PCI-ISA board. Luckystar LS486e is a good board for a beginner level. It is a PCI-ISA board.

EDIT:
I just forgot to mention, that the LS486e might not be easy to find. Though if you can find one, then it will support up to 5x86-133.
I am running one with such a CPU, and I am using a Cirrus Logic 5446 2mb VGA card.
The soundcard is an Audician32 with an Dreamblaster-S1 board, and I think it has 32mb Ram installed.
It has onboard controller, so no need to hunt down any controller card. For an 486 system, it is quite easy to work with.

I'd say go with what you can get.
The motherboard will be the hardest thing to get for a fair price. Once you find that you'll have a clearer idea of where to go regarding ISA/VLB/PCI graphics.

Sound will be isa no matter what.
DX4 is too new for a creative sound blaster pro IMHO, I would go with a SB16 and if your going for that you may as well go with an AWE unless your playing adlib games.
or if you want something different the Yamaha YMF isa cards are nice and plentiful, if you come across anything else google it or ask someone here will know something about it.

HDD will depend on the motherboard, most motherboards BIOS max out at 500MB or 8GB but every now and then it can be something else as well.
Guessing this is a DOS PC so a CF or SD to IDE adapters work real well and if you get one that mounts in a spare isa slot you can swap cards easy and the BIOS limit is less of an issue.

The other catch22 is the perfect motherboard doesn't exist.
Most people want ps2 keyboard and mouse ports but only the bigger OEM's were doing this and they used Dallas RTC's rather then coin batteries so you can either have a motherboard with a easily swappable battery and use a serial mouse or a ps2 mouse with a battery that needed to be unsoldered to replace

chinny22 wrote:

I'd say go with what you can get. The motherboard will be the hardest thing to get for a fair price. Once you find that you'll h […]
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I'd say go with what you can get.
The motherboard will be the hardest thing to get for a fair price. Once you find that you'll have a clearer idea of where to go regarding ISA/VLB/PCI graphics.

Sound will be isa no matter what.
DX4 is too new for a creative sound blaster pro IMHO, I would go with a SB16 and if your going for that you may as well go with an AWE unless your playing adlib games.
or if you want something different the Yamaha YMF isa cards are nice and plentiful, if you come across anything else google it or ask someone here will know something about it.

HDD will depend on the motherboard, most motherboards BIOS max out at 500MB or 8GB but every now and then it can be something else as well.
Guessing this is a DOS PC so a CF or SD to IDE adapters work real well and if you get one that mounts in a spare isa slot you can swap cards easy and the BIOS limit is less of an issue.

The other catch22 is the perfect motherboard doesn't exist.
Most people want ps2 keyboard and mouse ports but only the bigger OEM's were doing this and they used Dallas RTC's rather then coin batteries so you can either have a motherboard with a easily swappable battery and use a serial mouse or a ps2 mouse with a battery that needed to be unsoldered to replace

I would go with an sound card without bugs if i had access to one, so those yamaha YMF boards comes to mind.
About the motherboard, vlb/isa and pci/isa are nice, but there are two things that are critical: out of the box support of DX4 and a CR2032 battery, less critical is a ZIF socket for the CPU.
PS/2 keyboard isn't really necessary on the board, a cheap PS/2 keyboard to AT Keyboard will work just fine.
And personally i would go with a Microsoft Serial Mouse, it just works.

brostenen wrote:

Dig into Vogons and read posts, is one thing you can do. The other is to ask about what motherboards people will recommend. Pers […]
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Aglenoth wrote:

Hello everyone I would love to build an 486dx4 based system, however i don`t know what parts to choose.

Dig into Vogons and read posts, is one thing you can do. The other is to ask about what motherboards people will recommend. Personally I would go for eighter a VLB motherboard or a combined PCI-ISA board. Luckystar LS486e is a good board for a beginner level. It is a PCI-ISA board.

EDIT:
I just forgot to mention, that the LS486e might not be easy to find. Though if you can find one, then it will support up to 5x86-133.
I am running one with such a CPU, and I am using a Cirrus Logic 5446 2mb VGA card.
The soundcard is an Audician32 with an Dreamblaster-S1 board, and I think it has 32mb Ram installed.
It has onboard controller, so no need to hunt down any controller card. For an 486 system, it is quite easy to work with.

Good luck finding good parts.
I tried that Lucky star LS-486 with no luck. It was DOA. Hard to find a good socket-3 486 board with PCI slots.
FIC also makes a good mobo with PCI slots. But they are hard to find and its a gamble if it will be good or NOT.
I have about 5 dead 486 boards lying around trying to find a good one on eBay.
Also high quality ISA and VLB cards are hard to find and not inexpensive.
With all the computer recycling going on it is hard to find used old computer parts.

I found out that the best and less expensive route is to get a stripped down Socket-7 or Slot-1 mobo.
You want a stripped down one with NO built in Audio or Video that way you can add your own and not have hardware conflicts.
A BX440 0r BX443 Slot-1 mobo. Or a Stripped down Socket-7 Mobo. They run DOS and Win3x and WinNT351 great.
They also run Win-95 and Win-98 just fine. With PCI slots and SDRAM Dimms hardware is inexpensive and easy to find and reliable
They work with ATX Power supplies and modern cases. You can build one for about $300 or by a pre-built and just upgrade the graphics
and ram and audio. Sound blaster Audigy ZS2 or PCI 5.1 live card are inexpensive and easy to find and provide good audio.
You want a stripped down mobo with allot of PCI slots and an AGP slot.
3com 3C509 network cards have good hardware support in DOS and Windows and Linux.

Preferably PCI since I have never worked with VLB cards and also i find them pretty costly and hard to find 😀 I also wanted to use amd 5x86 from 100 to 133 mhz since I want 468 system that can play early 90’ games up to quake ať playable framerate 😀 also it would be nice to underclock the cpu down to 33 mhz , thanks for any help

I have few slot 1 builds but they arent very nostalgic for me thats the main reason for me to build one with 486 instead

You can change the cache settings in the bios to slow down the computer also there are some programs available to slow down the CPU for playing old games.

Aglenoth wrote:

Preferably PCI since I have never worked with VLB cards and also i find them pretty costly and hard to find 😀 I also wanted to use amd 5x86 from 100 to 133 mhz since I want 468 system that can play early 90’ games up to quake ať playable framerate 😀 also it would be nice to underclock the cpu down to 33 mhz , thanks for any help

Will this be a DOS PC or a Win9x PC? I'm asking because I'm planning one of my 486 builds as an OS/2 PC, for example.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

Good luck finding good parts.

There is a Tomato 4DPS with a 5x86 and 32mb of ram on eBay right now, for 75 US Dollars. It should be tested and all that. I think it is located in Russia, as eBay are saying "RU". It could be rumania though. Not shure.

There is also amibay. Sometimes you can find good parts there too.

Does amibay support oversea buyers ? Since I live in middle of Europe 😀

appiah4 wrote:

Aglenoth wrote:

Preferably PCI since I have never worked with VLB cards and also i find them pretty costly and hard to find 😀 I also wanted to use amd 5x86 from 100 to 133 mhz since I want 468 system that can play early 90’ games up to quake ať playable framerate 😀 also it would be nice to underclock the cpu down to 33 mhz , thanks for any help

Will this be a DOS PC or a Win9x PC? I'm asking because I'm planning one of my 486 builds as an OS/2 PC, for example.

This will be only DOS 6.22 PC no other systems will be installed

dionb wrote:

That's like saying you want to cook a meal and ask which ingredients you need. […]
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That's like saying you want to cook a meal and ask which ingredients you need.

To get anything resembling a coherent answer (rather than everyone projecting their own ideas of what *they* would put into *their* 486DX4 system), you need to tell us what the machine is supposed to do, what you have available and/or what sort of budget you have to get parts, how patient you are prepared to be to get stuff, and what is important to you.

To give you an example, I have an IBM 486 motherboard from a PS/1 in a generic LPX case, with ISA-only riser. It currently has an IBM "Blue Lightning DX2" i.e. regular Cx486DX2 but I want to upgrade to an IBM 5x86, mainly to play about with it and to run my favorite 4x DOS games (Master of Magic, Ascendancy, Master of Orion). The motherboard has onboard video (Cirrus Logic GD5428), which is good enough, so all I need is a sound card and a network card. For sound I want SBPro2.0 support and if possible wavetable, although I have both an MT-32 and a Roland GM-supporting piano for external MIDI, so just a MIDI interface without hanging notes is good enough. Any ISA NIC should be OK; I might use my 3Com, or just go with an NE2000-compatible one. I don't want to spend significant money on this, and can wait as it isn't my primary project.

(now, I already have everything except the CPU, and I found that on the cheap in the same town my daughter goes to school, so I just need to wait till she comes here on holiday in 7 weeks' time to finish this)

See if you can write something similar for what you have in mind. Then we can come up with what would be best for you, not what we would do ourselves 😉

Iam trying to build something that will let me play whole 90-97 era of games with playable framerate and best possible compatibility

Aglenoth wrote:

Does amibay support oversea buyers ? Since I live in middle of Europe 😀

It depends on the indevidual seller. Most of them are located in europe as far as I know.

Aglenoth wrote:

Preferably PCI since I have never worked with VLB cards and also i find them pretty costly and hard to find 😀 I also wanted to use amd 5x86 from 100 to 133 mhz since I want 468 system that can play early 90’ games up to quake ať playable framerate 😀 also it would be nice to underclock the cpu down to 33 mhz, thanks for any help

Even the high-end 486 won't be able to play Quake properly. Maybe Voodoo could help a bit, but Quake is really a Pentium game — it just needs a good FPU.

Second — in my experience, 5x86 has more compatibility issues with motherboards (particularly with VLB ones) compared to a DX4@100 that would work on basically any board that supports 3v CPUs. It's just that 5x86 was a late upgrade CPU that was released years after most motherboards. So it's often not even mentioned in manuals/jumper descriptions, and it might get tricky to run it at full speed.

Iam trying to build something that will let me play whole 90-97 era of games with playable framerate and best possible compatibility

The Pentium 2 system you have in your signature will work much better for games from 1995 to 1997 than a 5x86. Then again, 5x86 would be able to slow down nicely through turbo and cache options. I can't find benchmark results from my 5x86 system, but I think I was able to reach 486@33 levels through turbo and 386 speeds through cache.

So in short, 486 would be okay to run games roughly released between 1990 and 1995. Quake, Duke Nukem 3D (and Blood/Shadow Warrior for that matter), Tomb Raider and other demanding games would be better served by a Pentium.

Aglenoth wrote:

Iam trying to build something that will let me play whole 90-97 era of games with playable framerate and best possible compatibility

Then you dont need any 486 machine. You need something a bit newer, like a K6-III Plus at 550mhz.

Aglenoth wrote:

Iam trying to build something that will let me play whole 90-97 era of games with playable framerate and best possible compatibility

Give up. No 486 CPU will play many games beyond 1994.

#Aglenoth.

I have gone through this tread a couple of times....

You must have had 486 machines when they were the newest new stuff and when they were mid range machines (1989 to 1994-ish), because you pointed out that a 486 is nostalgic to you.

So you must know that any games after some 1993/1994 will start to struggle on a 486 machine.