So it turns out this is a rather infamous variant of a board known as the M919! While doing some testing off camera I was wondering why I couldn't detect the on-board 256K cache through testing software, and welp. Seems the company PC Chips was doing some shady crap back in the day with fake/non-working cache chips. Not only that, but apparently there's some kind of lockout where you can't use anything but their proprietary 256K COASt module. Amazing. Luckily, modern reproductions of the M919 256K cache module exists and I ordered one. Here's a follow-up! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-mZnS-whVuDI.html
Check out the traces coming from those "cache" chips on your model. They don't actually go anywhere. Which is a shame because there's no reason real cache couldn't work if the pads were actually wired up.
The louder speaker being louder is not because it's double the wattage - that rating is an input power handling rating, so as long as the impedance is the same on both speakers the power they receive from the same amplifier should be the same. the quieter speaker sounded thinner as well, so it's possible that the cone could have detached from the coil.
Dude. I almost had a heart attack when I saw this! I had a quantex 486dx2 50mhz that had a case exactly like this! I've been looking for years on the internet just for a PICTURE of my beloved machine from hs and never found one until literally just know. I'm so happy 😊 awesome channel, I've had a shitty week but this made my day!
There is a special group on vogons that make those cache modules ( arround 300 they have make so far +- ). And indeed the infamous M919 wich is if you know its quarks a really fine board sinds other options cost atleast 200 to 300 dollars a board. I have one 1 WITH the 256 KB cache but if i put a 5V cpu in it it will fry the cache sinds it only runs @ arround 3 to 4 volts and that voltage is the same as the CPU voltage ! best option is NOT to use 5V cpu's in that board !
WHOO! I actually have two M919 boards from my youth. One has empty sockets to install cache in. The other has two "surface-mount chips" in the corner. There's a bunch of traces there that leave the left side of the "chips" and circle around to the right side. It is HILARIOUSLY fake.
My first mail order PC was a 486-66DX from Quantex in a tower case, that happens to be the same case as LGR's Wood Grain PC. That case served me well for many years.
This was the first computer I ever used. I remember my father placing me and my twin in front of it and saying "this is the future, and you need to learn how this works." This is the computer that taught me how to read, how to spell, and how to do math.
@@rphoenix5908 Ruff's Bone was the one I remember the strongest along with Math Blaster. We also had some kind of game that helped you type, but you got awards to help improve your invention? I am not really sure what it was called. Also, watching my oldest brother play Sim City 2000 was also a blast.
I've got a similar 486 DX-4 PC c.1995 with the same AMI WinBIOS setup. Crazy that you had a BIOS screen with mouse support back then; it wasn't until nearly 20 years later that I got my first PC that had a BIOS with mouse support!
@@lucasrem When I said "nearly 20 years later," I meant nearly 20 years after 1995, not 20 years prior to the current year. In the same way, if one said "Churchill won World War II in 1945 and died 20 years later," they don't mean that Churchill died in 2001, you absolute genius.
14:40 It sounds like the FM chip is not getting the right data from the main Chip. The FM Chip is basically controlled by 8 Datalines from the main chip... If something goes wrong there it sounds like this (and needs a reset to fix). That would explain why the Tracker Music and WAV stuff is working because that is directly coming from the main chip.
Interesting. Yet Keen 4 plays perfectly despite that! I’ve always had bizarre incompatibilities with Jill, which is why I always use it as a test. Output even changes between versions of the game!
Jill of the Jungle is pretty infamous for having a weird sound engine that doesn't get along well with later sound cards. I get a similar unholy cacophony on a Vibra16 card and it makes the samples sound like they're being played back on an industrial rock crusher.
That's what I was thinking as well. I just had a similar issue a few weeks ago with the original EGA version of Monkey Island. I tried several cards until I found out it was a software bug in the interpreter that causes this behaviour on CPUs which are too fast, like my am486dx4 100. You can still get the patch from Lucasfilm Games/Disney or.. you know, press the Turbo button to fix this particular issue :D
I had a Pionex computer my dad bought for me off of QVC back in 1997-98. It was terrible, but I loved it because it was the first computer I could actually do stuff with, as the 486 I had prior was a nightmare to get anything running on.
Haha, I also remember pissing off my parents before we got a dedicated sound card. King Quest V in particular and all those beep-y songs must have been very annoying when you’re trying to sleep.
Your parents where more pc noise tolerant than mine haha, my mom would loose her marbles at the constantly repeating voice lines in warcraft 2, regardless of the volume. I swear she was like a bat, i could barely hear the game and she would scream from the other end of the house to lower the volume lol.
So well equipped (well, apart from the RAM) and *so* clean inside.... Someone has put a lot of love and care into this PC! VLB and PCI on the same board, I am insanely jealous!
The first PC I ever saw running, my friend had a 486-DX2-80 and he invited me over to look at something called "Doom". Had no idea what it was. Sounded cool. Pretty much changed the course of my life, that day. Ended up buying that machine from him just 4 months later and playing Alone In The Dark, Doom, The Legacy, UFO : Enemy Unknown. Never turned my Megadrive on again! I gave it to a young kid up the street that used to play football with us, his mother couldn't afford to buy him anything. He seemed happy enough! And so was I. Playing Doom till 2am before school the next day!
I absolutely love desktop PC's like this one. My first machine was a Packard Bell 486 in a desktop case similar to this one with the 3.5" floppy drive to the right of the 5.25" slots. So many good memories of computing from the early to mid 90s! I built a new Ryzen 5 3600 based PC earlier this year and searched high and low for a modern day desktop case that would work. But I couldn't find anything that would work for my build that didn't cost well over 2x as much as the Lian Li 215 case I ended up using.
My first computer was a Quantex 486DX-33 in 1993. Came with 4 MG of RAM and 80 MG hard drive and Windows 3.1. Lasted 7 years, all I did was reconfigure with 16 MG of RAM in the third year and installed Windows 95. Excellently built machine. I recommended them to so many friends and family members, and they all loved these machines. And yes, this was from a company in New jersey.
I have nothing to say of value, but thank you for this and all your other vids. I was in such an awful mood, but watching this helped turn my mind back around. Thanks LGR.
Good ole' Cyrix. I owned a system building/IT services company from 1996-2006. In the early days, we sold many Cyrix CPUs. When they worked, they were fine, but man, the defect rate was insane. Sooo many RMAs over the years. The last chip I remember them touting was the "Jalepeno" but to my knowledge it never came out (they were acquired around that time).
Was mostly bad board support. Never had any issues with the dozens and dozens cyrix chips we ran. But there were plenty of boards that really had bad support for the cyrix cpu's. for instance the fic VA-503+ board works perfectly with a cyrix MII with 100mhz bus while the newer fic PAG-2103 would have all sorts of issues (fpu exceptions, seg faults, etc..) with the MII chip. I still have a cx486-dx266 and an MII-300 running (linux), with longer uptimes than most nerds underwear.. Cheers!
My parent's Quantex tower, circa 1994-5, looks almost exactly like your woodgrain tower but without the woodgrain. Same numeric display for the processor, turbo/reset button, lock, similar light configuration, and nearly the same finned accent on the right hand side. There were a couple minor differences , like the buttons on theirs doesn't angle up, but they were almost definitely the same manufacturer. I remember that coming into our house when I was five years old. My dad spent something like $5k outfitting it with a Pentium 100 processor, 32 MB of RAM, a full gig of hard drive space, 17 inch color monitor, and the very first color inkjet, the original Epson Stylus Color (a $500 printer at the time.) It dual booted OS/2, Unix and Windows 95 because my dad needed those OS's for work. We were living in the future.
Nostalgia! A Cyrix DX2-80 was the first CPU I ever bought - popped it in our Micron 486 (who remembers when Micron made PCs?), upped the FSB to 40mhz, and was shocked at how much better Doom ran
i love that soundcard. i hope more games make that happen. please just record that whole soundtrack like that. its almost like it doesn't recognize the off notes at all. it turns some stuff into a drone noise album. amazing!
Oh yeah. Muffling the sound of a PC w/ a towel, the joy of first discovering ATL0 for the modem... All essentials for the late-night computer user back in the day.
My very first PC had the same case as the one at 1:05 running Doom. I went from an Apple IIgs to a 386-25 with 4 megs of RAM and a 130 meg hard drive. It was a big upgrade!
PCI slots on a 486 motherboard was a *VERY* rare thing back in the day. The PCI slot wasn't really available on consumer-grade devices until the Pentium was pretty mainstream. There were very few motherboards that were released with 486-compatible CPU sockets and PCI slots. Definitely a good find here, even with the cache issues that these motherboards had.
@@stefanoberli5920 The monitor he's using in this video is a Gateway LCD monitor, he did a blerb on it recently and showed finding it in the latest episode of LGR Thrifts. But yeah LGR does a really good job capturing CRT footage anyways
I didn't say what kind of display it was. It looks really crisp and high contrast. I haven't seen that often on RU-vid. Sometimes in movies it looks so crisp but that's just edited in. Even if lcd would be easier because of the slower refresh, you wouldn't get it so crisp without knowing what you are doing. This is purrfect
You can get a decent capture of a CRT with a camera that has adjustable exposure/gain and also shutter speed. You can avoid the scrolling refresh lines this way. Also turning down the monitors brightness and contrast so the camera doesn't need to use a high shutter speed to compensate (which usually puts a very wide dimmed section on the screen from the refresh rate).
QUANTEX! The company I have worked for in IT for the past 22 years used to buy Quantex desktop computers in the Pentium 1 to Pentium 4 days. Good computers but a high failure rate on the motherboards. I replaced so many parts on those computer. Our company didn't care because we bought them with a 3 year warranty that covered parts. The bitter part was when Quantex went out of business leaving us with a lot of systems with no valid warranty. After that our company signed a contract to buy from Dell and I spent years sending failing and obsolete Quantex computers to the recycler. I couldn't wait until I never saw another Quantex.
I had one of those Cyrix DC2-80 chips, I always loved the green heatsink, this is making me miss my old 486 from back in the day. Had a Tseng Labs ET4000/w32, a 1GB hdd, a ESS Audiodrive 1868f and 8mb of ram.
The case is different, but it reminds me a lot of my AMD 486DX-2 80 self build when I worked at a local computer store back in the day. That place helped kickstart my career in IT. :)
That looks like an extremely nice 486 platform to build-up! Love the three different types of expansion slots on one motherboard! It's quite nice across-the-board :-) ... oh, and 486dx with Windows 3.1!
This was super neat, I've never seen that version of the American Megatrends BIOS management. I've only seen the classic dual pane lists view BIOS as far back as I can remember.
Memories! I lived close to a computer store where a lot of us would hang out. We would get together and BS. It was wonderful. The shop keeps kept a BBS. They had the best prices. They would consign for a fair price. I bought and sold from there. I was a 20 something who also owned a daily driver sleeper 1970 VW Bug. Money was always tight. Anyways, I bought tons of used stuff I may not have been able to at full price. I always loved the alternative CPU's. Hard drives and RAM cost so much. I worked on so many systems, for extra cash. I thoroughly enjoyed every moment. Even at the height of my frustration, there was passion. Hacking, as in problem solving relaxes me. I wish life were so easy to troubleshoot. But ambition and direction would take over this slacker. I stopped working on computers. This year I built my first computer in a number of years. There is so much new! Very familiar though. The improvements really renewed that enthusiasm Very Zen.
Ahh those were the days Clint , I have been through all those type of desktop cases before I jumped to a tower cases of 90's that was awesome & those were the days, but my 1st desktop case was desktop flip top with 2 solver push in latches / button with metal hinges on both sides that would lock as you lift the top up to work inside your pc.
@@k4hvdq9tj92 it might actually be Just as simple as some corroded traces. The communication between the Sound cards processor and the opl chip is broken at some Point. That explaims why Wave Sound works but adlib OPL doesn't.
My uncle had a quantex P133 machine growing up. Quantex was an upscale brand too! Had all quality components, MAG Innovision monitor, Matrox Mystique gpu etc etc.
Does anyone else find these videos comforting to fall asleep to? Not that the videos put you to sleep, but I think LGR has an ASMR quality to it for relaxation. God, I sound like a weirdo. Oh well.
About Quantex. It was a sub-brand of Fountain Technologies, based out of Somerset, NJ (Franklin Township). Fountain sold machines in similar cases with their own name, but they were not that common. They also sold under the Pionex, Pionex Elite, CyberMax, and Inteva brands. The computer store I worked for back in the day sourced new Pionex Elite machines (and later budget Inteva models) from them after Leading Edge went out of business in 1995. One day in 2000, our orders started to not get fulfilled in a reasonable amount of time, and one day their phone number stopped working. Despite being a large white box builder in the state with a state govt contract, their machines are fairly rare around here. I saw far more DTK machines (also based in NJ) out in the wild. Also, surprising to see a PC Chips board in their machines (maybe it was swapped?). At least in the Socket 7/PII era they were using LuckyStar and Fordlian/Red Fox motherboards.
I worked at a local computer shop in the 90's and we sold Pionex Elite systems. As soon as I saw your video I thought to myself Quantex is also known as Pionex before I even started watching the video. It seems like I remember our systems coming from GA but I may be remembering wrong. I do remember them using Biostar motherboards.
Holy cow, I remember that system. Back in 2002, when I started messing with this stuff, one of my bandmates/friends at the time got one of these. His had the same case but an older 486 Socket 1 motherboard in it , but with a DX-33. I always liked the case design on those. Used to spend hours blowing each other to smithereens in Tank Wars on that thing.
I've come to like these Blerbs videos better than the main channel, probably because of the relaxed style. Not that I don't watch all videos of the main channel too. Thanks for the videos, Clint!
this is such a cool PC. I hope to see at least an hour long vod of you tinkering! Maybe it's own series. Like the ULTIMATE XTREEME 486 build. I dunno how much more 90s you can get without a mohawk.
Fun! I ran a DOSBench on my MediaGXm @ 150MHz (the slowest I've been able to clock it) and its Cyrix 5x86 core turns in 85 FPS in SuperScape 3D Bench, actually fewer frames per clock than your Cx486DX2-80 here. This is a great little PC! Congrats on picking it up!
Had a Quantex Pentium 3 back in the late 90s/early 2000's was either 700mhz or 1000mhz (one of the vertical card type) and had 20gb HDD. I remember my grandfather said 20gbs was huge and more than we would ever need for storage.
The Cyrix 486 DX/2 80 MHz was the CPU in our very first PC :) It lasted a long time till I finally replaced it with a Pentium 133 a few years later. :) Edit : I love the name of the CD-RW driver :D BURNBABY.
Oof, the Vibra16's FM synthesis is absolutely BRUTAL. That makes the no-name Vortex card you used a little while ago sound like a Sound Blaster 2.0! ;)
Your video reminded me of one of the Pentium class Cyrix Processors I used to own from back in the mid 90s.. it was forever crashing & blue screening. I wound up giving it away. I'd upgraded it from an old Pentium 75... not one of my better upgrades. Great video...
That is the same desktop case used for every flea-market-special PC of early 90s. 80486SX, SIS chipset, 4MB RAM, Cirrus Logic VGA, and 320-512MB HD (already stuffed with shareware). And naturally, they all slapped their own name badge on case.
oh my... I remember that era so vividly sometimes. I was just a little kid looking at all those systems like this on the magazine ads and was wondering if I could ever be able to get one!
I love these 486 videos, my first PC was a home built 486dx-33. Please make an upgrade video. It has to have a voodoo in it somewhere, that is just too great of an idea Clint! Maybe you can visit the recycle shop too since they are close...maybe it could be a local Computer Reset type experience?
My first computer was a Quantex with a pentium running windows 95. i still have it. it was used for like a decade or more continuously. I used the Mag monitor as my daily for like 15 years until it died.
That awesome music in that pinball game really sounds like 80’s, while doom on a 486 runs and plays much better then doom on snes ,and that closer look inside this 486 pc was the best part😁
Got a P2-400 from Quantex with exactly the same case as in the ad at 2:41 in 1999. I like those simple design with no fancy additives e.g. a bulging plastic flat panel covering up most of the FDD and additional cover for CD/DVD. Hated to see it closed down in 2000.
That sound card sound that you got when you played Jill reminded me of my Audigy 2 ZS. It would happen once en a while when I played the first Call of Duty (2003) and I would have to restart the PC when it happened. It was just random and I could never figure out why. Back then I had a Intel P4 2.4 GHz and a Nvidia 4200 Ti Ultra.
I believe the 40MHz bus is running the PCI out-of-spec as PCI was limited to 33MHz. Also, I believe Cyrix chips were made in Texas Instuments fab facilities, hence the reading Cyrix/TI. TI probably had some agreement cross-licensing with Cyrix on that matter.
You're correct. Between 1988 and 1994, Cyrix mostly used Texas Instruments production facilities. After they had a falling out with TI, they started using IBM production lines.
I must admit that my jealousy over all my friends having 486's in the early 90's, never allowed me to enjoy the full 486 experience as I only had my dad's 386 with PC speaker to play games on. This is what motivated me to get a Pentium 166 as my first computer since I was the first of them all to get a job and the credit I needed to buy my own PC.
