Hy guys. Thank you for the wellcome. I'm a long time lurker on TPU. I just entered now because I had something to share
The 5x86 Story
What do you do when you first start gathering
old hardware?
In my situation the facts were
stacked against me. The pieces I was trying to find were, by all means dinosaurs, a foot note into the PC history. Many have already been
discarded, buried into landfills, melted, dismembered.....
I entered a couple of IT
forums in my country and tried to find the pieces for the 5x86 puzzle, but
to no avail.
My first purchase was a complete success. I scored for the sum of around 80 $, a large number of AGP and PCI VGA adapters prior to 2000, an awesome Maxi Gamer 3D Voodoo 2, some socket 7 motherboards, two busted socket 3 motherboard, lots on SIMM, and DIMM RAM and the a gem of a PSU
Minebea Electronics 200W AT PSU - the first piece of the 5x86 puzzle
I tried the local
flea market but my searches were fruitless....In the end I found a guy who let me buy from him three socket 3 motherboars, two AMD 5x86 133MHz CPU's, one AMD 4x86-DX2 66MHz, one AMD 486-DX4-100MHz and two heatsinks complete with clips for my socket 3 build.
This was my second piece of the 5x86 puzzle
I was quite pissed for
giving away my first PC back in '98 or '99.
I was young and foolish :D
The motherboard I found was a
Jetway J446A v2.0 - chipset
SiS 496/497 - 256KB cache/3 PCI/3 ISA/4 RAM SLOTS not a Tomato Board 4DPS SiS 496/497 like I used to have. So this was as good as it gets
So there I was in
2015 with a motherboard, CPU, RAM and a PSU. How the hell was I going to find a case like to one I used to have and an exact HDD? The ODD was not so important....
To my surprise in one of my trips to the local flea market I found an almost exact case. The first time a I saw it
I was thunder struck! I just couldn't belive my eyes
It was dirty and scratched but it was complete.
The
bouns inside was a socket 7 motherboard with a Cyrix 6x86 PR233, Tomato 5STX-J98 motherboard, 32MB RAM, SiS VGA, a Seagate Medalist 3.2GB HDD and a Sony ODD.
With the case I had another piece of the 5x86 puzzle
Through some
twist of the fate I found the HDD on a local forum and the moment I held it in my hand I new
the PC Gods were smiling down to me from above
The entire adventure took around three months of digging up in the local flea market and local IT forums.
So there I was smiling with all my loot
these relics were more valuable to me than the latest GPU, CPU or another IT gizmo
All the parts were prepared for a complete cleaning process using 99.9% isopropyl alcohol and
a lot of elbow grease 
