386DX-40 mid-tower system

I'm starting to clean out some of my extraneous stuff to regain a bit of shelf space, and since I don't really use this thing anymore, it's time for it to find a new home.

As the title indicates, it is a 386DX/40. The case is one of those generic Taiwanese jobs, nothing fancy and it's not in amazing condition... the drive faceplates are a bit yellowed and there are some scuffs and scratches here and there, but it's reasonably presentable. I put a 100 CD spindle next to it for a bit better size reference.



It has a Chaintech 340SCD motherboard with an AMD CPU (soldered on, with a separate upgrade socket for a 486DLC chip or whatever), a Cyrix x87DLC coprocessor, and 8MB of 30-pin SIMMs. It has the SiS 'Rabbit' chipset, which seems to be one of the faster ones available for the platform. The barrel battery has been removed, with only some slight cosmetic damage where it was.

Also included are the following cards, from top to bottom:
-A generic multi-IO card with IDE/floppy/serial/parallel ports
-A Tseng ET4000AX with 1MB, made by Cardex. It advertises a 'Sync BIOS', whatever that means.
-3Com Etherlink III, aka, 3C509, with RJ45, BNC and AUI connectors
-Adaptec AHA-1522A SCSI card
-Sound Blaster Pro CT1600

It also has HD 3.5 and 5.25" floppy drives.





As for the bad points, some of the metal clips on the RAM slots are a bit mangled. All the slots still work fine, but you have to be careful when you install/remove modules. Also, I was never able to get the little LED speed display thingy to work right. Maybe I was doing something wrong, or maybe there's something faulty about it... I don't know. I ultimately gave up and left the damn thing unhooked.

It's almost a turn-key system, everything in it works fine, it just needs a hard drive and OS. Hell, I'll even throw in a drive if you want... I have a few laying around, though they're all IDE rather than SCSI.

Make me an offer. I'm not looking for a whole lot, I just have no idea what this sort of thing goes for, since I don't really see complete systems for sale that often. I'll try to find a suitable box in the next day or two and work out the exact packed weight and all that. (EDIT: Oops, forgot to mention, it's about 28 pounds unpacked.) And if you have any other questions about it, feel free to ask.

It's odd that it has the Cyrix "87DLC" coprocessor but not the main 486DLC CPU itself. Maybe it did at one time, but someone took it out?

I think the OP already pointed out that the processor is soldered onto the board. The CPU socket is for an "upgrade." Cyrix FPU was probably an add on.
Pity it has no VL bus, or I be all over it.

It's odd that it has the Cyrix "87DLC" coprocessor but not the main 486DLC CPU itself. Maybe it did at one time, but someone took it out?

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More like, I had an 87DLC chip and the board had an empty socket, so I decided to combine the two. And I don't believe it's functionally any different than a regular Cyrix 83D87 anyhow.

Last chance on the complete system... I'm giving it until Monday, then I'm going to part it out and scrap the case. All the other parts will still be available, I just need to get the bulky case out of here.

so tempting as Ive been eying a 386 build for awhile. shipping alone would probably be killer though. can the cpu speed be set to 25mhz?

Speed is controlled by a standard DIP-14 size oscillator in a socket (or actually two, there's a separate one for the NPU), so dropping it down to 25mhz would just be a matter of swapping the 80mhz can for a 50mhz one.

I'm really just looking to cover shipping + a couple bucks for gas to get it over to the UPS or Fedex place (since I live in BFE and the nearest shipping place is 25 miles from me), but yeah, shipping something like this isn't going to be cheap. I'd make a rough guess of somewhere around $60 to your part of the country.

The other option is that I could pull the internals and you could provide your own case. I was planning on doing that anyway, if it doesn't have any takers in the next couple days. That'd save quite a bit on shipping, though with the obvious disadvantage that AT cases can be a bit tough to find these days.

I could probibly do that then. I already have a slow 486 so I was really looking for a slower or middle speed 386 so if I can change the speed to 25mhz with little hassle and have the features and stability of a later board that sounds pretty good. I'd love the case but with shipping as it is I can be patient and source locally.

Old Thrashbarg said:

I'd make a rough guess of somewhere around $60 to your part of the country.

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I'd make an educated guess and say $35 via USPS. And I'll bet that's a lot closer than 35 miles, too.

Hm, interesting... it does seem to come out in the neighborhood of $35 (using rough size/weight estimates since I don't have it boxed up yet). I was assuming USPS would be more expensive than Fedex/UPS for a big heavy box.

Hmm, well. I'm definatly Intrested.

oblivion said:

Hmm, well. I'm definatly Intrested.

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I am going to sound like a broken record but please, use the Private Message system. That is what it is for.

Old Thrashbarg said:

I was assuming USPS would be more expensive than Fedex/UPS for a big heavy box.

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I use USPS all the time and it's never been more expensive then either of those two. And it's always been closer to me as well, way closer. Sure there are times when you can't use USPS, e.g., size or weight limitations on domestic or international destinations. I use FedEx when I want them to pack and ship the multysyncs I ship domestically. But I pack smaller monitors myself and use USPS. And, when I sent an IBM 5151 to Eastern Europe both Fedex and UPS wanted ~ $400 to ship it while USPS did it for under $200.

Well, it's too bad I'm not looking for another AT style case right now, that is certainly a nice case. Generic no-name brand AT form, so no proprietary motherboard needed. Usually no nutty mounting hardware needed. Plenty of room for expansion or messing about, although I used to go with the full honking tower cases instead of mid-towers. I also love how these things usually had lots of cutouts on the back for serial ports or similar plugs, like they were just begging to be filled up an hooked to a modem bank or something. :D

Stone said:

I use USPS all the time and it's never been more expensive then either of those two.

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The only time I've seen UPS be quite a bit cheaper than the post office is when shipping heavy items (like computers) to Canada, because USPS no longer offers international ground shipping, so you have to pay for airmail, while UPS offers ground shipping to the parts of Canada that are relatively close to the U.S. border.

Also note that the prices that UPS quotes on their web site are only good if you pay online. If you go to a UPS Store and pay there, the price will be a few bucks higher, because they add on extra fees like a fuel surcharge.

I would be willing to buy the complete guts of the unit. (including the PS if you can) I have pleanty of new AT cases lying around, just need guts of one.

The system has been SOLD.


As for UPS vs USPS, I never really looked into it much... it just seemed like a reasonable assumption, so I never really thought to question it. But now that I think about it, most of my dealings with UPS have been with commercial shipments, which often tended to be on the large and/or heavy side (like tractor parts), and it's also possible that there were corporate contracts or volume discounts factoring in.

I have a question about this motherboard, when booting, does it show EZ-Drive just after post? I have been playing around with one that I now have on eBay and I just discovered that you can do a one time boot to floppy or hard drive without going into the bios and changing the settings. If your boot option in the bios is set to C: then A: and you decide that you want to boot with a floppy one time all you have to do is hold the CTRL key down and goes into the EZ-Drive utility and allows you to choose which you would like to boot to for one time. Does your motherboard have this also? I have never seen anything like this on a board this old, the newer ones have the press F8 for a boot menu.