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386 Build Ideas...

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Smack2k

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All,

Looking to see your recommendations here....

What are some good motherboards / video card / sound card / RAM Amount recommendations for a 386/20 PC?

Thinking of building one..

Thanks!
 
I'm building one too. As per usual, it depends on what you are attempting to use the machine for. For example, when I built a 286 I wanted it to be abysmally slow for compatibility reasons, you might want to do that with a 386, you might not, I didn't and took the other approach.

In my opinion;
> Try to find a motherboard with CPU and FPU at the speed you want, you can always disable the FPU in BIOS or pull it out if you need to slow down.
> No point exceeding 4MB RAM, you could run WfW 3.11 on that with the networking components. Put 8MB in if you want, but you'll probably never use it.
> The Tseng ET3000 or ET4000 is a favorite for the video card. An S3 would likely be the next choice - I have a Trident for now though, it works.
> I use an SBPro 2 (CT1620) - plays anything the machine will, though you could put an SB16 in as those are cheaper and easier to find.
> Hard Drive? I was thinking of trying mine with an IDE-to-CF (512MB) as that seems cheaper. I'm only suggesting capacity as I haven't tested the device yet.
 
-American Megatrends 33mhz 386+387
-4mb ram
-Paradise chipset VGA, or VGA Wonder
-16-bit IDE + 500mb Seagate (or something Compact Flash if you want to futz with overlays)
-Serial, Parallel and RTC combo board
-Sound Blaster 16 (NOT one of the value cards)

This is roughly the config of my own system with the exception that I have mine maxed out at 12mb.
 
Motherboard - take what you're given - just make sure it's a standard AT form factor and doesn't need a riser card or anything odd - normally you'd buy this with the CPU anyway
CPU - sounds like you've chosen the 386DX-20 which is a good processor, the only ones I'd avoid would be the low lend SX chips e.g. SX/16 or SX/20. SX/33 is quite brisk though! DX-40 is considered gold.
RAM - 4 x 1Mb SIMMs - will be more than enough
Video - get sometime from the time period, Trident T8900 and T9000 are a dime a dozen, will be fine for a 386 build.
Sound - SoundBlaster Pro would be a good, but any 16 bit card will work fine, other than genuine Creative cards my favorite clones are fully-populated ESS AudioDrive cards - the ones that don't have half the chips missing
Hard Drive - Anything 80-500Mb IDE will be fine, grab a cheap multi IO card, and you're away

This advice is pretty generic and blah.
The only interesting thing I can say to look for, is an AMI BIOS, I prefer it over anything else. The AMI BIOS shipped on clone 386 boards, makes the Phoenix 386 ROM BIOS PLUS look like garbage.
Some may question it's colour scheme, but never it's features.

Edit: also I generally 'mid-spec' my builds. If I want faster, I just use a 486!
 
Best boards I've seen for the 386 are those based on an OPTI chipset with VESA slots. They have hardware support for 386 CPU with L1 cache, like those from Cyrix and support 486 as well.

Video card: Every popular for the time chipset will do. In reality, at those times everything was CPU-limited and the graphics performance was bottlenecked by the system BUS, rather than the video card. VESA would show some measurable gains.
RAM: 60ns non-parity memory is faster. I wouldn't use less than 8MB and would prefer at least 16MB
Cache memory: The more the better, the faster the better. 256MB 15ns are not bad.
FPU: If you plan to use the thing for pure DOS, the FPU will almost never be used (not because it isn't useful, but because of developers habits being: since most potential buyers don't have an FPU, don't develop software requiring the FPU). I've got plenty of those, but have yet to benchmark them.
Sound card: Whatever can emulate SB PRO later, or SB 16, or authentic sound blaster. You might or might not want the card to have a secondary IDE for the CD-ROM
Storage: While the traditional old IDE or SCSI drive makes the system more vintage, I wouldn't go back to this after I tried an SD-IDE adapter with 512MB or 8GB capacity (depending on LBA support or not). It is not only the performance difference, but the noise. Old hard drives sound like tractors, while the rest of the PC is nearly silent.
Compatibility: You can try the turbo switch if you want to slow the system down
 
You could look up some ads for stock systems. All depends what you want to run though. 4MB RAM was pretty sweet at the time and the hard drives weren't huge but did what ya needed. A lot of portables came with 1MB RAM IIRC which for DOS stuff was fine but getting into multitasking you wanted as much as you could get RAM wise. But as others pointed out the max the motherboard supports is the next issue so you'd be looking at probably 16MB or 20MB MAX.

Also the larger the drive the longer the mundane tasks will take so keep that in mind as well. You'll really feel the hit when you need to do a defrag or scandisk on a GB drive vs MB drive.
 
I have a few 386's... my PS/2 Model 70 at stock (IIRC this one has a 386DX/25 and copro in it), my PS/2 Model 80 with a 386DX/20, and a generic 386DX/40 with co-pro.

The IBM's are obviously stock with graphics and sounds, but with the DX/40, I've got an ET-4000 and 16mb RAM in there. Only because I had the RAM available. I could easily get by with 2-4mb. This box will likely be the most played-with box, so I figured I'd stock it up with 16mb in case I ever got a wild hair to run Linux.

I was always partial to the Sound Blaster Pro v2.0, so that's usually my card of choice. From experience back in the day, the Pro Audio Spectrum 16 was a nice card as well - good Sound Blaster emulation, and IIRC, on-board OPL3, but SB emulation required a driver that memory says was either 13 or 16kb of RAM. Most had options for CD-ROMS, but figure 60kb for the combined SCSI driver and MSCDEX.

Hard drive size is personal preference. Personally, I'm good for a 120mb vintage drive, or a 2gb CF partitioned up into multiple drives. I'd just say try and see - that's half of the fun of these vintage builds, right?
 
Maverick1978 said:
I have a few 386's... my PS/2 Model 70 at stock (IIRC this one has a 386DX/25 and copro in it), my PS/2 Model 80 with a 386DX/20, and a generic 386DX/40 with co-pro.

The IBM's are obviously stock with graphics and sounds, but with the DX/40, I've got an ET-4000 and 16mb RAM in there. Only because I had the RAM available. I could easily get by with 2-4mb. This box will likely be the most played-with box, so I figured I'd stock it up with 16mb in case I ever got a wild hair to run Linux.

I was always partial to the Sound Blaster Pro v2.0, so that's usually my card of choice. From experience back in the day, the Pro Audio Spectrum 16 was a nice card as well - good Sound Blaster emulation, and IIRC, on-board OPL3, but SB emulation required a driver that memory says was either 13 or 16kb of RAM. Most had options for CD-ROMS, but figure 60kb for the combined SCSI driver and MSCDEX.

Hard drive size is personal preference. Personally, I'm good for a 120mb vintage drive, or a 2gb CF partitioned up into multiple drives. I'd just say try and see - that's half of the fun of these vintage builds, right?
Click to expand...


Agreed on the Hard Drives!!

As far as Sound cards go....I have SB16 and SB Pro 2.0 mentioned....which is better on this build of machine? Or does it even matter?

As far as Video goes, I have an ET4000 ISA card, but had planned to use it in my 486....I also have a Cirrus Logic card for another 486...what are your thoughts on that dropping down to the 386?

Its a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5424 or 5426 (I cant see the last number and havent powered it up yet...

Even the Trident ISA cards...I have 3 or 4 of those...for a 386, is it that vital to worry about using a Trident? This thought is from almost everyone's utter hate of the Trident cards....
 
I personally have no hate towards Trident cards. I know that many do. That said, these days, I'm after cards that I did NOT have back in the day - and that's the Weitek/ET4000/ATI/S3 ISA and VESA cards, so that's often what I use these days.

So far as the SB16 vs SBPro, to me, the SBPro 2.0 was just a better-sounding card. It didn't appear to be as noisy as the card in my "Sound Blaster 16 MultiCD" package, it didn't require a TSR like my PAS-16, and it worked extremely well with Wing Commander II (a must) and my Apogee/Epic shareware games at the time (also a must). Of course, most Sierra titles just used plain old "Sound Blaster" compatibility and didn't care about the 16 or the Pro, so that worked in my favor as well.

MP.COM (ModPlay, a trakker player) worked equally well on all of the cards. Being interested in the demo scene back in the day, I often had MODs and S3M music going on. To the point that I had a track, Hallucinations, exported onto cassette filling both sides. Yeah, I was hooked on that track :) I think it was by Jesper (Jesper Kyd, the guy behind several Assassin's Creed OST's, among many other games and movies - yeah, his start was the Amiga trakker scene back in the day!)

I guess, predominantly, it's a matter of choice. Certainly both sound cards would be equally appropriate in the machine. Technically, so would a SB1.5 or an Adlib. Or a Covox. Maybe even a GUS Classic.
 
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Max out the ram if you have it available. The extra can be used as the ram drive and win/wfw 3.x swap file. Other Guis will make good use of the extra if you are that way inclined. You can set batch files up to load programs to the ram drive and run them from there if you so desire also.

I've got a 386DX25 with co-pro. It has a 4 gig hdd with DDO software split into 3 partitions, trident 9000 video card and runs Windows 3.1 as well as of a number of other GUIs sweet. It also has a IDE CDROM, SBPro 2.0 card also and a DE 220 nic. The nic is handy for transferring files.

There's really no "ideal". It just depends on what you want to achieve.

More generic advice from New Zealand ;)
 
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OK,

Have just about everything ready for this...

Still want to know everyone's thoughts on the video cards:

Trident's are fine to use as I have seen, but what about

I also have a Cirrus Logic card I was thinking or using and also an S3 (Maybe, needs cleaned of some corrosion on the connector portion of the card)..

Its a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5424 or 5426 (I cant see the last number and havent powered it up yet...)

I am using my ET4000 ISA in my 486 build, just curious what you all think for the 386..

I will end up probably trying them all!! That leaves one last question:

What are some good 386 era games that I can use to really see how the video card handles things...I know this isnt 3D land or super graphics stuff, but just curious...if this is even worth searching!
 
Wolfenstein 3D - that should run nicely on either max or one under max screen size
Doom - should be playable but not perfectly smooth at higher screen sizes

But I'm not a pro at this. That is just how I'd personally make a judgement.
 
You can also try Time commando.


I used to play it in my 386 with 8mb of memory and with my Et4000 card (under the lowest settings of course).You can also try Tomb Raider 1 (but I'm not sure if it works with a 386)
 
Try Jazz Jackrabbit, Dangerous Dave 3, and Commander Keen IV. They really push the 2d capabilities of VGA cards.
 
Thanks for all the recommendations...will be testing this out soon...

Will see if Trident cards really dont stack up well against other machines on the 386 level
 
Smack2k said:
That leaves one last question:

What are some good 386 era games that I can use to really see how the video card handles things...I know this isnt 3D land or super graphics stuff, but just curious...if this is even worth searching!
Click to expand...

Why don't you try 3dbench instead?
 
Woudl that apply to 2D cards as well? I thought that only worked with CPU benchmarking, but video cards have an "effect". What is that effect?
 
For games, I'd suggest max settings on Epic Pinball for audio/video, as well as One Must Fall - push the settings on that. As I recall, those were rather demanding games, and could push my 486SX-25 with stock 256kb VGA graphics and 4mb RAM (though I had absolutely no issues after putting an Overdrive in there and getting to DX-50mhz speeds)
 
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