Pionex 486: Computer from the early '90s. Teardown and test!

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Thank you so much!
Thanks to ‪@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR‬ for making the video from which I stole the DEVICE string.
Here's the latest from Necroware on RTC modules: • Let's talk about RTC o...

[@sjgrall]

Your videos give me hope of a return to a happier, simpler, less stressful life. Your authenticity is truly appreciated!

[@EpochAV]

I very much agree. My anxiety about the state of the world fades when I can watch one of Mike's videos.

[@gen_angry]

"Keyboard error, press F1 to continue." lol I always love that one.

[@MichaelDKS]

Yep. also kills me every time 🤣

[@kkal1183]

I love the humorous slant and how personable Mike is.

[@HugoFaria-AZ]

Necroware has a new way to address those RTC modules.. with heat (~100ºC) you can remove that casing and break away the resin holding everything in place and then you can glue and solder the new battery holder :) check his videos, I believe the latest one he uploaded he does just that

[@FrenziedManbeast]

Another great video! FYI, I googled Chinon Industries Inc, and turned up a Wikipedia page listing them as a Japanese company. The Japanese pronunciation of "Chinon" would be "Chee-no-n" if you were still curious.

[@vwestlife]

The line input on the CD-ROM controller card is a pass-through, so you could feed the output of your sound card into it, and then it would combine the sound card audio and CD audio into one output for your speakers.

[@WinrichNaujoks]

That t shirt nearly tore!

[@bradleyfield3944]

I think I like vintage computers second best in this video 😊

[@luckybob77]

@@bradleyfield3944 the thirst is real, aye lads? ^.^

[@westtell4]

also glad to see a new video so fast... keep up the good work Love watching ur videos they are typically the high light of my day when i see them

[@kloudykatt]

Man, your videos are just a wonderful end to the weekend. Always a treat when a video comes out. I strive to be able to reassemble computers as you do!

[@thedungeondelver]

Hey at least you didn't kill a one-off IBM prototype by jamming a paperclip into it!

[@ClanTeamKill3r]

are you talking about what he did in the last video or something else

[@TronicJohn]

@@ClanTeamKill3r Famously 8-bit Guy did that once (IBM 7496 Executive Workstation)

[@KevinFarleyWV]

The only one that left the mistake in their video and didn't edit it out you mean.

[@TronicJohn]

@@KevinFarleyWV Last I heard (I admittedly don't follow him anymore mostly because of him being a milkshake duck) 8BG not only owns up to the mistakes (that's good!) but actually defends his decisions leading to the mistakes (that's bad!).

[@themoonupstairs]

I really hope you can get that drive working. Even building systems in the early 90s I don't think I had ever seen one like that before--my personal rig definitely didn't have a CD-ROM drive in 93 though. Really cool!

[@andrewinnj]

Like for the My Cousin Vinny reference, subscribe for the 486 Power™ 💪

[@T3hBeowulf]

Yes! Reference gotten. I-(clap)-dentical, (jazz hands)

[@o0Donuts0o]

The beep at 23:07 was so depressing. Like it’s just done booting up for the millionth time and the RTC was its last hope out. Then… RTC was revived.

[@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR]

@miketech1024 Nice video! Glad my stuff could be of help to you.

[@miketech1024]

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Thanks! Sorry for mis-pronouncing your channel name. Hopefully your drive isn’t also stricken by that capacitor plague.

[@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR]

@@miketech1024 no worries. And no, so far it‘s still working. Instead I was just hunting down an old IBM P70 suffering from the capacitor plague ^^

[@eugeniuszgorka8599]

Ale mnie zaskoczyłeś Mike , tym filmem ( pozytywnie ) . Pozdrawiam serdecznie 🤗🤭

[@RedStar-dz5tc]

Very nice video for learning vintage and retro PC restoration and repair!

[@catriona_drummond]

Those caps were a nice highlight toward the end of the video.

[@FOIL_FRESH]

i have a sony 4x cdrom i wish to use one day in my 486 (just waiting to find the right controller card/sound card with sony pins), your troubleshooting has made my day. thanks for doing the dirty work for me.

[@MrSzalonnaOriginal]

It's a miracle that the drive still worked to that extend. I was shocked. Good video by the way and have a great day!

[@maxtornogood]

Always fun to go back to the 90's! I enjoy those old Caviar drives. It's not quite a MikeTech video without some Crapacitors!

[@eveypea]

That motherboard and cpu were the same in my first pc! The BIOS has a HDD format utility in it. Man, seeing that pink screen took me back to my teenage days foraging parts at the local computer market and writing up my high school assignments in Wordpad. I had two 3.5" floppy drives, a 40MB HDD and 20MB of RAM. Eventually I added an ESS sound card and a quad speed CD-ROM. Thanks for the nostalgia!

[@T3hBeowulf]

Necroware also noted that the epoxy in those modules becomes brittle with heat A heat gun and pry tool di-lids and exposes the battery completely without much fuss. Then you can remove the old battery and solder a socket to the undrilled pins.

[@miketech1024]

@@T3hBeowulf So I should trade RTC hackulation for RTC mutilation? Sold!

[@RoterFruchtZwerg]

​@@miketech1024 removing the epoxy with hot air (~100°C) looks pretty easy, seen it a lot recently in vintage repair videos. And I guess replacing the battery instead of shorting a bad battery to a new one is also better in general 😉

[@cullmaster7361]

Another great video 👍🏻 Thanks Mike. Just to add that Panasonic 3.5” floppy drives also suffer with failing capacitors. Nice system show and tell. Cheers 🍻

[@mspysu79]

A nice little system there, a full 486 DX2-66, I only had a 486 SLC-40 back in my 486 days, it's nice to see VLB get some love as well, hopefully, you can show EISA or even Microchannel :) Oh, the lesser known (by some) capacitor plague of the late 80s through the early 90s, there was a big issue with a few counterfeit electrolytic formulations out there, one of the biggest companies affected was Panasonic, who bought millions of wait for it... counterfeit Panasonic capacitors! They were mainly surface mount electrolytics and used by their industrial/professional division so they made it into thousands of broadcast VCR's and cameras. Elna high temperature (105C) non surface mount capacitors also had a big problem, I can't tell you the fun they caused on the 6 layer boards Sony used on the BVH-3x00 ($50,000) NTSC/PAL Series and the HDD-1000 digital HDVS ($250,000) 1" VTR's. but many things are affected including ECU's from 90's cars. All of the 90's capacitors leak in such a way that the leaded capacitors eat the rubber seal out of the bottom and they just dump on the board, and the surface mount does the same thing but with less electrolyte, it does not spread as far.

[@miketech1024]

I do have a system that I believe uses MCA. It's kind of a mystery box. Branded 'VersysS' but is clearly an IBM system. I should probably get on that soon since its bugging me.

[@analogvideochannel4612]

Ah interesting about the early cap plague - idk which brand the cap are but like all the early 90s 8mm Sony camcorders (both comsumer ones and the CCD-V5000 semi pro thingy) also suffer from this and since they're built with a bunch of sandwiched pcbs they're a huge pain to repair even the boards haven't been eaten up. Panasonic and JVC also put these faulty SMD caps on these "hybrid ICs"/glass modules in some of their early 90s vcrs which can also hard if not impossible to fix depending on the variant - the new-fangled surface mount capacitors were of course a perfect fit for these fancy modules...

[@LFOSyncToo]

Sometime in the hopefully-not-so-distant-future will Mike grace us with a repair video... At long last!

[@JoCrt]

I'd like to see you repair more stuff. I know you're good at it from your oldest videos.

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

Another beast! I just refurbed my PM2400SA to mint working cond.

[@MichaelDKS]

Oh, the nostalgia level is high with this one. This was my first PC, with 8 MB ram, and a 420 MB HD :)

[@monkeychickenist]

The Bob Ross of retro computers.

[@MothKeeper]

⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️ The comedian of Comment posters... NOT!!!

[@blackheart58]

Another great video to brighten my Sunday morning! Computers from the 90’s are a blast from the past for me. There is a lot of spider activity in there. Who knew spiders liked exploring computers lol. I knew you couldn’t leave that drive for another time. It’s not in your computer DNA lol.

[@paulstubbs7678]

That's one crazy CD ROM drive, all the tray loaders I've ever seen were motorised in and out,

[@willyglover]

That exact cdrom was my first! A second hand from someone who bought a Mitsumi 4x IDE drive. Installed it into my Compaq Deskpro 286 which was also a hand me down from a family member. That was my first PC compatible, coming from a long line of Commodore and Amiga computers.

[@johnmay4803]

thank you for the upload the vid was really good

[@shorty1k]

The audible Awwww I made when the video ended. I'd watch you fix every step of this just to see it run doom.

[@Constantin314]

done moving, Mike? glad you're back! very nice system you got there

[@pomonabill220]

I love how you show your arms! NICE! AND your flag watch!

[@John-uc6gb]

Good video, thank you

[@SudosFTW]

Quaternary Ammonium Salt compound capacitor plague of the 90s strikes again.

[@ingoreimann282]

got an instant flashback from the Sony CDU33A-01 cd-rom drive. i remember how excited a school friend was about getting a nice deal on a quality sony drive, even double speed, but then being disappointed on first use about the not motorized tray. from the looks of it of course every one expected this tray would act like the one found on hifi equipment. this was during the time most computer drives still used a caddy or were totally weird like the mitsumi lu005s i had back then.

[@annihilatorg]

Woo TPC shout out!

[@charlybrown9024]

I like how you do not try to conceal or edit-out your mistakes (like the pin shifting while inserting the RTC). That's more educational.

[@jasonme3557]

really miss theses days when PC's were cool

[@pierreinthavong181]

Smart video!😊

[@EastAngliaUK]

before my time I have never seen or used a PC like this

[@Vanessinha91Pucca]

Love the 90s for PCs

[@FubarMike]

Hopefully you find more systems from this era but with hard drives. I always loved seeing old win 3.1 installs or obscure dos GUI programs.

[@senilyDeluxe]

There's that 1024 cylinder problem striking again. That Drive Overlay (34:12) helps with that. If you format that hard drive, you'll be stuck with only 540MB again. And if you boot without the DDO, you might corrupt the file system if you write to the disk.

[@DeadReckon]

Computers of this era are so strange, you never know what you'll get in them. 5.25 floppy? 3.5" floppy? 8x CD-ROM? All of the above? 800MB HDD? Who knows! I love seeing that machines like this that survived such a rapid time of change in the PC industry are still around to show just how strange and varied their lives were, and still could be. I'd totally try to run Doom on this thing.

[@carltondoorman9145]

Hey, you've discovered the computer spiders! Back when I was refurbishing old compters 20+ years ago, I was always finding spindly white spiders in every machine. Never saw them anywhere else. Apparently some species of arachnid has evolved to live exclusively in computers.

[@abcsd1254]

It doesn’t surprise me that they used clone parts to drive down costs. I recall parting out socket 7 systems in the 90s that had been built with parts that had Compaq, HP and IBM part numbers but still had matching builder serial number stickers to the systems. The technology changed so fast it must have made sense to reuse power supplies, floppy and optical drives.

[@reidster87]

That CD-ROM/controller/sound card combination would be a great addition to an XT-class clone system. Not only are the sound card and CD-ROM controller card 8-bit ISA, but they have the longer card edge fingers typical of pre-AT ISA slots. If you get the drive up and running, it could make an interesting demo on an XT or clone of some of the earliest CD-ROM based software.

[@Blink_____]

It always trips me out when a see a BIOS screen with those colors. I had one or two boards like that and then never saw that palette again

[@charonunderground8596]

A beautiful journey into the past. I love the 486, it's one of my favorite periods in computer history. And by the way, I've always wondered what is the difference in performance of hard drives connected to an I/O controller on ISA and VLB. I used to have a cool VLB I/O controller from QuickCMD and it worked perfectly, but I have no idea what effect it had on hard drive performance.

[@NeoClip]

It actually happened, a floppy drive was dirty for once!

[@NJRoadfan]

Pionex was a marque of Fountain Computers based out of Somerset NJ. They went bankrupt in 2000. Their most well known marque was likely the Quantex brand. They sold machines under the Fountain, Pionex, Pionex Elite, CyberMax and Inteva brands as well. As the time, the computer store I was working for was sourcing new machines (Pionex Elite) from them. One day the new orders stopped coming in and nobody was answering the phone. I don't think the store was out much, if any, money from the outstanding orders, but some customers had to wait for new machines as we scrambled to find another supplier on short notice. The company we found was also based out of Somerset NJ, called Aspect Computer. Eventually they imploded in a big drug money laundering scheme.

[@MK-of7qw]

I used to have a Pionex computer I bought as Sun TV in 1997. it was a Pentium 133

[@Drago1995]

i didn't know until recently this year, that those exoskeletons are not dead spiders xD

[@FSK1138]

i would love to see a used 2000's pc build with a massive tower case and tricked out to the max

[@rmcdudmk212]

That's not a bad little 486.

[@abcd1239me]

our first pentium 120 was made by Pionex, which I had that case. it was a tank.

[@timmooney7528]

The key lock on my 486 would disable the keyboard. My first CD drive connected through the sound card. I bought them as a Soundblaster CD package.

[@PipBoy3k]

Most of my experience was from the windows 95 era. I finally found a recycler in my area (It's not open to the public) found what I thought was a a pristine 386 system... I discovered Varta damage when I got it home. If anything it's refurbishing experience, although I have no idea how to identify the capacitors and resisters.

[@CraigLillie]

You must have heard that other saying from the Software Publishers Association (SPA), "Don't Clip that Zip"! 🤣

[@sethg6157]

Really want to see the drive recapped!

[@jaybee2216]

The dude who wrote that program (John Rosengarten)…not sure if same bloke but there is a bit on LinkedIn and his job history aligns with writing that kind of program at that time…

[@GigAHerZ64]

11:30 - you should make sure you drill *through* one of the terminals. You don't want your new battery try to charge the depleted one. BTW, are you aware you can heat this up and the case and resin will easily chip away? The cleanest way that also reuses the rtc instead of replacing it.

[@blakecasimir]

Always a pleasure seeing another video from you Mike. Have you tried hot air on these Dallas batteries? Makes the resin much easier to crack off.

[@Windows777-q1n]

Nice Hair Syle

[@wskinnyodden]

Yey, the second HDD had the BOOT Sector driver installed to support disks larger than 500Mb.

[@Wormetti]

those are advanced self removing caps, ready to be replaced with self installing caps 😀

[@SeishukuS12]

Poor Sony... On the bright side, they were pretty good about having service manuals for everything back then, should be able to dig one up for it. Should have all the waveform data for adjustments, as well as schematics for the board.

[@BestSpatula]

I had a Pionex! It wasn't a 486 though. It was a Pentium 233 MMX. Purchased at Sam's club in the mid to late 90s. It was an AT motherboard system.

[@Vanessinha91Pucca]

I have this exact same CD driver on a SB16 at a 486 DX2 with Windows 95. I may go back to my moms house to see if the PC will boot easily and try to copy the driver :)

[@westtell4]

its not stubbornness i've taken to calling it my determatism

[@Leahi84]

My second computer ever was a Pionex tower with a Pentium 2, Windows 98 and a crap ton of bloatware. They sold them on QVC in the late 90s and my dad made the mistake of buying it for a ridiculous premium price from them. I mean, it was a massive upgrade from the Packard Bell 486 we had before it, but it was still crap.

[@christophero1969]

There is no capacitor plague, the capacitors are just old. All capacitors are only warranted for 15yrs., not 30 plus+ years.

[@davinp]

It's very yellow as most plastics from the 90s are. Interesting that is very little dust

[@tarajoe07]

I have an old Panasonic CDrom and the Aztec sound card that connects it. Have never been able to get it working

[@gen_angry]

6:45 Id wager the line outs are just redirects for CD audio. Like if you didn't have a sound card, you could use that for that purpose. That CDROM controller card could probably have been bought as a single item.

[@lindoran]

I guess you can heat it up until the potting gets brittle (apparently even with a hair dryer ) for the rtc chip and then that plastic cover just pops off

[@LabCat]

I've used Chinon drives before, and yes, the 3.5" ones ARE noisy AF. I much prefer Sony or TEAC micro-floppies. When I got my 486 DX2-66 in 1994, my uncle was astounded that it came with a CD-ROM drive instead of a 5.25" FDD. "How will you ever load software?!" (Next thing you know, he's asking me to put a CD-ROM drive in his 386 because he got Encarta on CD.)

[@NiPPonD3nZ0]

I've got a recovery image for Windows 3.1 of and Olivetti computer that uses one of those drives, and one Cirrus Logic VGA card too... It has some spetacular startup animations that I've never seen anywhere else on the internet! Want that image to restore on this 486? The specs of the Olivetti are very close to that machine and it might work

[@scorch527]

I'm still massively disappointed every time there's no hard drive. I open every video crossing my fingers you'll find one!

[@wskinnyodden]

That BIOS has the 500Mb HDD size limit dude, you need a BIOS upgrade/patch, boot sector driver (if you can find one) or an XTIDE BIOS Extension.

[@AsmodeusDeviluke]

A lot Sony drives from the early 90s had the same caps apple used.

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

DX2 66 was what my high school had until my 2nd or 3rd year when they "upgraded" to pentium something's running windows 95 As much as I love DoxBox I'd love to have a 486 class machine or a firdt gen Pentium. Ido finally have a 9x machine yeah! A 500mhz slot 1 Pentium 3 with 512mb or ram, no HDD using sd to ide adapters. I couldn't find a period correct or any beige case for it so... I kinda sorta built it as a reverse sleeper complete with a light kit, may the retro gods have mercy on me.

[@doomslayerdave]

This system def needs some cache

[@brandonupchurch7628]

I have a Pionex Pentium II 333 system that I really need to power up again some day, I was gonna see if I could upgrade it to the max at some point, it'll only register upto 384MB (3x128MB) of 66mhz SDRAM, I was going to see if it would work with some old 256MB 50ns EDO server DIMMs I have but I never got around to it. I think I had a Geforce 3 in it and was running Windows 2000 off an 80GB HDD the last time I had it running, but that was back in 2013-2014.

[@medallish]

It this channel was to have a mascot it has to be that small crowbar shaped tool.

[@gen_angry]

That 2GB drive is likely just too large for the controller to really work with it, esp since you only got 504MB out of it. That 800MB has an overlay installed that works around the problem. You'd likely need that again if you were to reformat it

[@mikerochburns4104]

My Cousin Vinny. 😂

I love your videos Mike, do you want to go out on a date? Hahaha

[@mrLumen2]

Pionex - its "Pioneer" China-version

[@Homie_2]

vlp connector kinda looks like pcie

[@aaldrich1982]

why did the POST report change from "486DX or 487SX" to reporting the DX2?

[@dismuter_yt]

No need for a modem in that PC, it had integrated web.

[@bramvandenbroeck5060]

My HP Vectra 486 isn't a real one, it doesn't have a turbo button. . . .

[@typedrat]

I regret to inform you that Chinon is pronounced Chin-on. 😢 Additionally, there's no such thing as an "IDE" disc drive. All disc drives, including brand new Blu-ray drives that communicate over USB or SATA, are SCSI-based to this day. They just use ATAPI or USB's mass storage device class to tunnel SCSI commands to the drive.

[@bradleyfield3944]

I'm sorry, what? Who's watching this for the technical stuff?

[@ipoopmuffins]

ah yes finallly, a VLB, aka very long board, card.