The part about buying a misleading CPU really hit home with me. Man all those small retailers in the 90s were living the dream with their unaware customers.
My parents bought an AMD 486 100mhz at the end of 1995, it was still a viable low end machine for that time but they paid as if it was a Pentuim. Had to somehow make it work up until 2001 with that machine. Don't know if I had a career in tech if I wasn't forced to tinker with it.
marcodiego · 4h ago
My first x86 was acquired in 1997: a 200MHz pentium MMX with 32 MB of RAM, a 2.0 GB harddisk, a 2 MB S3 ViRGE as video card, Aztech Labs AZT-R 2316 sound card, a 33.600 bps winmodem and 28X (I think) CD-ROM. I soon wanted to install Linux on it. It ran minilinux, a small distro that could be launched directly from DOS without partitioning, relatively well. I also downloaded Debian and prepared the 10 floppies to install it but never got ahead because it didn't support my keyboard layout (ABNT2) out of the box. I eventually installed Conectiva Linux 3.0 (marumbi), a RedHat based distro, on it. It worked somewhat beautifully but had no support for the modem and soundcard.
As my relatives and siblings updated their computers, I inherited their spare parts. My machine got some very interesting upgrades. It got 2 floppy drives (very rare at the time), 2 harddisks, a cd-recorder unit, RAM was upgraded to 64 MB and the modem was replaced by a ne2k compatible network card. I also had a Linux-supported Canon BJC 4200 and a SANE-supported TCE table scanner. Still, I couldn't get the SoundBlaster that my brother had and, sadly, my machine continued without sound support on Linux.
At around 2006 I replaced it with a new self built computer which had better compatibility with Linux than with windows-xp and then this new computer became my first dedicated Linux machine. I found out that Linux eventually got support for AZT-R 2316 at around 2007, but the last time I tried my old computer, it displayed "parity error" probably from oxidation in the memory connectors. I then just gave up on it.
Later on I thought about if it would be possible to install a graphics card with OpenGL support and USB port on one of the remaining PCI ports. I certainly wouldn't be able to install a modern Linux distro on it, but certainly it would work with one of those specially crafted for old computers like TinyCore. With recent kernel changes, swapping maybe smart enough to be usable on SSD with SATA to IDE adapters even in that computer. Now, that would be a dream machine.
tos1 · 6h ago
Love the image of the monitor showing Battle Chess! As a side note to all like-minded people that love old DOS games, check out the library of DOS games on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games
pjmlp · 5h ago
The best version of Battle Chess was on the Amiga, though. :)
kriro · 5h ago
My entry was the mentioned 486DX2-66Mhz. Double speed CD-Rom and Sound Blaster. Norton Commander was great, Doom and Pirates Gold where my games of choice.
Also started programming on this one with QBasic and then moved to Turbo Pascal 7 (because I needed a .exe file to be called from autoexec as a password protection vs. my sister which I couldn't do with QBasic :)
Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D
yazantapuz · 4h ago
> Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D
With a friend we destroyed the msdos 622 installation on the new 40 mb hd of my family 386 when deleting tmp files...
liotier · 2h ago
I did that a few years ago, with the 1990 computer that I lusted over as a teenager: the IBM 8595 AKD (European reference - it is 85950KD in North America)... 486 DX, XGA display, 320 MB SCSI, 64 MB RAM... At that time my computer was a 1988 Olivetti PC-1 (512 KB 8 MHz Nec V40 with CGA and a floppy drive)...
I was awed by the beast... Everything about it screamed over-engineering - even the case was incomprehensibly robust and the power switch had a satisfyingly loud motion... I could even touch its legendary tangential fan... Touching the 20 years-old dream was an emotional moment - I'm glad I did it... The ultimate Windows 3.0 host !
But it had to go after a little while: my two-room apartment was too small for so much awesomeness, so it went to another fan.
adamcharnock · 3h ago
The very moment I saw the letters ‘MMX’, a long forgotten part of my brain woke up and said, “I know what that smells like!”
Which is bizarre. But to me it is (apparently) the small of new electronics, plus perhaps the ‘hot dusty things’ smell. It also comes with the memory of playing Pod (a racing game), by Ubisoft (I think). Good teenage memories!
tecleandor · 2h ago
Oh, that was nice. I think it was one of the first "high fps" games and it looked super smooth...
vunderba · 6h ago
Great article. The mention of Cyrix brought back a rush of nostalgia - one of the earlier PCs I built used a Cyrix 686 166mhz processor.
From the article:
> 8BitDo makes a fantastic modern keyboard inspired by the M looks and feel.
Hard disagree. I found most of their keyboard replicas to be rather cheap feeling. However, their controllers such as the Arcade Stick and Pro 2 are excellent.
I think the closest approximation you can get to an old school model M keyboard with buckler springs is probably from Unicomp. If you don't care about that kind of authenticity I would just stick with something like a Keychron mechanical keyboard and call it a day.
I had the same Cyrix cpu and all I remember is that FPU performance was terrible in Quake.
bitwize · 3h ago
I had a Cyrix 6x86MX and it was good enough for Quake (I played Quake originally on a Pentium-60, and it was fine).
The Quake code was designed to take advantage of the fact that the Pentium could have one integer and one FPU instruction in flight at the same time, thanks to optimizations by an even bigger space-alien wizard than John Carmack -- Michael Abrash. The Cyrix CPUs... couldn't dual-issue instructions like this, so clock-for-clock their performance suffered compared to Intel.
micv · 3h ago
It was alright in Quake, as I recall, but it really didn't cope at all well with Quake 2 and Jedi Knight.
Waterluvian · 4h ago
In Part 2 the photo immediately after “It seems IBM integrated it to the motherboard” completely fooled my brain into believing that I’m looking at the side wall of a garage. The garage door to the left. The opener equipment top-right.
And I’m just immediately fixated on this whole vibe of a life-sized tinkering workspace that’s the inside of a PC case.
somat · 2h ago
makes me think of the IBM AN/FSQ-7 built into the SAGE air defense stations, the largest computer ever built.
While realistically I understand it was just a bunch of racks and consoles, due to the permanent nature of the installation and the way it was integrated into the building I like to imagine the operators and technicians scurrying around admits bunches of wires and tubes.
Waterluvian · 31m ago
> Weight 250 tons
So that doesn’t qualify for free shipping, I imagine.
I absolutely love the aesthetic of a big classic telephone receiver attached to the end.
dep_b · 3h ago
Could be a fun exercise:
- Commodore 128 with dual floppy drive vs my tape-only C64
- Maxed out Amiga 1000 with a bunch of sampler and MIDI extensions vs my A500 + 512kb
- B/W PowerMac G3 fully expanded just because
- Dual Celly 300A @ 450 with Dual Voodoo II vs my 450 with single Voodoo II
Nothing after that had this "I really want this, but I can't get it" thing. I just bought what I wanted.
vincent-manis · 5h ago
My teenage dream machine was a PDP-8 (the original) and a Teletype ASR-33. Fortunately, I never got it.
musicale · 1h ago
Fortunately you can connect a replica PDP-8 front panel to an emulator!
PS/1 seems like an odd choice since it was intended for the home and small business market. It was IBM's answer to beige box clones dominating everyone who wasn't an institutional buyer and paying for the PS/2 premium.
tokai · 4h ago
Because of the authors childhood experience of his neighbors PS/1 being much better than his own machine.
criddell · 5h ago
More than once I’ve had a TI-99/4a and fully loaded peripheral expansion box and an Atari 800XL on my eBay watch list. I’ve come so close to pulling the trigger but I know it would give me a weekend of fun and that would be about it. Back to eBay it would go for the next impulsive dinosaur.
bluedino · 5h ago
Reminds me a lot of the IBM 486 we had in school, it was the first Windows PC I had ever seen, most everything else was either an Apple II or an IBM running PC DOS.
It had a CD-ROM, speakers and sound and color and everything. I think it was $10,000, or that's what the computer teacher said.
dt3ft · 4h ago
Thanks for sharing. I love the design/theme of the site. Pure bliss.
p_ing · 8h ago
I can't say a PS/1 would have been my first choice for a 486 platform; I'd imagine there are faster motherboards out there and a desktop (i.e. ASUS w/ SiS chipsets). That said, I had a 486/66, so... (some Dell).
And it looks like the PS/1 is missing VLB, but of course the video card is integrated in this model so that makes sense.
I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card and a Sound Blaster AWE64.
But that's my childhood machine, not the author's :-)
bluedino · 5h ago
I was always afraid of a lot of the IBM and Compaq computers because of all of the incompatibility notes or issues I'd read about in README.TXT (usually minor workarounds), and then to a greater extent in getting Linux running on them.
p_ing · 5h ago
Linux wasn't too much of a concern when these machines were in their prime. But yes, I remember those compatibility notes.
AStonesThrow · 5h ago
The 486 generation was fraught with bus wars and the motherboard market was rather fragmented.
I once visited a college buddy who had a genuine EISA system, and I believe that I left flecks of drool as I admired the superior electronics and engineering invested in that EISA bus. Of course, nobody seriously purchased EISA if they expected to be compatible with stuff.
My father had a PS/2 50Z, which unfortunately saddled him with the MCA Microchannel bus. A likewise superior bit of engineering that was compatible with virtually nothing. Thankfully, Dad never felt a burning need to trick out his system.
Personally, I enjoyed the standard ISA path on my 286 and 386. It was with some regret that I chose VLB for the 486 board, because compared to the above buses, VLB was a hack and a kludge, and you could smell the duct tape and chewing gum on every expansion card.
However, VLB expansion cards were as plentiful as Star Wars action figures, so I was able to absolutely cram cards into a full-size tower until several generations of Pentiums obsoleted everything except PCI.
p_ing · 4h ago
The days of nearly-full slots was great. While by the time I had my first computer, a 386SX (12Mhz?) IDE and floppy controllers had made it to the motherboard, we still had a sound card, modem, video card, potentially game card if no game ports on the sound card, and awhile later in PCI land a 3Dfx card.
Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' (though I do have a BT 5.1 card for a purpose I no longer need). SLI is dead. Only those with special needs, LLMs or crypto, would ever fill up the additional slots.
Building computers is now just stupid simple and in my view, sorta brainless. No jumpers, no "must go in this slot #". The only thing I ever have difficulty with is mounting the CPU cooler, the thing is f-ing huge and requires a special very long Phillips screwdriver.
/oldmanrant
Oh yeah, and if you didn't bleed when building a PC, you didn't really build a PC. Now everything is rolled steel for those kitten hands.
wpm · 3h ago
As someone with those "special" needs (if 10Gb/25Gb Ethernet and HDMI-capture are that special), it is incredibly frustrating.
The CPUs all come with enough PCIe lanes for a single dGPU at x16, x4 for the PCH/chipset, and maybe another x4 for a single M.2 SSD. If you aren't building a bog standard gaming PC with one SSD, one huge GPU, and nothing else, you get a configuration that doesn't match what you need. Bifurcation is hit-or-miss, if you can even physically get to the second PCIe slot, if that slot is even big enough. Random M.2s are linked to the PCH with random modes and bandwidths that change based on other configuration options.
All due to the stingy lane count on consumer platforms, again, targeting the lowest common denominator. It was even worse before Ryzen came out and offered a generous 24 lanes (16 for a GPU, 4 for the PCH, and 4 for an SSD) vs Intel's 20.
Of course, PCIe lanes aren't free, but somehow, having "I/O" targeted workloads means you also must go and spend 2-5x as much for "workstation" or server class motherboards, which also are engineered to a common "usual needs" spec that add in a bunch of shit I don't need, and usually require sacrificing single-core speed unless you get top of the line $10K+ server CPUs that draw 5x the power.
What I'd really like is instead of 4 lanes going to the chipset, I wish all of them did. Or at least, all of them went from the CPU to some switch chip that would allow me to set which lanes go to what slots, and have a software configured lane/bandwidth allocation. 24 lanes of PCIe 5.0 is 48 lanes of PCIe 4.0 is 96 lanes of PCIe 3.0, which is more than enough, but trying to actually unlock all of that bandwidth is still limited to the hardware configuration of the motherboard, and no way to reallocate unspent bandwidth. Instead of it all being hardwired for specific configurations, to the CPU directly OR to the chipset, I wish they were all wired for x16 (or x4 for the M.2 slots) direcly to some switch chip, which is then fully wired to the CPU's remaining lanes after PCH/chipset connections. If I need to stuff 4 slots with x16 cards, but they only run at 3.0 speeds, that would still leave 8 lanes of PCIe 5.0 I could allocate elsewhere.
I'm sure this is probably technically impossible, or would be incredibly expensive, but a man can dream.
cesarb · 4h ago
> Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste'
Made worse by the video cards being ridiculously fat. As an example, the one I have is two slots wide, and protrudes over the third slot; my motherboard has a PCIe x1 slot there, which is made unusable by that. The fourth and last slot of my motherboard, a PCIe x4, is clearly intended for the Thunderbolt card (there's a special connector near it on the motherboard for the sideband signals), but I can't see much use for Thunderbolt on a tower desktop, so it sits empty.
keyringlight · 3h ago
MY likely-underinformed opinion is that the ATX form factor for building PCs is creaking at the seams for the generic '1x dGPU' specification, but there's a number of factors that work against a change to something substantially better. It'd need a number of companies to offer new product lines at the same time, probably incompatible with ATX and all the challenges that would bring.
It's not just the huge heatsinks to get rid of the heat output, the power input is another. Also while dGPUs are growing at the high end, low-end dGPUs seem under-served, while AMD have APUs that I think could make a lot of people very content they don't seem too eager to make them easy to get hold of, and intel have the building blocks for a similar product but are hesitant to providing something beyond the minimum
vel0city · 3h ago
The popularity of the mini-ITX board size really shows this along with alternative mounting locations and risers for GPUs.
The old ATX power supply standard really needs to get phased out. I'm hopeful to see progress on ATX12VO become more common.
But even separate from that I see things like the Ryzen Z series opening even smaller devices while still offering a lot of graphical punch. I love the Z1 Extreme on my Legion Go, it's an awesome platform. And yeah, having that plus an external GPU could be cool but as noted it's $$$.
p_ing · 3h ago
Intel proposed the BTX format [0]. Didn't catch on. ATX has a lot of momentum (including the related mATX, EATX, and so forth).
I think BTX serves as the example for why a major change is unlikely, it's death is a warning to anyone thinking of doing the same. That said, even though it was led by intel back when they were in a much better position than they are now, I wonder if it wasn't against the background of Pentium4/"Preshott" and Athlon/Opteron would it have gone down better.
It's a shame as the only real personal computer desktop/tower maker that's exercised their freedom to make a significantly different design Apple with Mac Pros, and that's a different animal entirely.
p_ing · 4h ago
Yep, I have a 4090. It runs adventure and zork like no one's business.
AStonesThrow · 39m ago
TFA is a great read, although the PS/1 being a turnkey system, the author didn't need to piece together a lot of compatible accessories to make a great system.
"LEGO for Adults" is a very apt analogy I began to hear recently, about PCs in those days. It was an exhilirating feeling of self-determination and control for aficionados, that you could walk into a huge Fry's Electronics and there may be an entire wide aisle dedicated to sound cards, and most all of them would be compatible with your system -- the same situation with video cards, disk controllers, anything on PCI, not to mention the RAM and other accessories.
A desktop tower PC in those days was like a blank slate. I purchased my 386 "barebones" and upgraded piecemeal, because what better way to spec out the perfect system, and spread out the costs, than waiting a few months in-between expansion cards or accessory purchases? It was sort of a miracle that I upgraded the 386 so extensively, that by the time it was time to purchase a 486 system, all I needed was a motherboard and a disk, because the rest of the spare parts were all duplicated from past upgrades!
However this sort of self-assembly of PCs has long passed us by. Another interesting inflection point for me was reached in 2018. I decided I had no need for a desktop machine, and during the purchase of my ThinkPad, I was able to go direct to Lenovo.com, and spec out every detail of the machine to my heart's desire, building a truly custom system just through their website's storefront interface. It was custom-built and shipped direct from China, built to last like a battleship. Perhaps those days are bygone as well, at this point.
fabiensanglard · 5h ago
> I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card
This is exactly what the IBM PS/1 2168 have (see the unboxing section).
p_ing · 5h ago
The video frame doesn't render; on macOS Firefox it shows "No video with supported format and MIME type found.", so I missed it. But looking at the pictures, it only has ISA slots on the expansion board, unless I'm missing something.
But I missed that part of your post. I haven't seen integrated VLB before, only slotted. Does this board have an expansion to 2MiB? Though that would only matter if you wanted higher resolution/colors.
You never forget your first teenage dream PC. For me, it would be a 8800 GTX SLI build with a QX6850. And now I've revealed how old I am :^)
p_ing · 5h ago
Too young to remember how to configure an autoexec.bat/config.sys for maximum memory in Falcon Gold, too old to forget what a Folder is.
rzzzt · 5h ago
Fire up MEMMAKER.EXE which makes recommendations after two restarts.
coolcase · 1h ago
Mine was weird. An Amstrad 1512 but shrunk to about half the length in every dimension inc. monitor. I could probably make that now using 3d printer and rpi!
ungreased0675 · 5h ago
I love this. What a trip down memory lane.
dgfitz · 3h ago
I can’t help but notice the ship date on both the keyboard and the main unit. It looks like you had already bought the keyboard before the pc itself arrived.
MrBuddyCasino · 5h ago
Jealaous of that video game library. Fabien has good taste indeed.
fabiensanglard · 4h ago
Every times I think I a "done" I see something I want to add. The technique I used to limit myself is "whatever can fin on the three top shelves".
It worked until I started to store some boxes horizontally.
My parents bought an AMD 486 100mhz at the end of 1995, it was still a viable low end machine for that time but they paid as if it was a Pentuim. Had to somehow make it work up until 2001 with that machine. Don't know if I had a career in tech if I wasn't forced to tinker with it.
As my relatives and siblings updated their computers, I inherited their spare parts. My machine got some very interesting upgrades. It got 2 floppy drives (very rare at the time), 2 harddisks, a cd-recorder unit, RAM was upgraded to 64 MB and the modem was replaced by a ne2k compatible network card. I also had a Linux-supported Canon BJC 4200 and a SANE-supported TCE table scanner. Still, I couldn't get the SoundBlaster that my brother had and, sadly, my machine continued without sound support on Linux.
At around 2006 I replaced it with a new self built computer which had better compatibility with Linux than with windows-xp and then this new computer became my first dedicated Linux machine. I found out that Linux eventually got support for AZT-R 2316 at around 2007, but the last time I tried my old computer, it displayed "parity error" probably from oxidation in the memory connectors. I then just gave up on it.
Later on I thought about if it would be possible to install a graphics card with OpenGL support and USB port on one of the remaining PCI ports. I certainly wouldn't be able to install a modern Linux distro on it, but certainly it would work with one of those specially crafted for old computers like TinyCore. With recent kernel changes, swapping maybe smart enough to be usable on SSD with SATA to IDE adapters even in that computer. Now, that would be a dream machine.
Also started programming on this one with QBasic and then moved to Turbo Pascal 7 (because I needed a .exe file to be called from autoexec as a password protection vs. my sister which I couldn't do with QBasic :)
Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D
With a friend we destroyed the msdos 622 installation on the new 40 mb hd of my family 386 when deleting tmp files...
I was awed by the beast... Everything about it screamed over-engineering - even the case was incomprehensibly robust and the power switch had a satisfyingly loud motion... I could even touch its legendary tangential fan... Touching the 20 years-old dream was an emotional moment - I'm glad I did it... The ultimate Windows 3.0 host !
But it had to go after a little while: my two-room apartment was too small for so much awesomeness, so it went to another fan.
Which is bizarre. But to me it is (apparently) the small of new electronics, plus perhaps the ‘hot dusty things’ smell. It also comes with the memory of playing Pod (a racing game), by Ubisoft (I think). Good teenage memories!
From the article:
> 8BitDo makes a fantastic modern keyboard inspired by the M looks and feel.
Hard disagree. I found most of their keyboard replicas to be rather cheap feeling. However, their controllers such as the Arcade Stick and Pro 2 are excellent.
I think the closest approximation you can get to an old school model M keyboard with buckler springs is probably from Unicomp. If you don't care about that kind of authenticity I would just stick with something like a Keychron mechanical keyboard and call it a day.
https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/NEW_M
The Quake code was designed to take advantage of the fact that the Pentium could have one integer and one FPU instruction in flight at the same time, thanks to optimizations by an even bigger space-alien wizard than John Carmack -- Michael Abrash. The Cyrix CPUs... couldn't dual-issue instructions like this, so clock-for-clock their performance suffered compared to Intel.
And I’m just immediately fixated on this whole vibe of a life-sized tinkering workspace that’s the inside of a PC case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7_Combat_Direction_Cent...
While realistically I understand it was just a bunch of racks and consoles, due to the permanent nature of the installation and the way it was integrated into the building I like to imagine the operators and technicians scurrying around admits bunches of wires and tubes.
So that doesn’t qualify for free shipping, I imagine.
I absolutely love the aesthetic of a big classic telephone receiver attached to the end.
- Commodore 128 with dual floppy drive vs my tape-only C64 - Maxed out Amiga 1000 with a bunch of sampler and MIDI extensions vs my A500 + 512kb - B/W PowerMac G3 fully expanded just because - Dual Celly 300A @ 450 with Dual Voodoo II vs my 450 with single Voodoo II
Nothing after that had this "I really want this, but I can't get it" thing. I just bought what I wanted.
https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8
Or an FPGA-based hardware version:
https://hackaday.io/project/180081-opencores-pdp-8-on-fpga
http://fpgaretrocomputing.org/pdp8x/
etc.
It had a CD-ROM, speakers and sound and color and everything. I think it was $10,000, or that's what the computer teacher said.
And it looks like the PS/1 is missing VLB, but of course the video card is integrated in this model so that makes sense.
I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card and a Sound Blaster AWE64.
But that's my childhood machine, not the author's :-)
I once visited a college buddy who had a genuine EISA system, and I believe that I left flecks of drool as I admired the superior electronics and engineering invested in that EISA bus. Of course, nobody seriously purchased EISA if they expected to be compatible with stuff.
My father had a PS/2 50Z, which unfortunately saddled him with the MCA Microchannel bus. A likewise superior bit of engineering that was compatible with virtually nothing. Thankfully, Dad never felt a burning need to trick out his system.
Personally, I enjoyed the standard ISA path on my 286 and 386. It was with some regret that I chose VLB for the 486 board, because compared to the above buses, VLB was a hack and a kludge, and you could smell the duct tape and chewing gum on every expansion card.
However, VLB expansion cards were as plentiful as Star Wars action figures, so I was able to absolutely cram cards into a full-size tower until several generations of Pentiums obsoleted everything except PCI.
Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' (though I do have a BT 5.1 card for a purpose I no longer need). SLI is dead. Only those with special needs, LLMs or crypto, would ever fill up the additional slots.
Building computers is now just stupid simple and in my view, sorta brainless. No jumpers, no "must go in this slot #". The only thing I ever have difficulty with is mounting the CPU cooler, the thing is f-ing huge and requires a special very long Phillips screwdriver.
/oldmanrant
Oh yeah, and if you didn't bleed when building a PC, you didn't really build a PC. Now everything is rolled steel for those kitten hands.
The CPUs all come with enough PCIe lanes for a single dGPU at x16, x4 for the PCH/chipset, and maybe another x4 for a single M.2 SSD. If you aren't building a bog standard gaming PC with one SSD, one huge GPU, and nothing else, you get a configuration that doesn't match what you need. Bifurcation is hit-or-miss, if you can even physically get to the second PCIe slot, if that slot is even big enough. Random M.2s are linked to the PCH with random modes and bandwidths that change based on other configuration options.
All due to the stingy lane count on consumer platforms, again, targeting the lowest common denominator. It was even worse before Ryzen came out and offered a generous 24 lanes (16 for a GPU, 4 for the PCH, and 4 for an SSD) vs Intel's 20.
Of course, PCIe lanes aren't free, but somehow, having "I/O" targeted workloads means you also must go and spend 2-5x as much for "workstation" or server class motherboards, which also are engineered to a common "usual needs" spec that add in a bunch of shit I don't need, and usually require sacrificing single-core speed unless you get top of the line $10K+ server CPUs that draw 5x the power.
What I'd really like is instead of 4 lanes going to the chipset, I wish all of them did. Or at least, all of them went from the CPU to some switch chip that would allow me to set which lanes go to what slots, and have a software configured lane/bandwidth allocation. 24 lanes of PCIe 5.0 is 48 lanes of PCIe 4.0 is 96 lanes of PCIe 3.0, which is more than enough, but trying to actually unlock all of that bandwidth is still limited to the hardware configuration of the motherboard, and no way to reallocate unspent bandwidth. Instead of it all being hardwired for specific configurations, to the CPU directly OR to the chipset, I wish they were all wired for x16 (or x4 for the M.2 slots) direcly to some switch chip, which is then fully wired to the CPU's remaining lanes after PCH/chipset connections. If I need to stuff 4 slots with x16 cards, but they only run at 3.0 speeds, that would still leave 8 lanes of PCIe 5.0 I could allocate elsewhere.
I'm sure this is probably technically impossible, or would be incredibly expensive, but a man can dream.
Made worse by the video cards being ridiculously fat. As an example, the one I have is two slots wide, and protrudes over the third slot; my motherboard has a PCIe x1 slot there, which is made unusable by that. The fourth and last slot of my motherboard, a PCIe x4, is clearly intended for the Thunderbolt card (there's a special connector near it on the motherboard for the sideband signals), but I can't see much use for Thunderbolt on a tower desktop, so it sits empty.
It's not just the huge heatsinks to get rid of the heat output, the power input is another. Also while dGPUs are growing at the high end, low-end dGPUs seem under-served, while AMD have APUs that I think could make a lot of people very content they don't seem too eager to make them easy to get hold of, and intel have the building blocks for a similar product but are hesitant to providing something beyond the minimum
The old ATX power supply standard really needs to get phased out. I'm hopeful to see progress on ATX12VO become more common.
But even separate from that I see things like the Ryzen Z series opening even smaller devices while still offering a lot of graphical punch. I love the Z1 Extreme on my Legion Go, it's an awesome platform. And yeah, having that plus an external GPU could be cool but as noted it's $$$.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTX_(form_factor)
It's a shame as the only real personal computer desktop/tower maker that's exercised their freedom to make a significantly different design Apple with Mac Pros, and that's a different animal entirely.
"LEGO for Adults" is a very apt analogy I began to hear recently, about PCs in those days. It was an exhilirating feeling of self-determination and control for aficionados, that you could walk into a huge Fry's Electronics and there may be an entire wide aisle dedicated to sound cards, and most all of them would be compatible with your system -- the same situation with video cards, disk controllers, anything on PCI, not to mention the RAM and other accessories.
A desktop tower PC in those days was like a blank slate. I purchased my 386 "barebones" and upgraded piecemeal, because what better way to spec out the perfect system, and spread out the costs, than waiting a few months in-between expansion cards or accessory purchases? It was sort of a miracle that I upgraded the 386 so extensively, that by the time it was time to purchase a 486 system, all I needed was a motherboard and a disk, because the rest of the spare parts were all duplicated from past upgrades!
However this sort of self-assembly of PCs has long passed us by. Another interesting inflection point for me was reached in 2018. I decided I had no need for a desktop machine, and during the purchase of my ThinkPad, I was able to go direct to Lenovo.com, and spec out every detail of the machine to my heart's desire, building a truly custom system just through their website's storefront interface. It was custom-built and shipped direct from China, built to last like a battleship. Perhaps those days are bygone as well, at this point.
This is exactly what the IBM PS/1 2168 have (see the unboxing section).
But I missed that part of your post. I haven't seen integrated VLB before, only slotted. Does this board have an expansion to 2MiB? Though that would only matter if you wanted higher resolution/colors.
It worked until I started to store some boxes horizontally.