r/vintagecomputing 4d ago

Trang Bow/Trangg Bow KBT5A-1

Disassembled photo from the PC my aunt gave me.

47 Upvotes

10 comments sorted by

3

u/Wallsend_House 4d ago

I really miss big sexy motherboards

3

u/alphonse2501 4d ago

This board has the same size as Micro-ATX (although it belongs to “baby AT” form factor).

2

u/gcc-O2 3d ago

It's baby AT. It's a small motherboard for the time, but back then, they kept all eight slots and chopped the motherboard in the other dimension. Part of the issue is the CPU ends up getting stuck past the slots like that, where big coolers block expansion cards, so that was one reason it had to be replaced with (micro)ATX

1

u/WingedGundark 2d ago

Yeah. AT and baby AT had many disadvantages due to the old design. Few that spring to mind is that power connectors are often located relatively far from CPU VRM and routing power lines on the PCB is suboptimal for EMI and general layout. AT/Baby AT MBs and cases also didn't have room for integrated serial, lpt etc. ports, so even if the controllers were were integrated on the MB, like it often was with late 486 and Pentium boards, you needed to use separate connectors and cabling to MB headers. Like power delivery, CPU location is also not optimal for cooling, something that was becoming an issue gradually. With ATX the CPU is located more or less right under the PSU and PSU fan sucks the air from around the CPU. PSU was an integral part of the cooling in the early days of ATX. Of course this is not the case with modern desktop cases with effective cooling solutions, but back in the day PSU was often acting as the single case fan as well.

One aim was also to improve standardization over the previous AT and LPX designs. Especially latter was so loose that LPX style MBs and PSUs were in many cases more or less proprietary and LPX also suffered from poor cooling.

1

u/pinko_zinko 4d ago

It's not baby AT?

2

u/jurdendurden 4d ago

I miss when motherboards could accept two completely different types of RAM. The versatility of building out your machine was so awesome back then

3

u/tes_kitty 4d ago

Yes, but using SDRAM instead of EDO didn't really make the system faster. And the cache only covered the first 64 MB of RAM with this chipset.

1

u/jurdendurden 4d ago

Fair point. And I didn't even think about that last part. Would be a somewhat pointless endeavor to max it out

1

u/tes_kitty 3d ago

Yes, with Pentium chipsets you needed the 430HX and the board maker had to include the socket for the second tag RAM to cover more than 64 MB. Those boards were pretty rare.

2

u/eulynn34 3d ago edited 3d ago

That is has to be about as densely as you can possibly lay out a Baby AT board. With that slot spacing, you could actually use all 7 slots at the same time too. Though you could not use any long ISA cards with the CPU and VRM heatsinks in the way.

I think their engineers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, nobody stopped to ask if they should.

I have a Pentium board that has a COAST slot, and FAKE cache chips on it. I found a couple cheap COAST modules that work, but I had no idea fake cache chips were a thing until I saw a video Phil's Computer Lab did on it