Guided Tour - First Stop: House of Cards

(We are looking in the left side of the computer. The front of the computer is at the right side of the picture.)

Here, the main feature we see is the daughterboard or "riser card", vertically in the background. It is plugged into the motherboard at the bottom, and it is holding four cards in expansion slots. Not all computers come with the same number of slots. Some computers have the connectors right on the motherboard, rather than on a daughterboard. Packard Bell calls this computer the "4x4 series" - there's a similar model called the "3x3 series" with only three expansion slots, allowing the computer to be shorter. In this computer, there are two types of connectors used by cards: the older ISA type (usually black) and the newer PCI type (usually white). The top connector is PCI, and the bottom two connectors are ISA. The second-from-the-top slot has both types of connectors, but only one connector can be used at a time.

The top card is an Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI card, plugged into a PCI connector. You can't see it well, since we're looking at it edge-on. Along one of its edges, we can see two internal SCSI connectors: a long rectangular 50-pin connector, and a smaller D-shaped 68-pin connector.

The second card (the longest one) is Packard Bell's "Sound144AM" ISA card, which came pre-installed in the computer. It contains a sound card (identified as an "Aztech Sound Galaxy Washington 16" by Windows 95), a 14.4bps modem, and a proprietary (MKE-Panasonic) CD-ROM connector. The large ribbon cable connected to the nearest end of the card goes to the CD-ROM. The thin cable near the mounting bracket at the back also goes to the CD-ROM, but it only carries audio. Slightly above the card you can see an unused PCI connector. It is partially hidden by the two ribbon cables coming from the third card.

The third card is the GSI 2C card. It is an ISA card with IDE connectors on it. IDE and SCSI are the two main interfaces used for hard drives. There is a ribbon cable plugged in one of the connectors, and it loops over the Sound144AM card and back toward the hard drives. This cable is split lengthways, which is something I've only seen in this computer. There is also a twisted pair of red and black wires connected to this card, coming from the front of the computer. These two wires go to the hard drive in-use indicator light on the computer's front panel.

The bottom card is a Gemulator card, with the two-chip TOS 2.06 ROMs sitting in two of the card's eight ROM sockets. (Yes, those are real, non-pirate ROMs produced by Atari.) The Gemulator card allows for emulating the Atari ST line of computers, as well as the Macintosh (if you have Mac ROMs and the right version of the Gemulator software.)

The large square chip on the motherboard directly under the Gemulator card is the 'famous' CMD 640 PCI IDE controller chip (see my "My Experiences with SCSI..." page for more info on it.) The video controller and Video RAM are beside and behind the CMD 640, but you can't see these well in the picture.

On the near side of the CMD 640 chip, there is a tiny blue wire which runs from the pin of one chip to another chip on the other side of the daughterboard. This wire is too small to see in the photo. My computer was sold as "Factory Remanufactured", and this blue wire is probably the reason. The original trace (copper strip on the circuit board) on the motherboard probably didn't connect properly, or was broken somewhere. The blue wire was soldered on afterwards to do the job. Since the original motherboard was defective, the computer could not be sold as 'new', even though it now works correctly. Because of this, the computer was sold at a lower price than other 'perfect' computers. (It was also considered fairly slow when I bought it, lowering the price further.)

On the right side of the picture, we see the 60MHz Pentium processor, and a few cables. We'll take a better look at these at the next stop.