Welcome to the third installment of my Building a Retro Gaming Rig series. Today, I’ll be taking a look at another motherboard and CPU combo that I picked up from eBay on a bit of a whim.
In Part 1 of this series, I took an in-depth look at some Slot-1 gear, including the popular Asus P2B and some CPU options. As I was thinking ahead in the build, I got frustrated with the lack of simple and classic-looking ATX tower cases available these days. Everything looks far too modern, has too much bling or is just plain gigantic. Used tower cases from twenty years ago are all yellowed pretty badly and just look bad. On the other hand, there are lots of small, simple and affordable micro ATX cases available.
Micro ATX – or mATX – motherboards were actually pretty uncommon twenty-odd years ago. PC tower cases were pretty large and in those days people really did use lots of expansion cards and needed the extra space. Only very compact systems and OEMs seemed to use the mATX form factor at that time. Many of these boards were heavily integrated, lacked expansion slots and stuck you with some pretty weak onboard video solutions.
MSI MS-6160 Motherboard
In an interesting twist, I came across an MSI MS-6160 mATX board based on the Intel 440LX chipset that seemed to tick many of the right boxes. The combo included a Celeron 400MHz processor and 512MB of SDRAM for only $35 CDN.
vswitchzero 