To the best of my memory, the Packard Bell computers mentioned above had a standard design and more or less the same few components scattered across a few different models.
I had a Packard Bell Legend as well, though I don't recall the model number. Out of the box, it looked like this:
- 486sx 33MHz or 486dx2 66MHz processor (fan not included!)
- Up to 16MB of RAM, with up to 2 SIMM slots (8MB maximum capacity each)
- AT motherboard, manufacturer unknown (it may as well have come free in a box of breakfast cereal)
- 2400 baud internal modem that was soldered to (not incorporated into) the motherboard
- ISA video card with up to 1MB of SGRAM
- ISA IDE controller/sound card combo
- An empty ISA slot (mine was filled by a US Robotics 33600 modem)
- A motherboard riser card, on which the ISA slots were mounted
- Matsushita IDE 2X CD-ROM drive
- Up to a 720MB IDE Seagate hard drive
- 3.5" floppy drive, manufacturer unknown
- 120W power supply (mine failed after 3 years of constant use)
- Desktop AT case
- Tinny speakers, a feeble serial mouse that broke after a week of use, and an AT keyboard
The video card was the most monstrous thing I've seen inside a computer case. It was a good twenty inches in length and took up a large portion of the interior space. One could cut ten halfway decent PCI-Express video card shapes out of the huge circuit board.
Mine came with a 486DX2/66 processor. It had a passive heatsink! No fan. Taking the cover off the case, one would be blasted by a wave of hot air coming off the processor in visible waves.
The fact that it came with an onboard 2400 BPS modem should have been an omen of things to come. The 14400 BPS modem had been released years beforehand and the 2400 had been obsolete for quite a while by the time of purchase.
I used my Legend to run a BBS. After three years, the power supply, CD-ROM drive, hard drive and video card all failed. I replaced most of the parts. The kicker is that I paid $2,000.00 (USD) for it, at a time when it was already obsolete, in January 1995, just as the Intel Pentium was introduced. It should also be noted that the hard disk that shipped with my Packard Bell box hadn't been tested before shipping—after 10 minutes of inactivity it would spin down. Not go to sleep, but actually spin down, like you were preparing it for a bumpy trip, like you could do with old hard drives. It would take 30-45 seconds to spin back up when something attempted to read/write files on it. I had to call PB tech support (one of a great many calls; most of them involved problems with the sub-discount quality hardware), and for once, I got someone competent on the other end—he walked me through writing a TSR program in DOS debug that corrected the spin down problems.
The Packard Bell Corporation was purchased outright by NEC in the late 1990s, and the brand was discontinued, which is just as well because it never had a good reputation and I'd like to think that most people would know enough not to buy one... but the fact that PB sold computers for years on end before being purchased by NEC says otherwise.