My Dell is a mismatched assembly of obsolete parts trying to compete in the modern era. It's like a modded 1970s car bound for a demolition derby.
This isn't a retro PC, it was built to be used for everyday real life computing. The case is from a Dell Dimension 4300. Like so many others it came from a thrift store - back when they sold computers to customers instead of "recyclers" those places always had Dells. It's very scratched and beaten up and a chore to open and close. I stripped out the parts but the case fits other Dell boards.
The motherboard is a Dell Optiplex GX270 SFF. Yes small form factor, but I put the board in the 4300 mid-tower case instead. The GX270 has a WinXP Professional license in the BIOS, it just needed an appropriate install disc to recognize it.
The PSU is an AcBel 550W intended for some Sun workstation which were liquidated on the internet a few years ago. It comes with 24pin+8pin connectors which don't fit the motherboard. 20pin and 4pin extension cables were needed to make it fit.
The CPU is a Prescott 3.0GHz hyperthreaded. Definitely wouldn't want that in a small form factor case. It works well with H.264 video though. It's using the low profile heatsink and blower fan from a Prescott equipped SFF GX280 (what an abomination that was). It's not the proper setup for a mid-tower, but it works.
RAM is 4x 512MB DDR400 CL2 Kingston Hyper-X from my old Athlon. These aren't able to be properly utilized by the Dell because it will only use SPD settings, and the SPD on those modules is conservative. One of them is even programmed as DDR333, so the system is clocking all the RAM at DDR333 because of it. It's a waste, but the only other RAM I have is ECC and the Dell BIOS refuses to boot with those, even though they're unbuffered. Non-Dells have no problem with them, but Dell is special.
DVD drive is some Memorex thing from another thrift store. It works well.
Hard drive is a refurbished 1TB Seagate 7200.10 (warranty replacement). It uses the only SATA port.
The video card is a Visiontek Radeon HD2600XT AGP. I got it cheaper than usual on eBay. I'm impressed by the quality of it, it has a copper heatsink on both sides of the card and Sanyo capacitors.
The performance might be overkill for a P4, but this card lets it run newer shader heavy games decently, even though I'm not sure I'll really utilize it. It also has H.264 acceleration in MPC-BE, which I prefer over decoding 1080p in software. The Preshot is capable of that, but lives up to it's name in the process. Video playback is something I want this computer to be good at, and was the overriding reason for the CPU and video card choices.
I initially wanted this build to be based on an MSI 875P Neo, but the performance of that board turned out to suck. The Dell GX270 spanked it and was completely stable, while the MSI was touchy. I found a setting in the MSI BIOS that allowed it to match the GX270's performance, but the MSI became terribly unstable in that mode so it wasn't really usable. Dells of the early 2000s get a bad rap. They may be boring and have the limitations of non-enthusiast hardware but the electronics are solid and they work.
The cases are awful though. I'm sure somebody at Dell must have been really proud of coming up with these clamshell things but every one I've encountered has been practically unusable. The best P4-era Dell case I've found was from a cheaper model that had a standard MicroATX design with an easily removable side panel. Apparently you had to pay extra to be blessed with the clamshell disaster?
After I took the pictures here, I couldn't get the thing back closed. I stopped caring and just jammed it shut. There's obviously something wrong because the front corner is split open now. This comes after a previous episode where I've already locked one of the latches permanently open so I wouldn't have to pry it open with extreme force.
The system looks like hell but it runs great, my only complaint is that for some reason my standby option has been disabled in WinXP. I have no idea why that happened - it used to work. I noticed that immediately after booting the standby option is available, but once it finishes loading everything the option gets grayed out. I tried disabling services and didn't find a cause. Nonfunctional standby is something that has always irked me, and one nice thing about brand name systems like Dells is that this feature always works. But not now.
