Those are some really interesting machines you have there!

aberration wrote:

Any other Optiplex fans out there?

Yes, I'm one of those members of the proud Dell collectors club*. I have a Dell Optiplex GX150 (tower) that I use for Windows 98 gaming. Although some people don't appreciate the clamshell cases Dell used in the late-P3/P4 era, I actually have a nostalgic attachment to them. Also in my collection is a newer Dell Optiplex 745 (small desktop - originally a GX520, but I upgraded its motherboard and CPU) that I use for digitally transferring analog videos (particularly VHS tapes of some movies that haven't been released on DVD 😈 ). And finally (even though it's technically not an Optiplex), a Dell Dimension 4600 (tower) that I use as my Windows XP sandbox computer.

*Not a real club, in case you're wondering.

aberration wrote:

Only problem is that I would need to get a power supply adapter if one of the PSUs ever blows because of Dell's stupid custom layouts.

The last time I checked, I believe Dell ATX power supply adapters are available for sale on eBay, just buy five of them and you'll have nothing to worry about.

The last time I checked, I believe Dell ATX power supply adapters are available for sale on eBay, just buy five of them and you'll have nothing to worry about.

Funny thing is I had the exact thought in mind! They're all piled up in my Amazon cart waiting for me to decide I have enough spare cash to add to the spare parts hoard.

I love the Optiplex towers and desktops with ISA slots. The GX1 is quite versatile, except the AGP slot is used by an onboard ATI card.

The black GX400 uses a somewhat standard ATX layout but it only has 6 slots IIRC. Could turn that into a killer sleeper rig.

I also have a very prized Optiplex, a GX110 in the small desktop form factor. I got it with a 733MHz Coppermine, 256MB RAM and a 40GB HDD. I upgraded it to a 1GHz Coppermine, 512MB RAM and a 120GB HDD. The riser I have is PCI only so for now I upgraded it to a Radeon 7000 PCI and a Terratec i128 SOLO-1. It is a very nice Win98/Win2K dual boot PC that I can use for pretty much everything from 1991-2000, it will likely end up on my current work desk under my main PC monitor as my go-to retro system; I just love the form and the case.

I lately find myself considering replacing the Radeon 7000 card with either:

• A Matrox G450: A more contemporary card from 2000, the systems build date, and in my opinion a much, much cooler graphics card, though its 32-bit performance would be quite lacking compared with the Radeon 7000 - I would like to be able to play 1024x768x32bit Quake 3 at the very least on this PC..
• A GeForce 2 MX400 PCI: Another 2001 card with a lot more muscle than Radeon 7000 but it's not passively cooled so I'm not super hot about using it.
• A Radeon 9250: A 2004 card that would be very out of place in this PC but would enable it to play games way beyond 2000. If you will upgrade the system, why not go all in?

I would also love to use an AWE64 in this system but I can not, for the life of me, find the PCI/ISA riser card for this case on sale anywhere.

Hey appiah4! Nice machine, also a huge lover of this case and form factor, always good to run into more optiplex fans! I did a swing by the microcenter near Philadelphia after my classes on Tuesday and picked up the parts to get my GX115 version up and running to my satisfaction.

I'm pretty sure that the 10GB WD drive in there was original and I really wanted something with more longevity so I put a PCI SATA card in and managed to get it up and running on a Microcenter house brand 120GB SSD(hopefully the firmware levels the wear decently). It adds a nice little speed boost to the whole affair.

WINDOWS ME THE HORROR!!! Na, I actually really enjoy ME and happen to own a legit upgrade disk from the local goodwill. My problem was that every time it came to installing the onboard graphics driver in 98 after install it locked the whole thing up. It also refused to work with the 16MB Nvidia TNT card I pulled from one of the GX110 towers so as soon as the 98SE install wrapped up I threw the ME disk in and "upgraded" it. And to my happy joy the ME disk had the proper drivers for onboard and the Nvidia card!

So here goes.
Dell Optiplex GX115, whatever you call this low LPX form factor here?
CPU: Pentium 3 Coppermine 733mghz (pulled from a broken down HP Vectra to upgrade the original celeron)
Memory: 512MB PC133
Storage: Microcenter house brand 120GB SSD
Cards: SYBA sata controller, Nvidia TNT2 16mb, 4 port usb

To my amazement I installed the XML office compatibility pack via kernelex with XP SP2 settings and Word XP will actually open and save to DOCX. I use this machine to study for nursing school exams at the moment.

I personally can't unsee these things as "those stupid slow old school computers", so it's good to see that there exist some who disagree.

I worry about those proprietary PSUs in the desktop flip-top case models, though. Do you guys have any plans for what to do when these start to fail?
EDIT: grammar

Do you guys have any plans for what to do when these start to fail?

Yep, you can find the PSU adapter for these by searching amazon et. al. for the Dimension 4100 adapter which I think is made by athena.

They're quite scalable... for GX1 you can slocket them and go from a Pentium II 400MHz or whatever it has to oeuvre 1GHz... bump teh RAM to 512MB, add whatever drives you want, nab a nice PCI video card...

oeuvre wrote:

They're quite scalable... for GX1 you can slocket them and go from a Pentium II 400MHz or whatever it has to oeuvre 1GHz... bump teh RAM to 512MB, add whatever drives you want, nab a nice PCI video card...

The GX110 has the same options, except you obviously can't go down to PII Slot-1 CPUs, but can go down to Mendocino Celeron 400..

There's a GX100 as well

no real nostalga attached but also like the "rounded-front leaning-forward case design"
It looked old at the time, like 1930's streamlining, which made it kind of, um, classy?

They kinda remind me of 80s and early 90s BMWs

SW-SSG wrote:

I personally can't unsee these things as "those stupid slow old school computers", so it's good to see that there exist some who disagree.

EDIT: grammar

Thats actually the reason I have so much nostalgia for these computers. Me and my friend used to get these when our school district switched over to XP, because they were pretty much slow as hell at that point. We had stacks of them in the basement, and now I look back fondly on learning how to rebuild/tweak computers from those days.

I'm going to have to keep an eye out for one of the LPX optiplexes.

oeuvre wrote:

They're quite scalable... for GX1 you can slocket them and go from a Pentium II 400MHz or whatever it has to oeuvre 1GHz... bump teh RAM to 512MB, add whatever drives you want, nab a nice PCI video card...

Well, I wish the school IT department knew that... towards the end the GX1s were all running Win2K on their stock 64MB (or so) of RAM. They had been rolled out sometime in 1998 with WinNT 4.0, so they'd at least lasted 10 years despite all the abuse of a typical middle-school (e.g. junior high) environment. Naturally the newer models with P-IIIs fared somewhat better. The replacements were Optiplex 755s with WinXP on 2GB of memory.

Madc0w wrote:

Thats actually the reason I have so much nostalgia for these computers. Me and my friend used to get these when our school district switched over to XP, because they were pretty much slow as hell at that point. We had stacks of them in the basement, and now I look back fondly on learning how to rebuild/tweak computers from those days.

So that's where they all went, eh? :p
In our case, every single beige Dell (CRT monitors too, as the new ones included LCD panels) in the school was loaded into a dumpster and they were gone the next day. No idea where they went or what happened to them.

Btw, the question in my first post has mostly remained unanswered... I mean the proprietary power supplies with the 60mm exhaust fans. This was the most common form factor at my school, and are significantly smaller than the units found in the Dimension 4100. I'm quite sure they are neither TFX, Flex ATX/ITX, or SFX-sized but are anyway about that size. Perhaps it is possible to cram a TFX PSU's motherboard in there.

appiah4 wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

They're quite scalable... for GX1 you can slocket them and go from a Pentium II 400MHz or whatever it has to oeuvre 1GHz... bump teh RAM to 512MB, add whatever drives you want, nab a nice PCI video card...

The GX110 has the same options, except you obviously can't go down to PII Slot-1 CPUs, but can go down to Mendocino Celeron 400..

You'd be surprised to know that GX110s with Slot 1 instead of Socket 370 actually do exist. I was proven wrong when I thought they all used Socket 370 when someone claimed to have owned a Slot 1 model and stated that it was real. I guess if you were lucky enough to come across the elusive Slot 1 GX110, you could have a Pentium II if you were hardcore enough to even bother with downgrading the processor.

(Yes, I'm aware that appiah4 has the Socket 370 model, I was just proving a point about Pentium II compatibility on the early models that did use Slot 1.)

I mean the proprietary power supplies with the 60mm exhaust fans.

Ahh ya I see your point. I was hoping if the day ever came I could find something small, jam it in tightly enough, use the cable adapter, and call it a day.