I agree fyy,

My main box is a HP DC7900, Core2quad, 8GB RAM, 240GB SSD, Nvidia GT-640. It does what I need, stable and inexpensive.

HighTreason wrote:

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What would you do with a Dell Dimension 4600?

Funny you should say (or rather, post) that: As, my *MAIN* *RIG* is a Dell Dimension 4600... with an added 2GB RAM, an SBLive, and an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 😀

I am viewing this thread with interest, recently salvaged a Dimension 4500 for $3 untested, cleaning 12 yrs' worth of dust out was satisfying!! Scored the SB live! Value and a working 9800Pro. But with an i845 chipset it can't go as far as the 4600, maybe a 3.06Ghz P4 tops, and DDR only. Well designed machines though, very solid and a shame just to tip it. Was thinking of switching a Highpoint SATA card and SSD setup into it for the family, but that is putting pearls on a swine sadly...

JidaiGeki wrote:

Was thinking of switching a Highpoint SATA card and SSD setup into it for the family, but that is putting pearls on a swine sadly...

Perhaps, but you could justify it by telling yourself that SSD could go into a newer machine later on down the road. Also, it DOES support up to 4GB DDR1 and has an AGP slot, which is nice. Put in a video card that supports hardware decoding h264, a hyperthreading P4, and 4GB of ram and it should be able to flex a little bit of muscles for regular day use.

I resqued a DELL P4 of some kind about a year ago, I have not touched it since but now I got some strange urge to see what it can do.

Skyscraper wrote:

to see what it can do.

It'll run a marginal modern system, a good XP circa 2004, a fast w98, and it'll take the chill off the room this winter...

I am leaning heavily in making it a dual boot system. Fast 98 and good early XP box. I did not have time today to mess with hard drives. The motherboard is solid though. Made by Intel, 9x/NT support, IDE, SATA, Floppy, will hold 2 3.5" hard drives, AGP, and 3 PCI slots. Couple that with working front panel audio for a SB Live or Audigy and it seems pretty sweet. No proprietary form factor or PSU to deal with and it doesn't take up a lot of room being a Micro-ATX mid-tower design. I read the early revisions will take a 3.0-GHz Northwood or Prescott and the later revisions will take more. I did not look further as I will not be going fast than 3.0-GHz.

squareguy wrote:

I am leaning heavily in making it a dual boot system.

All I can think of for reasons against: 98 cannot do the later AGP cards that you will want in XP. 98 does not play well with over half a gig of RAM, whereas XP likes about 1.5 before diminishing returns.

You /can/ dual boot, it's just they're better as a pair of boxes.

Well hopefully I will find out tomorrow if there is one or two more like it, so hopefully I will have a pair. As far as if I dual boot it will be for early XP only. I do have an Athlon II 250 board with 4-GB RAM and a GT-740 card for later stuff if needed. When will I ever get all these boxes built???

it's sadly slightly a few months too new to be a Ben Curtis tribute system 🙁

but if I had stumbled onto one i'd go full dork age on it. XP with the Luna, Plus, UT2003, Sims expansions, JK2, ZoneAlarm, "xp games" collections, XCOM Enforcer etc... and give it the worst possible video card to run Deus Ex Invisible War with. 😀

Dude....

EDIT: I laughed so hard when i read the Dork Age comment I almost peed myself...

squareguy wrote:

Athlon II 250 board with 4-GB RAM and a GT-740 card for later stuff

Is there anything an early XP box would play that a late XP box won't?

When will I ever get all these boxes built???

Wait... we were supposed to be hurrying? Uh-oh.

I would like an early XP box to play Splinter Cell displayed correctly with a GeForce4 TI and a later one for games that require more horsepower without having to swap video cards around. It's also an excuse for more boxes I suppose.

EDIT: nice collection BTW

Got it. Thanks.

And "more boxes" is good. It's always a very good thing to have spares.

That's a good idea. A 865 chipset based Pentium 4 ~ 2.4 GHz with an AGP card is great for older games.

To get the most out of some of the later XP games I would move to PCIe, be it Core 2 Duo, Phenom II, Ahtlon II whatever. Games such as FEAR, Doom 3, Far Cry that are a little bit too demanding for an AGP system.

squareguy wrote:

What would you do with a Dell Dimension 4600?

I'd get all three systems, set them up with fresh installations of XP, and sell them on Craigslist for $50 apiece, then use the proceeds to buy a nice piece of retro kit that you're genuinely interested in.

My mother used a Dimension 4600 for several years and it was a fine system, but not really worth keeping as a collectible so we sold it when she upgraded to a C2D system. Dell Dimension minitowers are like Ford Taurus sedans - decent and useful, but not interesting or rare enough to hold onto.

I'm not worried about collectability, just playing games and the more common the better for spare parts.

I was able to go by today and I did get an identical 4600, so I have two now.

A very interesting feature I found was after i flashed the BIOS to the newest version and going through the menus I found a setting for "OS Install". I enabled it since I am about to install Windows 98 SE and I got a boot menu telling me that the computer was in OS Install mode and that the RAM was being limited to 256MB. So, Wow! I can put 98 on one hard drive, XP on another and be able to go from 256MB for 98 all the way to 4GB in XP with just a BIOS option. I may not use it but interesting nonetheless.

That's a pretty cool feature!

The Windows 98 gods hate me. There of course has to be a resource conflict between the video card and some ACPI motherboard crap.

Oh well...

Years with W98 taught me that there is no god. Look into disabling ACPI. But first update the BIOS, and second look into the Unofficial SP3 because this is the sort of thing I'd hope they'd have dealt with. Then I'd go for disabling.