From personal experience, old HP and IBM systems were a cut above the rest. You might wanna hold out for a HP Vectra as those things were built like tanks, ATX standard, a huge case that you could use for anything and very high quality througout as they were meant to be "workstations" and not PCs (just means that they were expensive).

IBM 300PL is another super old PC. Drawbacks are non ATX standard motherboards but ATX standard PSU and the AGP slot is meant for NLX cards (which are difficult to get hold of and limited to older cards only). Upside is these 300PLs are also superbly built, are very fast clock for clock as they have a superb Intel 440BX motherboard, hold 768mb ram and with a slotket you could get a Tualatin into that thing.

Other OEMs I wouldn't bother with personally.

Packard bell - destroy on sight
gateway - usually good
ibm/hp - the "standard" ones are great. The propritary ones... not so much
compaq - meh, servers were good though
dell - meh usually propriatary

luckybob wrote:

Packard bell - destroy on sight

But gut it for parts first 😁
Their boards are usually "of use", like their SiS530 stuff
I hate their cases though, I think they are ugly, but to each his own 😉

luckybob wrote:

gateway - usually good

Agrees 😄
Their motherboards are often made by Intel and they made some nice cases (though with a couple quirks like having the front panel plug thingies in 1 big connector and having no reset switch)

luckybob wrote:

ibm/hp - the "standard" ones are great. The propritary ones... not so much

Their standard ATX boards often use non-standard backplate layout, with everything ever so slightly replaced, a standard old fashioned backplate won't fit -_-

luckybob wrote:

compaq - meh, servers were good though

But their i815 are decent and don't use proprietary PSU pinout 😉
Watch out for their i810 stuff though

luckybob wrote:

dell - meh usually propriatary

dell = shoot to kill 🤣, just clean out all the parts and incinerate the rest, including their proprietary cases.
Heck, even their case fans are often a different pinout!!!

I got one more OEM to add:
Fujitsu Siemens = always standard parts of high quality and even their recovery disks are just normal XP cd's which will only activate on a FS.
Also their "recovery" disks aren't tied to any specific model, any XP recovery disk will work on any of their boards that support XP 😉
And their cases are generally of pretty good quality also. Got opne old one which currently houses a P3-1000 and the case is very sturdy, made out of steel 😀

Also I might add that FS use FSP PSU's, which is a good quality PSU for an OEM

Here is the Gateway system I chose to use for my Windows 98 system. It's a PII 233 64MB RAM 4.3GB HDD and AGP STB Velocity 128 (Nvidia Riva 128) and SB 128 PCI.

Let me know your thoughts and anyway to improve it!

/

It looks....nice!

It's clean and everything!

Only bad thing is the lack of a backside case fan exhaust and wheres the reset button?
I've noticed it's missing in my Gateway case also

It has a place for a fan, but it's covered up with a metal plate. Do you think it would be worthwhile to add in a fan?

Ya this one don't have a reset switch but I wonder if the mobo has a header for one? I will have to look.

It has one the 1st PII cores, built in 11-1997. From the data on the hard drive it was owned by an accounting firm, and would have been little tiny shredded pieces by now ;-(

Tetrium wrote:

It looks....nice! […]
Show full quote

It looks....nice!

It's clean and everything!

Only bad thing is the lack of a backside case fan exhaust and wheres the reset button?
I've noticed it's missing in my Gateway case also

ibm5150pc wrote:

It has a place for a fan, but it's covered up with a metal plate. Do you think it would be worthwhile to add in a fan?

Ya this one don't have a reset switch but I wonder if the mobo has a header for one? I will have to look.

It has one the 1st PII cores, built in 11-1997. From the data on the hard drive it was owned by an accounting firm, and would have been little tiny shredded pieces by now ;-(

Ah, never knew that about the metal plate!

I think if you can get a Deschutes Pentium 2 (which eats like only half the power of the earlier Klamath) you should be fine even without a fan, though adding a slow moving one wouldn't hurt 😉

Edit:Ah...can't read the part number on the CPU.
And about the reset header, I think chances are good your motherboard does have the header, but only the case is missing it 😉

When you're talking about 10-15 year old computers, it doesn't much matter which were better when they were new. They're all just as likely to have problems so many years later. The one brand I would avoid like the plague unless it was given to me for free was Dell. They did a lot of freaky stuff with their parts to prevent you from upgrading them during the PII-PIII time periods. Some of them can be worked around now, but it's just a lot of hassle when you can get a much more expandable machine cheaply enough. I learned my lesson with my small string of Optiplex GX1's. It's a good thing the machines themselves were free or I wouldn't have anything to do with them. My only real investment is in a box of spare parts for $20. I was originally going to upgrade them because I liked the look of the cases, but now I'm waffling about it. I have some Powerleap upgrades, but the memory isn't expandable enough on those boards and I would need to convert to a standard ATX PSU because the Dell ones are non-standard and low wattage. It's probably not even going to be worth lifting the lids off the cases.

IMO some of the best old school OEM machines from back in the day are the ones that no one ever heard of. At least then they would usually use a standard ATX case with ATX power supply and an off the shelf motherboard (or AT stuff if a few years earlier). The mobo might be crap but you could swap it for a new one if you wanted.

Everybody else from that era had at least a few systems with propretary elements, whether it was power supply, case, or even (at least for IBM) ram. That said I don't think I ever saw a proprietary Gateway in the ATX era except in some of their desk tops. Always go for a mid tower or a full tower. Desktops often used proprietary form factors with proprietary expanders for PCI/ISA.

Packard bell machines are super interesting, mainly because they always feel so much slower than everything else. I swear it's like they bought special motherboards with fake chips on them or something.

SavantStrike wrote:

Packard bell machines are super interesting, mainly because they always feel so much slower than everything else. I swear it's like they bought special motherboards with fake chips on them or something.

Did P-B buy from PCChips?

This Dell hatred is a little surprising. Remember that glowing review of the GXpro ?

ibm5150pc wrote:

Here is the Gateway system I chose to use for my Windows 98 system. It's a PII 233 64MB RAM 4.3GB HDD and AGP STB Velocity 128 (Nvidia Riva 128) and SB 128 PCI.

Let me know your thoughts and anyway to improve it!

If your goal is to play "Quake 1 DOOM NFS Ect", then why don't you just try doing that and decide if you are satisfied?

Jorpho wrote:

This Dell hatred is a little surprising. Remember that glowing review of the GXpro ?

ibm5150pc wrote:

Here is the Gateway system I chose to use for my Windows 98 system. It's a PII 233 64MB RAM 4.3GB HDD and AGP STB Velocity 128 (Nvidia Riva 128) and SB 128 PCI.

Let me know your thoughts and anyway to improve it!

If your goal is to play "Quake 1 DOOM NFS Ect", then why don't you just try doing that and decide if you are satisfied?

Try upgrading one, is all I can say. They may have been reliable and fast for their time, but once they became outdated you didn't have many options. Selling them on or finding a retailer who took old machines in trade was probably the best thing you could do with them.

SavantStrike wrote:

Packard bell machines are super interesting, mainly because they always feel so much slower than everything else. I swear it's like they bought special motherboards with fake chips on them or something.

PB was notorious for using Pentiums without any L2 cache, as a cost-cutting method.

Tetrium wrote:

It looks....nice! […]
Show full quote

It looks....nice!

It's clean and everything!

Only bad thing is the lack of a backside case fan exhaust and wheres the reset button?
I've noticed it's missing in my Gateway case also

It almost looks like there's a square plate where an 80mm exhaust could go with four screws holding it on. If so, I'd get on that stat 😜.

I think it looks like a lovely system for vintage gaming though.

As for Dell hatred, they're absolutely fine machines if you're happy with the way they are from the factory. The thing is a lot of the people here like to tinker, for which they are not so fantastic.

Thanks everyone for your input, but so far this thing is not normal at all, it's non standard ATX power supply, I thought OK I can deal with that just buy an extra.

So then I went to put in the fan, removed the plate and went to stick in a 80mm fan, won't fit. The mounting holes are 67mm what the h*ll kind of fan is that?

So I guess I don't get a fan unless I can find one with the 67MM holes and I can't find any 67MM fan online. Anyone have a clue? without drilling holes?

SavantStrike wrote:

It almost looks like there's a square plate where an 80mm exhaust could go with four screws holding it on. If so, I'd get on tha […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote:

It looks....nice! […]
Show full quote

It looks....nice!

It's clean and everything!

Only bad thing is the lack of a backside case fan exhaust and wheres the reset button?
I've noticed it's missing in my Gateway case also

It almost looks like there's a square plate where an 80mm exhaust could go with four screws holding it on. If so, I'd get on that stat 😜.

I think it looks like a lovely system for vintage gaming though.

As for Dell hatred, they're absolutely fine machines if you're happy with the way they are from the factory. The thing is a lot of the people here like to tinker, for which they are not so fantastic.

sliderider wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

This Dell hatred is a little surprising. Remember that glowing review of the GXpro ?

Try upgrading one, is all I can say. They may have been reliable and fast for their time, but once they became outdated you didn't have many options. Selling them on or finding a retailer who took old machines in trade was probably the best thing you could do with them.

I would posit a lot of computers from back then were difficult to upgrade.

Ooo, that's a lovely machine you got there, real clean and original. I'd hate to mess with such a nice stock machine, so if it were mine I'd just do the following:

1) More ram: 128-192mb
2) Maybe, just maybe a faster Klamath processor.
3) A larger faster hard disk
4) A Voodoo 3
5) Get a pci slot fan - this works real well on old cases with no standard fan ports.

That's it.

Jorpho wrote:

sliderider wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

This Dell hatred is a little surprising. Remember that glowing review of the GXpro ?

Try upgrading one, is all I can say. They may have been reliable and fast for their time, but once they became outdated you didn't have many options. Selling them on or finding a retailer who took old machines in trade was probably the best thing you could do with them.

I would posit a lot of computers from back then were difficult to upgrade.

Not like Dell. At least some of the computer makers used standard ATX power supplies, motherboards and cases. Many Dell models used non-standard parts so you couldn't upgrade them because the parts that you could buy in stores were either electrically incompatible or wouldn't fit physically. You had a small amount of wiggle room, but not much. The upgrade limits of the factory parts were reached pretty quickly then you had no choice but to buy a new computer.

Not like Dell. At least some of the computer makers used standard ATX power supplies, motherboards and cases.

That's a bit of a selective memory, there. Most of the midrange/highend Dell systems were pretty close to standard during the late Pentium - PIII era. There was the different power supply pinout, but in their tower machines it was still a regular ATX size and was pretty easily adaptable to a standard PSU. People seem to forget about those systems, though... most of the Dell talk around here centers on Optiplexes, which have never been standard and were never intended to be upgraded much (though you can still do quite a bit with them, even so).

Dells are also pretty good about CPU upgrades... You can even slap a Tualatin (with adapter) in most of their PII/PIII machines and it'll run without complaint. Compare that to the Compaqs which will usually complain if you even try to use a later stepping of chip from the same architecture.