chinny22 wrote on 2024-11-14, 01:05:
What scares me most about this era of Dell's is the cap plage, Dell seemed to suffer more then other large OEM'S in this.
That's because Dell PCs from this era used Intel and Foxconn as the motherboard manufacturer. Both of these companies actually tried to do the right thing by using Japanese electrolytic capacitors almost exclusively, like they always have been in the past (at least for Dell.) The problem is that the Pentium 4 chips of the era were quite power hungry and thus demanded much stronger and more precise VRM designs than before, which in turn demanded much lower ESR capacitors that before. The cap manufacturing companies responded and were able to come up with new ultra-low ESR series to meet the new VRM circuit demands. Being still a relatively new technology, these ultra low ESR caps didn't go down without any issues. In fact, just about all of the ultra low ESR series from all of the Japanese manufacturers had issues. Not only that, but the extra heat from the P4 chips accelerated the failure of these caps. Unfortunately for Dell, both Intel and Foxconn seemed to use Nichicon more than any of the other Japanese brands... and Nichicon had major issues with their HM, HN, and HZ series in the early years (i.e. caps date-coded between 2001 and 2005.) So that's why Dell had so many failures.
That being said, not all Dell's suffered from the capacitor plague. In particular, I have a Dell Dimension 3000 and two Optiplex 170L PCs. All of these use solid polymer caps around the CPU, which is one of the highest-stress areas in these machines. I suppose I also got lucky in that the few large caps on the motherboard of my Dimension 3000 are not from Nichicon, and not from the affected low ESR series (IIRC.) All of these have been rock-solid systems and still work to this day. The Dimension 3000 was bought by my parents and used as a family PC in either later 2005 or mid 2006 somewhere. It didn't get retired until 2015 or 2016 or so from that duty... lasting us a good 10 years. The Optiplex 170L's were retired office PCs from a local Park Authority (or so I was told) that I acquired in late 2012. I set up and used one of them as my main PC from early 2013 until pretty much the end of 2023... so a good 10 years on top of however much the previous place used it. The other was given to a family friend around the same time and retired around 2017-ish... and then picked up by me again and revived in 2023 as a "2nd main/office" PC at my parent's house.
Going back to the thread topic... these PCI-only P4 PCs are indeed a bit "lack-luster" for a proper retro gaming rig (especially under Windows 2k/XP), with the Dimension 2400 probably even more so with its Intel i845 onboard graphics. Not that the i865 "Extreme Graphics 2" in my Dimension 3000 and Optiplex 170L's is anything to write home about... though side by side with the i845, I do think it's substantially better in some ways. In Mafia, for example, I get more or less the same (rather poor) framerates that I do on my Radeon 9200 SE... and that seems to apply for a number of other games too. So I'd say they are more or less equivalent.
Now, we all know a Radeon 9200 SE / 9250 SE are not really great GPUs when it comes to gaming. However, for many Win9x games up to maybe 1999-2000 or so, I'd say they are decent enough. With that said, I have been curious before to try that Dimension 3000 of ours under Windows 9x with the onboard graphics, to see how well it would do, and I might try it someday when I have more time. A few years back, I did try a 2 GHz P4 Northwood system with onboard i845 graphics under Windows ME and was left both disappointed and pleasantly surprised with the performance of various games. In particular, Need For Speed High Stakes with Direct3D as the render path ran pretty good (60 FPS most of the time with a "full grid" race) with most visual settings maxed out. Resolution was of course relatively low (either 800xx600 or 1024x768, I don't remember exactly anymore.) Funny thing is, due to the P4 sheer speed (even though it's not a very efficient architecture), I could also get pretty good framerates under software render. I don't remember what other game(s) or benchmarks I tried... but if I don't remember, then they were probably experiences not worth remembering. 🤣
So I suppose even these common "office 'putters" could make an OK Win9x gaming rig - just not a really high-end one. Even better, since these aren't anything special, I think they are more likely to get played on "without remorse or worry" about loosing any precious hardware if the machine croaks.
