observer wrote on 2025-06-29, 01:16:

Oh man, what a day. I saw an interesting facebook post a few days back. it was a dell computer and monitor, with one hastily tak […]
Show full quote

Oh man, what a day. I saw an interesting facebook post a few days back. it was a dell computer and monitor, with one hastily taken picture for free. it was listed 2 hours ago. I politely message the owner, who lives an hour away, quickly that i'm a vintage PC collector and would love to pick this up. I'd even give him $20.

I was really hopeful, given how fast I was able to reply... but alas, no response. the next day, the add was removed. not sold, but just removed. oh well.

Today my wife and I went to the beach, we were meeting up with someone else for an old ATI 9800 XT that I've been after for a fair price. We picked up that card and went to the beach. while we were there, the guy with the free computer messaged us. he still had it and I could come get it. score! I let him know we were at the beach, but when we were done we'd stop by.

I get there later on, and an incredibly nice man sets me up with a box of accessories, the computer and a huge monitor. probably the largest CRT computer monitor i've ever seen in person. It was a Dell Trinitron P1110 (21" CRT) in great physical shape. it came with a matching Dell 733B system!

i carefully got everything home, and it all worked! i popped open the PC and the first thing I see is a long AGP card. 3dfx logo! i wondered for a sec if it was a 6000 but i saw 2 VSA chips under their fans, a Voodoo 5 5500 is certainly another score! the ram was the next one, RDRAM with a pentium 3. i've only seen ram in Pentium 4 boards.

wow. well i have my work cut out for me. i'll try to get the colors fixed on the monitor, but just wow, what luck! the P1110, the voodoo 5 and an RDRAM system to top it off. i wish that nice man the best!

Wow! What a find! That is a really awesome setup.

Just a heads up, these computers can have bad caps, so I advise to check the PSU for any bulging/leaking caps. Otherwise it's an neat PC.

Now that is one awesome score! Congrats on the find!

thanks folks! all seems to be well with it.

if anyone else finds one of these and wants some CPU ideas: i tested other CPUs. it wouldn't take anything above 733mhz, slot or slocketted. It would boot with an 866mhz and a 1ghz, but would not be able to boot anything, it wouldn't leave the bios page.

it had the A01 bios on it still, so i flashed that to A07 (https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drive … ode=dimension-b)
flashing the bios with that tool was great, it made a bootable floppy that worked on the first try

anyway after this i was able to boot into windows on my slocketted 1000ghz p3. it would not take a tualatin though, i had a 1.266ghz III-S on hand, it wouldn't even initialized the monitor. but so far runs great on the 1ghz slocket. an advantage of the slocket is i can use pretty much any heatsink now!

Congrats, these are the best stories!

observer wrote on 2025-06-30, 19:05:

anyway after this i was able to boot into windows on my slocketted 1000ghz p3. it would not take a tualatin though, i had a 1.266ghz III-S on hand, it wouldn't even initialized the monitor. but so far runs great on the 1ghz slocket. an advantage of the slocket is i can use pretty much any heatsink now!

Curious, what did the DIAG LED's show with that 1.266gHz? Or is it the model before those even existed?

kotel wrote on 2025-06-30, 19:42:

Curious, what did the DIAG LED's show with that 1.266gHz? Or is it the model before those even existed?

this board has DIAG leds? i only see an orange LED in the middle of the board, which is always orange when the board has standby power or is in use.

I put a PCI boot analyzer card in, the typical 4 digit indicator type... it just has "- - - -" with the Tualatin in. i have 2 different slotckets, same behavior with both. nothing on the monitor, no boot beep.

i'm sure there's a way to get a tually in this board, especially given a slocket is required... but i do not know of it (yet!)

also for anyone readying this: with 1ghz and the 1GB of ram in here, this thing is fast. quake2 over 60fps with an older radeon card. desktop operations fast, bootup in 30 seconds, everything is snappy... at least in windows xp! it honestly seems faster than my 1.5ghz willamette p4 system which is also rdram based.

observer wrote on 2025-07-01, 14:26:

kotel wrote on 2025-06-30, 19:42:

Curious, what did the DIAG LED's show with that 1.266gHz? Or is it the model before those even existed?

this board has DIAG leds? i only see an orange LED in the middle of the board, which is always orange when the board has standby power or is in use.

Okay it seems like it doesn't have any DIAG LED's. Too early generation of dells. Otherwise, it's the perfect system for retro enthusiasts!