A nice dell Pentium 4 (and a decent model, too) \ VOGONS

A nice dell Pentium 4 (and a decent model, too)

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First post, by ahendricks18

Posted on 2015-07-31, 01:06

ahendricks18 Offline

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Hello guys,
I recently was looking to setup a LAN party with some friends. I needed extra PC's so I could invited people who did not have their own PC. I found this old Dell Dimension 4600 the other day. Got it home, blew the dust out, added a DVD-RW, better ATI AGP card, and it works like a charm. I can't really post any actual pictures because my phone (motorola) took a shit the other day. I can upload a CPUZ report though. I might upgrade the HDD and the CPU to a faster P4 over 3 ghz so I can run L4D2 for the LAN party. Already bought a 10/100 switch at radioshack today and setup some network drives and file sharing between 3 PC's.

Main: AMD FX 6300 six core 3.5ghz (OC 4ghz)
16gb DDR3, Nvidia Geforce GT740 4gb Gfx card, running Win7 Ultimate x64
Linux: AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 1.5GB DDR, Nvidia Quadro FX1700 running Debian Jessie 8.4.0

Reply 1 of 8, by blank001

Posted on 2015-07-31, 02:44

blank001 Offline

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Where did you find a radioshack?

_: K6-III+ 450apz@550, P5A-B, 128Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300, AWE64 Gold 32mb, SC-55v2.0
_: Pentium III 1400 S, TUSL2-C, 512Mb CL2, Voodoo 5500 AGP, MX300

Reply 2 of 8, by ODwilly

Posted on 2015-07-31, 03:07

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O man you can deck that thing out with 4gb of DDR400 and play the heck out of some Counter Strike and HL2!!! I gave one away two years ago and kind of regret it honestly.

Main pc: Asus ROG 17. R9 5900HX, RTX 3070m, 16gb ddr4 3200, 1tb NVME.
Retro PC: Soyo P4S Dragon, 3gb ddr 266, 120gb Maxtor, Geforce Fx 5950 Ultra, SB Live! 5.1

Reply 3 of 8, by NJRoadfan

Posted on 2015-07-31, 04:00

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I had one, I landed up giving it away. The ones that didn't die from faulty power supplies tend to run forever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97tmEbWhI08

(when it was still in my possession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udxKus4rNFA )

Reply 4 of 8, by chinny22

Posted on 2015-07-31, 12:42

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Yeh, The big brand OEMs don't get much love which is unfair and have found the Dimension's to be mostly of a good build quality.
This isn't all bad though as it means they usually can be had cheaply and if your not into overclocking make a good system to build up from.

Reply 5 of 8, by ahendricks18

Posted on 2015-08-01, 17:10

ahendricks18 Offline

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blank001 wrote:
Where did you find a radioshack?

There is one in salamanca, about 10-15 minutes from my house. And we live in the middle of nowhere. The guy who always works there is really nice and knows what he's talking about.

Also, I am downloading openSUSE Linux at the moment, and I am going to dual boot with windows xp. XP for older games, openSUSE for web browsing and other modern applications.

Reply 6 of 8, by Unknown_K

Posted on 2015-08-01, 21:18

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A Dell 8300 is one of the few P4 systems I keep around.

Collector of old computers, hardware, and software

Reply 7 of 8, by squareguy

Posted on 2015-08-13, 02:31

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Grats on a nice find!

I have to admit I love the Dell 4600, I just picked another one up today for $10! What is not to like? Solid Intel board, small quality case, takes standard ATX PSU, AGP slot and 3 PCI slots.

The one I got today is getting a Quadro4 700 XGL (Geforce4 Ti 4200), Yamaha YMF724 and a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. The front panel audio connector even plugs into the Santa Cruz, easy-mode headphones 😉 (Audigy and SB Live! are other options)

Keep your eye out for more, It's never a bad idea to have spare parts. I really believe this is one of the most under rated boxes out there for retro gaming.

Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Reply 8 of 8, by Jorpho

Posted on 2015-08-13, 03:37

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I was just about to give away the Dimension 8200 I found on the curb some months ago. I've already got another fully-loaded P4 system (based on an ASUS P4R800VM, using the ATI Radeon 9100 PRO IGP chipset) and don't see much reason to keep it around.

What in particular would make this Dell system superior? Does it have support for the DOS SBLive drivers? The System Specs from http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/pro … on-8200/manuals suggest that it uses RDRAM and tops out at 2.8 GHz. That's not very appealing.

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