Grrr. I Typed a nice post but accidentally hit the back key on my mouse and lost it. Sigh.

My buddy gave me a brand new (literally, never used before) Dell Dimension 5150. His office had received a bunch of these and supposedly this just sat. It took a few modest gashes on its travels to get to me and had dust externally from it's long entombment, but the innards look new. It smells new when the fans run 😜

Specs:
Pentium 4 630 3ghz
512MB DDR2
OEM Radeon X3xx
HDD was pulled and destroyed, sadly along with the blue caddy (has to be done before a computer can leave the building).

I tossed in a 4gb kit of ddr2 800 but it's running at 533, I'll try some other kits later to see if that machine can handle 800. I also put in a Radeon X1550 512mb I had laying around, but performance is lackluster. It can't keep 60FPS in half-life 2 @ 1024x768.

I'm thinking I'll grab a Pentium D 945 3.4ghz, they might as well be free on ebay. But I'm genuinely curious if for games, a P4 3.8ghz or 3.6ghz would be better. I can't recall if any time period games were honestly using parallel threads yet.

GPU : The hard part. My instinct is just to toss in a 7800GT and be done, but there is no PCI-E (or molex) power available and I'm not sure I want to bother pulling the stock PSU out. Is there anything somewhat time period accurate that will be a major upgrade from the x1550 without relying on external power? I don't mind if it's maybe a year or two newer, but I'm not going to run a gtx 750 or anything like that. Machine is just for some XP fun, DOOM 3, Half-life 2, Far Cry, then it'll probably sit in my closet for 10 years honestly 😜.

Low quality pic taken in the dark for the curious:

edit: note this is a BTX form factor board. I did consider swapping in something that supported core 2 CPUs and a new PSU, but meh, too much work. No point doing all of that when I already have a Dell Studio with a c2q.