First post, by Darkman
- Rank
- Oldbie
So I very recently got a Dell Precision 220 workstation , an i820 RDRAM based system with SMP. The system itself was for a very good price (about the price of a cup of coffee) but lacked a CD drive , a video or sound card, and had a single PIII 933Mhz. It did however have an 18.4GB Quantum Atlas 10K U160 drive along with an adaptec 29160N card (a Dell OEM variant I guess), along with 1GB of PC800 ECC RDRAM which is also very nice (given how relatively expensive RDRAM can be , its nice to have the max this machine can take). The machine was generally quite clean on the outside other than some black marks on the case, which I have since removed. The Hard drive had WinXP SP3 on it too (the COA sticker is actually for NT4 oddly enough). Sadly the button for the floppy drive is missing, but given I wont really need to use the floppy drive much with this system its not a big deal.
The single 933Mhz CPU was replaced with dual 1Ghz 133Mhz Coppermine PIIIs, while the computer was lacking a VRM module, an equivalent one from a Compaq Proliant seems to work just fine.
For the CD drives , I figured 2 are better than one, and so Im using a Pioneer DVD-105S slot DVD , as well as a Samsung SD-616T , also a DVD drive.
The hard drive and SCSI card were replaced with an adaptec 2100S (with 64MB of cache) and my 300GB U320 (though running at U160 speeds) Seagate Cheetah 10K drive). This drive already has a dual boot of Win98SE and Win2K SP4 , which are more appropriate for this system.
The graphics card is a Voodoo5500 AGP , a favourite of mine for this kind of system, originally this system came with either a Matrox G400 or a Geforce2 GTS , and may well recieve one of those in the future (though it would have to be a GF2Ti , I dont have a GTS). There are also 2 sound cards , an Aureal Vortex 2 Superquad and a Sound Blaster Live 5.1 (SB0100 which is apparently an OEM variation , but it works fine with the normal drivers). Also the usual maintenance of cleaning , cable tidying , replacing the battery and updating the BIOS.
You will have to excuse the quality of the photos, had to use my phone to take them .
the 1Ghz CPUs I had were actually OEM Dell ones, never knew that.
very interesting way of taking out the hard drive tray,
the machine after cleaning, installing the hardware and some cable tidying (most of the power supply cables are out of sight).
Appropriate I guess, a Dell AT102W keyboard.
As far as games its not too shabby, Quake3 gets 74.7 fps (demo1 , 1024X768X32 , everything on high settings). Quite surprised as I've often heard less than great things about the i820 chipset (maybe thats more applicable to the SDRAM variants) but so far its been smooth sailing.
One interesting option in the BIOS under the "CPU speed" tab is an option to change the speed of the CPU to "compatible mode" which apparently slows it down , I havent tried this yet , but it could be interesting to see just how slow it will get , it can also be done on the fly if the system is in real mode. I assume this is simply disabling the cache memory, but we will see.
Overall its a great machine. I always liked Dell machines from the late 90s and very early 2000s.