Probably depends on the chipset - @slivercr did it with the 840 Outrigger: an ongoing adventure with the OR840 and with the right kit revisions / mods you can do it on BX (Asus P2B-DS) so may be possible on others too like the GX. Which chipset is the Dell?

keenmaster486 wrote on 2020-06-03, 20:44:

I have a dual Slot 1 motherboard from an old Dell Poweredge server. […]
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I have a dual Slot 1 motherboard from an old Dell Poweredge server.

I think it might be interesting to see how far I can push it in terms of performance.

Perhaps I get some Slotket adapters to put some 1.4 GHz Tualatins in there.

Maybe a PCI SATA card with an SSD would be nice, and maybe USB 3 too.

It would be cool to make it run every OS from DOS to modern Linux, somehow.

I wonder how much having two Pentium III 1.4 GHz CPUs would help a modern 32-bit Linux distro, perhaps it would be somewhat similar to having an early dual core Pentium 4?

I've done all these things you mention!
My system actually got downgraded to dual 1 GHz CopperMines, and it still runs Linux great.

I've tried a lot of different things, at one point I was booting FreeDOS, W98, W2K, WXP, and Debian (super easy to set up, just install all the OS separately, with only one HDD plugged in. Then plug them all in, make the Linux drive your bootup drive and update GRUB—they will all get picked up automatically).

From personal experience, and in my opinion, SSDs should go in any computer going forward 😜. The USB3 upgrade is not that "useful", it'll still give you faster transfer speeds than USB2, but it will be capped at 133 MB max due to the PCI bus. If it has to share the PCI bandwidth with your SATA add-in card, performance will drop even more. Save the money from the USB3 adapter—setting up LAN with Linux is the way to go for file transfer.

Hardest things to setup are the memory limitations. You want to max the RAM for Linux/W2K/WXP/anything that can use it, but have to make W98 see only 512 MB at most. My computer runs W2k and Debian these days, works great.

EDIT: PC Hoarder Patrol beat me to the reply as I was typing! Thanks for the thread reference 😉

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2020-06-03, 21:06:

Probably depends on the chipset - @slivercr did it with the 840 Outrigger: an ongoing adventure with the OR840 and with the right kit revisions / mods you can do it on BX (Asus P2B-DS) so may be possible on others to like the GX. Which chipset is the Dell?