First post, by xefe
Hello!
I'm from Portugal and i like obsolete computers. I have a kind of a disease, i think, with about 12 lovely machines laying around my house.
My current ongoing project is also my favourite one. My favourite for now 😜
It's an old HP DC7100 SFF that was just about to go to the dumpster in the place where i work. Lacking a decent XP machine to play some 2001-2005 games and loving these small cramped form factors, i grabbed it and gave it a good clean and some love:
- Upgraded it to 2x1GB DDR400 dual channel with some sticks i had laying around and used memset to tighten the timings as much as i could, sandra bandwidth went from 3600 MB/s to 4000 MB/s (100% stable HCI memtest);
- Grabbed a very cheap Pentium 4 670 3.8ghz (i got lucky, these usually go for 40$ nowadays on ebay) and undevolted it to 1.237v(boost) and 1.137 (idle) using RMClock (100% stable Prime and IBT);
- Replaced the original 80GB 3.5" HD with a faster 250GB 2.5" Laptop HD with some spacers to reduce noise, heat output and current consumption;
- Installed an Asus GT 610 Passive low profile graphics card on the PCI-E x16 slot with extra heatsink and thermal pads on the VRAM chips and got a very good Vram overclock, from 600mhz to 870mhz which i find impressive. Overclocking the VRAM on this card is where it's at, this GPU is bandwidth starved and Oc'ing the core achieves almost nothing. First i went for a GT 710 which is much faster but sadly it requires UEFI bios... And the P4 670 is the bottleneck most of the time anyway;
- I enlarged the spacing/gaps on the front grill for better air flow direct to the CPU (see front panel pic) and cut a hole in the back for two 40mm exhaust fans;
- Added very small TP-Link wireless N usb adapter on front usb port.
The system runs cool and quiet even with the addition of the two 40mm fans, at least the cpu runs very cool, idles at 38º and goes to only 59º on prime95 with stock heatsink+fan on a warm day, amazing for a Prescott at 3.8ghz. I love running the fastest shitty P4 ever made, brings a smile to my face.
The GT 610, being passive and overclocked in a cramped space, ran very hot at 90º full load so i had to build the exhaust system. Took it down to 82º.
This is a very well built machine, very heavy, completely tool-less (for reals, you can tear it all down to bits without a single screwdriver), all Nichicon caps troughout (board and PSU).
I'm having a lot of fun with it playing all the classics again. Finished Halo and Doom3 and i'm once again hooked to GTA San Andreas and F.E.A.R. Great games.
Also having fun running some benchmarks and tuning the system.
Currently running in 16:10 1680x1050 Asus monitor.
Currently watching a few GT 530's which are faster, cheap and easy to come by, but with a current consumption at 50 watt, puts the power supply on it's limits, it's only a 240 watt PSU...
Is it worth it to have hyperthreading turned on? I'm having a hard time spotting a difference and some benchmarks even score higher with it turned off. Processor runs 5º cooler with it turned off also.
I'm also thinking about spray painting the front panel in Crimson/Blood glossy red. Opinions?
Here are some pics:
