My souped-up Dimension T550 DOS/Win9x gaming machine \ VOGONS

My souped-up Dimension T550 DOS/Win9x gaming machine

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First post, by Standard Def Steve

Posted on 2013-01-11, 10:45

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Thought I'd show off the souped-up Dimension T550 I found in the trash a few months ago. I use it as a DOS and early Win9x gaming machine.

As found in the garbage:
Katmai P3 - 550MHz
Voodoo3 3000 AGP - 16MB
37.5GB IBM DeskStar
Turtle Beach Montego PCI sound card
56K modem and SOHOware 10/100 NIC
128MB of RAM
Windows XP Pro 😲

After upgrades:
PIII-1200, underclocked to 900MHz @ 100MHz FSB
Asus slotket and a Lin-Lin FCPGA2 adapter
PCI Radeon 9250 256MB (I'll explain later)
IBM Deskstar 37.5GB
SB AWE64 ISA sound card
No more 56K modem 😀
LG 16x DVD
320MB of RAM
Windows 98SE

All set up:

A look inside:

Yo dawg, I heard you like socket adapters...

Expansion cards:
-PCI Radeon 9250 256MB.
-SOHOware 10/100 NIC
-SB AWE64

I chose the PCI Radeon over my AGP Voodoo3 and FX5200 mainly because of its excellent DOS performance. On the 9250, SVGA games and 70Hz side-scrollers have this awesome, silky-smooth look to them. By contrast, both of the AGP cards would judder quite a bit. This particular 9250 also seems to have 128-bit memory bus, as it is a great deal faster than the FX5200 in many D3D games.

Reply 1 of 7, by sgt76

Posted on 2013-01-11, 15:19

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Man...that thing looks new. Damn nice!

Reply 2 of 7, by Filosofia

Posted on 2013-01-11, 16:46

Filosofia Offline

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"What the hell?! This thing can't handle Windows XP Pro?! To the garbage with it" 🤣

Is that a 19'' an M991, if so how do you feel about it?

Reply 3 of 7, by Standard Def Steve

Posted on 2013-01-12, 04:32

Standard Def Steve Offline

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It's a 17" E771. Has great image quality for a CRT that was considered an entry-level model in 2002. Still nice and bright after thousands of hours of use.

Reply 4 of 7, by mr_bigmouth_502

Posted on 2013-01-12, 12:23

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It looks kinda like the Dell Dimension 4100 I have in storage. That thing is a BEAST as far as Pentium III boxes go, and it's nearly silent too! 😁 I actually remember it outperforming my Dual PIII 1GHz rig (which has a gig of ram as well! 😳) in games, despite the fact that it only has 256MB of RAM and a 866MHz CPU. I suspect the chipset has something to do with it. 🤣

Last edited by mr_bigmouth_502 on 2013-01-13, 01:53. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 5 of 7, by chinny22

Posted on 2013-01-12, 13:16

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Nice slocket sandwich you have there! Got the T500 myself for £5 last year and really like the thing.

Dell makes surprisingly good retro PC's

Mine wasn’t quite complete and definitely didn’t have a Voodoo 3, man you’re lucky!
It makes a great late dos early windows PC
Case is nice and simple on the outside and spacious inside, Motherboard is an Intel SE440BX3, can’t get much more stable then that! Plus on board sound is in effect a SB pro with DB60XG Midi which is great for dos games (Doesn’t work in pure dos sadly)

Only thing I don’t like is the proprietary ATX connecter, but bit of research has found the Dell power supply is good quality, and there are adaptors available

Out of curiosity what does your post test say? After upgrading the CPU mine correctly identifies CPU as P3 1000 Mhz but then the next line comes up with” XPS T@00” which makes me smile

Reply 6 of 7, by Filosofia

Posted on 2013-01-12, 15:40

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Standard Def Steve wrote:
It's a 17" E771. Has great image quality for a CRT that was considered an entry-level model in 2002. Still nice and bright after thousands of hours of use.

Ok , I should have noticed it thanks.

Anyways... have you tried an harmless 12% FSB overclock ? Just to achive the 1GHz barrier 😎

Reply 7 of 7, by Standard Def Steve

Posted on 2013-01-13, 03:06

Standard Def Steve Offline

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chinny22 wrote:

Out of curiosity what does your post test say? After upgrading the CPU mine correctly identifies CPU as P3 1000 Mhz but then the next line comes up with” XPS T@00” which makes me smile

Even with the latest BIOS installed, the CPU is detected as a "Pentium Pro 900B MHz". The machine itself is described as an XPS T900.

Filosofia wrote:

Anyways... have you tried an harmless 12% FSB overclock ? Just to achive the 1GHz barrier 😎

Wish I could, but there are no processor speed settings in the BIOS. Software overclocking will only allow me to select 104MHz FSB (not worth it) or 124MHz FSB (too fast for the PCI cards).

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