Just curious,but are you going to fix the Abit AN7?

PcBytes wrote:

Just curious,but are you going to fix the Abit AN7?

Honestly I don't know.

If it takes a standard ATX case and power supply, it's not a Dimension 4100. 😉 Nice build anyway.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

If it takes a standard ATX case and power supply, it's not a Dimension 4100. 😉 Nice build anyway.

Standard ATX case, not a standard ATX PSU - it uses a 20-pin connector but the pinout isn't standard/ATX. 😵

Thanks for the kind words. 😊

EDIT

Alright, pulled the service tag out of the BIOS because I was curious; here's what Dell's website said about it:

System: Dimension 4100
Specs: 128M RAM, dual CD-RW drives (would be nice to have those!), unknown 32M video card (it just said "32M MRMGA"), V.90 Modem, Ethernet card (appears it was an EtherLink TX)

It doesn't specify CPU that was originally shipped.

This is the picture it gave me:

Honestly I don't feel bad about not having that case... 🤣

Well, I'll be damned. I have a Dimension 4100 in storage, and back when it was stock it came with a 32MB Geforce2MX, and an 866MHz Pentium III Coppermine. AFAIR it didn't come with an ethernet card, and it didn't have a second optical drive either. I don't remember how much RAM mine came with, whether it had 128MB or 256MB, but I remember it being swapped around a few times.

I wonder, can you get sound in DOS with your current setup? I can't really dig mine out of storage right now, but I'd like to know as I'm planning on setting mine up as a DOS SVGA/late 90's Win9x box.

Never heard of the 3DLabs WildcatVP 880Pro. Is it based on the Nvidia FX series chipset? What's the model number on the Zalman?

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Well, I'll be damned. I have a Dimension 4100 in storage, and back when it was stock it came with a 32MB Geforce2MX, and an 866MHz Pentium III Coppermine. AFAIR it didn't come with an ethernet card, and it didn't have a second optical drive either. I don't remember how much RAM mine came with, whether it had 128MB or 256MB, but I remember it being swapped around a few times.

I wonder, can you get sound in DOS with your current setup? I can't really dig mine out of storage right now, but I'd like to know as I'm planning on setting mine up as a DOS SVGA/late 90's Win9x box.

It has Windows 2000 installed currently (there's only drivers for the GPU under 2k or XP, and XP was having problems with some motherboard component (best I've been able to nail it down to is the Intel 815 INF driver from Dell (which caused havoc for 2000 as well, but isn't loaded by default by 2000))), so no DOS via 9x; I could maybe try one of the bootable benchmarks or something (if you have something I could test I'd be happy to take a look, basically - it has no issues with FreeDOS but I haven't tested anything for sound), but what I'm thinking is: there is no integrated audio on this system (at least on mine), so I'm using an SB Live! PCI card. I don't know if SB Live! works in DOS at all. I'm not sure if there's a variant of the motherboard with integrated audio (I'd imagine there are; my board has pads where the output jacks would go), and if there is I can't comment on that controller + DOS.

borgie83 wrote:

Never heard of the 3DLabs WildcatVP 880Pro. Is it based on the Nvidia FX series chipset? What's the model number on the Zalman?

The Zalman on the gcard: VF700-AlCu; I'm not sure if Zalman still makes them anymore, but I've heard decent things about the knock-offs you can find on eBay (though have not tested one myself).

The Zalman fan on the CPU HS: RDH9025B; it came out of a "package" that included the CNPS3000 Socket 370 heatsink and some other stuff, none of which I think I have anymore. 😊 The actual heatsink on the CPU is a Thermalright SI-97.

The gcard itself: it's based on the 3DLabs P10, which is a 3DLabs designed GPU (they call it a "VPU"). It's a mid-range pro card from the same era as (and competitor to) Quadro 4. You can read about the cards from 3DLabs:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030608130530/ht … ata/wcvppro.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20030618035911/ht … vppro/index.htm
And some articles I've found about the P10 itself:
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/p10/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/905

I haven't gotten to testing out actual games with it yet - but if I remember to, I'll update the thread when I do. I'm guessing it will do okay based on the 3DMark results and the presence of various "game profiles" in the DirectX sub-section of the drivers.

Just curious as I've played with the wildcat vp's on and off - in 3dmark2001 do you get a row of white dots or dashes in the lower part of the screen during one of the fish scenes? Pretty sure I get it on two of my cards [and used to get it on others in this range] so I concluded it was a driver issue. Don't think other makes show that glitch.

ratfink wrote:

Just curious as I've played with the wildcat vp's on and off - in 3dmark2001 do you get a row of white dots or dashes in the lower part of the screen during one of the fish scenes? Pretty sure I get it on two of my cards [and used to get it on others in this range] so I concluded it was a driver issue. Don't think other makes show that glitch.

Nope. 😊 No problems with 3DMark that I've seen thus far aside from normal vertical tearing/flicker when FPS runs over the monitor's refresh rate (my FX 5800 Ultra (and others) will do the same thing in 3D01). I'm running the latest Acuity build for Windows 2000 (dated March 2006), but had it running Windows XP at first (same date on the drivers, but they are separate downloads from 3DLabs - I think the primary difference between the packages is the dual monitor feature; on XP it uses Windows' built-in multi-monitor support, while on 2000 it installs "3DLabs DualView" as well) and that didn't exhibit any strange dots/dashes/etc either.

More generically:
IME dots/dashes usually means overheating (or failed) memory, but maybe not always. Try comparing what you're seeing to here:
http://www.playtool.com/pages/artifacts/artifacts.html

obobskivich wrote:

It has Windows 2000 installed currently (there's only drivers for the GPU under 2k or XP, and XP was having problems with some m […]
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mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Well, I'll be damned. I have a Dimension 4100 in storage, and back when it was stock it came with a 32MB Geforce2MX, and an 866MHz Pentium III Coppermine. AFAIR it didn't come with an ethernet card, and it didn't have a second optical drive either. I don't remember how much RAM mine came with, whether it had 128MB or 256MB, but I remember it being swapped around a few times.

I wonder, can you get sound in DOS with your current setup? I can't really dig mine out of storage right now, but I'd like to know as I'm planning on setting mine up as a DOS SVGA/late 90's Win9x box.

It has Windows 2000 installed currently (there's only drivers for the GPU under 2k or XP, and XP was having problems with some motherboard component (best I've been able to nail it down to is the Intel 815 INF driver from Dell (which caused havoc for 2000 as well, but isn't loaded by default by 2000))), so no DOS via 9x; I could maybe try one of the bootable benchmarks or something (if you have something I could test I'd be happy to take a look, basically - it has no issues with FreeDOS but I haven't tested anything for sound), but what I'm thinking is: there is no integrated audio on this system (at least on mine), so I'm using an SB Live! PCI card. I don't know if SB Live! works in DOS at all. I'm not sure if there's a variant of the motherboard with integrated audio (I'd imagine there are; my board has pads where the output jacks would go), and if there is I can't comment on that controller + DOS.

borgie83 wrote:

Never heard of the 3DLabs WildcatVP 880Pro. Is it based on the Nvidia FX series chipset? What's the model number on the Zalman?

The Zalman on the gcard: VF700-AlCu; I'm not sure if Zalman still makes them anymore, but I've heard decent things about the knock-offs you can find on eBay (though have not tested one myself).

The Zalman fan on the CPU HS: RDH9025B; it came out of a "package" that included the CNPS3000 Socket 370 heatsink and some other stuff, none of which I think I have anymore. 😊 The actual heatsink on the CPU is a Thermalright SI-97.

The gcard itself: it's based on the 3DLabs P10, which is a 3DLabs designed GPU (they call it a "VPU"). It's a mid-range pro card from the same era as (and competitor to) Quadro 4. You can read about the cards from 3DLabs:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030608130530/ht … ata/wcvppro.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20030618035911/ht … vppro/index.htm
And some articles I've found about the P10 itself:
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/p10/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/905

I haven't gotten to testing out actual games with it yet - but if I remember to, I'll update the thread when I do. I'm guessing it will do okay based on the 3DMark results and the presence of various "game profiles" in the DirectX sub-section of the drivers.

I was thinking maybe if your drive is partitioned as FAT32, you could make a directory for the DOS Soundblaster Live drivers found here, http://easymamecab.mameworld.info/html/snddosdr.htm set up a DOS 7 or FreeDOS bootdisk to load the drivers from that directory, and then try to run Doom, or really any other DOS game that supports Soundblaster + General Midi.

ratfink wrote:

Just curious as I've played with the wildcat vp's on and off - in 3dmark2001 do you get a row of white dots or dashes in the lower part of the screen during one of the fish scenes? Pretty sure I get it on two of my cards [and used to get it on others in this range] so I concluded it was a driver issue. Don't think other makes show that glitch.

Update to the above reply; I re-ran 3D01 to check this (for folks following at home, it's the "Advanced Pixel Shader" test). With the DirectX Default profile loaded there's maybe 1 or 2 dots (and I probably would've gone along forever and never noticed it if you hadn't asked); however switching to the Direct3D Games Default profile and a lot more dots do appear momentarily (this change doesn't improve 3DMark score or change fillrate either, so I'd just leave it on "Default" vs "Games Default" and be through with it). I didn't try all of the other profiles since it requires a restart to change 😒.

I'm not sure if that's similar to what you're seeing - it's a very momentary thing.

I also ran AquaMark 3 (or attempted to) - plenty of corruption on the textures on the first part, and it ran at about 4 FPS so I just aborted it instead of sitting there and watching it for howeverlong. 🤣 (I honestly didn't expect it would run that well).

Yes that sounds like what I get - thanks for having a look and finding out. I have only tried the games default and "diablo 2" profiles, which perform very similarly in 3dmark2001. Not come across aquamark.

ratfink wrote:

Yes that sounds like what I get - thanks for having a look and finding out. I have only tried the games default and "diablo 2" profiles, which perform very similarly in 3dmark2001. Not come across aquamark.

I wasn't surprised AQ3 ran poorly - it's a bit new/demanding for a DX8 card (GeForce FX runs it so-so; ime GeForce 6 and higher do a better job). As far as the VPs, try the DX Default - seems to more or less eliminate the issue (there was maybe one or two dots that I actually saw). 😀