Hi, all! It's been a while since I shared a build here. I wanted to show this one off because it has some interesting quirks and features.

I call this my Dimension 4650. It's a Dimension 4700 case with Dimension 4600 guts. My work periodically collects obsolete hardware for e-recycling and lets employees take what they want before it goes out. That's where this machine came from, though I suspect it originated at someone's home. (The recycling company charges a flat rate, so we're encouraged to bring in e-waste from home too.)

When I first saw the system (it was a true blue Dimension 4700 then), I thought: Sweet, a compact Pentium 4 box! This will be great for AGP gaming. Then I learned it had a PCI-e slot. Well, that works too I guess... Then I learned it had a LGA 775 motherboard that can only take Netburst CPUs. Welp, that sucks. Then I found it had bad caps and was ready to throw it right back on the recycling pile.

I really liked the case, though, so I started researching the feasibility of a motherboard swap. I went on eBay and found that motherboards from the similar-looking Dimension 4600 were easy to source. This is a Socket 478 board with an AGP slot, exactly what I was originally hoping for. Dimension 4600 motherboards actually were - and remain - some of the cheapest AGP motherboards available. There were rumors the board could be dropped into a Dimension 4700 case and Just Work™, so I decided to give it a shot.

It works! But, it required some surgery. The front panel connectors fit, but the Dimension 4600 and 4700 mount their CPU coolers differently, so the case had a metal protrusion behind the motherboard that didn't line up. To solve this, I simply used tin snips to remove the metal protrusion. I reused a standard Socket 478 mounting bracket and a Rosewill RCX-Z200 cooler from a previous project and took care of CPU cooling that way. The same earlier project provided a Pentium 4 3.4 HT, the fastest CPU the Dimension 4600 motherboard supports, and faster than the Pentium 4 HT 530J the system came with.

One really neat thing about the Dimension 4600/4700 is that they use standard ATX power supplies. If you've ever tried to upgrade a Dell, you know how rare this is for them. My system's previous owner had replaced the original PSU with a Sparkle ATX-350PN. I kept using it and haven't had any issues, but it's nice to be able to swap in a beefier PSU for more power-hungry video cards.

It's been a year or so since I used this system. Most recently, it was running beautifully with a Radeon 9600 Pro under Windows XP. Nice and fast and totally stable. I have lots more AGP cards that would feel at home in this build, so it's much more useful to me than a vanilla Dimension 4700 would have been.

Some other miscellaneous things I did:

1) Ordered a floppy drive mounting bracket, part number 1T909, and installed a floppy drive salvaged from a Dimension 8300. It works and enhances the retro curb appeal 😁

2) Replaced the stock case fan with a Noctua NF-B9 redux-1600. Nice and quiet. It fits in the original housing but connects directly to the PSU. The motherboard complained loudly about not having a fan connected and held up the POST with a "press F1 to continue" prompt. Not cool, but I found I could suppress this by disabling keyboard error reporting in the BIOS.