I bought one of these! The system in itself was not that expensive but the shipping was 60 euro as the systems weight is 23kg and a certain cheese loving country lacks good (read cheap) shipping options. But hey at least I get brittle plastic, 1GB RDRAM and not very speedy Netburst CPUs!

Its a Dell Precision 530 MT Work Station from year 2001 with Intel 860 chipset. It was originally sold with two Foster (Willamette) core Xeon CPUs but should accept Prestonia (Northwood) and Gallatin core CPUs as long as they are of the 100(400) MHz FSB flavor. I own a few year 2001 dual CPU motherboards with AMD 760 MPX chipset and I need something to pit them against in some future shootout. I expect the AMD 760 MPX platform will rule with year 2001 CPUs but I think this system will crush any Socket A system if equipped with a couple of fast Gallatins.

The picture isn't of the actual system I bought as the sellers picture showed a potato but it should look exactly like this one as the front cover is missing just like in this picture.

Skyscraper wrote:

I bought one of these! The system in itself was not that expensive but the shipping was 60 euro as the systems weight is 23kg an […]
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I bought one of these! The system in itself was not that expensive but the shipping was 60 euro as the systems weight is 23kg and a certain cheese loving country lacks good (read cheap) shipping options. But hey at least I get brittle plastic, 1GB RDRAM and not very speedy Netburst CPUs!

Its a Dell Precision 530 MT Work Station from year 2001 with Intel 860 chipset. It was originally sold with two Foster (Willamette) core Xeon CPUs but should accept Prestonia (Northwood) and Gallatin core CPUs as long as they are of the 100(400) MHz FSB flavor. I own a few year 2001 dual CPU motherboards with AMD 760 MPX chipset and I need something to pit them against in some future shootout. I expect the AMD 760 MPX platform will rule with year 2001 CPUs but I think this system will crush any Socket A system if equipped with a couple of fast Gallatins.

The picture isn't of the actual system I bought as the sellers picture showed a potato but it should look exactly like this one as the front cover is missing just like in this picture.

Dell precision 530 MT.jpg

Looks like it's the same transformer chassis dell used in a lot of models. You should be able to use the same front door and hinges from a precision 650 or 670. Also, before you do anything with it check the caps. My old 670 I passed on and my current XPS Gen 2 have had bad caps with the original mobos. Otherwise rock solid an amazing systems. Nice find man.

EDIT: Also don't worry about the plastics as much. Not very brittle. But It scratches very easily.

xplus93 wrote:

Looks like it's the same transformer chassis dell used in a lot of models. You should be able to use the same front door and hinges from a precision 650 or 670. Also, before you do anything with it check the caps. My old 670 I passed on and my current XPS Gen 2 have had bad caps with the original mobos. Otherwise rock solid an amazing systems. Nice find man.

EDIT: Also don't worry about the plastics as much. Not very brittle. But It scratches very easily.

I don't think (or at least hope) the caps on the motherboard is an issue on the Precition 530 MT. I looked at some bare boards to get an idea of what to expect and the caps looks to be of good quality. I'm a bit worried about the PSU though as it's a custom proprietary design with odd form factor and thus not easy to replace with anything else. With luck it's easy enough to recap if needed. The Dell Precision 530 MT PSUs available on Ebay are all old used units and also cost as much as I paid for the whole system (not including shipping).

This is how a bare Dell Precision 530 MT motherboard looks like, there are at least 3 revisions but they look the same. I'm not sure the first two revisions of this motherboard support Prestonia CPUs (at least not officially) but the one in the system I bought does as it's the third revision that shipped with systems made late 2001 and during the first half of 2002. It could very well just be that the early VRM modules had issues with the lower voltage of the Prestonia CPUs. The boards and VRM modules that support Prestonia CPUs should also run Gallatins as it's basicly the same core just with a bit of L3 cache added.

First post here. 😀
Got this system for free this weekend. It's a AST Bravo LC 4/33. Don't think it has been used for the past 20 or so years. I'm trying to decide on upgrade it or not. Kinda like it to be a completely stock 486 Dx33.

Cool! I have box full of GPUs from AST Computer 😀

Vegge wrote:

I'm trying to decide on upgrade it or not. Kinda like it to be a completely stock 486 Dx33.

Personally I like to keep brand computers as stock as possible (except RAM and storage in some cases).

Pretty cool computer BTW. I love desktop style PC cases.

Arctic wrote:

Cool! I have box full of GPUs from AST Computer 😀

I have a dead AST Advantage! Pro 486/25SX. I also have the fully functional original monitor. It's a night and day difference in terms of condition between the two. The computer looks like it was in a dumpster for years but the monitor looks museum quality... Idk how that happened. I bought them off some accountant locally.

Bought a Matrox Millennium G200 G2+/DUALP-PL 16MB PCI video card + DMS-60 to dual VGA cable for it. I'm building an Optiplex GX1 and want to have MS-DOS 6.22/WfW 3.11 + 98SE so this card supports that and is a big upgrade from 4MB onboard ATI Rage

I found it really interesting that Matrox made a quad monitor G200. Did they even make a quad monitor G400, 450, or 550?

Most likely. Multi-monitor setups are their bread and butter.

feipoa wrote:

I found it really interesting that Matrox made a quad monitor G200. Did they even make a quad monitor G400, 450, or 550?

The G200 quad could drive this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

oeuvre wrote:

Bought a Matrox Millennium G200 G2+/DUALP-PL 16MB PCI video card + DMS-60 to dual VGA cable for it. I'm building an Optiplex GX1 and want to have MS-DOS 6.22/WfW 3.11 + 98SE so this card supports that and is a big upgrade from 4MB onboard ATI Rage

I love Matrox cards.. Currently own a Mystique 220 and a Millennium G200A, hope to get a G400 and a Millennium II at some point. Maybe even a Pahrellia.. I miss them.

appiah4 wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

Bought a Matrox Millennium G200 G2+/DUALP-PL 16MB PCI video card + DMS-60 to dual VGA cable for it. I'm building an Optiplex GX1 and want to have MS-DOS 6.22/WfW 3.11 + 98SE so this card supports that and is a big upgrade from 4MB onboard ATI Rage

I love Matrox cards.. Currently own a Mystique 220 and a Millennium G200A, hope to get a G400 and a Millennium II at some point. Maybe even a Pahrellia.. I miss them.

I suppose you could purchase and use a new PCIe Matrox-branded card if gaming doesn't interest you. Although, I recall reading that Matrox is no longer producing their own GPUs, which sorta kills the novelty.

I have one of those Quad G200s too! 😀
I thought it could be a cool upgrade to a Voodoo 2 SLI system 😎

feipoa wrote:

I found it really interesting that Matrox made a quad monitor G200. Did they even make a quad monitor G400, 450, or 550?

Matrox did make a G450 Quad: http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gr … ries/g450x4mms/

There's a lot of Prince of Persia ports to eight bit micros, so I'd be surprised if an XT was too slow. I first played it on a 12MHz 286.

However, it's far better with a Roland sound module attached!

Recently been playing a little of it on my PowerMac 4400, the Mac graphics are different to most other platforms (very similar to PoP 2).

I played Prince of Persia on an XT with monochrome graphics and an AT with Hercules graphics all the way back in the late 80s so I really don't think it should be too slow. Like, at all. It works flawlessly on a 7MHz 68000 on Amiga, Mac, several consoles etc.

The only problem with that theory of Prince Of Persia not being slow on an XT is that we don't know what kind of graphics option it was running on. Maybe it's the VGA version that's slow?

I recently ran it on an Olivetti M240 (8086 10MHz) with a VGA card and it runs perfectly fine, although it does seem just a bit slower than what it should be.

Have these on the way now:

MSI Premio TX5 socket 7 motherboard - has the clock generator chip that supports 50, 55, 60, 66, 75, and 83Mhz bus speeds. It may support other undocumented bus speeds. I'll be testing it out when I get it.
A Pentium 166MMX to go with the TX5

An unknown Socket 3 ISA/VLB motherboard with 8x 30-pin simms and an unknown CPU.

I bought either an i7 870 or a q6600, depending on the accuracy of the listing. For $15. Yay!