cj_reha wrote:

Picked up a Dell Dimension 4400 from the thrift store. 99 percent of the time I pass these by (I only have so much room and don't want to fill it with P4s...) but this one has an early pentium 4 and it is interesting to me.

Pentium 4 1.7 GHz (400 MHz/256 KB), 512 MB or 1 GB DDR (havent checked), ATi Rage 128 AGP video, no hdd.

Caps look bad so I'll see if it posts and probably scrap it.

Exact same configuration as the Dimension 4500 I picked up a few weeks ago except mine had a 20GB Seagate in it.

Check your PMs btw.

cj_reha wrote:

Picked up a Dell Dimension 4400 from the thrift store. 99 percent of the time I pass these by (I only have so much room and don't want to fill it with P4s...) but this one has an early pentium 4 and it is interesting to me.

Pentium 4 1.7 GHz (400 MHz/256 KB), 512 MB or 1 GB DDR (havent checked), ATi Rage 128 AGP video, no hdd.

Caps look bad so I'll see if it posts and probably scrap it.

Some day, those will be rare because even hoarders and collectors find them ugly and unappealing. Bad caps galore, awful creaky cases that don't stay shut, proprietary everything, slow and uninteresting P4... even scrappers don't like them due to all the plastic.

The best I've gotten out of one of those style machines was an OEM Geforce 4 Ti 4600 (that I later baked in an oven to get it to stop artifacting... which worked!). That machine was purchased by a friend of mine for an ungodly sum back in 2002 as a top of the line gaming system. I think it had RDRAM and a P4 2.4Ghz. I'm sure it was easily $2000 then. I scrapped the system at some point because those things are just such a mess. When I used to work at a PC repair shop (~2003-2006) they were very common... we called them "Story Book" Dell's due to the ridiculous design. They took up so much space on the workbench it was hilarious.

As a side note... this just popped into my head. 2002-2003 was quite an amazing time for PC hardware in my opinion. As expensive as a prebuilt system like that was, a year later I was running a $50 Athlon XP 1700+ at 2Ghz, an Abit NF7-S 2.0 and a Radeon 9600 Pro. That system totally trounced far more expensive ones from the year prior when it came to gaming. Still, those Dells were EVERYWHERE and some of them are still floating around...

ugg, I still have one of those crap-tastic dell's languishing in my basement. I think it is holding up a shelf.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

cj_reha wrote:

Picked up a Dell Dimension 4400 from the thrift store. 99 percent of the time I pass these by (I only have so much room and don't want to fill it with P4s...) but this one has an early pentium 4 and it is interesting to me.

Pentium 4 1.7 GHz (400 MHz/256 KB), 512 MB or 1 GB DDR (havent checked), ATi Rage 128 AGP video, no hdd.

Caps look bad so I'll see if it posts and probably scrap it.

Some day, those will be rare because even hoarders and collectors find them ugly and unappealing. Bad caps galore, awful creaky cases that don't stay shut, proprietary everything, slow and uninteresting P4... even scrappers don't like them due to all the plastic.

I had a hard time trying to maintain a Dell Dimension 4300S as a 9x gaming rig for the past few years now. At one point the original (E773c) CRT monitor died and it got to the point where finding a black Dell CRT became difficult to the point where I almost scrapped that machine in favor of a beige P3 tower... until another black Dell (M782p) CRT turned up at Goodwill nearly a month later, the BIGGEST issue is that due to its' puny Small Form Factor chassis the AGP slot was restricted to low-profile cards which had a segregated market when it came to gaming cards so finding a card that wasn't a piece of crap (something better than the original Rage 128 Ultra but wasn't a wimpy Geforce 2/4MX or FX5200, or even a non-SE/LE Radeon) was darn near-impossible to the point where even using a PCI video card with the PCI riser made more sense from a gaming perspective. Because this was a Pentium 4, a PCI video card would've felt like a bottleneck to the point where I was much better off ditching the 4300S in favor for a full-sized tower machine with a proper AGP slot (which I did).

Unfortunately, as more people buy older hardware and use it until it dies out, the good stuff will become harder to find to the point where the lower-end less sought after stuff gets a higher demand than ever before. One day these (sometimes) poorly-made OEM systems of the era will become sought-after by those who want to get their retro-computing fix in anyway possible barring emulation. You already know what happened to AT-era desktop stuff, eventually the same can happen to the newer generation hardware.

I have a Dimension 4550 that has 4 bad caps by the CPU heatsink, but still fires up. Had to zero (wipe) the 30GB Western Digital HDD since it was used at a dentist office for a long time (no wonder those caps blew). Upgraded the RAM to 1.5GB, GPU from the MX440 to a GeForce 6200 AGP, going to have 2 CD drives installed, or just 1 CD Drive (burner), and had XP Home installed, but the HDD was placed in my iMac G3/600 that had a busted 40GB HDD.

luckybob wrote:

ugg, I still have one of those crap-tastic dell's languishing in my basement. I think it is holding up a shelf.

That's one of the best uses for such a system. That and a door stop.

Got this Thunderbird 900 today. Getting an 1Ghz is probably a pipe dream so this is the fastest slot A cpu i will have.

Just bought 😀
Epox MVP3G2 together with AMD K6-2 500AFX for about 5Eur shipped!

Scraphoarder wrote:

Got this Thunderbird 900 today. Getting an 1Ghz is probably a pipe dream so this is the fastest slot A cpu i will have.

Athlon900.jpg

My 1 GHz Thunderbird cost $80. Only seen one other for sale in 15 years of collecting.

And a second thing I've bought today.
S3 Virge GX2... PCI - I didn't even know that there was a PCI GX2 version...

Good day at the thrift store(s) 😀

- Memorex "Spillproof" PS2 keyboard CIB
- InterAct PC Raider Joystick SEALED
- Quake handbook, missing CD
- Windows XP Home Upgrade-only CIB
- CompUSA USB 2.0 PCI card SEALED
- 2 PS2 mice
- Chester Creek big keys USB keyboard
- 4x software CDs
- Imation colorful floppies CIB
- 512 MB PC133 SDRAM

brostenen wrote:

dpl wrote:

Just got a Yamaha DB50XG for 45 EURO this week... looks like it is in good condition. :-) […]
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Just got a Yamaha DB50XG for 45 EURO this week... looks like it is in good condition. 😀

Congrats....
Never had one as they are allways expensive when I see one for sale.
So I am confined to use a Dreamblaster-S1.

So how are you enjoying that Dreamblaster? I'm considering getting one of those myself, the look promising.

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Bought locally for about 20Euro 😀
Boxed Elsa 3D Revelator... will try to connect it to my Elsa GF 256

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That case looks nice and simple though, and it doesn't look cheap either. The board seems to have at least one BGA chip for the chipset, so this makes me wonder ... what is the chipset of that board ? Could it be an i430TX ? if it does, that might be a better board than your actual board (depending of which board your actual pentium has)

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Scores from a few different thrift shops over the last couple weeks, mostly on discount days. I'm well under $20 into this lot.

The PS/2 to USB is an 'active' converter that will get a Mac Mini with no PS/2 support onto my KVM. It's also nice to finally replace my dead Playstation 2, well worth the $14. The little jewel case 2.5D collection were $1-$2 each from various shops, Dark Forces is even still sealed. B) Now all I need is a jewel case Rise of the Triad.

Yeah that sound blaster has no OPL3 at all so FM will sound a bit off and it probably has the hanging note bug on the watetable though the SFX must be nice and clean since that's a newer card (the earliest sound blaster 16s were really noisy). However since your mobo has integrated sound which is made by a yamaha sound chip, you should have an OPL3 coming with your board so that's not a big deal for the FM music