If my former Dimension 8300 judging by introduction date (around 2003-2004) and the Dimension XPS Gen 3 around 2004, then YES, rebuild your motherboard with new capacitors. Polymer capacitors works very well here.

I picked up 8300 infested with bad capacitors and recapped, modified P4 mounting bracket to fit, drilled number of holes through the plastic and metal chassis and installed screws from inside to secure falling off plastic shells, and carefully grind off the protruding screws, added missing parts, among them was Northwood 2.8C to it and used it for many years at previous work, when business closed made mistake to not take it with me.

As a replacement, I kept a computer based on Optiplex 780 board into hacked but forgot to uncover rear 2 usb ports using 760 tower for years (was my main PC) one day, someone else donated a 780 tower. I rebuilt one from both, plastic etc, using the 780 motherboard. Reason for replacing that motherboard was failing clock when running XP or Windows 7, with one from the donated 780 tower into mint looking 780 tower. Call that thing not correct period and restoration.

Cheers,

XP was already on the way out when S775 was released which means it makes for really fast XP builds. I think it's the perfect base for XP rig and your personal history only makes it more so.
A lot of these questions depend on what games you are playing as XP was still supported by a lot of games right up to 5 years ago that's 16 years worth of games! but in general

1) 2GB will probably be fine but 4GB wont hurt either and DDR2 is cheap so why not? DDR2-533 is as fast as the motherboard supports but faster DDR2 sticks will work if that are available for a better price. You want matching pairs for best performance. Companies like OCZ sold ram with sexy heat speeders and the rest of it if you want to go down that path.

2) The Dell spec sheet says you have a 460W PSU. The recommended PSU for a GTX 260 is 500W, I wouldn't risk it.
https://downloads.dell.com/manuals/all-produc … anual_en-us.pdf
The Radeon 9250 is makes for a powerful Win9x card but you can probably do better for a XP rig.
This link has Graphics card PSU requirements NVidia dropped XP support after the 700 series (well a bit longer but PSU requirements exceed 400W)
I'm not sure about AMD side of things.
https://www.realhardtechx.com/index_archivos/Page362.htm

With all that said try the 9250 first and if it plays everything fine then I'd just keep it.

3) Turn on Hyperthreading. XP knows how to handle this properly.

Sadly this PC is from the capacitor plague era. This wasn't just a Dell thing but they do seem to suffer worse then say HP. Recap or run it into the ground are your only options as replacment boards will have the same problem.

Unlike similar aged HP PC's Dell still have the driver and support page if you need firmware updates or documentation
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-uk/produ … sion-g3/drivers

If you load up a vm or use roytam1 browsers on that machine then yes for 4gb.

bump to 4gb, and swap psu for seasonic 650w gold 80 plus. This era of 2004 computers from dell is standard ATX.

This is what I did with my 8300 using standard PSU.

Cheers,

Would this memory work?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/2GB-2x-1GB-Kingston- … 1G/265101615581

That ram should work fine in that system.

Also, looking through my box of extra cards I also have an ATI FireGL V055 and an nVIDIA Quadro 256mb FX 8974. Are either of those better?

FireGL Vxxxx? There's no 550 version. Likewise the Quadro FX xxxx?

Look into these two links to help with you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_ … ng_units#Quadro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_gra … s#FireGL_series

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-04-06, 23:07:

FireGL Vxxxx? There's no 550 version. Likewise the Quadro FX xxxx? […]
Show full quote

FireGL Vxxxx? There's no 550 version. Likewise the Quadro FX xxxx?

Look into these two links to help with you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_ … ng_units#Quadro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_gra … s#FireGL_series

Cheers,

I'm guessing it's a rebranded version for Dell? It might be a V3300 then as that one looks like the one I have.

The other is another Dell rebranded card. It's a Quadro FX3400

FX 3400 is a 6800 GS on PCIe bus, decent enough for P4 if yours is PCIe slots.

V3300 is x1300 on PCIe, GDDR2, slower.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-04-07, 00:07:

FX 3400 is a 6800 GS on PCIe bus, decent enough for P4 if yours is PCIe slots.

Don't you have to use the 6800 drivers instead of the Quadro drivers to get the full benefits? I thought I read that somewhere, but I could be mistaken.

Tempest wrote on 2021-04-07, 01:51:

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-04-07, 00:07:

FX 3400 is a 6800 GS on PCIe bus, decent enough for P4 if yours is PCIe slots.

Don't you have to use the 6800 drivers instead of the Quadro drivers to get the full benefits? I thought I read that somewhere, but I could be mistaken.

Benefit seems to be minimal in most cases, I'd see how it goes first as you'll need to flash the BIOS to convert it to a GF card.
Agree this would be a good match for the system though!

chinny22 wrote on 2021-04-07, 12:14:

Benefit seems to be minimal in most cases, I'd see how it goes first as you'll need to flash the BIOS to convert it to a GF card.
Agree this would be a good match for the system though!

Oh ok. I didn't realize you had to flash the BIOS to get that to work. I'll try it out as is and see how it goes.

I tired putting the Quadro into my system and all that happened was the fans ran full speed and nothing appeared on the screen (didn't even get a BIOS beep). I had the same problem with this card when I tried putting it in another P4, I think either something is wrong with the card or it's not compatible with these systems.

If it didn't work in another PC I'd guess dead card.
If it was me I'd try out the GTX 260, you may get away with a quick test if you unplug all the drives. Alternately can you "borrow" a PSU form another rig?
If it works then you could buy a 500W PSU and the newer card may even allow you to turn AA, AF, etc up without effecting performance.

chinny22 wrote on 2021-04-13, 10:59:

If it didn't work in another PC I'd guess dead card.
If it was me I'd try out the GTX 260, you may get away with a quick test if you unplug all the drives. Alternately can you "borrow" a PSU form another rig?
If it works then you could buy a 500W PSU and the newer card may even allow you to turn AA, AF, etc up without effecting performance.

Honestly it's probably not worth the bother. I'll see if the XP games I want to play run ok on the current card I have. Maybe I'll look for a cheap GTX that will work with my current power supply.