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Adventures in restoring an old Compaq DeskPro 2000 computer

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Reply 60 of 61, by eisapc

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I fully agree.
I am a great fan of these old Office boxes from the big brands.
These include Compaq, HP, IBM, Dell and Fujitsu (-Siemens).
Sure they often use non generic parts but on the other hand they run rock solid for years.
I used an old Deskpro SFF PIII for years as a linux fileserver.
My actual daily driver is a HP z230 SFF while my actual gaming box is a a Z440 (was a Z800 before).

DP2000, 4000 and 6000 are nice retro boxes no matter as as a tower, desktop or SFF-Desktop.
Combining the onboard graphics with a Voodo make them perfect for win9x gaming too.
Some 4000/6000 even had an AGP but used this special double wide half hight bracket.
Just trying to get such a board replaced in my PWS5000.

Reply 61 of 61, by songoffall

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chinny22 wrote on 2025-02-10, 05:40:
It's why I have fond memories of the Deskpro 2000's/4000's at my first job. They were built solid and caused less problems then […]
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It's why I have fond memories of the Deskpro 2000's/4000's at my first job.
They were built solid and caused less problems then the later P3 era Compaq's that replaced them.

Even now people complain about old OEM machines about nonstandard or incompatibility with generic parts, lack of tweaking/overclocking options, etc.
But they are missing that's the point of OEM business machines, at least from this era. They were built to have as little downtime as possible and quickly get going again if they are down.
The same era of home market Compaq's were cheaper and it showed, but then downtime isn't as important.
Sadly it was just after this time that the business range also started sacrificing quality for price.

Yeah, except in my country (and most of the former USSR) in this era we had a (somewhat racist) gradation of computers:

  1. White builds were OEM machines built in US, Canada and Europe, considered the best in performance and stability - brands like IBM, Compaq, Dell, Zenith Data Systems, etc. Interestingly enough, Japanese computers were seen as white builds too.
  2. Yellow builds were OEM machines that came from Taiwan and China, and were seen as a step down in quality.
  3. Red builds were OEM machines from Russia, seen as a step-down from yellow builds. More corners were cut, almost no premium components, etc.
  4. Black builds were non-OEM machines assembled locally. The compatibility and stability of these systems was seen as the lowest, and premium parts were rarely seen here, and they were often made from decommissioned previous generation parts.

During the PIII era, the quality of so called "black builds" started to rival that of OEM builds, because prices started coming down and PC builders started to gain some experience - I started building computers in this era and was one of the first people to do advanced cooling, cable management, case mods, BIOS tuning, no OC though - my focus was on longevity and stability at stock settings.

P2 300MHz/Matrox Mystique/Sound Blaster AWE 32 Value
Pentium 3 733MHz/3dfx Voodoo 3 3000/Aureal Vortex 2 (Diamond Monster Sound)
Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz/GeForce FX 5500/Creative Audigy 2
Core2 Quad Q9400/GeForce 8800GT/Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty