xjas wrote on 2020-03-21, 10:08:

Love this build! The new decals look great.

Did you use 'sticky' photo paper then, or something else?

I used high gloss sticker photo paper, I had some doubts and I was printing with a Canon MX922 at home. However with my day job, finding a real printing facility that could die cut and everything meant traveling out to one in a business/industrial park that's usually open when I'd be at work. With COVID-19 coming and being couped up at home soon I was like 'Fuck it, let's Amazon some materials and at least try. It'll be a thing to do at least'.

In the end I was REALLY impressed with the result. My hand cutting of the graphics with a knife is not 100% but I think that I could later redo them using a consumer plotter and get far better results.

Reminds me of what's currently left from my IBM Netvista 6578.
Threw the i815E board away, replaced the PSU with a ghetto-adapted TFX-format FSP/Sparkle 250W PSU and currently left the case empty.

Would it be worth installing a FM2 Athlon X4? Or should I simply settle on a FM1 setup similar to this (except with only one DIMM slot working) and Windows 8.1?

A small bummer, I had a Radeon HD 7950 on hand which is also one of the last AMD GPUs to have XP 32 bit drivers. It worked in a lot of cases and 3D Mark 2003 was getting scores in excess of 60 000. (I'm sure that glorified Phenom II X4 3.0ghz CPU in it, running single threaded, was probably the bottleneck) I hit some issues though. Some games like The Movies wouldn't render vdieo, there was audio, I heard menus sounds if I moved the mouse around blindly, but the visual was just black. Also being a 200w GPU with a factory overclock from 800mhz to 925mhz, it caused bad thermal issues in a system who's only exhaust fan is the PSU itself. It did enable it to run Black Mesa in Windows 10 however.

So that's out, we're back to the HD 6550D IGP, but I found a cheap HD 6750 that I bought using eBay bucks as a far more suitable drop in replacement. It's hopefully as game compatible as the 6550D is, it has almost 2x the processing hardware in it, runs at a higher clock, and it uses 1GB of GDDR5 where as the IGP is of course relying on 1600mhz DDR3 system memory. It'll be interesting to compare the two for sure.

So the HD 6750... Uhh... Who would just wrap a GPU in bubble wrap, stick a shipping sticker on it, and ship it that way?

It did not make it here unscathed... Yes, I got a full refund.

Easily fixable is those 2 capacitors were the only issue.

Unknown_K wrote on 2020-04-19, 03:16:

Easily fixable is those 2 capacitors were the only issue.

It also lost a fan blade which was a $8 part ordered from China. (God knows when that'll show up however) But yeah, it even still works without the capacitors, but gonna replace them eventually.

That said, someone ships something as carelessly as that, I'm getting a full refund. I'm not paying to repair things that broke because someone shipped them like a complete idiot. Put it in a box.

So I picked up this HP L2035 20" LCD monitor for CAD$12 over a month ago, just before COVID-19 shut things down. When researching the specs everything said it was a 'TFT' screen and I thusly assumed it was TN. I'm sure others who know mid 2000's monitors know better than I did but it turns out this was quite a score; This has an S-IPS panel, the same as the Dell 2001FP even. I went digging and found 2004-2005 reviews making this an expensive (USD$999 in 2004 according to one review) and relatively high end display. I had no idea, I thought it looked nice but yeah, seems I accidentally scored a 4:3 S-IPS screen for next to nothing and it took me over a month to realize what was on my desk.

Some updates... Because I changed nearly all the parts inside of this. I moved away from the large mATX A75 board with the AMD A8 3870K and put in a 'skinny' mATX Asus B75 board with an Intel i3 3250 chip on it. This is 2C4T but as this is mostly for Window XP, it's single threaded performance vastly outclasses the A8-3870K. I also located a 'blower' style Radeon HD 6850, mint OEM example made by Sapphire. This is some mean graphics performance but the cooler exhausts all the heat out of the back of the case rather than filling the case with heat. This is likely to be the last hardware configuration with this machine, but I may experiment with an HD 7850. The HD 7950 had some compatibility issues with some games like rendering all black in The Movies no matter what driver I used, but maybe an HD 7850 would work better?

I also pulled out the giant Noctua U12S cooler because; 1) It's big and in the way. 2) This is only an i3. 3) I could use that U12S in a server I'm deploying in the fall.

All in all this is a pretty pleasing system. For Windows XP gaming it's basically god mode performance. I can run games at 1600x1200 with super sampling AA without much trouble. This is how you WISHED a Windows XP system performed back in the day.

Fujoshi-hime wrote on 2020-04-26, 22:56:

So I picked up this HP L2035 20" LCD monitor for CAD$12 over a month ago, just before COVID-19 shut things down. When researching the specs everything said it was a 'TFT' screen and I thusly assumed it was TN. I'm sure others who know mid 2000's monitors know better than I did but it turns out this was quite a score; This has an S-IPS panel, the same as the Dell 2001FP even. I went digging and found 2004-2005 reviews making this an expensive (USD$999 in 2004 according to one review) and relatively high end display. I had no idea, I thought it looked nice but yeah, seems I accidentally scored a 4:3 S-IPS screen for next to nothing and it took me over a month to realize what was on my desk.

IMG_20200314_155935.jpg

I was looking through this thread, searched for some info regarding the L2035 and found this http://www.l2035recall.com/ . You should probably check if your L2035 is safe .

darry wrote on 2020-08-21, 02:29:

I was looking through this thread, searched for some info regarding the L2035 and found this http://www.l2035recall.com/ . You should probably check if your L2035 is safe .

Thanks for the heads up but I came across this already, it's a lot easier to come across this info than it is on the panel type frankly. 😀 My panel serial number is MUCH higher than the range they say is affected.

That's really, really nice work. I love to see that kind of restoration effort.

- Alex

Hi I picked up a emachines 566 the other day and came across your build and it's something iam looking to do , I know the post is old so don't blame you if you don't remember! I was wondering what model the asus b75 motherboard was . Does any micro atx board fit? Thanks in advance