First post, by dormcat
- Rank
- Oldbie
Last week when I took out garbage I saw a man few years older dumping an XP-era laptop. I tried to intercept it but an old recycler lady took it away first. I chatted with the guy and he told me that he got an old P4 desktop if I was interested. Sure!
The next day he came with a huge silver chassis. Man that was a Gigabyte 3D Aurora! With three 12cm chassis fans and water cooling sockets (not installed though)!
Me: "Are you sure giving this to me for free? Seriously? Even the heavy empty case worth a few dollars."
Him: "Sure, just take it. It's collecting dust in my house for many years anyway."
I thanked him again and took it home, walking; should have ridden my motor scooter out.
Opening it up, it had no HDD (naturally), no video card, but MB, CPU, RAM, ODD, PSU, and various cables were all there.
MB: Asus P5GDC-V Deluxe, Intel 915G chipset
CPU: P4-520 2.8GHz, "Prescott" 90nm, LGA775
RAM: Kington 512MB DDR x2
ODD: Pioneer DVD-multi
PSU: 500W; 5V rail at 40A (!)
Pros:
The interior is VERY clean
MB booted up nicely
PSU has large current at 5V rail
Cons:
With 84W TDP, P4-520 is not exactly an efficient CPU. I already have two much faster builds (C2D E7400 and A64X2 5000+, 65W TDP for both) for WinXP.
For Win98SE, even my existing Sempron 2800+/3100+ are faster under single core:
Besides, Asus provided no native Win98SE driver for the chipset. While it could be found at Phil's, the PCIe slot limits possible graphic card selections to GF6 series or Radeon R(V)370/4x0 series (X300-X800), the only two series of PCIe cards that support Win98SE.
The DVD-multi is not reading.
Last but not least: the CPU fan is as noisy as a hair dryer.
So now I've got a problem: I'm not sure what to do with it. Under WinXP it's much slower than my existing XP builds; under Win98SE it's wasting energy and not faster than a 1.6GHz Sempron either, and I might have to look for a video card I don't have.
"Beggars can't be choosers," but right now I'd say the most valuable part is the PSU. 🙁 I'm reluctant to have it sitting in a corner collecting dust just like before.