Post your system.......

[Uranium-235]

Originally Posted by momaka

The specs of this Dell OptiPlex 170L:
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 Prescott HT 2.8 GHz (800 MHz FSB), socket 478
RAM: 1280 MB DDR PC3200 @ 400 MHz single channel ( 1 GB + 256 MB ) --> now upgraded to 2 GB as of this writing.
Video: on-board Intel Extreme Graphics 2 through motherboard i865 chipset
HDD: single 80 GB Samsung Spinpoint SP0802N (7200 RPM, 3.5”, PATA / IDE)
Optical: Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HL-DT-ST) GCC-4482b CD-RW / DVD-ROM
PSU: HiPro / Chicony HP-P2507FPW rev-A01, 250 Watt ATX with original Teapo caps
OS: Windows XP Professional SP2 32-bit (OEM COA on case) with select patches

Anyways, this post was made not so much to show off this PC, but more as a tribute. It’s served me well, so I think it deserves an honorable mention here.
And will continue serving me until I come up with another machine that I feel is equally reliable.

I have a silver shuttle with a Prescott 3.4. Fan spins up pretty high at moderate activity, despite the thin layer of AS5. I don't even know why I keep it lol. Think I have an old AGP ati card in it.

I guess for writing papers netburst arch works fine. My old supervisor ran a TS server for his stupid web game friends from our shop on an old GX110 SFF (PIII 933). Website complexity grew past it. hmm. <image searches motherboard> Ohhh so sad no graphics upgrades. Hmm, I do have memories of playing Tachyon: TF on my old DV2000 with i815, so I guess that onboard couldn't be that bad

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Originally Posted by momaka

Another possible upgrade I’ve been thinking about (for fun, at least) is add in / solder the missing AGP slot (have one from a scrapped Dell OptiPlex 260 board) – probably won’t ever happen though.

i wouldnt recommend that. i looked up the specs of the optiplex 170L and noticed the chipset is an 865gv. the v suffix means the chipset doesnt have agp support or it was removed because during manufacturing, the chipset had a defective agp line so it was removed and binned for non-working agp support.

if u added in the agp slot, no guarantees a discrete agp card will work properly. depends on your luck similar with unlocking unused cores on cpus and gpus.

[Uranium-235]

Originally Posted by ChaosLegionnaire

i wouldnt recommend that. i looked up the specs of the optiplex 170L and noticed the chipset is an 865gv. the v suffix means the chipset doesnt have agp support or it was removed because during manufacturing, the chipset had a defective agp line so it was removed and binned for non-working agp support.

if u added in the agp slot, no guarantees a discrete agp card will work properly. depends on your luck similar with unlocking unused cores on cpus and gpus.

except anomalies https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb...n.php?S_ID=234

but yeah the power regulation was probably not installed so even if it did support it, you would have to build the agp ports vrm

[BigTroll]

I like those old shuttles, I have a SS51G with a 3.06 Pentium 4 Northwood, I maxed it out and gave it a AGP Radeon 3650 and a haugepauge TV card, I still use it every now and then to make VHS rips.

[Uranium-235]

Originally Posted by BigTroll

I like those old shuttles, I have a SS51G with a 3.06 Pentium 4 Northwood, I maxed it out and gave it a AGP Radeon 3650 and a haugepauge TV card, I still use it every now and then to make VHS rips.

I have a ST61G4.



except imagine a SILVER 16x dvdrw, matching the front pretty well.

it's in closet storage (where I keep the more expensive computers). 3.4 prescott, runs pretty hot (of course).

[BigTroll]

Thats a nice one, I like the integrated card reader too!

[Uranium-235]

Originally Posted by BigTroll

Thats a nice one, I like the integrated card reader too!

well it's from 2003, so probably no HD or XD support, kind of irrelevant today. I'm setting up some customers with XPC DH110SE's that have SDXC support. Interesting systems. I have the bigger XH110G as my HTPC/Emulation (once the GT 2030 comes out i'll probably put one in).

Been getting Skylake i5-6500T's but the DH's, and my XH has an i5-6600T

Next customer wants win10 so i'll probably get one of the 310 series with a kaby lake chip

I don't know why shuttle hasn't decided to start making ryzen systems. The TDP/performance/price I think beats most of intels offerings

[momaka]

Originally Posted by BigTroll

Funny story, around 2013/2014 we had a 170l at the school, my co-worker gave me a soyo board with the beautiful Silver Sacon caps none bulged, it had an AMD duron in it so I put it in the 170L since I needed a case and wanted a vintage AMD rig

That's a shame they threw it out. Soyo boards, from what I heard, were pretty good (sans the caps.)

Originally Posted by BigTroll

I would love to just give them away but that would be gifting of public funds or some bs like that.

It IS BS.
Most of those "public funds" come from taxes, which come from you know who. So if anything, the government (be it local/state or federal) should actually clean those PCs and offer them for free / cheap to families in need instead of dumping them for scrap / cents per pound.

Originally Posted by Curious.George

hospitals are notoriously wasteful and tend to also stick to the short update cycles of most businesses

Pretty much all businesses I've seen lately have adopted this cancerous practice. Mostly IT departments giving themselves job security, it seems.

Originally Posted by Uranium-235

I have a silver shuttle with a Prescott 3.4. Fan spins up pretty high at moderate activity, despite the thin layer of AS5. I don't even know why I keep it lol.

Because it's a Shuttle?
Seems like these things are still holding some value, for whatever reason. Same hardware in desktop or even SFF desktop, you can hardly even give away for free anymore. Most of the time, no one wants things that old.

Originally Posted by Uranium-235

I guess for writing papers netburst arch works fine.

Even P3 is.
It's really only the web that has pushed these old CPUs in the dust. For everything else, you can find a slightly older version of whatever software you need that will do mostly everything you can nowadays. Of course, the obvious exception being anything CPU and GPU intensive (i.e. video editing, CAD, and 3D rendering, to name a few.) I still use Photoshop 7.0 (the last pre-CS version), and for 99% of any image/photo editing I want to do, it works fine.

Originally Posted by Uranium-235

Hmm, I do have memories of playing Tachyon: TF on my old DV2000 with i815, so I guess that onboard couldn't be that bad

i815?! Oh man!
The HP Pavilion 8756c desktop PC (Pentium 3 850 MHz) I used to use before the abovementioned OptiPlex 170L had that onboard i815 IGP. 1280x960 with 24-bit color was the maximum that thing could do. DirectX support - what's that?! When Hardware Rendering runs faster than DirectX from the IGP, you know that thing is seriously crippled. Case in point, the Pav. 8756c could not run even Half-Life or original CS 1.1/1.5 in DirectX.

Originally Posted by ChaosLegionnaire

i wouldnt recommend that. i looked up the specs of the optiplex 170L and noticed the chipset is an 865gv. the v suffix means the chipset doesnt have agp support or it was removed because during manufacturing, the chipset had a defective agp line so it was removed and binned for non-working agp support.

if u added in the agp slot, no guarantees a discrete agp card will work properly. depends on your luck similar with unlocking unused cores on cpus and gpus.

I'm not too worried if it doesn't work. I have that AGP slot sitting on a (physically) broken board doing nothing anyways. So it's worth a shot.

Also, I doubt the i865gv chipset makes a difference. From what I've seen with other Dells from this era, I think it's either the Dimension 4600 or 4800 that has the same exact motherboard as my OptiPlex 170L. Main difference is, the Dimension has all of its 4 RAM slots installed on the board, along with the AGP slot.

Originally Posted by Uranium-235

but yeah the power regulation was probably not installed so even if it did support it, you would have to build the agp ports vrm

Nope, it's all there.
The 1.5V rail used for the AGP is also used for the NB, if I'm not mistaken.
Aside from a few SMD components missing near the AGP slot (which do not appear to be connected to any of the AGP slot pins), everything else appears to be there.

I guess we will see if I ever get to trying this.

That is, presuming I can even remove the AGP slot from the broken board without damaging it. I already had to remove a damaged PCI slot from another board before, and it's not as easy as it looks - that is, if you want clean removal.

[lti]

My parents stopped using their Pentium 4 two years ago, but they still have it.

[Uranium-235]

Originally Posted by lti

My parents stopped using their Pentium 4 two years ago, but they still have it.

a customer of mine decided to upgrade from a pentium 4 2.8HT sony /w winxp I sold him 7 years ago with a C2D (he said scrolling facebook was waay too slow)

just last year

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by Uranium-235

I have a ST61G4.



except imagine a SILVER 16x dvdrw, matching the front pretty well.

it's in closet storage (where I keep the more expensive computers). 3.4 prescott, runs pretty hot (of course).

I used to have one... Kerijane gave to me (remember her? ), and about 6 years ago I gave to Hondaman to use as a HTPC. Slick little system.

[Topcat]

^
I've recapped a gazillion of those.

[Uranium-235]

Originally Posted by Topcat

^
I've recapped a gazillion of those.

I'm not surprised, the caps seem very iffy

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Originally Posted by Uranium-235

except anomalies https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb...n.php?S_ID=234

oh... that board... i've had it before for a few months. the agp slot u see there is not a true agp slot. its an xgp slot, a third party agp solution hack by biostar engineers. the xgp slot actually goes through the southbridge so its not any faster than pci or agp 1x speed. i eventually sold the board off cuz the gaming performance was terrible through that xgp hack solution and upgraded to a core 2 e8600 system instead.

Originally Posted by momaka

Also, I doubt the i865gv chipset makes a difference. From what I've seen with other Dells from this era, I think it's either the Dimension 4600 or 4800 that has the same exact motherboard as my OptiPlex 170L. Main difference is, the Dimension has all of its 4 RAM slots installed on the board, along with the AGP slot.

i checked those systems and the pcb layout on the board being the exact same is where the similarity ends. the actual chipset soldered to the board on the dimension 4600 is the 865g which does have a working agp line.

the 865g and 865gv both come from the same silicon anyway so they are both electrically compatible pin-wise and so are interchangeable with the same pcb design, so they just used the same pcb interchangeably for two systems/chipsets which some manufacturers like to do. just the 865g chipsets with defective agp lines get binned down as an 865gv.

however, there is no such memory limitation for the 865g and 865gv. both can support up to 4gb of dual channel ram according to official specs and docs from intel. so u'd have better luck installing the two missing memory slots on your optiplex 170L instead and hopefully the bios isnt crippled to reject more than 2gb of ram on the optiplex 170L.

[lti]

Originally Posted by Uranium-235

a customer of mine decided to upgrade from a pentium 4 2.8HT sony /w winxp I sold him 7 years ago with a C2D (he said scrolling facebook was waay too slow)

just last year

They upgraded because it wouldn't play YouTube videos very well. It needed some browser hacks to get H.264 videos to play in Windows XP, and the CPU usage was permanently stuck at 100% (2.53GHz P4 with a GeForce 4 graphics card and a monitor running at a resolution that Nvidia claimed the card didn't support).

Originally Posted by ChaosLegionnaire

oh... that board... i've had it before for a few months. the agp slot u see there is not a true agp slot. its an xgp slot, a third party agp solution hack by biostar engineers. the xgp slot actually goes through the southbridge so its not any faster than pci or agp 1x speed. i eventually sold the board off cuz the gaming performance was terrible through that xgp hack solution and upgraded to a core 2 e8600 system instead.

Don't trust anyone who calls themselves the best (see webpage title). Along with the weird cheap fake-AGP, their "manual" download links to a .exe file.

[Uranium-235]

yeah scrolling down facebook it was upping to 100%, and actually leveling off at 80% 'idle'. Gave him a C2D 6570 /w 4gb win7. I just threw the sony away

Yeah that biostar website hasn't been updated since 2005. The updated one (ending with .tw) still has 'best motherboard' in the title

[Uranium-235]

Originally Posted by lti

Don't trust anyone who calls themselves the best (see webpage title). Along with the weird cheap fake-AGP, their "manual" download links to a .exe file.

I think it's just a pci/agp bridge chip, with limited compatibility.

[TechGeek]

Originally Posted by Uranium-235

I think it's just a pci/agp bridge chip, with limited compatibility.

I'll have to execute a similar hack on a couple of my more senior-age machines soon. PCI->PCIe bridge for networking cards.

Machine 1: Tech Room Network Bridge (built November 15, 2004)
PCI Slot <-> PCI->PCIe Bridge <-> ASUS AC68 wireless card

Machine 2: Tech Room Firewall/DHCP Server (built in 2006)
PCI Slot <-> PCI->PCIe Bridge <-> GbE NIC

[Uranium-235]

I had a poweredge 1800 with a bridge on the board, and one on the perc card, so it was

PCI-X bus <-> PCI-X->PCI-E bridge <-> Pci-E slot <-> PCI-E card <-> PCI-E->PCI-X bridge onboard <-> PCI-X Raid chip

[Topcat]

I never thought I'd have such a boring/unexciting home system....but anymore, I don't use it for anything but web browsing and playing a little Diablo2 with my wife....

Dell Optiplex 990 SFF
i7-2600 @ 3.4GHz
16gb DDR3 RAM
Quadro K420 2gb GPU low-profile
Sound Blaster FX audio low-profile
240gb Kingston A400 SSD
Logitech G15 v1 Gaming Keyboard (bought new ~12yrs old with now very dim lighted keys, a mod is in the works! )
Logitech MX1000 laser mouse
Dell U3011 30" 16:10 2560x1600 display

It's quiet, efficient, and quite snappy....no complaints after a couple customization's. The onboard audio is lame, disabled it for the FX so I can use my 7.1 speakers. I also don't care for Intel HD GPU's, so I added the K420...which screams with D2 with Sven's Glide wrapper. Anything Glide pukes big chunks on Intel GPU's. The system was given to me in a large lot I hauled away from one of my EDU clients. I added the extras, all was ~$50-ish. Recapped the PSU pre-emptively. OS is Server 2012 R2. It's just dandy for the functions it performs.