Question Legacy Dell Dimension B110 - Options

[Anomaly_76]

Before anyone starts laughing, I'm not working on this one for myself, my friend's kid picked it up for $15 and is hoping it can at least do some light gaming with upgrades.

Dell support has no visible info on the serial number. Powering up, it appears to be a Celeron D 325, 2.53 Ghz on a 533-Mhz PCI (not PCIe) bus. 60GB IDE/PATA HDD, 1GB RAM. It's currently running Win XP.

First order of business was to see if it could run Win 10. While I've read it's possible with workarounds, I'm not sure it will be worth it. First impressions, I'm thinking Ubuntu or Puppy Linux would be a better option. Booting from a USB Win 10 32-bit installation media produces a boot loop, so I think my gut reaction was correct.

Can this thing even run Win10? If not, my experience with Linux is limited. So considering a BIOS update that supports P4 is available, adapters to run SATA from an IDE interface are available, and indications are a couple hundred bucks will allow this thing to do casual gaming, how would any of you proceed with it, if there were no other options?

 

[USAFRet]

Before anyone starts laughing, I'm not working on this one for myself, my friend's kid picked it up for $15 and is hoping it can at least do some light gaming with upgrades.

Dell support has no visible info on the serial number. Powering up, it appears to be a Celeron D 325, 2.53 Ghz on a 533-Mhz PCI (not PCIe) bus. 60GB IDE/PATA HDD, 1GB RAM. It's currently running Win XP.

First order of business was to see if it could run Win 10. While I've read it's possible with workarounds, I'm not sure it will be worth it. First impressions, I'm thinking Ubuntu or Puppy Linux would be a better option. Booting from a USB Win 10 32-bit installation media produces a boot loop, so I think my gut reaction was correct.

Can this thing even run Win10? If not, my experience with Linux is limited. So considering a BIOS update that supports P4 is available, adapters to run SATA from an IDE interface are available,

If looking to make this even a marginal game system, that was $15 wasted.

1GB RAM ain't gonna cut it. At all.

and indications are a couple hundred bucks will allow this thing to do casual gaming

For a couple hundred $$, he could have bought something much newer, and more capable.

 

[Anomaly_76]

If looking to make this even a marginal game system, that was $15 wasted.

1GB RAM ain't gonna cut it. At all.


For a couple hundred $$, he could have bought something much newer, and more capable.

I'm well aware this thing is not going to run the likes of AAA titles. I'm told the board can support up to 2GB, perhaps 4GB. Realistically, what are the newest titles it could run with, say, a 2.8-3.0 Ghz P4 and a Radeon 7000 / GeForce 6800 series?

 

[USAFRet]

I'm well aware this thing is not going to run the likes of AAA titles. I'm told the board can support up to 2GB, perhaps 4GB. Realistically, what are the newest titles it could run with, say, a 2.8-3.0 Ghz P4 and a Radeon 7000 / GeForce 6800 series?

I wasn't talking about AAA.

Just getting Win 10 to run reliably will be the issue.

2GB RAM will be 'watching paint dry', 4GB is 'barely usable'. And that just the OS, not anything else.

Luckily, this is only $15.
Turn it into a marginal file server.

The $200 or so you would spend trying to make this thing semi gamable would be better spent on a whole different, newer refurb or off lease system.

 

[Anomaly_76]

I wasn't talking about AAA.

Just getting Win 10 to run reliably will be the issue.

2GB RAM will be 'watching paint dry', 4GB is 'barely usable'. And that just the OS, not anything else.

Luckily, this is only $15.
Turn it into a marginal file server.

The $200 or so you would spend trying to make this thing semi gamable would be better spent on a whole different, newer refurb or off lease system.

Gotcha. Good advice.

Now that I see what some people are asking for the old Radeon 7000s and GeForce 6800s, I see what you mean. Just showed him a 6th-gen Intel with an R9 380 and 16GB RAM for $80 I found locally. Thanks.

 

[USAFRet]

Gotcha. Good advice.

Now that I see what some people are asking for the old Radeon 7000s and GeForce 6800s, I see what you mean. Just showed him a 6th-gen Intel with an R9 380 and 16GB RAM for $80 I found locally. Thanks.

Yep...MUCH better performance.

 

[Anomaly_76]

Yep...MUCH better performance.

So, after discussing all this with my friend, turns out his kid just got this thing to tinker with and see if he could build a light gaming machine, which is fine, except for the insane prices for era-appropriate hardware upgrades.

It goes without saying, but examples are:

$40-$80 for a 3.4 Prescott / Northwood P4
(I bought an i7-2600 for $30 last year)

$150-$300 for a Radeon 5400-7000 series
(You can buy any GTX1650-GTX1660 you want brand-new for that, even some used RTX cards, if you're sharp).

We now know who the previous owner was, who used it for accounting and tax preparation, as well as that the existing Samsung SP0802N HDD (80GB IDE), is dated Nov '06.

Presumably, it could be close to the 500,000 hr MTBF if it ran 24 hours a day. If not, daily shutdown could still be pushing its 50,000 start / stop cycle rating at 15 years. It sounds healthy, but even for a tinkering project, I don't trust it, especially with no existing OS install media.

So considering all this, I suggested a solid-state drive upgrade, if for no other reason, to have a safety net while allowing his kid to tinker with it and learn, bypassing existing storage with a cheap SSD setup would leave the original as a plan B.

This gives some performance increase without substantial investment, and a safety net with the known working drive and OS are still there as a plan B. Possibly I could even clone that existing install to the SSD.

Amazon has several solutions, one a plug-and-play PATA SSD (KingSpec) for under $40.

However, this video tested this exact drive against not only an an open-source DIY version (nearly identical) that outpaced it, but other devices which smoked both, including two different SATA-IDE adapters with SATA SSDs. Supposedly all were plug-and-play, required no special drivers, and suitable for boot / OS use.

I'm curious how a SATA drive can outpace an IDE drive when adapted to an IDE interface, but the bigger question is, since this test was done using a Macintosh, given the different OS / processor, how might a Mac's read/write speeds compare to a PC with Windows or Linux with the same adapters / drives?

Since floppy drives are all but dead and I'd rather leave any existing Molex available, what I have in mind for this, is a simple 4-pin floppy IDE / SATA power adapter, IDE-SATA adapter (2nd place in the above video), NGFF SATA M.2 adapter with a 128GB SATA M.2. I've seen good results from an i3-2100 with the NGFF / M.2 arrangement, and the IDE-SATA adapter was 2nd place in the referenced test video.

At $56, this arrangement is 44% pricier than the $37 plug-and-play KingSpec, but the increased capacity greatly offsets the cost per GB ($0.44 per GB vs $1.15 per GB). The referenced test video indicates dividends with increased performance over the KingSpec as well, which would simply be a bonus.

Probably about as far as anyone would go with this thing, but I figure if its best use case is a server / NAS, 40% more storage that's faster to boot is a logical step. Is the floppy power adapter okay for the lower-power use of an SSD, or would the larger 4-pin HDD Molex be better?

 

[USAFRet]

So, after discussing all this with my friend, turns out his kid just got this thing to tinker with and see if he could build a light gaming machine, which is fine, except for the insane prices for era-appropriate hardware upgrades.

The problem is in trying to bump this old office level system, into something currently semi compatible, for a reasonable cost.
As noted above, much better performance can be had for the same price as trying to update this thing.

Parts depend on other parts.
Too many things would need to be changed, all at the same time.

But, this might be a $200-300 learning experience.
How to buy, how to assemble, how to diagnose....

But performance-wise, it will never be "good".

 

[35below0]

Just getting Win 10 to run reliably will be the issue.

With 1Gb of RAM, it will struggle to run Win 7 at all.

It's an XP era machine that can run extremly old games, and with difficulty. Tinkering would be fun except parts have dried upand are expensive.
Shame, but what can you do.

 

[Anomaly_76]

The problem is in trying to bump this old office level system, into something currently semi compatible, for a reasonable cost.
As noted above, much better performance can be had for the same price as trying to update this thing.

Parts depend on other parts.
Too many things would need to be changed, all at the same time.

But, this might be a $200-300 learning experience.
How to buy, how to assemble, how to diagnose....

But performance-wise, it will never be "good".

Oh, I think we're all aware of that, especially me at this point. I don't thnk he expected a barn-burner, or even knew for sure what this thing was. I had this 478-socket 325 confused with the 775-socket 325J at first. That could have at least been possibly upgraded to a 2 or 4-core. Such machines are viable budget gamers that can make at least 500-700 of the top 1000 playable, if only on 720p-medium settings.

But being that no multi-core options exist, and upgrade parts are hard to find and expensive, I do think an SSD could at least speed this thing up, 15-30% if done right, simply by virtue of the older IDE / PATA HDDs generally turning more slowly than their SATA counterparts, which by rights would increase latency by itself, with no other pertinent factors. I've suggested Puppy Linux or Ubuntu, which his kid has settled on Puppy Linux. So this will be a bit of a learning experience for me as well.

As to the $200-$300 learning experience, I definitely hear you on that. I hope to help my friend keep that closer to $100. I see no harm in a few bucks into a few basic parts to allow his kid to learn something. I plan to walk him through the process of swapping the drive, then perhaps showing him how newer stuff works with odds and ends I have laying around.

And hopefully in the process of that, I can help him to avoid such mistakes in the future.

So the arrangement I suggested won't overload a floppy power adapter?