geekhack
geekhack Community => Other Geeky Stuff => Topic started by: roaduck on Thu, 22 October 2009, 05:00:32
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I finally plugged in my little black thing.
I've not been on the net since Saturday because my emergency PC with no sides on finally went kaput.
For nearly four months I've put up with a 900 MHz 256 MB RAM white effort with a 20 GB HDD.It was so
slow that any video killed it - from a flashvideo youtube to a 700 MB avi - it just froze and died.If you
tried to go to a news site when the mp3 player was playing it just sounded like a stuck record.So I've had
to play all video on a flash usb stick plugged into the front of my DVD player - not ideal.
I might post a piccy before it goes to the tip - you'd die laughing.
The BSOD wouldn't go, not even in safe, The hdd had innumerable bad sectors so I installed the new DELL Vostro 200 which is as quiet as my mate's laptop - Heaven.
The clicky IBM went on with no probs and it's running like a dream with 2GB of extra memory and a 256 MB ATI GPU.
There's a few things that I hate about DELL PC's like the BIOS, the non-standard motherboard and wiring connectors and **** PSU's but I love the noise that it doesn't make more.
The other foibles can be overcome and breathed on.
My last PC was a 7 fan 1000 watt hairdryer oced quad monster that was so loud you could hear it downstairs when it was on in the bedroom.
It was over the top really and I didn't need 14.8 GB of processing power and a 2 kg copper heatsink block in it.
I sold it to a Liverpudlian gamer for a £1000 - lost about £450 on it and wasn't that bothered. I was glad to get normal electricity bills and a quiet room.
(http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/EB_gSh9qRZT_q9qkHiODU4OpgUxb2ZnbbYAwxKbgV13-du9gBeXr_F0RLQ3-8ouYLucpUs-62jlVqoJjeW6VBTBRS_XALA/hair%20dryer.jpg)
I should have just got something sensible like my tiny black DELL Vostro 200 mini tower which is good enough for now.If I want a whisper quiet oced quad it'll have to go on a serious water diet to work at nearly 15GB speed which will cost £2.5K - £3K minimum which I haven't got.
(http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/EB_gSrsxGtr_q9qkf8wwUY56nsr0cklVEgu5H6espatoEmZJhLGwVauccSD0HY5EiW9m9pMTqqzH9pmtBDlzqMxXaNpCxg/DELL_Vostro_200_mini-tower.jpg)
This should last me at least six months then I'll go shopping to http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/ which is an ex hotel near me that is rather good and tan my card for three grand lol!
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JFTR, my dual 500 MHz Coppermine (BX board, Radeon 9000) will run your average Youtube video (like 480x360 or smaller) pretty decently. (If I like something a lot, I usually download it as MP4 and let VLC play it, which is yet better with hardware accelerated display and all.) 640x480 is a bit too much though - would need a multithreaded H.264 codec. I think most other video services have that as standard, so usually just some better slideshows there.
My parents' "new" machine will even play HD videos in 1280x720 - it's a Dell Precision 380 workstation ca. Aug 2005 with a 3.2 GHz Prescott (single core, 1 meg L2 and N0 step I think), 1 gig of DDR2 and a Quadro FX4400, now with a 640 gig WD Caviar Blue plus one of the old 80 giggers it came with. Migrating Win2k was some fun, fortunately we could use the old Promise IDE and a SATA adapter...
The mo/bo of the old system had gone south, and we were looking for something with a decent system concept that wouldn't break the bank. This fit the bill quite nicely, even though the graphics card seems waaay oversized for a bit of Google Earth. ;) Expectedly it's a bit on the power hungry side (idle ~135W, full CPU load +60 W), but the noise level is quite moderate (once we got the graphics card fan tamed). The case is a joy to work with - dead easy to open and close, no screws required for either expansion cards or harddrives (which sit in plastic trays), nicely routed cables, lots of room, and pretty solid too. As usual for Dell, support in terms of manuals and downloads is top notch (only the actual downloading function didn't seem to like Seamonkey for some reason, so I had to extract URLs by hand).
The only oddity is that since flashing the last BIOS (2007 vintage), directly entering the system setup from the boot screen only produces a black screen while the same works fine from the boot menu. Whatever.
In any case, it's quite nice to have a halfway recent system around. Maybe we'll give it some more RAM and slap on Win 7 later.
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I finally plugged in my little black thing
Nice one keyb_gr : Nice little number you've got and at least your thing functioned.
I couldn't even get the system report in AIDA 32
which is only a 3mb proggy because the bloody thing crashed - haha!
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You bought a Dell desktop? :crazy:
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I've personally found Dell systems to be reliable, except for the Optiplex GX260 of which we had many motherboard failures due to defective capacitors.
It's a shame Dell didn't stick with BTX, although I'm sure Intel is as much to blame for dropping it as anybody. I have a Dell Dimension E521 (mBTX form factor) at home and it's crazy how cool the CPU runs with what is a rather basic heatsink - nothing more than a big chunk of aluminium covered by a plastic duct with a slow fan - there are no heatpipes or anything fancy. Cool air blows in through the front, across the CPU, across the motherboard chipset, across the graphics card and out the back. Contrast that with ATX where the airflow is forced to make right angles all the way through (although there are ways to improve it through case design).
BTX initially solved the problem of cooling the high-power Pentium 4 but then with the Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 we saw power consumption drop considerably, so BTX seemed to fade away. There was a hell of a lot of noise about how great BTX was going to be, when Intel needed it, but then, nada. Now power consumption seems to be going up again and we're stuck with ATX.
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I've personally found Dell systems to be reliable, except for the Optiplex GX260 of which we had many motherboard failures due to defective capacitors.
It's a shame Dell didn't stick with BTX, although I'm sure Intel is as much to blame for dropping it as anybody. I have a Dell Dimension E521 (mBTX form factor) at home and it's crazy how cool the CPU runs with what is a rather basic heatsink - nothing more than a big chunk of aluminium covered by a plastic duct with a slow fan - there are no heatpipes or anything fancy. Cool air blows in through the front, across the CPU, across the motherboard chipset, across the graphics card and out the back. Contrast that with ATX where the airflow is forced to make right angles all the way through (although there are ways to improve it through case design).
BTX initially solved the problem of cooling the high-power Pentium 4 but then with the Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 we saw power consumption drop considerably, so BTX seemed to fade away. There was a hell of a lot of noise about how great BTX was going to be, when Intel needed it, but then, nada. Now power consumption seems to be going up again and we're stuck with ATX.
Good luck finding anything BTX, as Dell seemed to be the only one who ever really used it.
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You bought a Dell desktop? :crazy:
I know I know but it was cheap - less than £100 from a friend with printer and 19" monitor and at the time I was desperate for a 'puter...any computer.I wouldn't buy a new Dell, I'm not that thick.
As I said it's only a temporary secretary - It'll probably end up as a media server with 2 x 1.5TB drives in to replace my ragtag edge10 4 disc JBOD.
It's like a few of my first cars were Fords; now it's German taxis.
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While I wouldn't buy a Dell for money reasons (building your own is cheaper), I have never had a problem with the 4 or so Dells I have used over the years at work.
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The Dell Outlet store has bargains from time to time. I picked up my Dimension E521 from the outlet a couple of years ago and it cost less than it would have to build a similar-spec system at the time.
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I'd rather pay extra for all standard components.
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Depending on model, they did use all standard components.
The only real "significant problem" that arose from the use of nonstandard stuff was that power supply fiasco with Slot 1 motherboards. I had one catch fire when I used it on a normal board.
When I first went back to pcs in 2000 after a gap away from them of eighteen years I went out to a big box store called PC World on a Sunday and bought a Patriot desktop.
The PSU on that was so bad it sparked everytime you turned it on or off and fused the electrics on a regular basis - the poor little celeron chip must have got mega surges (on a regular mains extension lead) and I was very surprised that it worked at all when I transferred the gubbins into another ATX case; the cpu should have been fried by then.
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Lol, I think we've all been there with early-2000s hardware.
ATX as a standard hadn't been perfected so everyone was doing SOMETHING wrong...it's just a question of what, varying from brand to brand.
In the case of Dell, they opted to invent their own power supply that used the same connector as ATX, looked the same as ATX, worked the same as ATX. Problem is, it spontaneously combusts if used with a real standard ATX motherboard.
It's wired differently.
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I know I know but it was cheap - less than £100 from a friend with printer and 19" monitor and at the time I was desperate for a 'puter...any computer.I wouldn't buy a new Dell, I'm not that thick.
Oh, I thought you bought a new one. Buying an old one for £100 is perfectly acceptable =P
It's wired differently.
Depends on the model. I've had Dells from almost a decade ago that used standard ATX parts. They were Precision machines though, not the low end stuff.
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It's wired differently.
I tell you what does my head in Tim - Proprietary connectors so that things aren't interchangeable.I know that makers have to make a living but it just seems like such a waste of resources.
For example I must have fifty plus ac mains adapters (some people call them wall warts) and they change something like the inside diameter of a barrel plug by a tenth of a millimetre and you can't use it on anything else 'cos it's not a standard size.It drives me nuts.
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Mhmm. I'm glad that the EU and the Chinese govt. is standardizing mobile phone connectors. I hope they do stuff like that with other appliances in future. Nice to see the EU actually doing something useful for people...
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Oh, I thought you bought a new one. Buying an old one for £100 is perfectly acceptable =P
Depends on the model. I've had Dells from almost a decade ago that used standard ATX parts. They were Precision machines though, not the low end stuff.
I got a total bargain at a hundred quid ch_123 - it cost my friend nearly seven hundred quid for the whole setup and he only used it for a couple of weeks.It's less than six months old.
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Mhmm. I'm glad that the EU and the Chinese govt. is standardizing mobile phone connectors. I hope they do stuff like that with other appliances in future. Nice to see the EU actually doing something useful for people...
New Samsung mobile phones are supposed to have a standard micro usb connector or whatever it is from now on ch_123.And every Samsung I've had has had a different connector on it so if I lost the phone or it got stolen the old mains adapters were bleedin useless even though they were all the same voltage and amperage - stupid.
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Lol, I think we've all been there with early-2000s hardware.
ATX as a standard hadn't been perfected so everyone was doing SOMETHING wrong...it's just a question of what, varying from brand to brand.
It wasn't that they were doing wrong, but rather cheap.
A lot of power early ATX power supplies were absolute rubbish. "300 watts capacity if you run it inside a freezer".
The good stuff, however, was pretty good.
I have a 300W Sparkle PSU somewhere. Bought it for an Athlon 1200C on the ECS K7S5A. (Remember those? Cheapest board in town, and for a few weeks at debut, the fastest) The fan seized, and you could literally not remove the PSU from the case when you shut it off because it was too hot to handle. I replaced the fan, it still works.
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I still have a few Fortron / FSP PSUs floating around (various 250 watters), pretty solid stuff indeed. They never won any awards for efficiency though. A 300 watter with a 120 mm fan is still in use.
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It wasn't that they were doing wrong, but rather cheap.
A lot of power early ATX power supplies were absolute rubbish. "300 watts capacity if you run it inside a freezer".
The good stuff, however, was pretty good.
I have a 300W Sparkle PSU somewhere. Bought it for an Athlon 1200C on the ECS K7S5A. (Remember those? Cheapest board in town, and for a few weeks at debut, the fastest) The fan seized, and you could literally not remove the PSU from the case when you shut it off because it was too hot to handle. I replaced the fan, it still works.
To be fair, not much needed 300W back then. Maybe 100, but I doubt much actually could use 300W.
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Well, there is real 300 and then there's crap 300. The local shop foisted "Deer" PSUs on us -- and they did clever things like sudden shutdowns.
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Well, there is real 300 and then there's crap 300. The local shop foisted "Deer" PSUs on us -- and they did clever things like sudden shutdowns.
OMG, I thought the computer store I worked at almost 10 years ago got those crap Deer PSUs. Those things were a joke. We got more "repeat business" because of those POSs.
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Yep, those were nasty. You could actually tell by weight alone that there wasn't much in there.