The kind of artifcats you experienced with the Hercules card are often caused by old electrolytic capacitors. I recently changed the capacitors on a FX 5900XT and Nvidia MX 400 with similar artifacts. They're working flawlessly now.
The 8800GTX was the perfect choice. Actually the one I have is also one of those DELL OEM versions with the sled, as they can be had pretty cheaply, and the sled comes right off if you don't need it. But hey, it works even better here. More RAM and a fully-patched Vista would be great future upgrade paths for this machine. I also wonder what are the fastest CPUs this thing could support.
I've got two Xeon 5355's sat here next to me, along with 16x 2GB DDR2 ECC sticks, a PCI-X Gigabit Ethernet card, an SSD, and other parts - yeah - we're pimping this thing out.
That thing is bigger then my T3500 with a X5690, only has 6 2GB stick of RAM, and I have added a AMD RX580 8GB. Runs Windows 10 Pro fine with a Samsung 850 EVO.
I'm thinking this could run windows 10 quite well with an SSD thrown in, but not sure what value I gain from that when my main rig has a Ryzen 5900x and a 3080 😂
I received two of these for free from my employer. They originally used Windows XP 64-bit. One had 16 gb 800 mhz ECC DDR2 ram and the other had 12 gb. These are quad channel. One had 2 dual core Zeons and the other only had one dual core Zeon. I haven't started on them yet, but I'll probably work on these as a winter project. Dell still has all of the drivers for these on their site.
It's always great to see these old workstations get a new lease or life. The dual cpu is very cool! Also the 2GB of RAM is due to the fact there's two CPUs so it's running them in parity. Another kit would get you the full 4GB
Ah, I didn't realize these were variants of the XPS 7x0 series chassis! The staggered PCI-E slots on the riser is unique to this case, the 7x0's case is all in a row, but it's also BTX and otherwise internally identical. Re: optical drives on SATA: SATA was still very new and only just one generation prior to this, the number of ports was still usually limited to just two or four, so people were precious about what they attached to them. Since there was no performance to be gained attaching even the fastest DVD drives to SATA, IDE quickly devolved into 'good enough to host my optical drives' and 'compatibility connector for old HDDs that haven't failed yet'. If you follow the cable routing, you'll see Dell absolutely treats it as the latter; in my XPS 710, the IDE cable is pre-routed out of the board, behind the drive cage, between the PSU and the side panel before arriving at the front panel for quick installation of a secondary drive. There are no 'proprietary' Dell GPUs; Dell OEM cards use the bracket with the cable management hole for convenience and stability during shipping. Obviously nothing prevents you from using any card you like. You absolutely must update the BIOS and take a look at the cheap Socket 771 Xeons you can fit into this board! 2GHz with just two cores is okay, but you can do much better. Take a look at the 'low-power' Xeons; for $5/ea., you can get four cores running at 2.66GHz with a cool 50W TDP, a figure surely significantly lower than your existing CPUs. Also, this would be a very good candidate for dual-booting as you can run Windows XP for backwards compatibility purposes (to support Win98 and early XP titles that misbehave on newer OSes) and Windows 7 or 10 for compatibility shims (dgVoodoo2, ReShade) or community QoL patches, source ports and mods that will often depend on DX10+/Vulkan (dgVoodoo2, ReShade, modern source ports like GZDoom, etc). Vista? I really wouldn't bother at all. Just realized I'm seeing this video pretty late. Hope this information is still useful to you as you explore the limits of this system's capabilities!
we actually have a dell precision 690 as well, which my father bought back around 2011-2012 and which broke down around 2016 due to a memory fault. My bigger brother wants to just use its case for a sleeper build, but maybe i can convince him to give me the machine so i can restore it to its former glory
There were a lot more PATA DVD-RW available in 2007, which were cheaper too. Next to that, there weren’t any speed advantages over SATA for such an optical drive back then. I’d love to get such a beast for myself sometime. They are just so well built! Thanks for this video!
Nice industrial class retro machine you've got going there! As for my XP retro build: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 @ 3.0GHz, Gigabyte EP35-DS3R, 8GB (4x2GB) G.Skill DDR2 1000, 2GB GDDR5 EVGA 750 Ti SC, Creative Audigy SB0090, XP Pro SP3 (32-bit) & 8.1 Pro (64-bit) (with ClassicShell Start). It too can run Crysis. ;-) Also: 128GB & 256GB SanDisk X400 boot SSDs, 1TB & 2TB WD Black game & data HDDs, dual Lite-On SATA DVD writers, Sony 1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive, EVGA SuperNOVA 550G2 PSU, BeQuiet! Shadow Rock LP CPU cooler, Cooler Master Elite 370 case, Scythe Kaze Master KM01-BK VFD fan controller, Anidees 120 & 140mm blue LED halo case fans, optional extra EVGA metal backplate for 750 Ti and BitFenix Red, Green and Blue SATA braided data cables.
If you still have that malfunctioning gpu you showed at the beginning of the video odds are you can get it working by replacing the thermal paste and if it has them pads as well. Also if you know how to solder or have someone who can do it for you replacing all the capacitors is always a great idea for such an old device. Also check solder joints are good they may have cracked. If so they should be pretty easy to reflow them.
I've been fascinated by Xeon workstations for a bit now. You can get a lot of computing power for sometimes very little money the catch is the they can be big hot and loud and usually they don't come with any modern gpus and the power supplies can be a bit difficult to work with. But if you can look past that and do your research so you know what your buying and getting into they can be fun to have and tinker around with.
The X58 Precision systems are so much better than these slightly older lga 771 systems. I have a t7400 and the fact that you can install two 6c/12t processors versus two 4c/4t processors is best of all.
Great video, my xp project build is an AMD Athlon XII 5000 with 4GB ram and a Radeon X1900XT 512MB crossfire edition graphics card. The mobo is bright red so I wanted to use parts that match my color theme. I've seen Radeon HD 2900 graphics cards up to 1GB with a translucent red fan shroud adorned with Chrome flames, that's the gpu i really want paired with this retro rig but I'm not paying over 50 for a card that old.
Great video! I dreamed of an 8800 GTX 768mb when they came out and later got an 8800 GTS 320mb version! I will have to find one of these machines and see if my old card still works!
I'm glad you enjoyed it, there's more to come with this machine. The 8800 was an absolute beast when it was released and its still a favourite of mine.
Dust can be mitigated quite a bit. I have a t3400 & use air filter foam cut to sit in front of the lower front fan inside the pc, it covers the whole front of the fan shroud so as not to get sucked in i.e there's a curve towards the shroud at farthest edge, while the edge closest to the side panel gets tucked into that fan shroud tang thing which appears to be not moulded in yours . I then added this mesh cloth which i think is for holding women's stockings in the washing machine to the front panel to cover any remaining grill holes. I guarantee. your dust issues will be minimal. It does mean all but most of the durst collects on the lower front panel on the outside with more being caught on the now installed fan filter . Any dust inside the pc is really fine. My pc is 3" above ground level in the lounge. I clean the dust when it builds up enough on the outside which is about a year. Dell weren't the only ones to do the ide/sata weirdness i had an acer or early hp that did the same. Dell XP x64 had some support for the early 755 model however it was missing numerous drivers if i recall. That pissed me off as it was fast on 2 cores, then again x32 was quick on 2 core. Super fast on xeon quad which i later installed. The one thing i like about xp is customization with object desktop from stardock. You could make it look like a control panel off of star trek & i ain't talking just a wallpaper, it's an actual working theme where buttons etc on screen activate this n' that. Then there's logon studio (free) to change logon theme & then there's the free boot logon software to change that. I believe you have more work/fun to do yes ?. Downloading themes & perhaps make a vid of it as i suspect many have no idea how customizable xp is. There's other software that does the same thing that escapes my memory. All themes are free at wincustomize
It was the days of eSATA (not eSATAp) too. Surprised none of the external slots were because it was faster than usb 2.0 at the time and included on many mid to high range external hdds.
I have the t7500 for xp duel X5690 xenon cpu gtx960 Blue-ray burner 4x 2tb SSD Xp media Center also Dell had removed soecs when looking up service tags.
Nice pc. That 1000 watt psu is begging for dual gtx 295s, i mean if the board supports sli. Otherwise 2x hd 5970 in crossfire will also do. Crysis demands it. Although the gtx 8800 is a solid choice too.
Thanks! Check out the upgrade video I did on this machine, it got some massive upgrades to the CPUs, RAM and storage. Sadly, it ended up drawing way too much power and with the cost of energy being what it is here in the UK I ended up taking the 8800 out and selling the rest of the system. The 8800 now resides in a Phenom II X4 system for XP gaming
That is definitely pretty cool I have windows xp rig I call it the station It doesn't have A workstation Processor But I have a workstation Graphics card it's a Navidia quatro 4000 It's definitely Overkill For windows XP 32 bit There is a lot of games But I get a 100 FPS Or more But sometimes overkill can be fun Anyways Thanks much for the great video
really? you are impressed just how good Crysis looks in short Crysis was one of if not the last Proper PC game created , all we get now are consolet.r.d ports (most of the time)
The 64 bit version of Windows XP is a piece of shit. I got a brand new, dualcore PC and installed it. I got tons of BSOD for totally random driver compatibility reasons. After i moved to Windows Vista Home Premium x64 all the problems are gone.
The kind of artifcats you experienced with the Hercules card are often caused by old electrolytic capacitors. I recently changed the capacitors on a FX 5900XT and Nvidia MX 400 with similar artifacts. They're working flawlessly now.
Thanks for the tip. I’ve subsequently got it working on a Socket 370 based system so hopefully I can revisit it soon
The 8800GTX was the perfect choice. Actually the one I have is also one of those DELL OEM versions with the sled, as they can be had pretty cheaply, and the sled comes right off if you don't need it. But hey, it works even better here.
More RAM and a fully-patched Vista would be great future upgrade paths for this machine. I also wonder what are the fastest CPUs this thing could support.
I've got two Xeon 5355's sat here next to me, along with 16x 2GB DDR2 ECC sticks, a PCI-X Gigabit Ethernet card, an SSD, and other parts - yeah - we're pimping this thing out.
@@TechMadeEasyUK Nice!!
It's built like a server rack rather than a PC.
Wonder if they did a rack-mount version
That thing is bigger then my T3500 with a X5690, only has 6 2GB stick of RAM, and I have added a AMD RX580 8GB. Runs Windows 10 Pro fine with a Samsung 850 EVO.
I'm thinking this could run windows 10 quite well with an SSD thrown in, but not sure what value I gain from that when my main rig has a Ryzen 5900x and a 3080 😂
This reminds me of the HP z820 workstation I have from 2012. It still supports XP and is a beast with a gtx 970.
I received two of these for free from my employer. They originally used Windows XP 64-bit. One had 16 gb 800 mhz ECC DDR2 ram and the other had 12 gb. These are quad channel. One had 2 dual core Zeons and the other only had one dual core Zeon. I haven't started on them yet, but I'll probably work on these as a winter project. Dell still has all of the drivers for these on their site.
It's always great to see these old workstations get a new lease or life. The dual cpu is very cool! Also the 2GB of RAM is due to the fact there's two CPUs so it's running them in parity. Another kit would get you the full 4GB
I've got a whole pile of parts sat next to me to pimp this thing out soon
@@TechMadeEasyUK nice! Did you manage to find another memory kit for it?
@@thesmokingcap 16 sticks of 2GB ECC DDR2
@@TechMadeEasyUK Noiceeee, should be a beastly machine for dualboot OS's
@@thesmokingcap vista 64 bit dvd should land through my door this morning!
Intrigued how it will handle something like Ubuntu too though
Ah, I didn't realize these were variants of the XPS 7x0 series chassis! The staggered PCI-E slots on the riser is unique to this case, the 7x0's case is all in a row, but it's also BTX and otherwise internally identical.
Re: optical drives on SATA: SATA was still very new and only just one generation prior to this, the number of ports was still usually limited to just two or four, so people were precious about what they attached to them. Since there was no performance to be gained attaching even the fastest DVD drives to SATA, IDE quickly devolved into 'good enough to host my optical drives' and 'compatibility connector for old HDDs that haven't failed yet'. If you follow the cable routing, you'll see Dell absolutely treats it as the latter; in my XPS 710, the IDE cable is pre-routed out of the board, behind the drive cage, between the PSU and the side panel before arriving at the front panel for quick installation of a secondary drive.
There are no 'proprietary' Dell GPUs; Dell OEM cards use the bracket with the cable management hole for convenience and stability during shipping. Obviously nothing prevents you from using any card you like.
You absolutely must update the BIOS and take a look at the cheap Socket 771 Xeons you can fit into this board! 2GHz with just two cores is okay, but you can do much better. Take a look at the 'low-power' Xeons; for $5/ea., you can get four cores running at 2.66GHz with a cool 50W TDP, a figure surely significantly lower than your existing CPUs.
Also, this would be a very good candidate for dual-booting as you can run Windows XP for backwards compatibility purposes (to support Win98 and early XP titles that misbehave on newer OSes) and Windows 7 or 10 for compatibility shims (dgVoodoo2, ReShade) or community QoL patches, source ports and mods that will often depend on DX10+/Vulkan (dgVoodoo2, ReShade, modern source ports like GZDoom, etc). Vista? I really wouldn't bother at all.
Just realized I'm seeing this video pretty late. Hope this information is still useful to you as you explore the limits of this system's capabilities!
it's been a while since you posted, glad you're back!
Moving forward you can expect videos every 4 weeks!
@@TechMadeEasyUK nice
we actually have a dell precision 690 as well, which my father bought back around 2011-2012 and which broke down around 2016 due to a memory fault. My bigger brother wants to just use its case for a sleeper build, but maybe i can convince him to give me the machine so i can restore it to its former glory
There were a lot more PATA DVD-RW available in 2007, which were cheaper too. Next to that, there weren’t any speed advantages over SATA for such an optical drive back then.
I’d love to get such a beast for myself sometime. They are just so well built!
Thanks for this video!
Even Apple was using IDE optical drives in their Mac Pro's through 2008, making the switch to SATA in 2009.
excellent video, those old precisions were pretty awesome
Nice industrial class retro machine you've got going there!
As for my XP retro build: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 @ 3.0GHz, Gigabyte EP35-DS3R, 8GB (4x2GB) G.Skill DDR2 1000, 2GB GDDR5 EVGA 750 Ti SC, Creative Audigy SB0090, XP Pro SP3 (32-bit) & 8.1 Pro (64-bit) (with ClassicShell Start). It too can run Crysis. ;-)
Also: 128GB & 256GB SanDisk X400 boot SSDs, 1TB & 2TB WD Black game & data HDDs, dual Lite-On SATA DVD writers, Sony 1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive, EVGA SuperNOVA 550G2 PSU, BeQuiet! Shadow Rock LP CPU cooler, Cooler Master Elite 370 case, Scythe Kaze Master KM01-BK VFD fan controller, Anidees 120 & 140mm blue LED halo case fans, optional extra EVGA metal backplate for 750 Ti and BitFenix Red, Green and Blue SATA braided data cables.
Thanks, that's a beast of a GPU for that system!
always loved these Precision/XPS mid 2000's look, Preferably the XPS Gaming/Media Towers in White. So Slick. the MacPro of PCs at the Time
I agree. Not quite as well thought out as the PowerMac G5, but definitely has some thought behind it
If you still have that malfunctioning gpu you showed at the beginning of the video odds are you can get it working by replacing the thermal paste and if it has them pads as well. Also if you know how to solder or have someone who can do it for you replacing all the capacitors is always a great idea for such an old device. Also check solder joints are good they may have cracked. If so they should be pretty easy to reflow them.
I had a smaller version of that system, the T3400 with a Core2 Duo... it was a damn good daily fir what I was doing
I've been fascinated by Xeon workstations for a bit now. You can get a lot of computing power for sometimes very little money the catch is the they can be big hot and loud and usually they don't come with any modern gpus and the power supplies can be a bit difficult to work with. But if you can look past that and do your research so you know what your buying and getting into they can be fun to have and tinker around with.
You’re 100% right on the big, hot and loud point: last winter this one kept my office warm, and in the summer my AC couldn’t keep up with it
The X58 Precision systems are so much better than these slightly older lga 771 systems. I have a t7400 and the fact that you can install two 6c/12t processors versus two 4c/4t processors is best of all.
Cool find with the T7400!
Great video, my xp project build is an AMD Athlon XII 5000 with 4GB ram and a Radeon X1900XT 512MB crossfire edition graphics card.
The mobo is bright red so I wanted to use parts that match my color theme.
I've seen Radeon HD 2900 graphics cards up to 1GB with a translucent red fan shroud adorned with Chrome flames, that's the gpu i really want paired with this retro rig but I'm not paying over 50 for a card that old.
That's a sweet XP build!
Great video! I dreamed of an 8800 GTX 768mb when they came out and later got an 8800 GTS 320mb version! I will have to find one of these machines and see if my old card still works!
I'm glad you enjoyed it, there's more to come with this machine. The 8800 was an absolute beast when it was released and its still a favourite of mine.
Dust can be mitigated quite a bit. I have a t3400 & use air filter foam cut to sit in front of the lower front fan inside the pc, it covers the whole front of the fan shroud so as not to get sucked in i.e there's a curve towards the shroud at farthest edge, while the edge closest to the side panel gets tucked into that fan shroud tang thing which appears to be not moulded in yours . I then added this mesh cloth which i think is for holding women's stockings in the washing machine to the front panel to cover any remaining grill holes. I guarantee. your dust issues will be minimal. It does mean all but most of the durst collects on the lower front panel on the outside with more being caught on the now installed fan filter . Any dust inside the pc is really fine. My pc is 3" above ground level in the lounge. I clean the dust when it builds up enough on the outside which is about a year. Dell weren't the only ones to do the ide/sata weirdness i had an acer or early hp that did the same. Dell XP x64 had some support for the early 755 model however it was missing numerous drivers if i recall. That pissed me off as it was fast on 2 cores, then again x32 was quick on 2 core. Super fast on xeon quad which i later installed. The one thing i like about xp is customization with object desktop from stardock. You could make it look like a control panel off of star trek & i ain't talking just a wallpaper, it's an actual working theme where buttons etc on screen activate this n' that. Then there's logon studio (free) to change logon theme & then there's the free boot logon software to change that. I believe you have more work/fun to do yes ?. Downloading themes & perhaps make a vid of it as i suspect many have no idea how customizable xp is. There's other software that does the same thing that escapes my memory. All themes are free at wincustomize
Thanks, some good advice there!
Excellent video! What a great Windows XP gaming PC! Did you try re-seating the RAM sticks? That might help.
Could be. Its being upgraded shortly so we'll see
It was the days of eSATA (not eSATAp) too. Surprised none of the external slots were because it was faster than usb 2.0 at the time and included on many mid to high range external hdds.
I wonder if this was an after market addition?
I have one of these sort of eSATA brackets installed on my Q9650 retro PC build, it came with the Gigabyte motherboard.
I have the t7500 for xp duel X5690 xenon cpu gtx960 Blue-ray burner 4x 2tb SSD Xp media Center also Dell had removed soecs when looking up service tags.
That's a badass XP build, kudos!
gotta get this channel to 5k ur so close
Tell your friends! 😁
Nice pc. That 1000 watt psu is begging for dual gtx 295s, i mean if the board supports sli. Otherwise 2x hd 5970 in crossfire will also do. Crysis demands it. Although the gtx 8800 is a solid choice too.
Thanks! Check out the upgrade video I did on this machine, it got some massive upgrades to the CPUs, RAM and storage. Sadly, it ended up drawing way too much power and with the cost of energy being what it is here in the UK I ended up taking the 8800 out and selling the rest of the system. The 8800 now resides in a Phenom II X4 system for XP gaming
I have a precision for 490
That is definitely pretty cool I have windows xp rig
I call it the station It doesn't have A workstation Processor But I have a workstation Graphics card it's a Navidia quatro 4000 It's definitely Overkill For windows XP 32 bit There is a lot of games But I get a 100 FPS Or more But sometimes overkill can be fun Anyways Thanks much for the great video
Sounds awesome, why wouldn't you want the absolute best performance for your XP games. Especially if you couldn't afford it first time round
Thumbs up for old Dells and G80!
It's a beast, I love it
Only one thing was better than a gtx8800... 2 of them
really? you are impressed just how good Crysis looks
in short Crysis was one of if not the last Proper PC game created , all we get now are consolet.r.d ports (most of the time)
I think a lot of it has to do with modern consoles being essentially pc based in architecture. But yeah, for a 15 year old game it's still awesome
can you add two Intel Xeon X5472 Processors to this system?
Not according to Dell's website. It tops out at X5355's, which I later installed in this one
The 64 bit version of Windows XP is a piece of shit. I got a brand new, dualcore PC and installed it. I got tons of BSOD for totally random driver compatibility reasons. After i moved to Windows Vista Home Premium x64 all the problems are gone.
I was pretty mislead... I thought you were going to build a pc
Sorry about that
I'm gonna guess that you are an Aries.
Nope
@@TechMadeEasyUK what is your actual sign?