£10 Windows XP PC from a house clearance, repair and upgrade.

rare said:
To be fair Prescott although running hot isn’t slow, the problem was it just wasn’t a great advancement for the additional power usage. In some scenarios it can be quite a bit faster though.
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I didn't really have the means to make direct comparisons when she was my daily driver, all I knew was the jump from a 1GHz Pentium III EB with 512MB RAM to a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 HT with 3GB dual-channel RAM was astounding. But I did have friends with 3.2GHz Northwoods and we saw performance differences in the same programmes. We weren't super clued up back then to get into the weeds with increased pipeline lengths and new instructions and what it all meant.

In retrospect I would've gone with a Northwood. Hell, in retrospect if I knew what I was doing I would've gone AMD :P
 
Great work with the PC, do you have any pics of it cleaned up?

Amazing find with the monitor, it’s gorgeous.

If I were you, I’d keep that PC hooked up to it and invest in a few upgrades like you mention. It will be great for some old school gaming.
 
thats some high end pc I've got a pentium 3 600mhz bad boy with abit motherboard and a gf2mx, probably like 256mb or ram and a sony trinitron crt that pumps out like 100hz.
10gb hdd btw

no idea if its rusted though been sat in the garage for like 20-25years by now.

Might have some athlon cpu comp in there too not sure, probably around 1600mhz if so
 
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Out of interest, how much are decent CRT monitors going for? I'm just thinking I might have some in my mum's basement. Not sure what state they're in now but they were fairly high end at the time. They're mainly still there because they're large, heavy and difficult to get up a ladder and through a small hole (trapdoor)!
I'll check next time I'm down there and see if there's anything else interesting like AGP stuff - can't remember to be honest. I think there's a Shuttle.
 
R4z0r said:
Great work with the PC, do you have any pics of it cleaned up?

Amazing find with the monitor, it’s gorgeous.

If I were you, I’d keep that PC hooked up to it and invest in a few upgrades like you mention. It will be great for some old school gaming.
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Thanks mate. I wil get some when ive fitted the XFI front panel. Yeah a few upgrades would be good. im just trying to find some for reasonable prices.
 
arknor said:
thats some high end pc I've got a pentium 3 600mhz bad boy with abit motherboard and a gf2mx, probably like 256mb or ram and a sony trinitron crt that pumps out like 100hz.
10gb hdd btw

no idea if its rusted though been sat in the garage for like 20-25years by now.

Might have some athlon cpu comp in there too not sure, probably around 1600mhz if so
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You should get it out and check it over. it sounds worth saving!
 
Cenedd said:
Out of interest, how much are decent CRT monitors going for? I'm just thinking I might have some in my mum's basement. Not sure what state they're in now but they were fairly high end at the time. They're mainly still there because they're large, heavy and difficult to get up a ladder and through a small hole (trapdoor)!
I'll check next time I'm down there and see if there's anything else interesting like AGP stuff - can't remember to be honest. I think there's a Shuttle.
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I paid £100 for this Mitsubishi. I see some CRT's up for daft money but i think its resellers trying to sell them on so not sure if the yactualyl get those prices or not. I think £100 was a good price though especialyl as it included the delivery and it came boxed with manuals ect.
Sounds like you should check out what you have stashed.
 
Well my P4 CPU came today which is a

INTEL SL6WK Pentium 4 CPU Socket 478 3GHz Processor​


20251220_114016 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

I removed the old Celeron CPU and installed the P4, applied the thermal paste. Refitted fan. Powered it up and it will only briefly powers on for about 1 or 2 seconds max. I removed all conenctors from the board, removed the sound card, tried clearing the CMOS even. Nothing makes any differrence. Ive asked the seller if they actually tested it as it appears to be dead. I refitted the Celeron and that still boots fine.

Its getting a bit fustrating after the GPU not working and now the CPU. Im starting to think i should just leave this board and go with the AMD 6000+ setup i have in the loft with PCI express. AGP graphics cards seem expensive compared to PCIEXP.

Unless anyone has any ideas? I have looked and there doesnt seem to be any jumpers i need to adjsut on this board.
This is a link to the Motherboard manual. link

:mad:
 
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Pretty sure I’ve got a 3.0 Northwood, let me have a look and come back to you. You can have it for free. It’s not common to have a dead CPU but it’s not unheard of…
 
Many years ago the media production company I worked at upgraded our primary video editor with a dual 1GHz Pentium III system and it was monstrous when it could properly utilised both CPUs. I held onto it for a while and slapped it up to 768MB RAM with all the junk SDRAM I had lying around at the time. Shame it died in the end.
 
Its not much of an update but i never had any luck with this setup. I couldnt get it to boot with the P4 CPU (there was one newer bios flash to try but i didnt give it a go). The HD4670 didnt seem to work. So gave up on it and just put it up in the loft until i fancy having another look at it some time.

Instead i decided to build up a system i ran for a lot of years which i knew were good quality parts.

AMD 6000+ X2 CPU
Arctic Alpine 64 plus CPU cooler which i think was from an A8 setup but it was a close fit i just had to bend the metal mounting clamp slightly to get it to fit. I have a nice big Zalman AM2 CPU cooler but the mounting clamp looked to have snapped at some point.
Asus ROG Crosshair AM2 motherboard
2 x 1 gig Corsair DDR2 Dominator ram
Creative fatal1ty XFI sound card with front panel.
A Lexar NQ100 2.5” SATA III (6Gb/s) 240GB SSD from amazon - £24
Fresh windows XP Pro 32bit install from usb drive
At first i fitted an old R9 270X OC graphics card which i used to get it up and running but then i ended up getting a Nvidia EVGA 980ti for £51 on ebay.
I got a black Samsung DVD writer for £7 on ebay so all the drive fronts were the same colour.

I just needed a case for it all. I went over to my step dads house and i had a feeling i might have some old PC stuff still left in the loft from years ago.
I came away with 2 old cases, one was my old case and the other case was a system i think my grandad built. They both had AMD motherboards but not much else in them. I managed to get one to boot briefly but the caps were bulging on it and one of the PSU's was dead. It was at this point i decided to just go with the AM2 system instead of all the fighing on with dead or dying parts.

The 2 cases, one was really dirty i think it must have been from when the roof was replaced a few years back.

I decided to go for the blue and silver case as it looked less faded even though the beige one was my old case back in the day. The faded one has gone back in my loft with all the other stuff, maybe for a future build if i find a need some another system

20251224_201413 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

My old R9 270X OC card, i had lent this to my brother years ago and he recently gave me it back. It still works great but then i ended up with the 980ti
20260108_170235 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

The drivers need some very basic mods to get it to run on XP you just add a few lines in one of the files. But as is often the case someone had already done this and i found the modified driver Here

And the card installed and lit up! i dont think ive actually had a card which lit up like this before.

20260108_171931 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

IMG_20260116_160047_DRO by Bean Beano, on Flickr

Theres still a few bits i want to do such as
Add another Sata DVD drive so i can do away with the IDE cable (i might buy a blu ray drive for my main pc and then swap out one of the drives from that system to this one)
I need a power splitter to give me another floppy drive power lead to power the XFI front panel.
Both the cases had no side panels on them, im hoping they are still in the loft somewhere.
Look into which browser is best incase i want to take it online at any point (caution will be applied here)
Maybe the odd case sticker.
Wire up the USB front panels as i think i have connected them up wrong.
Find the small heat pipe cooler which clips onto the motherboard, im sure i have it somewhere.
Tidy the wiring up a little.

Ive started loading it up with some of the games i found in my loft. Ive made a start but theres still plenty to go. It would be nice to get this system on a desk at some point, but for now its sat on the floor
 
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Vestas said:
Spot the smokers machine ;)

Used to love Trinitron monitors until I learned to spot the wires.
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No i don't smoke its just the old plastic doing it's thing. Yeah i think this one has the 2 feint lines i think they are for the apature grill. Not very noticeable though. Its a great monitor
 
Beankp60 said:
No i don't smoke its just the old plastic doing it's thing. Yeah i think this one has the 2 feint lines i think they are for the apature grill. Not very noticeable though. Its a great monitor
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Trinitron monitors were the dogs ****** back then - especially for 17-19" monitors.

Once I spotted the wires I couldn't help seeing them after that :D
 
Vestas said:
Trinitron monitors were the dogs ****** back then - especially for 17-19" monitors.

Once I spotted the wires I couldn't help seeing them after that :D
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Ive got a 21" Trinitron TV in the loft for my old consoles, also a B&O 21" mx4000, commodore 1084s, and a couple others boxed up. I quite like a crt
 
Beankp60 said:
Sounds an odd setup ive not seen that before.
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Duel processors wasn't supported at all by DOS or windows 95/98. You needed Windows NT which was still in it's infancy back then or some form of Unix. And while Unix on PC was very much a thing there were also lots of specialist unix workstations about. So duel CPU PCs were not common.

Multi processor setups only really got going when NT4 got properly established and WinTel started to make more in roads into the server space.
 
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