- Joined
- Nov 12, 2014
- Messages
- 474 (0.14/day)
- Location
- Ilirska Bistrica, Slovenia
System Name | Thermaltake |
---|---|
Processor | AMD Ryzen 5 5800X3D @ 4.60 GHz |
Motherboard | Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite V2 |
Cooling | Thermalright Peerless Assassin |
Memory | 32 GB Crucial Ballistix @ 3600 MHz CL16 |
Video Card(s) | XFX 319 Merc 6800 XT |
Storage | Kingston 256GB SSD | Kingston 240GB NVMe | Samsung 1TB NVMe | Samsung F3 1TB HDD | Barracuda 2TB HDD |
Display(s) | 34" ultrawide LG 34GL750B 144hz 1ms | 55" LG UR91 4k@60Hz |
Case | Phanteks Eclipse P400 |
Audio Device(s) | ALC 1220 120dB SNR HD Audio |
Power Supply | Thermaltake GF1 850 W - 80 Plus Gold |
Mouse | Logitech G502 HERO Lightspeed |
Keyboard | Asus TUF Gaming K3 |
Software | Windows 11 Pro x64 |
A couple of weeks ago, I got my hands on a very old PC with some interesting hardware. It was apparently un-bootable, hasn't been in use for at least 7-8 years and was about to go in the trash. My hardware-enthusiast gut kicked in and I said to myself: "I'm gonna make this piece of art work and give it back it's former glory!".
(all the pictures were resized to 1024x768 or 768x1024 for easier viewing, I have larger ones, PM me if you want them for whatever the reason)
The PC in question looks like this (laugh all you want):
The first problem I faced was the PC not booting at all. All I got was the CPU fan spinning up and then dying after a minute. After opening it I also noticed it had an ATI Radeon 9600 GPU with 128 MB of DDR VRAM, which was no joke when this buddy came out. Next move? I put out the battery, left it sit for a minute and tried again: nothing. My next step was to try if maybe the RAM was faulty. I removed the old RAM (2 x 256 MB DDR 333 MHz) and put in two sticks of some RAM I had laying around (2 x 1 GB DDR 333 MHz). Boo-yah! The PC booted!
(a look inside)
After the initial surprise of this being such an easy fix, I opened up the BIOS and, holy-moly, this thing had an Athlon XP 3000+ inside! The CPU used to be the king of the market in the early 2000s (price at launch was 536 $). One thing that alarmed my senses was the CPU temperature. It was idling from 55-57 °C. I shut the whole PC off and went ahead to change the thermal compounds on both the CPU and GPU coolers. I used my old trustworthy ArcticCooling MX-2 for the job.
(CPU thermal paste application)
(GPU thermal paste application)
After re-applying the thermal paste, putting back the CPU and GPU coolers, dusting the PC, wiping it a little bit, adding a fan infront of the case and checking if everything was in it's place it was time to try and put an OS onto it. This is what I was dealing with at the time:
(PC after cleaning)
I burned a copy of Windows XP SP3 onto a CD (yes, I "stole" it from the internet, I don't give a sh*t + the darn thing wouldn't boot from a USB) and I got into the setup menu, bliss! At this point in time I noticed that I'm dealing with a 250 GB ExcelStor drive (IDE of course), which is just amazing. I created two partitions, one for the OS and one for everything else (20 GB and 210 GB respectively). After the Windows installation (took about 30 minutes) it was time to install some of the necessary applications (AV, CPU-Z, web browser etc.). I even took my time and tried to overclock the CPU and it's stable at > 2200 MHz!
This is what I have right now:
I think it's a shame that this PC was about to end up at a garbageyard, since it didn't take me a lot of time or money to put it back in flawless working order. It's fast, responsive and I haven't gotten a blue-screen yet!
Now that I've done all of this (drank countless coffee cups while at it), it's time to benchmark it and maybe play some old games on it, hahahaha.
So my questions for you guys are:
Full system specifications:
(all the pictures were resized to 1024x768 or 768x1024 for easier viewing, I have larger ones, PM me if you want them for whatever the reason)
The PC in question looks like this (laugh all you want):
The first problem I faced was the PC not booting at all. All I got was the CPU fan spinning up and then dying after a minute. After opening it I also noticed it had an ATI Radeon 9600 GPU with 128 MB of DDR VRAM, which was no joke when this buddy came out. Next move? I put out the battery, left it sit for a minute and tried again: nothing. My next step was to try if maybe the RAM was faulty. I removed the old RAM (2 x 256 MB DDR 333 MHz) and put in two sticks of some RAM I had laying around (2 x 1 GB DDR 333 MHz). Boo-yah! The PC booted!
(a look inside)
After the initial surprise of this being such an easy fix, I opened up the BIOS and, holy-moly, this thing had an Athlon XP 3000+ inside! The CPU used to be the king of the market in the early 2000s (price at launch was 536 $). One thing that alarmed my senses was the CPU temperature. It was idling from 55-57 °C. I shut the whole PC off and went ahead to change the thermal compounds on both the CPU and GPU coolers. I used my old trustworthy ArcticCooling MX-2 for the job.
(CPU thermal paste application)
(GPU thermal paste application)
After re-applying the thermal paste, putting back the CPU and GPU coolers, dusting the PC, wiping it a little bit, adding a fan infront of the case and checking if everything was in it's place it was time to try and put an OS onto it. This is what I was dealing with at the time:
(PC after cleaning)
I burned a copy of Windows XP SP3 onto a CD (yes, I "stole" it from the internet, I don't give a sh*t + the darn thing wouldn't boot from a USB) and I got into the setup menu, bliss! At this point in time I noticed that I'm dealing with a 250 GB ExcelStor drive (IDE of course), which is just amazing. I created two partitions, one for the OS and one for everything else (20 GB and 210 GB respectively). After the Windows installation (took about 30 minutes) it was time to install some of the necessary applications (AV, CPU-Z, web browser etc.). I even took my time and tried to overclock the CPU and it's stable at > 2200 MHz!
This is what I have right now:
I think it's a shame that this PC was about to end up at a garbageyard, since it didn't take me a lot of time or money to put it back in flawless working order. It's fast, responsive and I haven't gotten a blue-screen yet!
Now that I've done all of this (drank countless coffee cups while at it), it's time to benchmark it and maybe play some old games on it, hahahaha.
So my questions for you guys are:
- Would you like more threads like this? (I might build myself an old LGA 771 server system with 2 Xeon CPUs)
- What are your thoughts on the PC itself?
- Do you think I did a good job reviving this gem?
- Which benchmarks/games would you like me to put the PC through?
Full system specifications:
- Motherboard: VIA K7VTA3 ver. 6.0 (updated BIOS to 1.10 - latest)
- CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ @ 2.2 GHz
- Memory: 2 x 1 GB of DDR 333 MHz RAM
- GPU: ATI Radeon 9600 128 MB (AGP 2.0 X4)
- HDD: 250 GB ExcelStor Technology J9250
- PSU: LCPower LC420-H12 420W
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