GET READY FOR A WALL OF RAMBLE!
I have two Optiplex SX280 USFF boxes, one in storage and one that I used 24/7 for about 10 or so months. I picked both boxes off Craigslist for $25 each, with power supplies, P4 2.8GHz Prescotts, 512MB RAM each, but no hard drive (but did include the rails.) What ended up happening was, the guy was selling them because he couldn't get the Ethernet ports working... which was more or less the stupidity of the seller.
so I immediately take them both apart when I get home and find a slew of bulging caps on one, and only a single capacitor blown on the other. so the multi-bulge goes into storage, although it POSTs.
the single capacitor gets replaced with a junky capacitor off some old motherboard, and I was up and running-- but it soon bulged as well, and kept on going. (I guess it was still sending enough constant voltage to whatever component needed it at a voltage the component liked...)
SO
I looked online last week and found out that the SX280 design and form-factor was used all the way up to the Optiplex 760 USFF model. After some careful Googling, I saw that all one really needed to do was swap out the motherboard and tray, and you have a completely working different system.
Few days ago, I bit the bullet and paid a measly $30 for an Optiplex 760 USFF motherboard with tray (it's much cheaper without the tray, if you look closely) so to get the latest and greatest swap-in...
within 30 minutes of re-doing thermal compounds and a chipset cooling mod I'll get into shortly, I flipped it on with an E8200 in the LGA socket (a major upgrade from the P4 that was in it before) and was surprisingly back on track. the power supply is the same across all models, as well as the case and location of components. so a cheap parts/not working SX280 on eBay, upgraded with a $15-30 board would render a very cheap USFF box for use with practically anything... I'm pretty sure the onboard chipset is even powerful enough to decode popular HD media formats in hardware (but not with 10-bit I don't believe) but I'm unsure--I use the box I upgraded as a dedicated box at home, which does web/php and also runs an IRCd that links with a small network. the upgrade was to provide ample power for a small Minecraft server for myself and some friends to fart around on.
Original Specs (SX280):
Pentium 4 2.8GHz upgraded to a Prescott-2M 3GHz
2GB DDR2-667
320GB 2.5" SATA hard drive, D-Bay adapter
New Specs (Optiplex 760)
Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66GHz/6M/1333 Wolfdale 45nm
4GB DDR2-800
320GB 2.5" SATA hard drive, D-Bay adapter
both boards accept the power supply supplied to me with the SX280, and both use the same fans, heatsink/brackets, heatsink fan shround, fans, and other things like the drive tray.
Just a note about these SFF boxes though, is that the chipsets do get hot, because they're in an enclosed space. Dell tried to solve this after the SX280 started having capacitor popcorn
from the heat, by placing a fan under the hard drive tray in a small hole gap. this was to suck air across the underside of the hard drive as well as suck air across the chipset heatsink, which is anodized aluminum and uses their junky thermal wax tape pads to conduct thermal transfer. so to solve this, I used a taller chipset heatsink from a dead Shuttle box I parted out years ago (and used decent compound...) to bring the top to the metal of the drive cage. some more compound there and I've effectively increased the size of the heatsink, at least in part. on both the intel 915 and the 4 series chipset (too lazy to look up the actual model) the heatsinks are now cool to the touch, and it feels as if they're putting off almost no heat. this, supplied with a slim 80mm fan since I do not have a hard drive in the top tray, but in the D-Bay with a SATA adapter, I've essentially made this the coolest running SFF of this form-factor on the planet. on both the SX280 and 760 chipsets, the result is the same, but I've attached a picture of the inside of the box with the SX280 board installed.
Hopefully this wall of ramble helps someone with one of these USFFs, be it an SX280, 745, 755, 760, and any oddball ones in between that look like those, that if you're going to recap the board, consider an upgrade instead that makes use of the existing components you already have. and if it makes any difference, the 760 board makes the machine a lot more desirable to run Win7/8 on, as well as any Linux distro under the sun (mine's currently running Debian 7 "Wheezy".) Not sure about Haiku though.
and through all this, I now have advanced power savings, virtualization, and 6MB of L2 to play with... Already had 64-bit support, the Prescott-2M's were the first 64-bit Intel chips for consumer use, if memory serves.
I have two Optiplex SX280 USFF boxes, one in storage and one that I used 24/7 for about 10 or so months. I picked both boxes off Craigslist for $25 each, with power supplies, P4 2.8GHz Prescotts, 512MB RAM each, but no hard drive (but did include the rails.) What ended up happening was, the guy was selling them because he couldn't get the Ethernet ports working... which was more or less the stupidity of the seller.
so I immediately take them both apart when I get home and find a slew of bulging caps on one, and only a single capacitor blown on the other. so the multi-bulge goes into storage, although it POSTs.
the single capacitor gets replaced with a junky capacitor off some old motherboard, and I was up and running-- but it soon bulged as well, and kept on going. (I guess it was still sending enough constant voltage to whatever component needed it at a voltage the component liked...)
SO
I looked online last week and found out that the SX280 design and form-factor was used all the way up to the Optiplex 760 USFF model. After some careful Googling, I saw that all one really needed to do was swap out the motherboard and tray, and you have a completely working different system.
Few days ago, I bit the bullet and paid a measly $30 for an Optiplex 760 USFF motherboard with tray (it's much cheaper without the tray, if you look closely) so to get the latest and greatest swap-in...
within 30 minutes of re-doing thermal compounds and a chipset cooling mod I'll get into shortly, I flipped it on with an E8200 in the LGA socket (a major upgrade from the P4 that was in it before) and was surprisingly back on track. the power supply is the same across all models, as well as the case and location of components. so a cheap parts/not working SX280 on eBay, upgraded with a $15-30 board would render a very cheap USFF box for use with practically anything... I'm pretty sure the onboard chipset is even powerful enough to decode popular HD media formats in hardware (but not with 10-bit I don't believe) but I'm unsure--I use the box I upgraded as a dedicated box at home, which does web/php and also runs an IRCd that links with a small network. the upgrade was to provide ample power for a small Minecraft server for myself and some friends to fart around on.
Original Specs (SX280):
Pentium 4 2.8GHz upgraded to a Prescott-2M 3GHz
2GB DDR2-667
320GB 2.5" SATA hard drive, D-Bay adapter
New Specs (Optiplex 760)
Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66GHz/6M/1333 Wolfdale 45nm
4GB DDR2-800
320GB 2.5" SATA hard drive, D-Bay adapter
both boards accept the power supply supplied to me with the SX280, and both use the same fans, heatsink/brackets, heatsink fan shround, fans, and other things like the drive tray.
Just a note about these SFF boxes though, is that the chipsets do get hot, because they're in an enclosed space. Dell tried to solve this after the SX280 started having capacitor popcorn
from the heat, by placing a fan under the hard drive tray in a small hole gap. this was to suck air across the underside of the hard drive as well as suck air across the chipset heatsink, which is anodized aluminum and uses their junky thermal wax tape pads to conduct thermal transfer. so to solve this, I used a taller chipset heatsink from a dead Shuttle box I parted out years ago (and used decent compound...) to bring the top to the metal of the drive cage. some more compound there and I've effectively increased the size of the heatsink, at least in part. on both the intel 915 and the 4 series chipset (too lazy to look up the actual model) the heatsinks are now cool to the touch, and it feels as if they're putting off almost no heat. this, supplied with a slim 80mm fan since I do not have a hard drive in the top tray, but in the D-Bay with a SATA adapter, I've essentially made this the coolest running SFF of this form-factor on the planet. on both the SX280 and 760 chipsets, the result is the same, but I've attached a picture of the inside of the box with the SX280 board installed.Hopefully this wall of ramble helps someone with one of these USFFs, be it an SX280, 745, 755, 760, and any oddball ones in between that look like those, that if you're going to recap the board, consider an upgrade instead that makes use of the existing components you already have. and if it makes any difference, the 760 board makes the machine a lot more desirable to run Win7/8 on, as well as any Linux distro under the sun (mine's currently running Debian 7 "Wheezy".) Not sure about Haiku though.
and through all this, I now have advanced power savings, virtualization, and 6MB of L2 to play with... Already had 64-bit support, the Prescott-2M's were the first 64-bit Intel chips for consumer use, if memory serves.
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