Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

[Topcat]

Another ebay rescue of one of these boards. Complete system core including IO shield & dynatron coolers. 2x X5460 CPU's @ 3.16 and 16gb RAM. I paid less for this entire setup than what one of those dynatron heatsinks normally go for. No build in mind for this; I don't have any uATX cases that could fit one of these at this time....but there will be another build when I find one.

[Topcat]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

I wrapped this one up today.



The IO shield arrived last Friday.....but I was busy revising 'the oven', so this naturally got bumped.... I resumed it yesterday afternoon and finished it today. All the assembly was done yesterday, today was mostly software installs and testing.

Anyway....

Perfect fit!





80mm PWM fan installed in the front, pulling air in.





Dell 120mm PWM fan in the rear drawing out.



Dell plug modified for a normal fan header. Shaved the tabs off the back and depinned & repinned it in a standard config.



I used the Dell rubber standoffs to keep vibration down.....but they were made for thicker plastic and were a little loose-fitting. Nothing a couple washers couldn't fix.



Kingston 120GB SSD (I've got gazillions of these)....in an unknown brand SAS tray that some SAS SSD's came in. I had to use a HP SAS to SATA adapter.....but good way to use up some of these trays; I have quite a few of those as well. They came from some junk server I gutted.



Added a DVDRW. I wouldn't have except I didn't have the bay cover for it....so something had to go in there.



Attached the temp sensor to the northbridge chip.



tidying up cabling.





GPU, sound, and power supply added. PSU is a powerman 430w, recapped of course. This board was surprisingly light duty, this will hold it without issue.







Nice butt shot....



As expected, it worked.





This case was not of the greatest build quality; not really worthy of what went in it.....but since it actually fit, I figured what the hell.... Only glitch, the temp readout on the front has a bunch of dead segments. I did not investigate as to why.....but chalk this one up to another weird X7DCA-L build!

[Topcat]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

FWIW my wife still uses my X7DCA build as a daily driver and gaming rig... Despite having built her a newer and (as of recently, only mostly) faster system.

They're still very capable by today's standards for sure.....and they're absolute freight trains.

I'm not really sure this case is worthy of what's going in it....but just another neat build nonetheless.

[ratdude747]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

FWIW my wife still uses my X7DCA build as a daily driver and gaming rig... Despite having built her a newer and (as of recently, only mostly) faster system.

[lti]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

I remember some of the later clones being a little deeper to hold a standard power supply, but there still wasn't much space between the power supply and optical drive.

[Topcat]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

That's probably because of the mangled USB connector, and the Abit-rebadged-ECS motherboard didn't have any kind of protection on its front USB header (common for cheap stuff).

That case looks like one of the Apevia X-Qpack knockoffs (or maybe they were all made by the same company). The Apevia version needed a special short power supply, even though it had standard ATX mounting holes.

It may very well be. I couldn't find any badging on it anywhere. It had a full size PSU, but probably wasn't the original.

You're probably right on the USB....the thought crossed my mind as well.

[lti]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

PCB has a burned trace on the +5v runner. Apparently someone plugged in a USB device that the motherboard wasn't happy with.

That's probably because of the mangled USB connector, and the Abit-rebadged-ECS motherboard didn't have any kind of protection on its front USB header (common for cheap stuff).

That case looks like one of the Apevia X-Qpack knockoffs (or maybe they were all made by the same company). The Apevia version needed a special short power supply, even though it had standard ATX mounting holes.

[Topcat]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

Ok, today was wasted doing some case prep, test fitment, and cleaning. I can't assemble this until the IO shield gets here from China (may be a while), so I figured it was a good time to verify a few things and get everything ready for when it does.

This case was disgustingly filthy....I believe it was stored in a backyard storage shed....everything that was raw (unpainted) steel had a light dose of surface rust....the one time I'm glad the case was aluminum (as much as I was never a fan of AL cases). The dust was caked on everything, no doubt it would have to be washed.....but I did blow it out with the air hose so not to make a dusty mess on my bench.





I discovered that this has a removable motherboard tray.....which sounds all well & good, but the X7DCA with it's slight extra length won't clear the opening....so it'll have to be assembled with the tray in the case... The old board:



The board stripped down and tossed in the scrap bin. The tray.



Very little had to be modified, I had to grind a few millimeters off the heatsink bottom plate so it would clear the standoffs, normal for these boards.





Only one ill-placed standoff had to be removed.



The test fit:

All standoffs now line up perfect.





This is the one that counts!! The bottom edge! Clears by a good 3/16"





Now time to test fit a GPU. No problem. A full length would clear as well, but would render the floppy header unusable. This is likely the GPU I'll use; it's period-specific to the motherboard.







Now time for disassembly & cleaning.



Removed the 'ultra' branded fans. I will replace them with some nicer brand PWM's.



The front fascia is actually two pieces....was fun getting that apart without breaking things.



During disassembly, I noticed this. Front USB completely frucked.....





PCB has a burned trace on the +5v runner. Apparently someone plugged in a USB device that the motherboard wasn't happy with.



A donor from a junk case.....It's a common connector.



Removed.



The donor removed.



...and fixed!





Back in the case.



Everything washed & dried..... Can't go any further....so here we are.



Added a 40mm fan to the NB chip....they get hot....and that's all for today.



I thought about a little paint creativity with this case.....still haven't made up my mind. The original paint is in good (not great) condition..... I'll have to ponder that one...

[Topcat]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

ABIT KV-85 is what I spot in that XPC-like clone. Just another ECS clone sadly, based off the K8M800-M2 rev1.0.

Yea, that's what it is. I was never a fan of this generation of AMD CPU (it's a Sempron)....it'll wind up in the scrap bin. It doesn't work anyway.

[Dan81]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

ABIT KV-85 is what I spot in that XPC-like clone. Just another ECS clone sadly, based off the K8M800-M2 rev1.0.

[Topcat]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

Here's another corpse thread exhumed......as here's a $20 ebay find X7DCA-L. Yes, by modern standards these are getting whiskers on them.....but for 20 bucks..... It came with a pair of quadcore L5420's @ 2.5GHz 12mb caches and 32gb RAM. The heatsinks which are getting hard to find and expensive were just some freebies I saved from an old server I scrapped.







In the oven with only 16gb RAM remaining. There were 6x sticks; 2x 8gb and 4x 4gb. Two of the 4gb modules were bad, so I just pulled all of them and left the 8gb; leaving 16gb. I'll probably just run with this, as I don't have any more of this type of RAM (PC2-5300 REG/ECC). These boards do not use the miserably hot-running & power sucking FBDIMM's (WHEW).



This is the first time I've had one of these boards in the oven. I was pleasantly surprised over how much power they DIDN'T use!! They seem to be quite efficient, even under light to medium loads.





Ok, this additional build wasn't by accident. A few weeks ago I was given a weird aluminum case. I did some quick eyeball measurements and it looked like one of these boards would clear this case along the bottom edge without any hackery. When I actually put a ruler to it, it will clear by a good 1/8".....tight on that edge, but will clear with no interference...so the search began for another X7DCA-L.







Butt shot.... The twenty dollar board didn't come with an IO shield....but I did find one on ebay from China for 8 bucks shipped....



Will this one be as stunning as the Aurora R8 build? Never......but it's one worthy of mentioning. I have an Audigy FX sound card to add. The HDD cage is missing from this case.....but that won't be a problem for little old me!

[Topcat]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

Lockups/crashes/bugs due to all the drivers getting ripped out when the 10/11 upgrade takes place, plus hardware accelerated GPU scheduling causing crashes. (Though not all of that may be a direct result of W11 itself, it still paints a pretty dim picture right off the bat.)

I haven't ran into anything like that as of yet....and honestly I haven't seen a Windows PC that didn't have some kind of hardware issue hard-lock since the Vista days....

[TechGeek]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

Lockups/crashes/bugs due to all the drivers getting ripped out when the 10/11 upgrade takes place, plus hardware accelerated GPU scheduling causing crashes. (Though not all of that may be a direct result of W11 itself, it still paints a pretty dim picture right off the bat.)

[Topcat]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

I've warmed up to 10, but only with some serious modifications. ShutUp10+ to kill the crapware without massively modifying the OS, Classic Start to make the start menu usable. Only Pro or better at that.

I think I told you that strategy years ago; which still holds true. Pro of 10 or 11 is always a must....group policy editor.....but FWIW, classic shell and shutup10 work dandy on 11, I have gotten past that phase of testing.

IMO, I just don't see Windows 11 as anything that I'd install and use frequently. It's still very much a work in progress and I just haven't warmed up to it. At the college I go to, their esports lab has some Windows 11 systems and they've been much more problematic than the rest of the systems (which run 10).

What kind of problems? W11 is just a polished up interface of the W10 core. Would I run 11 over 10? Like I said; too soon to tell...as I have no windows10 systems in my fleet. They're eitehr Server STD's or Linux. For web browsing terminals around the shop, linux has been edging the Windows systems out slowly.....

[TechGeek]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

I've warmed up to 10, but only with some serious modifications. ShutUp10+ to kill the crapware without massively modifying the OS, Classic Start to make the start menu usable. Only Pro or better at that.

IMO, I just don't see Windows 11 as anything that I'd install and use frequently. It's still very much a work in progress and I just haven't warmed up to it. At the college I go to, their esports lab has some Windows 11 systems and they've been much more problematic than the rest of the systems (which run 10).

[Topcat]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

Hey TC, what's your thoughts on W11? Figured I'd ask since you put in the effort to get it running on that system.

It's really too soon to tell....I have to play with it some more. I've dealt with it in small amounts for customers, but overall it's the usual W10 fight.... A few I have dealt with 11 had it forced upon them by M$....on slow spinning SATA drives.... Talk about agonizing!

I never warmed up to 10, even after all these years....it just looked and felt awful....which was the opposite with 7. I didn't like W7 at all until SP1 came out, which cleaned up a lot of my gripes with it (mainly resource hogging issues)....but build...after build....after build with 10, I still dislike it just as much as I did before. S2K16 isn't bad; which is the 10 interface without all the frills & bloat...and the crapware within either isn't there or isn't enabled...but back to 11....

Just a recap of this system's specs before continuing....

X7DCA Motherboard
2x X5470 Harpertown Xeons @ 3.33GHz; 8 cores
48gb DDR2 ECC RAM
GTX970 4gb GPU
480gb SATA SSD

Now taking those specs into consideration, one would think this would be miserable & slow....it really isn't. Speed-wise, I have to say I'm impressed. No issues with youtube playback; none at all!! Load times of progs are near instantaneous. Boot time is a matter of a few seconds (one this slow-POST'er actually POST's). Would it compete with an 11th Gen I9 with DDR4 and a M.2 NVMe? Of course not....but for a system of this...umm... 'vintage', it's not bad at all! I was surprised by it, I liked it better than 10 right off the bat (which really isn't saying much), but there's more testing to do...mainly as to what witchcraft is going on in the background and what kind of things it's tattling back to the mothership...but I do take great joy in taking M$'s forced obsolescence ploy and shoving it right back in their faces.....this was a nice slap in their faces for it to run so nice on a system core from ~2008.

FWIW with OS's.... I've been pumping Linux Mint as much as I can to people who just need a good emailing, web browsing, facebooking, youtube watching, letter-typer for a computer. I've only had one guy come back and say he wanted to go back to Windows.

[TechGeek]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

Hey TC, what's your thoughts on W11? Figured I'd ask since you put in the effort to get it running on that system.

[Topcat]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

This Alienware X7DCA is back in the news again....as a fellow tech bet me that I couldn't get Windows 11 running on such an old system... I used this one as it already had Win10 running on it....saved piecing something else together.

So here's a Harpertown (basically a Core2 Quad), no TPM, and no SecureBoot.....

Some trickery & deceit getting past the 'checks'...and here we are!





Got past the initial install.....



...and here we are at the login screen!!



Desktop.



Browsing. Waterfox 5.0.1.



I won the bet!



The system specs are still the same as above, and I have to say it functions very nicely; better than 10 IMHO.....

...but it did feel good to fire this thing up again!!!

[shovenose]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

I love stuff like this. For a while I had a decent gaming rig in a Vostro 230 case. An i7-4770K with GTX560 IIRC. Looked 100% stock from the outside.

More recently I tried to build a Windows gaming PC in a Mac Pro G5 case. It worked, although I ended up giving up on the project.

[momaka]

Re: Dell Dimension 1100? ...or is it? The Ultimate Sleeper System

Just a little footnote....I found a pair of X5470's (3.33GHz 1333FSB) quadcore Xeons on the CPU bin....I honestly don't remember where they came from, but they're the fastest 5400-series Xeon @ 1333FSB.... Perfect finishing touch for maxing this critter out.

Nice!
Don't you just love it when you have old hardware like that and eventually find the best / top-end parts for it? Years ago when this hardware was new, one would have probably had to spend $1000's on an upgrade like that. Today: oh, just look through the junk/spare bin, LOL! And it's still relevant hardware for today's use, which is the real kicker.

Nothing except the GPU could possibly be upgraded....and no plans for that.....

Yeah, I don't blame you. GPU prices (and availability) are getting more ridiculous every day now. Hopefully the recent Crypto crash going on lately will muffle things down a little. It's sad to see people starting to fight for things like even a GTX 560... let alone cards like the GTX 970 you have in this rig. On that note, if there's a good time to be selling GPUs, it's NOW. I've been seeing even video tech channels doing recommendations on what's a better IGP, since ALL GPUs seem to be scarce at this point (including things like the lowly-low GTX 1030... LOL! )