February 2023 – I Forgot I Had A WordPress Account

I wasn’t planning on writing this blog post at all… But, with the way things are going at Twitter and the way things are going with getting used to Mastodon (as my replacement for showing off cool old and new tech stuff I’ve been up to), I feel like I really need to put SOMETHING a bit more lengthy somewhere else. This is about a man, and a fateful encounter with a PC on the side of the road, and the trials and tribulations that happened in-between then and now.

In June 2013, my mother had received a call that her boyfriend at the time had passed away in his backyard from a heart attack. We were mortified. I was asked, at a later point afterwards, if I wanted to be a pallbearer at the funeral service to take place after the wake, to which I whole-heartedly agreed. We loved him. He was a HAM tinkerer and instructor and on many levels, he and I were right on the same wavelength of thought. He taught me many, many things in the few short years he was a part of our lives.

On the way back from the cemetery following the burial service, I took the back-roads home, wanting to stay off the main roads due to my entire state of mind at the time. I was still dazed that this big event in my life which just took place, and wanted to drive just a bit more out of the way to take it all in before returning home to get myself into a mound of comfort food and a well-deserved depression nap. It was during the final leg of this trip that I caught sight of an unmistakable shape on the roadside, but in a color I was not familiar with seeing. I promptly pulled over, got out of the car still in my dress suit, gave it a once-over, and popped it into the back seat.

What I thought I saw was a black-case Dell OptiPlex GX110, an oddity in itself to me at the time. Instead, what I had found was donning a Pentium 4 sticker with a Windows 2000/NT4/98 sticker right beside it, and a Windows 2000 COA on the side cover. It was an OptiPlex GX400. I knew NOTHING about this machine at the time. I didn’t know it existed. But here I was, unloading it from the car not 20 minutes later, and it in fact existed all the same.

So what’s a GX400 compared to a GX110? Nothing. Nothing at all. In fact, very very little is the same about both machines. Instead, the machine this shares more similarities with is the OptiPlex GX300, which itself shares many similarities with the Precision Workstation 420 of the era. the GX110 is an Intel 810E Socket 370 board (anywhere from 667MHz to 1GHz) with two PC100/133 RAM slots, and only PCI for expansion via a pull-out expansion planar at the bottom of the case. Dell got rid of this sometime after to cut down costs. at the GX300 level, you had an Intel 820 chipset with two Slot 1 Pentium IIIs, usually in the ballpark of 800-933MHz, with two Rambus RDRAM slots, AGP and some PCI. The case was redesigned to allow for better airflow across the drive cage, as drives were starting to show up in 7200rpm speeds at a rather quick pace and were running quite warm. Not only that, but SCSI hard drives of the time which may have been even more commonplace in a workstation configuration, would have definitely run hotter. the GX110 was not able to keep the drives cool at all, even with a fan blowing directly onto them. I cooked at least one hard drive because of this fault in my own GX110 back then.

↑ This shows a good representation of the case redesign between the GX110 (left), GX300 (center) and the GX400 (right).

The GX400 goes the exact same route, but now you have the good drive cooling, AGP, no onboard graphics, 4 RDRAM slots (PC800-40!), with an Intel 850 chipset… and Socket 423. The first Pentium 4 socket, and quite arguably the rarest to find boards of. These days if you want a Socket 423 system, you’re either paying exorbitant money for a board (Asus P4T, Intel D850GB, etc.) or you get a Dell that had it standard, something I knew nothing about back a decade ago. The models with Socket 423 are as follows, in order of current auction-site rarity: Precision 330, OptiPlex GX400, Dimension 8100. The Precision 330 was not a big seller due to Dual Pentium III and even single Tualatin Pentium III systems easily squashing the performance of these early Pentium 4s. The GX400 seems to be a bit better of a seller, and there are still models available on sites like eBay for about a hundred bucks and up. The Dimension 8100 is by far the most common, and shares a motherboard with the GX400 and Precision 330 but is much more limited in the ports it has. The 8100 is missing the second serial port, the onboard AC’97 audio, and the onboard 3Com 10/100 Ethernet that are standard on the GX400/P330. You still get a single serial port and parallel port, PS/2 mouse and keyboard, and four USB 1.1 ports. Aside from this and a couple of minor differences between board revisions, the OptiPlex GX400, Precision 330 and the Dimension 8100 are all exactly the same computer.

Now that we’ve set the stage, let’s take a closer look at the GX400 as I have it today. When I originally got it, this machine was touting a 1.7GHz Willamette Pentium 4 with 256MB of RDRAM, comprised of two RAM sticks and two CRIMMs to act as jumper-terminators for the memory bus. There was a measley 250W power supply, and no hard drive. It also had an Nvidia GeForce 2 MX shoved in as a graphics card, likely an upgrade. Today, it sits with a 1.9GHz Pentium 4, 2GB of RDRAM comprised of 4 512MB sticks (which I paid a total of $45 for in late 2013!), a 250GB hard drive as boot, and a 200GB drive as a secondary drive. The power supply has been replaced with a 305W unit from an OptiPlex GX280, a nigh-unkillable supply from a machine plagued with bad motherboard capacitors in the height of the mid-00s capacitor plague. Past this, it also has a Dell OEM Turtle Beach Santa Cruz installed, an Intel Pro/1000MT PCI Gigabit card, and an ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256MB AGP card.

Windows XP SP3 flies on this machine, I don’t know why exactly. Obviously this is not with the USP4 patches, as I’ve found that to be counter-productive on hardware older than say, a Core 2 Duo for the sake of craziness with certain updates initially poised directly at POSReady 2009 installs which introduce weirdness into a standard XP install. Under newer hardware, it works fine, but it doesn’t always work correctly on older stuff, especially when it comes to games of the era.

The setup as it exists now can get about 125FPS in Quake III Arena 1.32 with everything on high and the resolution set at 1024×768. It can play a mean game of Unreal Tournament 2004 as well, so long as you turn the graphics settings down a bit to get the average framerate to stay above 60. I’m sure unofficial patches might solve this, but the only game that I have unofficial patches installed for is UT99, which absolutely flies, with framerates hitting over 200-300FPS on average if not capped at 60 to prevent tearing.

So why the extra cards? Why not just use the onboard ethernet and audio? Simply put, they get the job done, but they’re not the best. The 3Com 3C905C-TXB onboard is PERFECT if you’re using this PC for its intended purpose as a business machine, sitting there doing nothing but Word and Excel spreadsheets all day long, the occasional e-mail and not much else in the way of network activity. It gets by. But start transferring your games to it, drivers, music, anything you can think of to load up the drive(s), and you’re in for a world of hurtful wait. Not only that, but while there is indeed offloading baked into the chipset of this 3Com solution, the interrupts needed to make this happen ends up pinning the CPU core at full tilt. at 100Mbit/s. or 12MB/s, whatever you prefer. Instead, we can drop in a known-working Intel Pro/1000 card of any kind, drop on some moderately decent drivers and up the jumbo frames just a touch, and soon you’re pushing 35-40MB/s over the same connection with half the CPU usage. It’s not perfect, and both the Windows TCP stack of the time alongside the drivers can be to blame, but there’s only so much data you can push over a shared PCI bus with other devices.

On to the sound card, then. Why would you not want to use the one onboard? The onboard sound is an AC’97 codec coming straight off the ICH2 chipset. It can use a few different codec drivers, but the one that works the best seems to be the one from Sigmatel. Aside from that, it provides no acceleration at all, and all of the work needed to do something as simple as MP3 decoding is shoved off to the CPU. Not to mention, the onboard audio is noisy. There’s hiss, and if you do ANYTHING at all related to the drive activity or the like, you hear that in the noise as quiet hums and blips. After a while, it gets annoying, but it’s also not the best if you’re looking to have yourself a nice audio experience, especially with headphones.

You can use any sound card you want in lieu of the onboard audio. Sound Blaster Live! cards were popular at the time, if you want a simple solution to the problem, given their abundance. You can also get an Audigy card, or an SB Live! 24-bit, which is a cut-down Audigy card without the acceleration like mentioned above. This is also the case for the Audigy SE, which I believe uses an Audigy 4 chipset.

In my testing, all of my Audigy 2 ZS cards provided subpar results in this machine, going anywhere from being absolutely stellar one moment to crashing the system the next, and no difference to this did any one party’s drivers make. You’ll get the same results with the stock Creative driver pack that you will with the daniel_k pack. These are also re-capped cards, so I doubt this is the problem, but the more likely solution is that the Intel 850 chipset just seems to hate these cards for some strange reason. These work much better in Socket A boards with Nvidia nForce chipsets anyway, and my suggestion continues to be to keep them in that era of computing onwards, given there’s Windows 11 support for the cards still through the aforementioned daniel_k drivers.

The best card that seems to work in this system based on what I have, goes to the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, but I’ve also tried a Catalina as well with varying results. With the latter, you can use the Catalina drivers which are available from a number of sources, or you can use the MadDog Entertainer 7.1 drivers, as it’s 100% the same card down to the board markings. The MadDog drivers are older, but they still work a treat, as do the Catalina drivers. The latest VIA Envy24 drivers are not something to really look at unless you’re using Windows 7 or higher with one of these, as I noticed a lot more glitching and popping with that version than with the prior two.

With the Santa Cruz, you want to use the absolute latest driver, provided in the SC-4193.exe file, also found in various places on the internet. I would not use the version provided by Dell, as it’s older by a few build revisions and has the tendency to slow the system down a tad with regard to framerates in games.

Let’s move onto the PSU. Why replace the working OEM PSU with another? Due to age? No, dear reader, the answer to this one is simple: Gorilla Snot.

Gorilla Snot is the name given to a few makeups of contact glue used in things like power supplies and on circuit boards to prevent components from vibrating or shaking loose. These days it’s been replaced by silicone-based elastomers and hot glue, but in cheap devices and electronics made on a budget, it can still be found lurking in the shadows. The problem with these compounds is that while they do a magnificent job of holding stuff in place, it completely dries out after a given time between months to years if exposed to a number of hot/cold cycles, and will eventually become hygroscopic. This means that it will wick up moisture from the environment in which it resides, in order to equalize back to where it used to be. This leads to anything it touches also getting that moisture on it, and the compound can become quite conductive and corrosive. Below I’ve placed a couple images of the inside of the power supply I pulled from this machine.

This damage ended up blowing the fan control board in my supply, so the fan was not running, but the PSU was still returning a green on a working fan. This is dangerous both for the supply, but for you as well, if something catches fire, you won’t know it until it’s too late.

a replacement supply is still something you can get in the here and now, thankfully, but it will take some work to get there. You’re going to need an adapter from the 24-pin ATX12V 2.x standard to one that breaks out to both a 24-pin and a 16-pin plug to use it on this motherboard. This will also work with the aforementioned like-PCs, the Dimension 8100 and the Precision 330, but it will also work with other machines, like the PowerEdge 2300 server, another machine I have sitting here. The adapter you can buy today isn’t wired up correctly however, with just the 16-pin plug having the correct voltages. the 24-pin to 24-pin is straight-through, and this should not be so. Below I’ve listed out exactly how you should rewire such an adapter. You’re going to end up with an extra +3.3 and an extra +12v lead at the end, and these can be snipped off as needed. There is also a single missing +5v line from a modern supply, which you can substitute by either splicing a wire into an existing +5 lead, or leaving disconnected. I would recommend the former over the latter, assuming you’re good with an iron and heatshrink. Using one of the spare leads from the +3.3 or +12v lines would be recommended as it already has the connector end on it.

You want to do this ON THE ADAPTER and NOT at the power supply. Any changes made on the power supply end would then translate into the 16-pin, which should be wired up correctly and should not be touched. just plug, and play.

At the end, you should have something that looks like this:

When choosing a supply for a Socket 423 machine like this where there is no dedicated 12v connection to the voltage regulators based on Dell’s own stubbornness to follow spec, it’s important to lay down a couple of ground rules:

– Your +5v rail should be a MINIMUM of 22A.

– Your 3.3v rail should be a MINIMUM of 18A.

– Your 12v rail should be a MINIMUM of 14A, and having more 12v rails is overkill, but welcome.

– your 5v Standby current should be a MINIMUM of 1.5A but 2A is preferred.

– You do not need negative 5 volts. There is no ISA on this board which requires it.

On to the motherboard. You should CAREFULLY remove the heatsink off the 850 chipset and replace the thermal compound with something better. I used Arctic Silver Ceramique 2 as I’ve been able to get it in 25-gram big-boy syringes for under 10 bucks from eBay, but any compound that’s not too viscous should do the job. I would not recommend using Arctic Silver 5 due to the contact surface being aluminum, not because it doesn’t work, but I’ve noticed it doesn’t work as well, unless the contact surface is copper. In this case, ANYTHING ELSE that isn’t AS5 will do the job. I’d recommend the same for the CPU heatsink as well, but you can again, use any paste you deem fit. MX4 and MX5 are fine, if you want to be fancy about it, but Ceramique 2 does the job, and provides predictable results after over a decade on the market. It’s not the best, but it’s far from the worst, and it’s also non-conductive!

As further proof that I need to shill this wonder compound harder, I used the same application on an i7-2600 from 2016 until late 2022, under a Cooler Master Hyper T4, without any issues aside from needing to dust it out every so often. The contact surface in this case is mostly aluminum with copper heatpipes. Kept the CPU nice and cool at around 30-31C idle and 55C under full tilt load.

While you’re in there doing that, you may as well pop the board off and take care of a couple capacitors that either will go or have already gone. Inspect the board for bulging or popped capacitors. This machine was made at the butt-end of 90s era capacitors and right at the beginning before the great capacitor plague of the early 00s which “ended” somewhere around mid-2008. To the bottom-right of the CPU socket near the chipset, there should be a couple of Nichicon HM(M) capacitors. These are not present on all board revisions, but if yours have them, it’s advised to replace them, especially if the machine you have in front of you has been off for a long period of time. These should be the only Nichicon capacitors on the entire board, with everything else being either Sanyo or Sanyo OS-CON capacitors of which are hybrid low-ESR polymers, around the CPU socket.

I had these two Nichicons threaten to blow their tops on my board, and it’s surmised that other boards in the main three models here which have been heavily used in the past may also have these needing replaced. Replace them with 10v 2200uF, not 6.3.

As far as a graphics card, you’re free to use whatever you want under the sun within reason. Don’t expect to throw in a fancy newer AGP card like an HD2400/2600/3650 or the like and expect it to do everything you ever dreamed of. The limit I wish to impose on graphics cards here is all down to your budget and your use case, within reason. The max you should go in one of these is an Nvidia GeForce 6000 series or their Quadro counterparts, and on the ATI side, the X series up to the X850XT Platinum. You can go the extra mile and get a better card in the X1xx0 lineup, but the wonkiness of some of the chipsets in this family may be detrimental. Not to mention, most of them are AGP 8x cards, and most are natively PCI Express with an AGP to PCIe bridge chip from the likes of ATI themselves or PLX on the cheap end, later only PLX in the HD series.

RDRAM is expensive, but the stuff you want is PC800-40. don’t go for PC600, it’s too slow, and PC1066 won’t work half the time. In higher capacities, it’s easier to get it with ECC, and the Intel 850 chipset supports this fully. I got my set for $45 off eBay a decade ago, but finding a full 2GB set these days is rather expensive. The best course of action is to get them in pairs as you’re able to, but you definitely want 2GB if you’re going to be messing around with Windows 2000/XP/7/Linux on these boxes.

I’m not going to cover hard drives and optical drives too much, in this instance you can use what you like, be it a SATA SSD hanging off a silicon image card or an IDE to SATA adapter or whatever.

These will completely run Windows 98, 2000, XP, and 7 just fine. I haven’t tried Linux but I’d guess it’ll be fine too. I’d stay away from Vista, and I’d try to stay away from 7 if you can due to drivers for legacy GPUs not being the best with it. XP is where I’d like to say this machine shines, and it’ll be way too fast for 98, making it the perfect overkill machine for that, if that’s your fancy.

With your CPU options, all three base systems are capable of taking anything in the range of the base Socket 423 CPUs, assuming your BIOS is up to date, from 1.3GHz to 2GHz. I’d suggest getting the fastest chip you can get your hands on without your wallet screaming. I paid $3 for my 1.9GHz chip at a swapmeet, but they go for much more on the used market online. 2Ghz chips tend to command an extremely high price, because they’re the fastest for the socket, and that ends up being a seller’s market. If you MUST have the fastest, you’re choosing with your wallet to do that. This is especially the case if you want a Socket 423 to 478 adapter, as one of these can net you HUNDREDS of American Dollarydoos just for the privelege of owning one in the current market. But, you can comfortably shove a 2.8GHz/512/400 Northwood onto such an adapter, and get an egregious speed boost in the process. The problem is, the amount you’re paying for the adapter can buy three to five Socket 478 machines (on the current market). It makes absolutely no sense unless you’re a collector and not an enthusiast. And at that, if you’re a collector that thinks your socket adapter PCB is worth the gold on the pins, I’d like to have some not-so-nice words with you regarding artificially inflating prices in an already-been-screwed market in which no one is allowed to have nice things.

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With this, I bid thee Adieu. Hopefully the information posted here helps someone out in the future, because I’m expecting an uptick in the interest of Socket 423 systems as parts become even harder to get a hold of. We’re right on the edge of that timeframe, believe it or not. The Pentium M turns 20 years old in May of 2023, this year, and after everyone does their bit about it on that there red-play-button site, prices for such systems are going to skyrocket, and anything below them in performance is going to have an uptick as well.

Month: February 2023

OptiPlex GX400, Precision 330, Dimension 8100 – Addendum

The Dell OptiPlex GX400/Dimension 8100/Precision 330, or “How I came to love Socket 423 for all the wrong reasons”