Tuning and Benchmarking a Dell GX270 Pentium 4

This is my first project. Take a classic Pentium 4, in this instance an (in)famous Dell Optiplex GX270 SFF, and see how much better I can make the basic model by installing various upgrades. The GX270 model is infamous for being part of a large production run that had bad capacitors installed and which proceeded to literally blow up. Later, Dell ended up swapping out thousands of motherboards over this issue.

Here is the unit on the workbench. A Dell Optiplex GX270 with CD-DVD drive and a 3 1/2" floppy drive with a couple of front side USB 2.0 ports. These are readily available all over eBay for less than $100.

Here is the unit with the clamshell opened. A pretty nice piece of engineering fitting a lot of stuff in a small space. At this time there is an upgraded video card installed, but I am going to remove it for the base line tests.

Power it up and go to the Bios setup page to check things out. This is equipped with a Pentium 4 running at 3.2 GHz and 1 MB of DDR SDRAM.

 The BIOS leaves no options for any kind of overclocking.

The on board graphics is an Intel 82865G chip. It has almost no 3D power and in fact during testing failed the 3D test at least once.

For benchmarking I am using the 32 bit version of the Passmark V8.0 performance test suite. This is the best complete testing suite for PCs and is available for around $20 from Passmark.com. They also publish a huge variety of test results that users post. Very useful and interesting for testing. I ran the full test suite twice successfully and got overall scores of 85.5 and 86.1. Not too impressive but good enough for a baseline.

This is the detail page. Notice the very poor 3D results. Normally the first upgrade would be memory, but I'm going to put the video card back in.

Bare Metal PC League

I am going to start a FB page for people who are interested in "tuning up" older and legacy PCs. The page will give them a virtual place to ask questions, show off their projects and compare system specs and benchmarks. Eventually I'd like to even have some competition ladders and/or events. Here's the logo.

Accessing an old IDE HD with a USB Adapter

This is a continuation of my last post from 2014 in which I wanted to check for pics on an old IDE HD in a USB enclosure but couldn't get it to power up. I wanted an adapter so I could take a bare IDE drive and convert it to USB. I ended up buying this:

Inside are four pieces, a power cable, a power adapter, a power cord and the IDE/USB adapter pictured on the box cover.

I connected the power cable/transformer to the power connector and the IDE adapter to the IDE pin connector on the drive.

So it looks like this:

Then plugged the power cord into the adapter and the wall outlet and then the USB at the end of the IDE adapter into a port on the PC.

Waited. Got the Windows ping announcing it had noticed a new USB device installed and then went to My Computer and found it as Drive I:

Notice it is seen as a "DiskGo", the original name of the unit. Clicked on OK and saw the directory of files.

Started drilling down into the folders looking for pics. Success!