Dell

The Dell was an old computer from my old work that stopped working and couldn't be fixed, so I "sent" it to be recycled. I looked at the SMART values and the hard drives have been on for something like 5 years, but the real concerning thing was that they were both idling at around 60C, which makes sense why the hard drive failed. The airflow design is horrible - pretty much there is no air cooling the hard drives - and so the hard drives relying on convection for cooling. I eventually removed the hard drive bays, since there wasn't any good way to modify the airflow to cool the bays.

The Dell came with a Socket 775 Pentium 4 HT 630, 1GB of DDR2 533 RAM, and an ATI Radeon X300 SE. I eventually upgraded the RAM to 2GB and the video card to a X1950 GT.

I was originally going to use it as a jukebox for my entertainment centre, but with how unreliable the hard drives were (I didn't like the 60C temp), I decided to use it as my 64-bit test-bed instead. I was also going to upgrade it so that my parents would have something that wasn't so dated, but I didn't do the research and ended up having to build a computer from the parts that were already ordered (the Intel build).

I may eventually upgrade it to the Pentium D 945, which is the highest verified processor the motherboard will take (someone said the Pentium D 960, but the 945 is better for the current power supply), which will make it a dual-core instead of a single-core; I might also upgrade the ram to 4GB as well, so that the Dell will "match" Lie-chan's specs.

Although it has half the performance compared with Lie-chan, it still functions well as a test-bed, as I've only had one instance where the Dell's performance was problematic in testing (openSUSE 13.2 Beta).



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