My weird Dell D-Series office gaming fetish

[Reaperman]

 

I love D-Series dells--I have a whole, embarrassingly expensive, setup for them sitting right next to 'Beige4Daze' in my CRT gaming corner. These are the machines I occasionally brag about thrifting for under $10, because I'm always up for more fodder to slot into this setup. Make no mistake, like any hobby, they start off (really, really) cheap, but they quickly become a real money pit. They're pretty fun to hotrod out, by taking advantage of the business computer "legacy driver support" to rock older OSes, that are spec'd to the max. I tend to use them for win95-winXP era gaming, and tend to stick to a maxxed-out XP build, but dell has drivers to go back to win2000, even.

 

(my main D-series, a Dell Precision M2300 with extra cooling sticking out where the keyboard/monitor go)

 

This post is here because I finally made a video on that setup:

 

 

Maybe the video doesn't quite do its gaming power justice, but I had to skip lots of my favorite games that wanted to push that monitor to 85hz, making it very pretty, but tough to sync to the 60fps camera. (yes I tried turning the desktop refresh down to see if the games would pick up on it)

 

And you know what, these d-series' game along pretty well. Of course they do, it's windows xp32, on an ssd, with max ram, and 128mb nvidia graphics--it's going to be able to game just fine (*from a select era). They'll do linux too, but few modern distros are light enough for that processor, and when they are, it's still struggling (Lubuntu runs about the best, even peppermint was kind of too heavy)

 

So how this probably started: Like with Beige4Daze, the government previously forced me to use these hateful little D-series machines, circa 10-15 years ago, and my years of cursing at these daily has motivated me to actually enjoy using them in a gaming context vs an office context. It's kind of like how depression-era survivors still use the old recipes--and definitely nothing like Stockholm Syndrome...

 

Uncle sam currently forces me to use an E-series, but those aren't nearly as much fun to work with (no optical bay, or easy-open covers, and the batteries bloat), so I probably won't ever upgrade to their ecosystem. Steam decks probably cover that 2005-2020 range anyway.

 

D-Series plusses:

• Nice cases that are easy to open and work on.
• Quick swapping drives, and quick swapping docks, means a new OS is just a quick swap away.
• all use the same power supply (available in a variety of wattages/sizes)
• The monitor riser can support a crt, and the VGA outputs are still the priority.
• Quick-release optical/floppy/2nd-HDD/2nd-battery bay
• SATA connectors and USB 2.0 jacks.
• Still has PCMCIA to play with (I mostly use them for compactflash adapters)
• Nice driver support including support for legacy OSes. (win2k-vista)
• Can look up the service tags from ebay auctions online too see if it has Nvidia graphics ?

 

 

Thanks for putting u with another lengthy oddball post. I sure do dump my vintage computing budget into weird places.

Edited November 7, 2021 by Reaperman

[Reaperman]

Minor changes, I've reintroduced an optical drive velcro'd to the left side of the monitor, for playing disc-based games. (these laptops all have an optical bay, but it houses the 2nd hdd in most of my d-series machines)
I did this for the minor pickup of FF7 & FF8 --so much angst in one place! 

 

 

But a major pickup, I found/ordered myself a precision m6300 that was affordable. (~$50 shipped) I believe these are the most powerful machines that will dock with my d-series port replicator, since the xps machines that dock are the slimmer non-gaming ones.

That said, this one isn't quite top of the line.  It has a core2duo instead of an extreme, but the nvidia fx1600m has either max ram or 1/2 of that--specs below are confused on the subject of it having 256 or 512mb. The extra video ram is nice, and the FX1600M seems to provide a serious boost over the fx 360m's w/ 128mb that I've been XP gaming on up to this point.

 

It's a bit bigger than I'd like at 17"

 

But that means both ram slots are on the bottom, which is nice. 

 

The bottom photo was so nice I got the service tag for specs--I still don't know how much ram that 1600m is going to see. Sounds like some is shared and some is on the module(?).
If it shares some ram, that's probably fine--winxp32 can only see like 3.5gb if I upgrade it to 4gb

 

Finally, if I recall these have a mini-pci-e. I get all kinds of these mini form factors mixed up, but I think that's the one. So I figured I'd take a gamble with this neat little toy, and may actually buy it a real ssd for the port if it works (like a 256gb or something smaller).

 

I'm interested in seeing the speeds on it, since this will be an economical way to cram in a lot of storage as big micro sd cards are going to keep getting cheaper. 1tb cards will probably hit the $20 bargain bin within 10 years.

Edited December 8, 2021 by Reaperman

[Reaperman]

So I got this thing tuned up and running.  Still waiting on the above SD module, and also a 4gb ram pack (it's got 3gb now which is more than enough). Even though it's a weaker M6300, it's still an xp gaming beast, which handily games at its monitor's native 1920x1200 resolution. Interestingly it's the only laptop I've owned with an upgradable graphics card.

 

I think I'm going to mostly stick with my 14" dells for xp gaming--they do well enough for the era.

 

Since this m6300 is so powerful, I may even run win10 on it. It won't do great at it, but it will do it while docked in my CRT area, and I don't have anything else that powerful down there.

 

Currently I just game on the work bench with it, by plopping an 8bitdo stick right on its oversized base:

 

But I do have an arcade cabinet coming with a 27" VGA CRT monitor, which gets me thinking...

 

Anyway, here's my video of me yacking on about how I don't like it. (while the x3 benchmark runs) I now realize I'm wrong, of course--I don't like the form factor, but it's a REAL nice machine, for what it is--the only d-series machine with a PRAYER of running win10 semi-decently.

 

 

Edited December 22, 2021 by Reaperman

[Reaperman]

The thrift shop is attacking my wallet with another D-Series. $10 for this beauty

 

(PC g@mer MAZTER RACCCCEEEE!)

 

This one's weaker than the rest.  Most of my other ones are Core2Duos at 2.0-2.4ghz, but this one's a Pentium M 2.0ghz (single core, no HT even), IDE isn't as useful as SATA, and the mobo maxes at 2gb of ram vs the 4gb that I'm used to. 

 

But I love it, because it's my first 4:3 Dell with descrete graphics. A 64gb ATI paired with a 1024x768 LCD panel. Sure that's 1/2 or 1/4 the video ram I'm used to, but that still runs Freelancer (above) smoothly at default settings. Well enough that I'm currently having to pull myself away for a break 2+ hours in. all the rest of my machines probably run it better in the dock with the CRT monitor, but the onboard 1024x768 resolution means this will do it well on the go, without having to mod the UI for 16:9.

 

It's using the SD to IDE adapter in this below shot, which seems to run about 20mb/s.  Not great, but I can't remember where IDE's bottleneck was. That drive adapter naturally costs over twice the cost of the actual machine

 

 

close-lier on the bios specs

Edited January 23, 2022 by Reaperman

[Keatah]

18 hours ago, Reaperman said:

This one's weaker than the rest.  Most of my other ones are Core2Duos at 2.0-2.4ghz, but this one's a Pentium M 2.0ghz (single core, no HT even), IDE isn't as useful as SATA, and the mobo maxes at 2gb of ram vs the 4gb that I'm used to. 

You know - The Pentium M was one, is one, of the best designs from Intel at that time. It has more in common with a Pentium III than a Pentium IV. The processor I have is still serving as a daily driver for office productivity and vintage computer archiving applications.

 

It's also a good CPU to undervolt. I have mine operating at modern-day levels. Something like 0.700v in idle and sleep. At full tilt it climbs to a lofty 1.052 volts! When the system is idling and drops into full c3 state, the clock speed drops to early 486 levels and lower. 66MHz and lower. Total power consumption ranges from 7 to 20 watts. With a max speed of 1.7GHz.

 

Whoever said e-Machines weren't awesome?

[wierd_w]

On 12/8/2021 at 9:35 AM, Reaperman said:

Minor changes, I've reintroduced an optical drive velcro'd to the left side of the monitor, for playing disc-based games. (these laptops all have an optical bay, but it houses the 2nd hdd in most of my d-series machines)
I did this for the minor pickup of FF7 & FF8 --so much angst in one place! 

 

 

But a major pickup, I found/ordered myself a precision m6300 that was affordable. (~$50 shipped) I believe these are the most powerful machines that will dock with my d-series port replicator, since the xps machines that dock are the slimmer non-gaming ones.

That said, this one isn't quite top of the line.  It has a core2duo instead of an extreme, but the nvidia fx1600m has either max ram or 1/2 of that--specs below are confused on the subject of it having 256 or 512mb. The extra video ram is nice, and the FX1600M seems to provide a serious boost over the fx 360m's w/ 128mb that I've been XP gaming on up to this point.

 

It's a bit bigger than I'd like at 17"

 

But that means both ram slots are on the bottom, which is nice. 

 

The bottom photo was so nice I got the service tag for specs--I still don't know how much ram that 1600m is going to see. Sounds like some is shared and some is on the module(?).
If it shares some ram, that's probably fine--winxp32 can only see like 3.5gb if I upgrade it to 4gb

 

Finally, if I recall these have a mini-pci-e. I get all kinds of these mini form factors mixed up, but I think that's the one. So I figured I'd take a gamble with this neat little toy, and may actually buy it a real ssd for the port if it works (like a 256gb or something smaller).

 

I'm interested in seeing the speeds on it, since this will be an economical way to cram in a lot of storage as big micro sd cards are going to keep getting cheaper. 1tb cards will probably hit the $20 bargain bin within 10 years.

 

Just a heads up: if you do this, use it only as mass storage and not as the system drive.

 

Why:

 

Large SDCards have a native erase block size >4MB! (NTFS has a max cluster size of 64KB, with a preferred cluster size of 512 BYTES!)

 

Writes wIll be amplified an ungodly amount, and it will burn up the card's write life fast. Especially if the OS is scribbling all over it, like it was a spinny disk.

 

(I learned this lesson the hard way with a hacked chromebook, abusing the microSD slot for /home using linux. The cluster size is 4kb for EXT4 filesystem, but the browser cache and log files burned the card up in mere months of use. There is an effective mitigation for Linux, but not for windows.)

 

Only use it for mass storage. That will keep the OS from scribbling temp files and browser cache all over it. If you only write to it on rare occasions, it should be somewhat OKish, but keep this issue firmly in mind.