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Two
Dimension 8300
Part 2
Back
in 2004 I bought a Dell Dimension 8300 personal computer. I needed one.
My long-standing but somewhat flaky Compaq Presario 5004 was getting me
through reasonably well, with only a few sudden hard lockups per day1
until a basement flood came and pretty much
wrecked it. I actually did
try to revive it, by plugging it into an extension cord on the driveway
and not even hiding2 while I did so. The power supply just
sizzled a little.
I never did find out if the
motherboard was still good or not.
I still needed a new computer, so I
ordered a Dell Dimension 8300 in what should have been a good
configuration for the time: 1GB RAM, 160GB hard disk, Pentium 4
Prescott 3.4GHz CPU, nVidia graphics (nothing to write home about for
the time, and even less today) and a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS (as I
have no use for the SoundMAX that Dell would undoubtedly use in a
system without an audio expansion card). I spent about $1,800 on it
when the dust had settled.
Some people like to say that branded computers suck. I don't agree
wholeheartedly with that--a lot depends upon what you buy and how you
plan to use it. I was in no frame of mind at the time to build my own
computer anyway.
I ordered this in June of 2004 or so,
and waited until October to get it. (Dell did give me the option to
cancel my order because of this delay, but I stuck it out.) When it was
finally delivered, I
eagerly opened the box containing my new toy and set in to using it.
What I found is that it was not as impressive as it should have been.
And by “not as impressive as it should have been”, I really mean that
it wasn't very good at all. The system felt sluggish in every regard
when it came to disk I/O. Sometimes it would get so bound up that I'd
just give up and restart it.
This little game went on for several
years. At first I just put up with it, then I complained, followed by
more complaining and still more complaining yet3.
Somewhere along the line I bought an eMachines computer to replace
another system lost during the great flood and even in its bargain
basement configuration (PATA drives as compared to the Dim8300's SATA,
slower memory, onboard video and a slower AMD Athlon CPU) it still
soundly beat the pants off of the Dim8300.
The first thing I did to try and fix
the problem was to become vindictive. I viciously ripped the Prescott
3.4GHz Pentium 4 out of the system and replaced it with a lowly 2.2GHz
Celeron. And this did help—while it was obvious that the Celeron
couldn't think as quickly as the Prescott had, the speed of the system
actually picked up and the processor fan stopped sounding like a vacuum
cleaner at all times4.
This also confirmed that the Dimension 8300 motherboard and its A07
BIOS will in fact support a 400MHz FSB speed, something that
contravenes the Dell published specifications.
So I bought a 2.8GHz Pentium 4
Northwood CPU with an 800MHz FSB speed and installed that. It
definitely helped. Things still weren't what they should be.
At some point the nVidia video card
started to show signs of “personality”. It became finicky about
changing modes, and when it did, the video image frequently took some
time to settle down. Oddly enough, it was the basic capabilities of the
card—like the text mode—that succumbed to failure first. So I pulled
the card out and found a bloated cap, right next to the heatsink. I'll
spare you the whole
video-card-designer-puts-capacitors-right-where-the-most-heat-output-is
rant and tell you that this is exactly what did the card in. One
bloated cap, right next to the heatsink was all it took.
I chucked the card in favor of an ATI
Radeon X1300 AGP card. At the time, I was in a hurry and it was the 8X
AGP compatible card that my area Best Buy had for sale. I figured it
couldn't be too bad. Even though there is a capacitor sitting right in
the output from the cooling fan and it draws so much power as to need a
separate power connection, it's still alive and kicking. And
unlike the ATI Radeon 9800 Mac Edition to which I finally glued a
Rather Large Fan out of sheer exasperation, the X1300's fan has proven
reliable. Even so, I have overheated it to the point where the GPU
shifts its speed down.
What the Radeon X1300 is, if
anything, is slow. It's not slow to do whatever it is you're asking it
to do per se, it's just slow to acknowledge the request at times. In my
case, it'll freeze the system for a split second from time to time and
then get on with whatever it should be doing. No drivers have fixed it,
and while the card could be broken, I'd expect much more serious
misbehavior if it was. It's tolerable—this usually only happens when
switching video resolutions like you would if you were entering or
leaving a computer game and once at startup when the card seems to be
examining the monitors attached to it.
And where nVidia seems to continually
update and improve the drivers for its GPUs for a long time after their
release, ATI sunsets theirs pretty quickly. I'll consider it a lesson
learned and stick with nVidia from now on. I really do miss the days
when there was actually competition in the graphics market.
With the hard drives getting long in
the tooth, I opted to replace both of them. When I bought my Dimension
8300, SATA hard drives were still a pretty new idea, and both of the
drives in it were basically PATA drives with a SATA bridge IC on them.
This didn't really matter—the onboard ICH5 is only capable of operating
in ATA emulation mode anyway. With disk I/O being the seeming root of
all the problems I was seeing, I upgraded to new hard drives (both of
them native SATA drives) and chose a different brand. The originals
were Western Digital hard drives and the replacements came from Seagate
and Samsung.
This made no difference. Disk I/O was
still sluggish.
Somewhere in this whole saga I bought
a Dimension 8400 secondhand, the system that came out right after my
8300 had been delivered. It too had a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Prescott CPU,
although this one was in LGA775 trim as opposed to the 8300's Socket
478 CPU. The Dim8400 also ran rings around the 8300 in every regard,
and barely raised its cooling fan to above a whisper no matter what it
was doing.
Maybe I should have bought a
Dimension 8400 to start with? It certainly offered a lot of
improvements over the 8300—LGA775 CPUs with 64-bit computing support,
DDR2 memory, an Intel 925X Express chipset that could operate attached
SATA disks in AHCI mode (allowing the computer and its operating system
to make use of advanced SATA features, such as NCQ) and at least two
PCI express slots.
On the one hand, I felt good about
buying the Dimension 8300 because it was the more mature of the two
machines and you should usually never buy version 1.0 of anything. On
the other hand, with the improved specifications of the Dimension 8400,
Dell had just put the slipper in a few more times5 for good measure.
While it's a double edged sword, the
rapid obsolescence of computer equipment can be a good thing at times.
In particular, it let me find and buy another Dimension 8300 computer
system on eBay for a song. This system was advertised as being in
working condition.
“Working” apparently means a lot of
different things to people. I've got to be careful here, lest I segue
into an eBay rant (which I'm still working on). To me, “working” means
that something powers on and can reasonably be said to operate as
expected.
If you ever buy a computer and have
it shipped to you, it would be a very good idea to check the system out
before you ever plug it in. The Shipping People love nothing more than
to engage in contact sports with packages entrusted to them, so what
enters the system as a pristine cardboard box containing a computer
encased solidly in molded foam arrives as a shapeless carboard bag
containing some plastic pieces, phenolic shards and bits of wire that
might be a computer if you squinted at it in just the right way.
But I digress. I could hear something
rattling around in the computer and went to check it out. Nothing was
obviously amiss, so I swung the clamshell case apart and proceeded to
shift the system around while I examined it.
I should mention that doing this does
require some upper body strength, especially if you are a lazy-ass who
behind is planted solidly into an easy chair when you do it. In
particular, holding a 40 pound computer whose case is clamshelled apart
and swinging it around rapidly above your head to see what falls out
can lead to a sudden shifting of balance that could take you by
surprise and send you crashing to the floor while the still opened
computer flies into a nearby table lamp. Of course, while you are
regaining your composure and figuring out what profanity is appropriate
to use in this situation, the computer will continue on a flight path
guided mainly by the value of objects in its path, choosing only to fly
in a direction that assures only stuff with value will be in the way.
Fortunately, I did not lose control
of the computer. Not that I was doing such a thing while seated in an
easy chair to begin with, you understand.
Anyway.
What I did find was a
discombustulated CPU fan hanging loose in the system, a missing CMOS
battery, and a whole row of bloated capacitors running alongside the
CPU. Although I heard something made of plastic rattling around in the
case, I never did find it and perhaps it is now in the easy chair,
safely ensconced in some place where it will remain until I've
forgotten about this activity, at which point it will break out and no
doubt prong me in the nether regions when I least expect it, thus
necessitating the need to buy another table lamp. As found, the system
did work. I fixed the capacitors later.
I am convinced that the Shipping
People did not have anything to do with this fan becoming detached. The
bloated capacitors suggest that the fan was out of place for some time
prior to the computer ever being put up for sale. To give you an idea
of the simply phenomenal (keep in mind that I am working with the
normal standards of Shipping People as a baseline here) abuse it would
take to dislodge the fan, it is actually mounted on some fat rubbery
pegs that extend far past the holes drilled in the fan body. To pull
the fan off of these pegs would surely take deliberate effort.
Therefore I postulate that someone had reason to remove the fan. The
only other way I can see it coming off is if you put the computer on a
trebuchet and lined it from one end of a football field to the other.
What you'd have after that would look less like a computer than what
you'd have after the shipping people got through with it.
Putting it back into place was not
terribly difficult, although I did break one stretchy peg in the
process of doing so. Oops.
What was more interesting was the
missing CMOS battery. Why would anyone have removed that? I bought a
replacement and put it back together.
There. It's better now. Let's see if
it works. I pushed the machine closed, plugged in the power cord and it
came on. After setting the time and date it seemed a lot happier, so I
tried to shut it off. It would not turn off from the power button, so I
pulled the plug. After plugging it back in, I came to find out that it
would not turn back on. Why? I started to assume the worst—that the
motherboard had failed or something—but then I played with the ribbon
cable leading to the front panel, only to discover that where it
plugged into the motherboard, the connector had been manhandled to the
point where it was no longer holding the ribbon cable in contact with
the metal teeth that serve to complete the electrical connections. I
pressed the cable back down over the teeth and tried again.
Then the power button started to work
properly.
To my way of thinking, this explained
the missing CMOS battery. Without it, the system would not remember its
last power state, and every time AC power was restored, it would turn
on. While this is dumb, I'm impressed (in a Rube Goldberg sense) that
someone thought of this as a “solution” to the problem of a busticated
front panel cable. Of course, they could have done the same thing
intelligently, by using the Dell setup utility and telling the system
to always come back on after a loss of input power, but why do that
when you can actually play around inside the computer and run a much
bigger risk of Breaking Something Beyond Economical Repair?
Well. That was a bit more of a rant
than I expected to type here. Armed with my newly delivered and
“guaranteed working” computer, I set in to making some cross
comparisons.
I had a strong suspicion that this
system had, perhaps, been the recipient of some “organ donations” over
the years, but when I went to look up the system configuration from the
service tag, I got a “500 Server Error” response from the Dell web
site. At first I thought their system really was broken, but it worked
for my other systems AND it worked well enough for Dell's download
service to provide only the downloads that were relevant to this
system. As of this writing, it's still broken. That one service tag #
throws it for a loop every time. Go figure. Anyone want to cue up a
copy of the X-Files theme?
I aligned its configuration with my
first Dimension 8300 by installing a SATA hard disk, updating the BIOS
to revision A07, installing 2GB of RAM and finishing things up by
installing a 3.2GHz Northwood Pentium 4 with an 800MHz FSB speed and
hyper-threading support. My main system has a 2.8GHz Northwood, but
it's close enough for this comparison. Both operate under Windows XP
Professional at this time, although the problems with my first Dim8300
had been noted under Windows 2000 as well.
I ran a lot of programs, downloaded
stuff and really pushed the new Dimension 8300 hard. Based on nothing
more precise than "seat of the pants experience", it's clear that the
new Dimension 8300 laps the one I bought new. The conclusion that I've
come to is that something—most probably something on the motherboard—is
just ever so slightly broken in my original Dimension 8300. It and the
power supply are the only original pieces of hardware left (outside of
the optical drives, which I'm sure are not the problem). This new
system handily trounces it in every task I've tried so far.
I'm not sure yet what I'll do about
this. Maybe I will replace the motherboard in my first Dimension
8300...or maybe I'll just build the dream system I'd like to have here
and now in 2010?
Go Back >
Copyright © 2011
William
R. Walsh.
All Rights Reserved. Permission is granted to reproduce this material
or to use any part of it in other creations, so long as the following
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printing supply expenses) and no part of this material may be used in
creations that are illegal, dangerous or derogatory. Created, edited
and posted 05/16/2011.
Footnotes:
1 Lack of money breeds tolerance, don't you know?
2 I'm a big chicken when it comes to diddling with
electricity and plugging in devices of questionable condition. I did
hide around the corner when testing a submerged APC UPS. This was
probably a good thing as the UPS went off with a flash and a pretty
good bang when I plugged it in. How I didn't pop a circuit breaker with
such shenanigans remains a great mystery.
3 Lack of money, part deux.
4 This system, along with most of the others that I
own, runs distributed.net around the clock.
5 This means roughly the same thing as “kicking a man
when he's down”.