Downgrading a Retro Dell Computer (to make it better!)
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- Опубликовано: 14 июн 2024
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This is the best home computer of the 20th century....according to PC World Magazine in December of 1999, but we're not interested in that, I have a much more personal goal in mind today and that's why I'm going to take this powerful PC and downgrade it. Why? Because we can, but first it needs cleaning and fixing.
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02:54 Who are PCBWay.com?
03:19 Inspecting a Dell Dimension XPS T600
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13:40 Downgrading the XPS T600
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If you enjoy this video please consider taking a moment to subscribe! Thank you so much - Neil
Great video as usual! It's a pretty good life, isn't it, Neil?
Some of my favorite content on RUclips. Thanks for being awesome Neil!
That's kind! thank you very much and thanks for watching
Dell should be ashamed of themselves, modifying a standard connector with their own pinout should be criminal.
This is why I've always hated Dell. Yes, hate. It's a strong word but very applicable to a company that is so greedy they use custom parts for just about everything. As a retro gamer, DELL is a brand you should leave well & truly ignored because it gets expensive REAL quickly to source original compatible parts and the hardware quality is sub par at best anyway!
They should be ashamed for a lot of reasons, but they're clearly incapable of shame
@@adamwhite2364 If they were, they wouldn't have been doing it for nearly 30 years by now ... .
I had a chance at a huge pile of free Dell PCs from the early 2010's a few years ago and I took one look at them (opened them up) and saw they were utterly useless. There was no room for expansion cards let alone a graphics card, terrible BIOS, custom everything - nothing was salvageable. Even the DVD drive was so cheap they were almost all dead and the PSU lack connectors. Everything had to go to the dump which is a shame.
Just a heads up on these, if you want to use a regular ATX power supply and not an ancient Dell proprietary one, you can desolder the 20 pin connector and move it down on the board so that it uses the previously unused 6 holes, and you can then do away with the auxiliary power connector if you want.
Good info. This kind of proprietary nonsense is why I stopped buying Dell.
you can WHAT
**
I do recommend if anyone does this, they use a new 20 pin ATX connector as the dell one is missing one 5v pin.@@ryandary
There are adapter cables too for using standard PSUs on these boards with a breakout for the AT style connector. They seem to be getting harder to find on the usual websites but I've got several of these types of Dells running fine with them and no soldering required!
I too was able to convert this exact Dell board to the standard ATX power connector. I would advise not reusing the existing connector and getting a new one from mouser or an electronics parts store. But this Dell XPS case is one of my favorites from the era.
The nostalgia is strong with this one! I remember upgrading our PC in bits and pieces during this era. It's impossible to overstate how quickly the landscape changed between 1995 and 1999. No one today will ever experience the jaw dropping difference of going from Quake2 running in software at 320x200, to running it with a 3DFX Voodoo 1 at 800x600. It makes me laugh to hear modern gamers banging on about their performance demands for the latest games - they have no idea how good they have it. Back then, if you were young enough to be into this stuff, you probably didn't have a job, or certainly not one that paid enough to afford a machine like we see here - even rich parents would probably have said no! Thanks so much for the video - nicely done!
I had a voodoo 3 but I didn't get my first PC until february of 2000 when I was 17 about to be 18 in 2 months. A computer was always too rich for our family. Then I got a voodoo 5 9 months after that lol. I was using one of those Best Buy bought HP pavillions with an intell celeron 500 mghz processor lol. It did not come with the voodoo 3 I bought that separate.
Preach brother, what a moment. hehe
i did briefly have a pc with sli voodoo2, but it was back in 2000 when my brother upgraded his pc to a geforce 2 GTS and i got his voodoo2 to pair with mine on my system. a pair of diamon monster 3D II. which is still have right here, btw! it was cool.
@@GraveUypo I wish I had had the room or the foresight to keep all my old gear and the boxes etc. My younger bro called me up one day and asked if he could sell it. I was chasing girls so I just said "Sure whatever" 😀
I'll never forget my first 3DFX graphics card from Orchid. My games came to life great memories.
Those were the best. They had a relay that made an audible click when you switched to 3D accelerated mode.
I had this one too, bought in the year 2000. They upgraded the CPU to 650MHz with a note explaining that they ran out of the 600MHz chips. This was when 1GHz was just becoming available. Everything was obsolete in 6 months back then!
it is amazing how fast cpu clocks changed then and how fast thibgs became obsolete - in 2001 I bought a dell laptop that was 933MHz with a geforce 2go
Oh man, the memories. I had this exact model. Kept me going for a long time.
I still have this
John, did your PC have a DVD drive from the outset? 📀
My brother had one but with a Zip100 added. He had the same DVD and CD-RW tandem setup though
I had a Voodoo Banshee around that time as well! I remember installing it after playing the original Unreal in software rendering mode, and suddenly the game looked unreal. 😉
Me too.
When i got my Voodoo banshee, my brother decided to go for the Rage Fury MAXX, which was wicked fast in the one game he could get working on it, lol
@@gloomsurvivor The Maxx was my first GPU too. Got really lucky in that it played all the games in my small collection.
Happy and proud of the Cave's growth and its multiple endeavours, but this is the meat and potatoes of the channel. Love it, please keep it coming!
Highly recommend to add cooling on those Voodoos. One of my school mates had similar setup. We punched/drilled the solid side panel of a no-name tower to place 4x80mm fans. Lovely memories! Big thx for the vid!
Absolutely, I bought a PCI fan bracket and placed a Noctua 120mm fan pointed directly at the TMUs on my V2s since mine had no additional cooling/heatsinks.
Those buggers run fairly hot when stressed.
First time I played with accelerated graphics on my 200MMX was when I got a Matrox m3D card for $40 at Electronics Boutique sometime in late 1998. I went from playing Quake 2 online on software rendering at like 15FPS to OpenGL Quake 2 at 15FPS. The moment I loaded up Quake 2 and switched it to OpenGL and saw the m3D come alive on my PC was the best feeling in the world. I still remember that moment vividly.
The nostalgia for me in this video!
Need for Speed 3 Hot Pursuit was one of my favourite games to play on my Voodoo2 setup. I still remember saving up to buy that graphics card. Seeing the retail box in the video bought the memories flooding back 😊
That beast got me six years to a masters while it ran as a Napster ftp 24/7 I specifically remember only turning it on once for the original boot up and a week before graduation 6 years later to move out. Other than windows restarts....great workhorse
Love this era of gaming and computing. I built a ultimate 1999 PC with a Pentium III 733, 512 mb RAM and the GeForce 256 DDR, the videocard that just came in time for Christmas '99.
Voodoo/Glide just has this very distinct look. In older titles, if you go from software to Glide, you're all amazed. In newer titles, going from D3D or OpenGL back to Glide... not as much, lol. The 256x256 texture and 16 bit limitations really start affecting it when compared to what the GeForce cards could do in 2000/2001. The end was nigh for 3DFX.
A recommendation for Glide: Dethkarz! This racing game really shines with the slightly blurry look of 3DFX graphics. It gives you that feeling of speed.
I had a dual Celeron 400, running at 490 MHz on a BP6 mainboard, 384 Mo ram and a Voodoo 3 3000. A beast ...
Then a friend bought a GeForce 256 DDR for his P3 800, and I knew it was the end of 3DFx :)
I really hated the GF colors, but performance was way better.
Brilliant. I recently rescued a Dimension XPS T700r that had been abandoned in a cupboard for 10+ years at work, as it hasn't been used it's basically mint and even still has the NT 4.0 Workstation product key sticker on the side. I'll be using that to install that OS when I get around to it.
When I was working in Dell support in Canada. We were helping users on replacing PC components over the phone.
These machines are great for sweet spot of DOS and late 90s Windows gaming. Nice work Neil.
tombott from DF?
@@thetwistedsock3253 indeed
@@BottIsNotABot I was beansontoast. The website is on again although not very active. There's also a discord.
I was lucky enough to have SLI back in the day, two Diamonds exactly like here. I LOVE that you point the camera at the screen, works really well!
This system was peak Dell back in the late 90s. I had a Dimension XPS R400 with a Pentium II, which was built in the same chassis. The XPS R and T models were insanely upgradable and you can go from a lowly 400 MHz Pentium II to a 1.4 GHz Tualatin Celeron all with the same motherboard. My XPS R lasted me more than 7 years and I skipped the Pentium 4 systems and went straight to the Core 2 systems afterwards. The system got upgraded with a Voodoo3, Sound Blaster Live, UltraATA-100 PCI cards, DVD-ROM and CD burners. The only big drawback is that the power supply and motherboard were proprietary.
I actually prefer that image is captured by filming the CRT over directly capturing the graphic output. While the latter gives a sharper image, I find them too sharp sometimes to point of being slightly ugly as it’s missing the natural smoothing introduced by the CRT. Also filming them from a CRT actually shows how games looked back then in a much more realistic manner than a direct capture.
They didn't tend to have as bad of flicker or rolling lines or anything like that as they tend to have when filmed.
@@Aeduo I know this is new for Neil, I do see some frame rolling due to the difference between shutter and scan rate of monitor. It's hard to get an exact match. I know LGR always gets his spot on, I think he must have a camera that has precision frame rate adjustments or is has some features to help lock to the monitors frame rate.
I kind of get what you mean. Something gets lost in the analogue signal to digital capture. Probably just the capture cards encoding chip having digital signal math doing some truncating and filling in some gaps while a CRT would just display it warts and all without any sort of manipulation. That and things like the shadow mask and aperture grille, its easy to forget those older games, software, and operating systems were developed on CRT monitors that used these technologies and that would have effected the aesthetic tastes (good or bad) of pretty much anything meant to be displayed from when CRT was the standard.
@@marcusdambergerLGR has an entire video about filming PC CRTs but to confirm yeah he has DSLRs that have tiny adjustments for scanline timing. He also has lenses to get rid of the moire effect on his CRTs. Fascinating video, I love it
Dell did that ATX power switcheroo on purpose. It started in late 1998 and continued for several years. I saw a LOT of those piles of excrement back in the day, and usually after someone had already tried to swap in a standard power supply. To this day I will not recommend a Dell under any circumstances. A quick search of articles from back in the day reveals, "[I]f you study the Dell main and auxiliary connector pinouts ... and compare them to the industry standard ATX pinouts ..., you'll see that not only are the voltage and signal positions changed, but the number of terminals carrying specific voltages and grounds has changed as well. It would be possible to modify a Dell supply to work with a standard ATX board, or to modify a standard ATX supply to work with a Dell board, but you'd have to do some cutting and splicing in addition to swapping some terminals around. Usually it wouldn't be worth the time and effort."
Loved playing ut99 on my 3dfx voodoo card. I remember being amazed at the change from software rendering after I installed it. That started my journey into computer gaming from console and wanting the newest hardware for the games. I’m teaching my son about building computers now and we recently assembled his new rig featuring a 4080.
I really love the passion in your voice when speaking about the things in the museum.
I gave you clapping ovation when you pulled out the Voodoo2. The late 90"s SoundBlaster 64 Cards were great too. Playing Thief the Dark project with its beautiful directional sound design through 5.1 surround was awesome. Same for Descent Free Space 2. Incredible sound design.
Excellent project Neil! Reminds me of the kind of things we did on PCW! And I'm loving your CRT capture, it looks brilliant.
Great job Neil, a nice choice of internals and a cleaning montage too.
This episode brought back nostalgia for one of my old systems from back in the day. It's was a Compaq pretty similar to this Dell, having a ATI Rage with Voodoo combo although not SLI, the sound-card I used was a Soundblaster AWE32 with RAM Upgrade with it's giant size filling up the entire case length. When I think back that was one of my favorite systems.
When I think of this era I think of Need for Speed III. That's a game that I played extensively in software rendering and then later I had a friend who let me borrow his old Voodoo2 Banshee for a while and it made a drastic difference, that's for sure.
I really enjoyed this one, thank you 😊🎉
A really well put together and very neatly done video Neil, I am excited for this kind of programming as I was when tomorrows world/Horizon was on television back in the day, even if it was 3 hours I still would savour every frame. thank you for making it free, it would be waaaay undervaluing this work by calling it content! keep up the good work.
Another video full of happy memories for me.late 90s just awsome for 3d games , i had just gotten into pc gaming with bits handed down from other people upgrading. Great video and so happy u got it running again
Awesome video! Always good to see some retro pc footage. Curious as to what you consider a good joystick to use for this era of games? Have a Logitech Wingman Extreme Digital but it wears my hand/arm out after minimal gameplay.
"Unreal" (NOT Unreal Tournament) was my top #1 3dfx game with it's Castle intro fly-by, glassy floors, ambience and music.
A friend of mine had this one. It was his first PC after owning an Amiga for 10 years, and he spent a fortune on it. Impressive stuff at the time. The first time I ever watched a DVD was a rented copy of The Matrix on this bad boy. The 19in Trinitron monitor was superb. My friend gave it to me after he switched to a vastly inferior TFT monitor and I used it for another 10 years or so.
I still continue to use the monitor from the XPS R450 (one of the models that came shortly after this one) for my modern desktop. Same monitor, essentially, though I think it's a bit bigger (24 inches, maybe?). It's huge, and heavy. And it still works perfectly.
Carmageddon is my absolute fave from that era, still looks fantastic!
Wonderful build and video Neil, thank you!
I have several similar model Dells in my collection but not Voodoo cards to put in them unfortunately.
Still, they make great retro gaming machines and as you said, the build quality of the case and the airflow solution are brilliant.
Awesome! My first PC. Mine only had one optical drive, a TNT2, and a PowerPC coprocessor of sorts that attached to the DVD drive and GPU to let it play DVDs. I took it apart sometime in 2005 and that's how I learned about computers
I always love on a Thursday keeping an eye out for a good long RMC video after work. The first proper gaming PC I had was I believe the model down from this as it was a T500 XPS range. It had a Pentium III 500 and 128MB of RAM. It also had a DVD drive with an MPEG decoder card with TV out which I had hooked up to the TV in my apartment. A lot of my mates often say its the the first time they saw a DVD in action. The first one I bought was Trainspotting and it came on a flip disk with the 16:9 version on one side and the 4:3 on the other side. I can't for the life of me remember what GFX card was in it but I think it was something like an ATI Rage Pro and soon after that I bought a Voodoo 3. It was a beast of a PC at the time and my late Father put up the guarantee so I could buy it and pay if off monthly for 3 years. I think I spent around 2,400 euros on it and got a good few years out of it. I also ended up working for Dell for a number of years and it was one of the best jobs I ever had.
As soon as you mentioned grabbing another ATX power supply I groaned because I knew what was coming.
I have the Dell Dimension XPS R450, which I believe is the model that came after this one and the R400, and thankfully addressed nearly all of the issues of the XPS T600 and R400. I continued to use it as my daily driver until about fifteen years ago (yes, seriously), and it then became my primary retro machine. For the purposes of 95/98/XP/2000/Windows 7 retro gaming, the Dell Dimension XPS series is ridiculously good, and adaptable. I've not worked on it at all, and everything still works. Power supply, etc. The only thing that crapped out were the Altec Lansing speakers. The giant Sony Triniton monitor is still my primary monitor on my modern desktop (it's about 24", which is bigger than the monitor that came with this one). This thing is a beast. Good choice.
5:00 - This might be an idea for Halloween: “Jar-House of Horrors”, with each jar containing the “patina” removed from an entire family of systems.
Like the witches heads in Return to Oz?
Great video. I remember my Voodoo 3 and played Turok endlessly. It looked amazing back then, just the the 3dfx intro logo still gets me excited!
I remember lusting for the Voodoo 2 SLI setups on the windows of PC shops back in the day. It would have blown my mind back then.
Wow... I had one just like that back in 1999, with the Altec Lansing speakers and 17" monitor. It was a Pentium III 550 with a Voodoo 3 3000. Spent many many hours playing all kinds of games. Nice to see a video about this computer.
Great video - this is definitely a teenaged pipe dream for me! Hope to get a chance to come play Carmageddon - many hours spent playing that at a NOT smooth framerate while at college.
Job well done, like usual ❤
An absolute golden era of gaming. I miss it so much. Thanks for the trip down memory lane
Good video. In 1997 I had an Aptiva that I filled with 2 Voodoo 2's. Sound blaster board with sound blaster speakers. I also put 512k in its slots. So much fun.
Had on of those back in the day, very nice and solid machine.
Edit: almost forgot about a nice "upgrade", i changed the cpu cooler for a active one and the back fan acted as an exaust, helped a lot in hot brazilian days =)
Very cool build! Wish I had grabbed a couple Voodoo2 cards when they were still cheap - never imagined they'd get up to $100+ on ebay! I do remember seeing a Vogons thread comparing an original Voodoo with different CPUs, and it performed best at around 600-700MHz, so I suspect you could squeeze a few more frames out of it with a 1GHz P3, although 600MHz certainly isn't underpowered by any stretch
I wondered where this vid was going, very nice. My first 3D card was a Voodoo II, and the first game we tried was Quake II. We were all stunned at the difference, and I enjoyed bringing it around to mates' houses and repeating the process! Is there still another PCI slot available? If so, have you considered a Sound Blaster Live! instead? That would give you not just the Glide gaming from that , but also EAX surround titles, plus DOS compatability. And the software and mixing suite on Win9x was absolutely stonking, with brilliant effects to play with all day long. And yes, I had a Voodoo II and Sound Blaster Live! ;-) Beast of a machine.
I blew up a Dell back in the day using a standard ATX PSU, the bar-stewards deliberately cross wired them... never made that mistake again!
The hard way is sometimes the only way to learn 😂
The Internet has done a pretty good job of informing the tech community about Xbox clock capacitors, and Dell not-quite-ATX power supplies. I had always wondered exactly which ones had that particular land mine. Question: Answered. Thanks, Neil!
@@nickwallette6201How do you identify these models of Dell that have the non-standard pinout of the PS? From what range of dates did they make them? i.e. 96'-2002 or some such? As an example. Guess I need to research that. My work has a bunch of old systems from that era up in storage that haven't been tossed. Now they are worth reviving and giving new life to them with so many into retro computers from that time.
@@marcusdamberger Well, one way to identify which ones have a different pinout is to plug in a standard ATX supply and see if it blows up. :-D
I guess another would be to compare the wiring of the connector to the standard pinout (which you can easily find online.) I don't know what Dell's color scheme is -- if they stick to the yellow=12V, red=5V, orange=3.3V scheme, or if they use alternate colors (blue=12V, e.g.)
I'm sure that info is online as well. You could Google the PSU's part number and see if you can find pinouts for it. Someone has probably also documented which computer models have non-standard PSUs, but I don't know if it's safe to assume those are 100% accurate or complete.
If you want to be thorough (and this is definitely what I would do), either use a multimeter and test the pins yourself, or pull the cover off the PSU and see where the wires go. The PCB is usually labeled by section, so you'll have a cluster of wires soldered to the board, with a silk-screened outline around them and "+12" somewhere in the vicinity. That way, you can make your own color-to-voltage map, then color-to-pins map, and therefore, a voltage-to-pins map. Compare that with the standard pinout and you're definitely good to go.
EDIT: Don't forget the special pins -- POK and PON namely. It's possible that on some proprietary supplies (no idea about Dell specifically) these might not behave the same way as normal ATX. POK should have +5V on it when the PSU is stable. PON should have something like +5V on it as well, but only through a pull-up resistor, so you can short it to ground to turn on the supply. If either of those things isn't the case, you might not be able to swap in a standard PSU -- at least not without adapters of some kind.
Holy childhood batman!!!! This was literally (well the T550 not T600) the first ever computer my family had.
This took me back to my days of playing Carmageddon. Nice to see it running so smoothly, still looks like great fun.
That Acorn Phoebe case in the background makes me both happy as sad, happy that you've got one (I had one too, that I shoehorned a RISC PC mainboard in it) and sad about what could've been. RIP Acorn!
Dual Voodoo 2 was such a flex back in the day... good memories.
I had that case on mine! 455mhz p2 that came with a geforce 2 and a 16gb hdd. I think i put in a ram upgrade to 256 and later added a dvd decoder and a cdwriter. That kept me going all the way through to 2001 when i built a p4 with spares from a mate :)
Oh, memories! I did have a dual Voodoo II setup in SLI! Don't know why I sold them, but they are prohibitively expensive today. Very nice to see them again! I always lived Quake I (glquake). Brilliant!
Great stuff. My machine of the era had matrix millennium or g4 cards in it with orchid sound wave 32 for audio. Do you have similar at the cave? Great days :-)
Forsaken - Saw it on demo at Simply computers and went up to the counter and said "I want whatever is making that game look like that" my 1st Voodoo II.
The PII/PIII IBM in the corner looks a lot like the beast I used when I was 15-16, learning programming and reverse engineering. I had two of them and hosted an mmo server on one of them. I remember before I had got into PC repair myself, a local tech had asked me "What do you need more than a GB of ram for?" I told him straight up that I was running servers on it. He seemed kinda off put by the fact someone less than half his age was running server software and understanding it. Well, later when he repaired one of my rigs, he didn't seat the ram properly and the PC didn't post when I plugged it in. I returned it and explained the situation and he had the nerve to slap a sticker on the case, accusing me of tampering with the PC after I had taken it home.. It was less than an hour I returned. I never came back, I decided from that point on that he was incompetent and I'd do it myself from now on. Now I do it for a living as well as freelance programming/development.
-Minor edit: Had he just said okay, fixed it, and returned the PC and didn't accuse me, I wouldn't have labeled him as incompetent. I might have never decided to open a PC case. Funny how that works. I should thank him some day.
Thank you once again for the awesome video! This was a really amazing period of time for me, as I went from my Canopus Pure3D 6Mb Voodoo1 card to a single Voodoo 2 card, then eventually I bought a second Voodoo2 card to run SLI. I was the king of Lan parties as I also had a dual AMD Athlon system on a Asus A7M-266D board. So I had dual everything! Ha ha ha
No one talks about PC fight club! 😁👍
It is the first rule after all...
Another great video! My suggestions for 3d games would be Mechwarrior 3&4, Deus Ex, Shogun Total War, Max Payne, Black and White. They span between 99 and 2001 so hopeful they'd be buttery smooth
Huge bonus that it’s in one of my all time favorite cases. I bought one directly from the OEM because I couldn’t afford a Dell. Wish I still had it.
I’m gonna need a week to visit the cave!
I’m going to recommend rogue spear, it came out in ‘99 and still holds up today. Would love to see how it looks on this power house!
Thanks for putting together this Dell. While not my favorite PC from that era, it's leaps and bounds better than that Packard Bell. I've come around to Dell for laptops for my own personal use. Bought a gaming laptop in 2016 with 32 GB of RAM I still use today and the only failing component is the keyboard, but the laptop and its keyboard still work well enough to be usable after 7 years. Haven't replaced a single part.
Love these videos. I think I prefer the video capture directly from the CRT, get to that lovely CRT mask effect that is lost from a direct capture.
Very similar to my Pentium II 400 MHz build I did a couple of years ago now, same chipset I believe but with an MX400 and two voodoo 2 cards and 128MB RAM (Which I know now might have actually been a reasonable upgrade around a year later) and a YMF744 based sound card. An excellent general 90s machine for DOS and Windows and its good to see a similar PC here in the cave doing very well in that regard. Worth noting that 3DFX Tomb Raider patch is still useful to modern machines because it can run under a modified DOSBOX with Glide emulation and you can play Tomb Raider 1 at very high (For the time) resolutions and its really lovely.
6:18 I bought one of those cleaners recently off ebay for $100 Aus. Really good. As much as I would like cordless I always work on the comptuers in the same spot so its not like I have to move around, and it comes with a long braided cord too.
Great video. My favourite game for this setup would be Screamer Rally, I still play it on Dosbox but a 3dfx play would be a dream. ❤
Your videos have the effort and quality of production of a channel with 10 million subscribers. I am new here but you have my respect as a tech obsessed Yorkshire-man. It's because of you, LGR and Tech Tangents that I am building a vintage machine. Vintage being relative of course as it's DDR3 lol.
That’s very kind and I’m delighted you’ve found some inspiration in the videos and are enjoying some retro building. Good luck with the new/old PC
Powerslide is a great 3DFX driving game, made by Australian game studio Ratbag (now defunct). Had an awesome time with it during LAN sessions. It's on GOG fairly cheaply too.
It's funny you chose to go with the ATI card.
In 1999, I had a very similar setup, although from Compaq.
It had the ATI Rage 128 Pro AIW, paired up with a Slo1 Pentium 3 at 500MHz and 128MB of RAM.
The amazing thing was, the ATI card provided hardware acceleration for DVD playback. I also added a Voodoo 2 for the Glide/3Dfx support, and the ATI card actually provided decent DirectX / Direct3D and DOS support. Though my system only came with a 12.5GB harddrive, not a 20+ one, but that was still quite a lot for the time.
I got a similar experience with the "standardness" of these computers with a "Gateway 2000", the connector was standard, but the mount had one of the four screws shifted by about one centimeter just to make sure you could not put a standard ATX PSU.
I also had a Banshee, loved that card, one of the fastest 2D cards on the market, the only real weakness of the 3Dfx cards was that they only had 16 bit rendering while the competition had upgraded to 24 bit, which made a hell of a difference in term of quality of gradients.
And as a game suggestion: Batlezone!
Back in the late 90's stationed at RAF Lakenheath in the UK, one of the Dell desktops I helped keep running in Radio Maint. lost power one day. Looked in to it, and the power supply failed. Would've taken weeks to get a replacement Dell one. Went to our PC computer shop in the Base Exchange building, and found a suitable one to replace it. Switched around the two pins Dell "modified" for their mainboard, installed it, and PC was fully back up and operational. Never had any more issue with it.
That Dell mainboard is actually a rebadged (and heavily stripped-down) standard Intel desktop mainboard with a custom BIOS. I remember those non-standard ATX connectors, they were a real trap for anyone servicing Dell PCs. You're lucky your board survived.
Now, when it comes to 3dfx, two games of my early PC gaming days come to mind: Starsiege and Blood 2: The Chosen. I owned copies of those games but never had the chance to truly experience them to their full potential back in the day.
Back in 1999, my system was only a lowly 300 Mhz Celeron with 128 MB RAM and a low-end 4MB S3 card. In most 3D games, all it could do was software rendering.
Oh yes, a really good looking racing game of the era is Motorhead. However, the most fun racer, of all time IMHO, is Ignition, which has a very effective 3DFX version. Ignition is actually available on Steam and playable today, but sadly we can only run it in software on modern hardware.
Your CRT capture is really good!
I remember in the 90's when i put a 3DFX Voodoo card in the PC i built myself. All games looked better, ran incredibly smooth, with anti-aliasing, bilinear filtering, etc... it marked the beginning of a new era, and now in 2032 my GPU cost the same price that my entire pc (excluding monitor) cost back then.
And i game so much less now, as well.
90's had no paywalled content, no DRM, no 'season pass', no "day 1 patch", no "always online". I'd trade online multiplayer and DLC any day of the week to go back to 90's gaming ideals.
Sign.
Nice Voodoo BTW.
Great content, nice to see the old Voodo´s in action. Back in the days i had an ELSA Vodoo Banshee. Good times.
Still have a few of these Dells from the slightly better looking M166s up to a B1000 with Rdram all with various 3dfx's in up to a V3 3000 in the B1000, I love these cases, so easy to work on.
clickbait, no downgrade in sight
Very beautiful retro system, like!
My moment was Quake 2. From bordered software mode to fullscreen 3dfx mode was just mind-blowing. Great vid
Had an Orchid Rightous 3D, can still remember the clicking noises it made when firing up a 3dfx game
Great video! I had a Voodoo2 Paired with a ATI Rage back in the day. I loved the look of 3DFX Glide titles. Fond memories of Carmageddon 2. The original Half Life.
Very similar to my current retro build and almost exactly the same goals, win98 era gaming with those games running at their best, I'll be using a voodoo 3, will play with that dos launcher though
Clive Barker's Undying would be a good game to get on there. I think it natively supports the glide API too.
Fantastic video; brings back some happy memories of my first upgrade to a Voodoo card, and then a Voodoo 2 - no, I never had an SLI setup either!! 😆
Good games from the era to run? Obviously the original Quake 1 with 3DFX patch, and the glorious Dungeon Keeper with 3DFX patch...I loved DK and then when I applied the 3DFX patch, it ran soooo much better, and looked so much better; I wasted so many hours building dungeons and trapping/destroying the neighbouring enemies that attacked; it was a brilliant experience....a fabulous game with an incredible sense of dark humour, that would be non-offensive in the cave; you might have trouble getting people to leave though...!! 😂
This is 100% my time of machine. I was sporting a pentium celeron with a voodo clone I think back in 1998 on my first machine. What a joy of a computer.
Just like the Compaq's, those Dell's were a pleasure to work on. 👍
Thanks for sharing what you do.
Ah wow! This was my first PC back in the late 90s - or one VERY close to it (edit, it was the Dell Dimension XPS T500 Pentium III 500 MHz, the lower cost one). Served me well - miss it!
Fantastic restoration & repurposing that makes me long to see if I can find my original Voodoo II cards!
New area looks good, how's the floor
I bought a Voodoo 2 with money I had saved up back in 1999. When I got it the card was faulty, there weren't anymore of them in stock. The company replaced it with a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP. I miss 3DFX.
I would probably run Interstate '76 on it. I remember playing it back in the day, it was quite good.
Cool.. Good for letting us know about the non standard incompatible PSU, I have an R450 Pentium 2 cleaned up sat waiting for RAM and HDD.. It also has a Iomega ZIP drive