I have a slightly older IBM like this and it's the same boat. Upgrading, it is sort of possible if you go with PCI cards. It has space for 2 of them but it's limited to shorter cards. Due to the floppy drive and its ribbon cable getting in the way. I want to say the one I have is from 2002 or 2003. It runs 98/ME/2K/XP like a champ. Currently I have ME installed on it. I forget why I went that way with it.
The school I worked for a decade ago had a full computer lab of these they had from 2005 until 2015 running XP and then Windows 7. All of them got new thermal compound during my time there and the full 2GB of RAM to power those hungry Prescotts. One of them did get a PCI GT430 for testing purposes. At the time, the budget only allowed for us to get new PCs for other classrooms and not upgrades for the existing PCs for quality of life stuff. We did remove every single one of those northbridge heatsinks and swap out the bubblegum thermal compound with some ceramique 2 which helped loads for moving heat away from them and fixing a bunch of issues with hanging on some machines. At the time I badly wanted to take one home and downgrade the CPU to a cooler-running Northwood or the Extreme Edition I had sitting in a drawer just to have the bragging rights about it. This system would be perfect for a PCI FX5200 256MB given you replace the passive heatsink with one that has an inbuilt fan of some flavor.
Thank you, as always I enjoy the story's. I agree the FX 5200 PCI would be a great upgrade. This system does run hot even the power supply got too hot to handle. But it was fun to play with what I had on hand.
I have a slightly older IBM like this and it's the same boat. Upgrading, it is sort of possible if you go with PCI cards. It has space for 2 of them but it's limited to shorter cards. Due to the floppy drive and its ribbon cable getting in the way. I want to say the one I have is from 2002 or 2003. It runs 98/ME/2K/XP like a champ. Currently I have ME installed on it. I forget why I went that way with it.
The school I worked for a decade ago had a full computer lab of these they had from 2005 until 2015 running XP and then Windows 7. All of them got new thermal compound during my time there and the full 2GB of RAM to power those hungry Prescotts. One of them did get a PCI GT430 for testing purposes. At the time, the budget only allowed for us to get new PCs for other classrooms and not upgrades for the existing PCs for quality of life stuff. We did remove every single one of those northbridge heatsinks and swap out the bubblegum thermal compound with some ceramique 2 which helped loads for moving heat away from them and fixing a bunch of issues with hanging on some machines.
At the time I badly wanted to take one home and downgrade the CPU to a cooler-running Northwood or the Extreme Edition I had sitting in a drawer just to have the bragging rights about it.
This system would be perfect for a PCI FX5200 256MB given you replace the passive heatsink with one that has an inbuilt fan of some flavor.
Thank you, as always I enjoy the story's. I agree the FX 5200 PCI would be a great upgrade. This system does run hot even the power supply got too hot to handle. But it was fun to play with what I had on hand.
Man those ribbons take me back.
Right, if you want some for mementos let me know 🤣