Retro Review: Dell Dimension 8100

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[@azazelleblack]

I worked for Dell when these were new. Customers HATED them because they were big, heavy, hot, and most importantly, LOUD. We were told to explain to customers who called in to complain -- and they did -- that the "all-new Pentium 4 Processor from Intel offers unprecedented performance and speed for all of your applications" and that "Dell's cooling solution is among the quietest and most effective on the market." What a bunch of trash. lol

[@samwalker7567]

I remember having one of these, used, in about 2005-2006, though I'm sure mine had front I/O at the bottom. Vastly preferred this case design to the later clamshell ones that were really cramped to work in and far less good for cooling with their really thick, plastic coated walls. It was... adequate but when better options came up, it was no contest. The RDRAM was a pain to upgrade, the low wattage PSU was not great, and of course PCI Express had come out and this was AGP so no more GPU upgrades from a GeForce 6 series were going to happen. No idea what happened to it, I gave it to my local village hall where it was used as a free internet access PC for the elderly... last time I saw it, it was sitting in the back of a cupboard there and that was close to 15 years ago. Maybe it's still there, gathering dust.

[@Lurch-Bot]

I had a Willamette 1.6. But I had DDR. It overclocked very well. I had the FSB up to at least 150MHz. With a GF3 Ti500, it served me well for about 5 years. It was a Vaio and ran XP.

[@BrandensOutdoorChannel]

I got that pc as a high school graduation gift. I played Doom, Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein and Diablo/ Warcraft. I still have it in storage. Don't know if it will boot.

[@MercedesCitarobusvideos]

Very informative video!

[@johnirvin7880]

Great video. I bought this machine when it came out. I replaced it a just two years later with a Dell 8300.

[@tronalddump8776]

I have one almost mint my mom bought it brand new in 2000. I added SSD upgraded the power supply and added some ram. there's an adapter you need for the power supply and have to make sure the rails on new one can handle it. I found a Asus motherboard on eBay not long ago that was a fit for this case but it went for $200.

[@Knaeckebrotsaege]

If you ever manage to break the CPU cooler brackets, the mounting holes of S423 are exactly identical to S603/S604/S771 server/workstation Xeon sockets, so it at least isn't completely impossible to find aftermarket coolers that fit (or server coolers, though those tend to be incredibly loud unless you replace the fan)

[@s8wc3]

The p4's FSB is quad pumped (same concept as SDR vs DDR RAM, except taken further) so it's supposed to be as fast as a p3 bus at 400mhz :) you've also got a full fat SB Live too instead of the crippled version usually associated with dell which is cool.

[@chrisrudi7162]

I also have a socket 423 machine but with SD-Ram and 1.8 GHz Pentium 4. It was difficult to find a suitable cooler today. I was lucky that the socket 604 ones fit, I found an old server cooler for cheap.

[@BilisNegra]

Certainly not an almost clean installas you said at the beginning.... You have a full Adobe CS suite on it which would be interesting to watch running more intesively there. Along with MS Office, Nero... And good old Macromedia Flash (the content-creating software, not just the player). And then some more nostalgia bits brought by the likes of Netscape... And Encarta under "Microsoft Reference", I'm sure. I'm saying that as a good thing, obviously. Missing Winamp, though 🤣 (edit: I began to write this comment before realizing you did open a number of these programs. i also missed the final part stating you're proud to own this machine after all. I would and I liked that).

[@recoveryguru]

n64 also used Rambus RAM. The Booster Pak was 4 MB that upgraded the n64 to 8. The jumper Pak is a Rambus blank card included with the stock n64. Without either Pak, the n64 wouldn't work.

[@matthewday7565]

Did the 5 1/4"stop both drives working, could be that you had a double termination, or they both ended up on the same ID - normally they will both be set the same and it will be switched by the cable twist, but not sure when that became standard

[@greggv8]

The twisted floppy cable and setting all floppy drives to the same ID came along IIRC in 1984 with the IBM PC/AT. Some time later to save on cost, floppy drives were mostly made without jumpers to change their ID.

[@ayrtonwatson]

have this exact pc, just has an upgraded gpu from the geforce 2mx to the geforce 6200

[@mattnordsell9760]

Why did I see VMware when you had the device manager open?

[@mustasheolll2020]

Has that classical 2000s PC case design from Dell 😊

[@KabonkNo1]

I remember those proprietary PS. Really annoying, I had to scavenge for a replacement.

[@MoultrieGeek]

Dell still uses proprietary PSUs and motherboards to this day. No upgrades/replacements are possible without Dell supplying them. Very sustainable business model you have there Dell.

[@EthanAQueen]

Pretty sure I worked don the workstation version of the 8100 after it was out of warranty from Dell. The user paid Dell to have it repaired. It was insanely slow compared to what a standard desktop was at the time. I have a few Rambus based setups I want to build / have partially built. At least one is a Socket 423. One of the better ones I have in the works is a Pentium 3 Rambus system.

[@johnhajdu4276]

8:14 quote: "I noticed that the bus (of this P4) speed is slower than a traditional P3". It is not slower, it is base clock not FSB. Intel changed the way to work with bus speed, so instead of increasing the FSB from 133MHz, Intel decided to decrease the base clock speed to 100, and do the multiplicatio inside every chip which became the real FSB of 100x4=400MHz. The idea behind was the following: The main components of the motherboard, like RAM, CPU and North Bridge, is far away from each other, and a clock pulse over 133MHz is distorted arrives from one to the other. It has something with the wire inductivity on the PCB, which causes the square colck pulse looking like a sawtooth. To aviod this distortion, every chip contains a so called PLL (Phase-Locked-Loop) which can make 4 clock pulses from the 100MHz (or 1 clock pulse with 400MHz if you will) and thus the signal integrity is much consistent on the whole board. Later during the Northwood core era, Intel was able to increase the base clock from 100MHz to 130MHz and then 200MHz which made different Processors like 400/533/800.

[@betapyteag]

Ah interesting! My bad then.

[@justintolentino661]

I had one these bad boys new in 2001 with Windows ME. Made for a decent gaming machine until I built a C2D with an 8800GTX in 2006.

[@RuruFIN]

Nah, just put a generic cheap GPU heatsink to that GF2MX, should be more than enough. I remember having one with a passive heatsink, with a zip-tied fan attached to it, it also overclocked pretty well.

[@Aaron.Newman]

I vote you dual boot Win98 and Windows 2000 just like the sticker on the front shows. Install 98 first on the primary drive. Then 2000 on the secondary. Should cover all the bases of late 90's to early 2000's games. Also that GPU is easy to get a replacement for. I would recommend a Geforce 3, or Geforce3 Ti200 AGP.

[@BilisNegra]

9:09 XP too new? Even if this was a glorified PIII, what was XP when it launched in late '01 installed on? PIII's to be sure, along with their contemporary AMD Athlons from the turn of the century. Socket 478 Pentium 4's were just beginning to be a thing and hardly anyone had one in their system! That said, Win 2000 is plenty fine.

[@evilpenguinson6808]

I had a Willamette 1.7 with SDR.

[@andycristea]

I've been searching for one forever... I preffer it's professional brother, the Precision 330.

[@TeardownReuse]

1:30 petabyteag: this pc is 24 years old and the plastic really shows.... me: and i'm 24 and the skin really shows.... - 😂😩 i feel for this computer

[@BilisNegra]

Your young skin?? What do you even mean?

[@TeardownReuse]

@@BilisNegra by 25ish 80% of people either have marks/bruises/damage somewhere on there body from life aka same as this computer it has wear and tear buddy

[@mustasheolll2020]

I like the design, but that floppy drive built into the design does look a little weird

[@mustasheolll2020]

That looks a lot newer than 2000

[@gteagle2004]

I had one of these, I destroyed it trying to salvage a CD drive ._. I was a dumb kid at the time lmfao

[@mealot7613]

Pentium 4 was pretty meh unless you had one of the later models. Got a Pentium 4 650 on lga 775 oc to 4.3 ghz. Its not bad. Stronger then my athlon xp 3200+ at 2500 mhz although not by much.

[@jjohnson71958]

try using the onboard video instead bro

[@vorkev1]

Rd or rambuss was ahead of its time at the time ddr was 400 mhz but rambus was 800.hz if you had a rambus system and a ddr system back then the rambus rain a lot faster

[@TheGodOfAllThatWas]

This is not as clear as you make it out to be since rambus ran at a smaller bus width. Rambus and SDRAM more or less had a bit of a back and forth, depending on the exact config and what was the newest highest spec one would be belter then the other. And it was never much of a difference. The biggest problem being cost. RD was never cheap, so if you were in the wrong cycle of the back and forth you could pay more and actually be slower. It just wasn't obvious at the time Intel was going to flinch since they were saying Rambus was the future.

[@kaneCVR]

...no it wasn't, witch is one of the reasons very few people bought into it. Rambus memory is 16 or 32 bit per channel, as opposed to 64bit for DDR. That means DDR can fit 4 times as much data per read operation vs 16 bit RDRAM and 2 times more data vs 32 bit RDRAM. DDR later supported dual-channel operation, and while rambus also technically can support dual-channel operation, I never came across an x86 PC that makes use of it (maybe servers? someone will surely correct me if I'm wrong). Later performance DDR modules are low latency, much lower then rambus. 800MHz rambus memory has a transfer rate of 1600Mb/s, while DDR400 can do 3200MB/s. In dual channel operation, you can have a theoretical 6400MB/sec bandwith using DDR400, even more with enthusiast level DDR500 CL3 kits (PC4000). There is faster rambus memory out there, 1066Mhz I believe, but I don't know if any x86 platforms support it. It may have been designed for socket 423 FSB 533 willamette CPUs, but as far as I know, those never materialised, as intel moved to socket 478 and DDR memory.

[@Vile-Flesh]

I haven't gotten the chance to throw together a Socket 423 system to play with yet. It looks like your Dell has that stupid voltage regulator the ebay sellers love to sell separately and not include with the motherboard like the cock suckers they are. I have one or two Socket 423 mobos and a 1.3ghz and 1.4ghz CPU. Not sure if I have the correct heatsink and correct RAM (or possible voltage regulator God forbid), I'll have to look in the mountain of shit I hoarded over the years. I really want to experience the absolute lowest clocked Pentium 4 and see what it is like and how it compares to a Slot 1 Pentium 3 and Socket 370 Pentium 3 and a Northwood Pentium 4 2.26ghz. So many projects so little time. U.U

[@kerrypeterstevens]

Like the video, hate the music

[@betapyteag]

Sorry

[@95Comics]

wow a 3 1/4 inch floppy?!?!? thats incredibly rare! ive never seen one even. ive only had 3 1/2 inch floppy drives, those are worthless. but you have a rare machine there! kewl video!

[@betapyteag]

im bad at english my bad lol

[@95Comics]

@@betapyteag oh its just a 3.5? I thought you were serious lol. That machine would be awesome with debian linux or tinycore linux/ xubuntu and other small modern Linux iso’s. I like making machines like that act as functional modern machines! Lol. Oh and that fan is only proprietary until you snip it and splice in the new one, just make sure you get the wires correct and the right voltage. You can get agp gpu’s up to 1 gig but most major brands top at 512, but those are great cards and would totally shock you with what they can do. Also if you want swap the mb just cut out the io ports and 3d print a new io board. Keep the videos coming!

[@judenihal]

This is a nice video. I have the same exact computer which we bought in 2001, and it still works. I put an 80 GB SSD and a 40 GB Hard Drive (planning to replace with an SSD) in it and have Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP installed on it. Windows ME runs fine on it, and better compatibility since it's not on the dreadful NT kernel which at the time was terrible for almost every application out there. I do want to comment, why did you use a Mario Kart 8 Deluxe song? I like the soundtracks, but I don't think it's appropriate for the topic of this video.

[@betapyteag]

I just use music I think sounds good. I wouldn’t say any of the music I use in my videos suits the topic. It’s primarily just to serve as a bit of background noise.

[@SuperWhatever1978]

No Internet? Nahh no thanks. Now days everything needs internet. Even old games. Not for me.

[@lordwiadro83]

Just throw it into garbage. This PC is not worth it.

[@BilisNegra]

Better not do that while some people still keep doing so, and in not much time it'll become even rarer and for that reason sought after, no matter the quirks.

[@connormason7907]

Useful for legacy hardware and apps you can't expect it to complete with modern hardware