Finished: My Dell Dimension 4600 Rebuild project, Pictures

So for those of you who haven't been following this, I got an old dead Dell Dimension 4600 from my father in law. I took out all the internals except for the Optical Drives and rebuilt it just for fun, I was bored.

I purchased the following:
Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L motherboard
Intel E5200 CPU
WD3200AAKS Western Digital 320GB Caviar Blue
XFX 9600GSO 1GB (came with two free games that I wanted, only reason I bought this card, otherwise would have been a 4670)
CoolerMaster GeminII S Low Profile CPU and Chipset Cooler
Corsair XMS2 PC2-6400 4GB
Corsair 400CX PSU
Round IDE Cable
Mascool 80mm Case fan
Reused: DVD+/-RW Drive
Reused: CD+/-RW Drive
Reused: Dell Dimension 4600 Case
Reused: 110mm Case exhaust fan
Reused: Windows XP Home License
Reused: SoundBlaster Live! Sound Card
Total Cost: $430.40 After shipping/RMA, and before my $35 in rebates get here, if they ever do.

The first MB that I received was unfortunately DOA, so I had to send it back which postponed this project for a week and a half or so.

Pictures of the final product:

I overclocked the CPU to 3.5ghz using 1.3v Vcore, FSB 334x10.5. Ram running at 891mhz, 1.9v 5-5-5-18 2T. The OC was stable for 36 hours in Prime95 (I really wanted to make sure since I will sell this thing on craigslist probably and don't want to have to deal with people calling me about issues). I was able to boot into Windows at 4.2ghz, but it wouldn't stabilize under 1.42v vcore so I backed it down to something more reasonable. The MB BIOS isn't the greatest for overclocking, it took me awhile to figure out how to access the "advanced" features which normally come standard in most BIOS's. But it was $52 so I can't complain too much (well I guess it was $62 after I had to RMA the first one). I am pleased with the Coolermaster GeminII S cooler too, its a nice LP cooler that also cools the chipset, which is helpful since the G31 NB gets hot. Its also really quiet and kept temps under 59C the whole time in Prime95. The GPU unfortunately is kinda loud, but it was a good deal with the games I got with it so w/e. All-in-all it was fun tinkering with, and a fun little project, and it certainly packs a punch now, don't let its ugly little Dell logo fool you!

Bump and who can tell me how to make those pictures work here? I thought I knew how but apparently I don't...

Yeah I moved them to a new album which is why. They should work now, but still not showing up in the forum..

I thought I had done that earlier but it didn't work, huh. Thanks!

You think the 4600 is old? My current pc is a stock Dimension 1100, and it sucks ass.

I'm sorry to hear that. You will appreciate your new PC that you are building all the more!

Cool! Make sure you post some pictures of it when its all finished!

Nice job KID !

Pretty cool.

Real nice rebuild, I also sadly still own a Dell B1100 with stock lol. It should be ATX so I'll probably do another rebuild too lol.

I see you re-used the Turtle beach sound card to have the front audio jacks work. That's pretty much the only way to do it, and the only major road block with building using that case. If you can find one, try a clamshell dell case (the Dimension 4500, 4550 and others). They're quite a bit tougher, but the cases are much nicer. For real fun, try one of these old HP Pavilion cases:

It's a standard mATX board design, but uses a mATX PSU and the SFF requires careful motherboard selection to make it work. Here's mine using a Sempron LE-1100 and a Jetway M26GT3-SVP board:

The reason why they are so difficult is the fact that the CD drive limits how high the memory slots can be on the motherboard. Too close to the top of the board and they hit the CD drive. Right now, there's probably only one or two boards on newegg that would fit into one of these cases. Here's a pic of m26GT3-SVP. Note how low the ram slots are:

The Lite-On drive comes right up to that green coil on the top of the motherboard after the two capacitors. It is one of the shortest drives on the market. Any longer and it would have hit the coil and not fit.
The floppy drive prevents tall heatsinks. Had to cut the factory heatsink in half to fit, and there's less than a centimeter clearance between the fan and the floppy drive.
I've also built an Intel system using the same style HP Pavilion case. I used a Celeron 420 and a Biostar GF7050V-M7 board:

With that board I had to remove the top right factory push pin on the Intel heatsink and replace it with nuts and a bolt as the push pin collided with the CD drive. Also had to remove the plastic base around the CPU fan header on the mobo, and modify the CPU fan connector a little to be able to plug in the CPU fan. Otherwise the Celeron heatsink fit fine. Both builds required the use of 90 degree or very short sata connectors for the hard drive, a regular sized sata connector was too tall to put the cover back on the case.

The Sempron rig is now my HTPC, housing a hauppauge pvr-250 and windows MCE 2005. The Celeron rig is my daily computer, overclocked the Celeron to 2.66GHz/1333fsb. With C1E it idles at 2.00GHz/1.1Vcore, and consumes 48 watts for the entire rig, with 65 watts under load. The factory internals in these cases (old i810 boards with Celerons) had power consumption figures around 35-40 watts.

^Fortunately, the back panel swings out, allowing for full access to the motherboard. It's something you'd have to see in person to really get how it works. Overall it's not much of a pain to build in the case. I've built with worse. Not as easy as a full size atx, but it's a small price to pay for the small form factor.

That HP case looks like it would a pain to work with. Can't fit a good CPU cooler in there either with the placement of the PSU...I think The Dell case that I used is much easier. I actually found it to be fairly roomy for an mATX case and was quite pleased with it.

I stuck another fan under the front cover of the Dell to increase airflow, it normally only comes with one rear exhaust fan. With that extra fan in the front it ran pretty well and didn't get too hot at all. Got up to 64C once on a pretty hot day while I was running Prime95, which is a very managable temp and would have some longevity for the chip.

I couldn't find anything on Dell B1100...is that the same thing as a Dell Dimension 1100? If it is, it looks like it uses the exact same case that the Dimension 4600 uses, and no, it will not fit a full sized ATX board in it, you will have to use mATX. Overclocking can be good on mATX boards, it just depends on which one you get. The DFI LP Jr P45 board is supposed to have excellent OC'ing. The SBM this month used a ASRock G41 MB that oc'd to 4ghz with an E5200. The particular board I got wasn't particularly impressive, but it overclocked alright, as long as the IGP was disabled. If you were to get a Phenom II processor, Biostar makes a mATX 790GX board which overclocks well, as does DFI.

Prime95 only ran 2 threads in my build because I used a dual core CPU, but if I used an i7 then it would have run 8 threads if HT was enabled. Prime95 only runs as many test cores as your CPU has.

Yep I used the Dell OEM license, don't ask me how. I just tried reactivating over the phone and the tech just activated the copy, without asking for a license or product key. I didn't complain. I figured when I tried it that it was worth a shot, worse they would tell me was sorry it couldn't be done. Apparently it can be, although I was under the impression that those licenses couldn't transfer either.

Thanks for the reply, yes it is the 1100 desktop with a m-ATX motherboard. Yeah I only need something like a Celeron Dual Core for this build since its like a web browsing, video sufing build. How far do you think a chip like the E2200 will go? I also heard a stress test program called OCCT has support for multicore CPUs. But however I still think that Prime95 is the best all around stress test.

Haha, sweet. But I can't order online anyways. Looks like the local retailer carries the E1400 and the E5200. Theres a $27 diff. CAD between the two. Which one would you get?

E5200 vs E2xxx, E5200 can OC MUCH better with less voltage. You can easily get 3.2-3.6Ghz on the E5200 with a good board.

It's very mildly overclocked to 2.0GHz (originally 1.9GHz). That's more because of the ability to run the ram at rated speed than the 100MHz increase in speed. It also makes 4x multiplier just a bit more effective, as now the base clock speed is 850MHz. Surprising what 50MHz can do when the cpu is running that slow already. My HTPC is SD only, so the Sempron rig works well. The capture cards are hardware encoders, so the CPU is not important for encoding. It's really only used during playback of video and when watching DVDs, the majority of which can be performed even when the CPU is at base 850MHz speeds. Works well.

Ah....no sense of adventure. It is a smaller case though, about 2 inches shorter and 4 inches smaller in depth. Besides, CPU choice is the biggest factor in CPU cooler needs. The E5200 you chose would work well in a case like that, do to it very low power consumption. I agree with the roominess of the 4600 style case. It's pretty much your basic form factor mATX case, with pretty good cooling characteristics.

Well its a crippled core 2 duo, since it only has 2mb L2 cache instead of 4 or 6, but it will otherwise be very similar in performance.

$500 on craigslist. Enough to fund my next project. I probably could have gotten more for it, people seemed pretty interested, but I wanted to move it so I could get the money for my next build. I just kinda do it for fun, and the profit I make will just allow for me to build a slightly better build the next time I do it. Its much more fun to build higher end PC's than the budget ones, so hopefully I can work my way up to building some nice systems.

Asus I think. If its the P5KL board that one is supposed to be pretty good.

A E2180 OCed to 3.2Ghz is the same performance as a E8400 in 90-95% of the benchmarks.

Thanks Shadow, sounds like a good idea but I'm thinking I'll go with a E5200. How's the overclocking capability on G31 motherboards?

Sorry for the questions (noob) , but does O/Cing overclock the RAM too? And is it as simple as just raising the FSB? (because the multi is locked)

Yeah to overclock a Locked multiplier CPU you have to change the FSB. The ram speed is also determined by the FSBxRam multiplier, however most ram multipliers go down to a 2x multiplier, so you don't have to overclock the ram if you don't want to since you can just select a lower multiplier to adjust for the higher FSB. Typically though, you will end up with overclocked ram as well since it usually doesn't work out so nicely that you end up with a 400FSB, and DDR2-800...usually its like DDR2 883 or something like that.