Upgrading really old PC

[pmv]

Hi

I have a really old second PC (bought on ebay for a pittance), that I only use for internet access and when I can't face the terrible racket my main PC makes. Lord, this one is quiet in comparison.

I think it's this one

http://www.ciao.co.uk/IBM_NetVista_A40p_6579__6534804

At any rate its some kind of NetVista 1Ghz P3. This seems to mean it has a 155W PSU (haven't actually opened it to see).

I also have a cupboard full of old PC bits (a common phenomenon - I have invented the collective noun 'obsoletia' to describe this stuff)

The main bottleneck with this PC is the shared-system memory on board video.

So I was wondering if I could possibly put my old PCI Voodoo3 3000 into this thing.

It seems there are still unofficial XP drivers available for this card.

One problem might be that when I open it I'll find it doesn't have full height PCI slots. Don't know if it would be worth the bother of buying a 90degree riser card, but that would presumably solve that problem.

But the other question is whether the PSU can handle it. Cant' find any info on V3 power consumption, other than one old forum post where someone says his works on his machine with a 100W PSU.

Plus I wouldn't necessarily even be using it in 3d mode. Though it'd be interesting to try.

Anyone think this plan will work?
Before I go to the trouble of actually opening the case.

 

[ther00kie16]

Why not get a new low-end PCI/AGP card for under $40? It will be way faster than the V3 and won't suck that much power. If you are worried about the height, you could get a half-height PCI card.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

hd 2400pro is the best low-profile pci card. I don't think it sucks more than 20-30w max, but I don't know for sure.

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

The V3 will most likely work.

It's not difficult to open the NetVista's case, so why not look?

Maybe you should try quieter fans on your main PC.

 

[Klinky1984]

How is the on board video causing a bottleneck? What do you feel upgrading the video card is going to allow you to do? I think upgrading it would be a waste of time/money. Why not invest in a fan controller for your main rig so you can turn the fans down or configure your motherboard to adjust fan speeds w/ Speedfan.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I'd worry a little about adding a video card, since my P3 systems had 200 - 250 watt PSUs.

But yes, fixing the noise on your main PC seems like a better option.

 

[hans007]

you could just buy a d201gly2 or the new intel d945gcf board and replace the inside.

just get a stick of ram for cheap , and have a core 2 duo based celeron 1.2 in the case of the d201gly2.

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

Originally posted by: Klinky1984
How is the on board video causing a bottleneck? What do you feel upgrading the video card is going to allow you to do? I think upgrading it would be a waste of time/money. Why not invest in a fan controller for your main rig so you can turn the fans down or configure your motherboard to adjust fan speeds w/ Speedfan.

The shared video really throttles memory performance - it's very noticeable. Even the least powerful video card alleviates this, and if the OP has one laying around, it makes sense to put it to good use.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: hans007
you could just buy a d201gly2 or the new intel d945gcf board and replace the inside.

just get a stick of ram for cheap , and have a core 2 duo based celeron 1.2 in the case of the d201gly2.

Actually, the D201GLY2 isn't Core 2-based. It's just a Celeron-M 220, based on the original Pentium-M.

 

[hans007]

Originally posted by: myocardia

Originally posted by: hans007
you could just buy a d201gly2 or the new intel d945gcf board and replace the inside.

just get a stick of ram for cheap , and have a core 2 duo based celeron 1.2 in the case of the d201gly2.

Actually, the D201GLY2 isn't Core 2-based. It's just a Celeron-M 220, based on the original Pentium-M.

it is core 2 based.

the d201gly is a 1.33 core solo.


the d201gly2 is a 1.2 ghz single core core 2 duo. same core as the celeron 4xx series. it has 64-bit support... no pentium M has that.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: hans007
it is core 2 based.

the d201gly is a 1.33 core solo.


the d201gly2 is a 1.2 ghz single core core 2 duo. same core as the celeron 4xx series. it has 64-bit support... no pentium M has that.

I'll be damned. I knew that the D201GLY was Core-based, and had always assumed that the D201GLY2 was also Core-based. You'd think that someone who owns two of them (that would be me) would know which core it was based on, but I never really bothered finding out. Okay, enough off topic, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

 

[pmv]

Thanks, didn't expect so many replies.

Taking them in turn...

I _might_ get a low end card, but only if I can get one very cheaply indeed. Would rather use the voodoo if I can as it won't cost me anything.

Will bear in mind the hd2400pro, thanks for suggestion, if the slots are half height it'll be better to get a new card than try and make the voodoo fit with a riser.

I know its not hard to open the case, but it's a bit harder to rearrange my desk to be able to have the room to do so!

I think the vid card is a bottleneck, even for just web browsing, as this machine is noticeably more sluggish than, say, the 600Mhz P3 I once used or even the 466+v3 celeron machine I once had, despite having a much faster cpu. I'm pretty sure the sluggishness is due to the shared video memory, as flipped gazelle says. The stupid thing can't even do resolutions high enough to let me run the monitor at native resolution. Plus it'd be amusing to try some older games on it, maybe even dig out some glide only ones.

I don't believe I could _ever_ get the new system to be any where near as quiet as the old one (which is almost silent). I think you lot are either too young or have just forgotten what a quiet PC actually sounds like!

For starters the old machine's on board video (and the V3) are passively cooled. It _might_ even have a passively cooled CPU, as the 600Mhz P3 machine I used at work once did.

Changing my new one from a x1950 to a pallit 8800gt (with its non stock extra quiet fan) has reduced the noise considerably, but a vid card with a fan will always be noisier than one without. Plus a 500W PSU is going to be noiser than a 155w one. Especially as its a 2 8cm fan job not a 12cm fan one. Don't want to fork out for a new PSU just for that (though I do wish I'd gotten a 12cm fan one in the first place).

The three 12cm case fans I don't think add a great deal to the noise, 12cm fans are much more noise efficient than stupid 8cm ones, its the vid card, the CPU fan and the PSU fan that make the racket. Why turn it on if I'm just web browsing? I'll think about a fan controller, but the GFX card, and perhaps the CPU and PSU fan, already have 'throttling' and they are still too noisy for my liking.

Plus anyway I have the old machine for net access so I don't have to worry so much about security issues on the main one. If someone 'hacks' into this one there's nothing of any importance on it. Its an 'air gap' firewall.

 

[Klinky1984]

If it has so little available shared VRAM to run your monitor @ native then that could be a problem. As for 2D performance, I am not sold on it being the onboard video that's the issue, but it could be. I've seen improvements going from onboard SiS gfx to a PCI ATi Rage Pro. The only way you'll know if it'll work is to try it. That generation of video card can't be THAT power hungry. You'll need to open the case and find out what style of slots are available. If they're not full height then you'll need to find some low profile 2D card that'll work, I probably would just try for 2D as finding a decent low profile PCI 3D card might not be that easy, if they even make one... :/

120mm fans can cause a ton of noise if you're running them full speed. I run 2 x 120mm fans(1 case, 1 PSU), 8800GT & E2160@3Ghz on the stock Intel CPU fan. The 8800GT idles at 25%, the other fans run about 900rpm when I am doing basic stuff and go up to 1800rpm when I am playing games. Idle is very quiet, not silent, but my typing is certainly louder than the mild hum that is coming out of my X-QPACK case . I was running the fan @ 1800rpm for the longest time and could not get SpeedFan to work with my P5E-VM DO mATX board so I invested $20 into an ULTRA fan controller off Amazon. It worked like a charm and made a HUGE difference. I could not go back to running @ 1800rpm all the time.

 

[pmv]

@klinky

Fair points, I will have a serious look at fan controllers. I'm probably overdoing it with 3 fans anyway, but had heat issues in the past and this time wanted to be sure of good cooling. Plus, well, the slots were there and the LED's look cool! I don't think it was noticably quieter when only 1 fan was wired up though.
Like I say, I do wish I'd thought to get a 12cm fan based psu, but that'll have to wait for the next build or until this one dies.

If it wasn't such a hassle to move everything off the desk I'd have just tried it already, but was hoping someone would know for sure what v3 power use was, or whether netvista has full height slots or not, possibly save me the bother of trying it.

 

[hans007]

i have a celeron 900 with i810 chipset.

i believe its thee same one. i dont think a video card will help honestly the chipset is just seriously bottlenecked. my i810 + celeron 900 i added a PCI geforce 2 mx too and it is still slow. i remember having built a non i810e based sytsem back in the day and it was much faster (i remember having a celeron 800 on a 440bx back in the day).

anyhow, i am not sure its worth investing the money into honestly as i dont believe a video card will help that much unless its agp.

 

[pmv]

@klinky again

Hmm, having looked into it, info on web says you can only use fan controllers on fans with 3 pin plugs, they can't be used on fans with molex connectors. 2 of my 3 fans (i.e 2 that came with case) have 2-wires-leading-to-4-pin-molex-adaptor arrangement, so I'd need to buy new fans also. I'll probably do it one day, but probably leave it for now.

 

[Klinky1984]

If you're in a standard ATX case you can just use a 5.25" controller. I used a 3.5" bay controller since I wanted to leave my remaining 5.25" bay open.

Sunbeam 5-1/4" Rheobus Kit - BLACK $12.95ea
YATE LOON 120mm Case Fan - D12SH-12 - High Speed $3.70ea
S/H $8 - 9

Yate Loon's are decent, overall it'd be a $30 project . Also maybe all you need is new fans and to hook them to your mobo headers so you can control them with SpeedFan or your BIOS may have options...

 

[pmv]

@hans007

Thanks for that info. I'm not entirely sure what chipset this is, si soft sandra says its a "6650D3G" mobo with an intel "82815" chipset. Certainly its not a high performer, compared to machines of similar vintage I have used.

I've now opened it up and it does have full size pci slots, and even a full size agp slot. As it happens I also have a voodoo3 3000 agp lying around (tedious story why I have both). Was going to put that in but then realised I vaguely remembered something about different AGP versions having different voltages, so had to close the thing up and then go on the net to check that out in case I blew something up. Seems the voodoo3 is a 3.3v agp, and the netvista has a 'universal' (i.e. 3.3 or 1.5V) slot so it should be OK, if only I could be sure about the power issue. its also possible the unofficial drivers will be screwy, but I'm not asking for perfect 3d performance, just tired of waiting for screens to update or pages to scroll.

@klinky

Afraid you've confused me. Are you saying controllers sized for 5.25 bays use different connectors for the fans, so then I won't need new fans? The problem as I understand it is that the fan controllers I've looked at (all 3.5" because they're cheapest and I only need 3 controls) all require you to have fans with 3 pin fan power leads.

A 3.5" controller does mean removing the floppy drive, but I've never even bothered to connect it up anyway, who uses floppies any more?

I only have one mobo fan plug, but 3 fans.

Worked out to buy the cheapest controller, plus 2 replacement fans is a £15 ($30) job, but only if I buy something else for £5 from amazon to make up the total to enough to get free shipping (the controllers are all from 3rd party sellers so don't qualify). Gawd, you really get screwed on shipping with small items like fans, cables etc.

The controllers you link to look better value than the ones I can find over here, the 5 1/4 ones are all £20 ($40). It's always like that.

 

[Klinky1984]

You're right about the molex connectors, you'll need to huck the fans. My point is that new fans aren't that costly & overall the situation may be easier / cheaper than having to sweat it out worrying about the power supply/buying new card/buying new power supply/having a high performance PC rot in the corner while hammering away at some old clunker that looks like it belongs in an office from 1998 running Windows ME(note: LOOKS, not that it was from 1998 )

Honestly I don't think the V3 is going to cause any problems. Here's some guy who used a V3 on a 100 watt supply for awhile...(though he's posting about how it just died, I am guessing the rest of his computer is fine though - so maybe it wasn't a power issue).

That chipset is the i815 which wasn't as good as the 440BX, but shouldn't be too terrible. Though keep in mind as the web becomes more "dynamic" with scripting and AJAX more CPU is required to render pages than in the past. So while parsing HTML is a simply task, things that require extensive Javascripting or DOM re-arrangements can make older PCs chugg(not to mention a lot of video is starting to showup in all sorts of places). So it may not be the PC getting slower, but the web getting beefier...

Also if you're going from the UK then I guess eBuyer.com is a better value.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/136404
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/117321

They also have 3.5" controllers as well which are cheaper too. 6 knobs is kind of overkill, but it has 2 good reviews vs 0 for some of the other controllers.

 

[pmv]

Well, I've installed the voodoo3. Funny thing, it didn't work very well with default windows drivers, so I installed the hacked xp drivers, which made it even worse (ever seen XP running in 4 bit colour? That's what it literally was, even described it as such in the display control panel, didn't know it was even possible). Then rolled back the drivers, whereupon it started working perfectly, at least in 2d mode. 3d mode doesn't work at all, but was only interested in that for curiosity value.

And it is definitely more zippy, no more sluggish screen updates. Annoyingly even though I can go to much higher resolutions now, I still can't get the LCD native resolution.

Irony is I swear this machine is running louder now, I think the solitary case fan has stepped up a gear because of the voodoo's heat. Its no longer silent.

As far as fan controllers on other machine goes, I am unable to decide if I can justify spending the cash at the moment. Plus once I started looking got tempted by the more expensive ones e.g. akasa ak-fc-03. The thought process is 'I don't really need all that functionality' vs 'but look at all the pretty blue lights!'. I will give in eventually, but for the time being going to see if I can get this other one working in 3d mode.

What confuses me, though, is that the case fans are rated as 19db, the cpu fan as 40-60db, so surely the case fans would be drowned out by the cpu fan? I thought 3db increase meant a doubling of volume, so that would make the cpu fan equal to 100 case fans. Though clearly it isn't so I've got something wrong somewhere. Or are the manufacturers' specs on case fans lies?

 

[taltamir]

it would be cheaper to buy silent fans for your main PC...

 

[pmv]

@taltamir

hi, sorry must have not made myself clear. I'm not intending spending anything other than possibly fan controller for main pc (and 2 replacement fans with 3 pin plugs). Not sure what you mean by silent fans, I don't think there is any such thing (though the replacement fans will be supposedly 'silent' ones, but, well, I have one and its still fairly loud).

Seems to me only way to get noise down on main pc would be fan controller, which I intend to get soonish. (or replacing cpu cooler, or replacing psu, neither of which I want to deal with).

Haven't spent anything on second pc, and don't intend to. V3 is now running fine in 3d mode, with different hacked drivers. Ironically it plays Alien vs Predator perfectly, which is more than the main pc can do since nvidia broke that game with its recent drivers. Have heard the same is true of system shock 2.

Getting a twinge of geek nostalgia in seeing the 3dfx logo in the taskbar. A great shame that company screwed everything up in the end, they did kickstart the whole 3d acceleration business in the first place.

It (the old pc) is definitely louder than it was though. PSU fan and intake fan have clearly gone up a notch. The days of near-silent pcs with top end gfx cards have clearly gone for good (I mean once upon a time you could run voodoo2s, or even original geforce with no additional case cooling, just about. Or maybe you couldn't, that might explain why my old geforce2 pro literally went bang).

 

[Klinky1984]

I wouldn't take much stock in the dB levels that are listed from the mfg of the fans. They really do not tell you at what distance or how that measurement was taken. Some manufacturers do make quieter fans than others, also lower RPM = quieter fan & of course the larger you go the more air you can move at lower speeds. Your CPU fan should be 92mm or 120mm in size, hopefully your motherboard supports a smart fan control for the CPU at least. As for the PSU if you're feeling dangerous you can open it up and see if you can unhook the fan from the circuit board and loop it into the fan controller(if it's a 3pin connector or you can yank the fan out and put your own in, keep in mind you could injure/kill yourself by fiddling with the PSU internals, I've fiddled with the fan in my PSU a couple times and have lived to tell the tale).

Also when buying the fans you need to keep in mind the max RPM the fan can do. My controller apparantly can only half the speed of the fan. So I can go up to 1800rpm or down to 900rpm(or in between, but that's pretty useless). So getting a 3200rpm fan may not be the best way to go because at half speed you'd be running at 1600rpm which would probably be pretty audible.

I run my fans @ 900rpm while web browsing and bump them up when gaming. I also have RivaTuner profiles set to bump up the GPU fan. It definitely does get quite a bit louder but I have earbuds on and the volume up so I can't even hear the fans.

Oh and a good place to go for info on silent PCs is www.silentpcreview.com, their main page is a little out of date/slow to update but the forums are still active.

Also I am betting that LCD is hooked up via VGA to that card which even at native resolution is less desirable.

 

[pmv]

Spent a stupid amount of time trying to work out if some case fans really are quieter than others (other than as a result of just shifting less air) and if its better to run a quiet fan at max or turn a noisy high rpm fan down with a controller. In frustration decided that no-one really knows what they are talking about as far as which fans are quiet (one site will authoritatively recommend one and sneer at another, only for another site to contradict them with just as much certainty, and I can only find actual real test data on fans that nobody seems to sell anyway).

It does seem clear, from the hardware websites' tests I've come across, that yes, the the manufacturers' specs might as well be entirely made up. As there's no independent verification, there's obviously a marketing advantage in claiming dubious figures. And they all have wild unsubstantiated claims for their various special technologies (golf ball indentations, jagged leading edges, smaller central hubs, twice as many blades, fan blades specially blessed by representatives of all major religions, etc)

In the end finally discovered that amazon sell the kind of adaptor needed to connect my existing fans to a controller, and as that works out half the price of the cheapest new fans, and as I can't work out what fans would be best to get anyway, I'm going with that for the time being, even though my existing fans that came with the case are probably pretty rubbish.

Got a fan controller on the way. Then perhaps I will be able to turn the machine on after 11pm without worrying about the neighbours.

Really don't have the confidence to change my CPU cooler. The benchmarks on frostytech seem to show the stock cooler isn't _that_ awful, as far as noise goes. Even the expensive custom ones seem pretty noisy really. Next time I (pay someone else to) upgrade cpu I'll look into a quieter cooler.

Though I was tempted by those 70mm-80mm or 120mm converters, the idea being to just change the fan. But found two different websites testing them, and one found they helped cooling, the other that they made it much worse. The one that got worse had converters with open sides, the one that claimed it helped had a closed funnel. But again, I'm wary of doing anything that might mess up the CPU (what if the funnel type converter, which must increase air resistance after all, stresses the fan so that it burns out?)

Should I clean the psu fans? The leading edges are caked in impacted dust, that must increase turbulance, I'd have thought.

Oh, and thanks for the suggestion of a fan controller. Got it cheap on ebay in the end.

In meantime, old machine plays half life blue shift beautifully, and as I can't remember anything about it from the first time, its effectively a new game.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

3db is not a big increase, but 40-60db is very loud for a single fan. That might be why the thing is very noisy.