Could this prebuilt vintage PC actually be GOOD?!

There were an increasing number of cheap, proprietary PCs in the late 1990s -- many of which couldn't be upgraded well, or at all. But this Dell Dimension XPS could be almost as good as a custom-built computer.

Sources:
"Professional PCs," PC Magazine, December 2, 1997.
"Company News," The New York Times, December 11, 1997.
"Pentium Part II," PC Magazine, June 10, 1997.
"AMD challenges Intel with cheaper MMX chip," Computerworld, April 7, 1997.
"Intel's Celeron 266," PC World, May 1998.
"Celeron CPU Caches Up, Adds Muscle to Basic PCs," PC Magazine, October 6, 1998.
"Celeron 300A," Maximum PC Power User Handbook, autumn 2000.
"Rage 128," Maximum PC, February 1999.

00:00 - Introduction
01:11 - Drives and ports
01:53 - Not quite what it seems
04:35 - Upgrades
06:09 - The Slot 1 story
09:24 - Reassembly and cleaning
11:19 - I should have installed Windows Me on this
12:34 - Video cards kinda sucked back then, but we still liked them
15:40 - It's a good computer

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[MartinaD]

You have something very rare here: The heatsink is riveted to the CPU using very special rivets. These can be mounted or removed by turning them using a torx screwdriver. 😉

[olivierpericat]

This PC case is superb and super easy to use. It is NOT manufactured by Dell, but by Palo Alto Design Group (PADG), and its model name is the "ATCX convertible". It was used by a lot of manufacturers including HP and Micron. I personally bought one of these case without any OEM badge and still tun it today. 25 years later ! :)

[MrMoogle]

I miss this era of computing so much. Every six months, hardware moved on to the next level. The pace at which 3Dfx and NVIDIA were releasing new chips back then was amazing and impossible to keep up with. Even sound cards were constantly getting better with new 3D sound technologies coming out. There was always something new and exciting. Every month getting my PC Gamer and Maximum PC I couldn't wait to see what cool stuff came out that month.

[parastie]

I had a Celeron 366 overclocked to 466. It was on a daughter card to fit into the Slot 1, and I had a TNT PCI card for video. It was good enough to keep up with my friends' more powerful system while playing Quake 3 Arena during some LAN parties. I miss those days!

[fr]

My first PC was a hand-me-down in about 2002 and it was a Pentium II at 333MHz. So while the machine would struggle with 3D games, I knew it would be decent from personal experience. Imagine how amazing it felt to upgrade from that to a Pentium 4 1.3 GHz a couple of years later.

[MrDeelightful]

Damn, considering the era this came out that's a really well designed chassis. It comes apart way more easily than 95% of anything from the 90s. Great video Colin, as always. You really go the extra mile when it comes how you frame your shots and arrange the set.

[BluewindsLegacy]

This was also the era where Dell would include "Fingerprints" for the machine when they built the machine. It would just be a standard photo of foot prints but it added to the "Wow, Dell does this differently"

I had a XPS R400 and I miss that machine sometimes.

[Andrew_GCH]

Oh, gimme that SB128 all day, every day. Another great video, Colin

[heyjero]

I worked at Dell as tech support during this, and later model Dimensions. This was a time when support was factored into the cost of the machine, and you had REAL support to rely on if needed. So many hours spent walking a customer through how to install a replacement part, or reinstall 95/98/NT + drivers. The Pentium II 350/400/450 MHz DID have a way to overclock, by covering up one of the pins on the slot 1 socket. In the BIOS, you could flip the speed accordingly - so long as the processor was a 'good one, ' and could handle the boost. Good memories!

[greyATK]

The AudioDrive sounds so nostalgic. I'd listen to a playlist that sounds like that
Awesome video BTW!!

[J.Wick.]

I grew up with this exact PC other than it being a 333 P2. Barely noticeable difference. My dad spent a lot of money on it at the time, only for the 350 to come out a month or 2 later with 100mhz fsb lol. Ours had a 16.8gb hd 128mb ram, turtle beach Montego sound, riva 128 card, zip drive, and dvd. It was loaded for the time. I remember getting it in March of 98. That riva by stb in yours is the original. Same one I had.

[bullettube]

The reason there are two disc drives is that it's easier to copy discs, with one drive you have to keep swapping discs in and out. Dell wasn't as bad as Compac, I had a friend whose Compac had the keyboard permanently connected to the monitor! Compac also had weird memory specs, 768mb being common, and access to the bios being quite complicated. I built my own PC333 from parts, for $1400. A 250mb hard drive cost $400 when I built the system, but a 500mb drive a year later cost just $250. Opting to spend money on 16mb of memory was a good investment, and of course two 3.5 drives and a 5in drive because someone had to be able to copy your old floppies onto a 3.5 in disc!

[johnnycha]

9:00 A note about Socket 370, they debuted with the Second Generation Celerons before the Coppermine Pentium IIIs, and with the cache embedded onto the die, they slowly started to phase out Slot 1 CPUs as they have sorted out their CPU and cache manufacturing issues.

Slot 1 Coppermine Pentium III CPUs have on-die cache too, but the socketed ones were the norm at that point in time.

[Cyber_Horse_Studios]

Every dell that I’ve encountered from the 90’s up to the 2010’s have been some of the most robust and reliable PC’s I’ve encountered in my life. My very first computer was a Dell laptop and so while I do have bias, I can say that these machines have stood the test of time. They especially display this when given their highest end upgrades to speed them up significantly. A lot of other makers like IBM and HP have held up well, but I think the dells have held up the best out of them all as even their pentium 4 laptops were pretty impressive, and can still work with enough upgrades put into them.

[RC-nqmg]

If I recall correctly you can overclock the slot 1 pII by putting some tape over one of the card edge conductors to trick the system into a higher front side bus. PII 333 runs at a 66mhz fsb with 5x multiplier. If you can trick that board into a 100mhz fsb you can clock that puppy at 500mhz. I have done it many times.

[nshinfu]

i have the dell xps H266 i just looked at my computer, ,it has the built in sound card, BUT no agp slot , , i went back to windows 95 on it, ,Dell Dimension XPS D300 with windows 98 se, , great video, , hope to see more videos, , i also have a tall gateway 2000 P133, , 133mhz cpu really clean, , , which has a pin on the mothderborad to change the cpu speed for for slower dos games, , i love older computers

[michaeljohnson]

Love the computer MIDI music from that era.

[billv]

The soundstage and imaging on that ESS AudioDrive are surprisingly good.

[boydpukalo]

Dell did move to proprietary builds. I had a Dell XPS90 in the 1990's as my first computer, then started building my own until around Vista timeframe where I bought a Dell pre-built. I had proprietary motherboard form factors, case, and PSU. It was horrible. Cool video. Blast from the past to my college days.

[macktheinterloper]

I had one of these way back when, with a 21" Trinitron. And you're right, it would take another couple of years before Dell started going all proprietary. IIRC the only issue with this chassis was a custom motherboard connector. Other than that, it was as upgradable as any other PC of its day. As for gaming, well, anyone who was serious about gaming either had a Voodoo, or later a couple of Voodoo 2s in SLI ;)