[rescue] Revived an older Dell Workstation today...

[Lionel Peterson]

A while ago I bought a nice dual Xeon workstation (Dell Precision 450, w/ 2x
2.4 GHz CPUs and 1 Gig of RAM) at a surplus sale, but it really didn't have
the umph I was looking for, so I put it aside.

I took it back up last week and found out I could drop 4x PC-3200 non-parity
RAM in it, so I kicked it up to 2 Gigs of RAM with parts from my spare parts
box, and I went looking for a better AGP 8x graphics card. I found a 512M
HD3650 card at Newegg for $40 AR, so I did that, and it turned out great!

The box is running Win7 for now, probably Ubuntu soon, and is much, much
better. I'll probably drop in a dirt-cheap SATA controller and dump the 40 Gig
IDE drive in it now...

The graphics card it came with should have been decent (nVidia Quadro 128M,
IIRC), but there were no drivers beyond WinXP. The MB has a 4x/8x AGP slot, no
PCIe.

Moral of the story, with a $40 investment and some RAM from my desk drawer, I
turned an older box into a much nicer workstation. I can now hang dual DVI
monitors off it and run any modern/current OS on it. Not a bad deal, IMHO.

As a side note, the $40 HD3650 returned ratings of 4.4 and 6.0 on Graphics and
Gaming Graphics windows assessments.