An Old-School Dell - Lots Of Dust & Proprietary Parts

A more opinionated piece about a late 2000s computer I worked on.







Update -
The owner now wanted to turn this Dell case into ATX, and so bought an overclockable P965 motherboard.

I had the priviledge of testing the system again: This time the RX 570 worked (so that Dell motherboard was being Dell), and I ran Destiny 2. The framerates were around 15FPS - So yeah, the Q6700 was the real bottleneck.

Luckily for us we could overclock. The CPU cooler it came with was rather tiny, so the best I could do was 3.4GHz without going past 80°C on Prime95, and the framerates improved to around 30FPS, but was still stuttery regardless of textures or resolution.

So in conclusion of this update, the Q6700 was bottlenecking the whole system and while a significant overclock helped, the framerates still weren't good. From what I've seen here, the Core 2 CPUs aren't doing so well on new games.



Sources -

Torrey Alexander, who converted a case like this to ATX -
   / @torreydion  

Purpura XPS 720 Build by alain-s -
https://www.techpowerup.com/gallery/4...

XP-81, a warplane-inspired XPS 710 by Randy Gunter -
  / dell-xps-710-case-mod  

A side panel mod by drNesh, though it's only one photo -
http://themodzoo.com/forum/index.php?...