Let's upgrade my lab PC and talk about tools I use to make videos 

I wanted to add, after making this video, I bought this Startech PCI-Express to IDE card amzn.to/3dSgCpN which uses the JMicron firmware, and the Zip drive is now working perfectly! The card is just recognized as a "Standard PCI IDE Interface" in Windows 10 and the Zip drive is functioning great. I had tried a standard old PCI to IDE interface I had but Windows would not load drivers for that -- even when I tried to force them on. The JMicron cards are the way to go clearly! (JMicron cards flash a quick BIOS screen at boot showing you any detected IDE devices.) Also note, I only tested this in Legacy boot mode, so not sure if it works in UEFI mode.

I really miss the times when drive bays were an essential feature of every pc case.

Old Dell Precision workstations make fantastic PCs and are still plenty capable. You can do all kinds of upgrades (GPU, ram, etc). The PSUs are ridiculously strong. Most have a raid controller built in for a nice raid array (I used it for a striped raid of a couple of ssds for c drive).

Adrian should've been in this business for long enough to know that every new PC (whether brand new or new you you) absolutely requires a blood sacrifice in some way. Now that that's out of the way, it will surely give you years of trouble-free service! :-)

I know that pain - and the pleasure upgrading the hardware and being able to re-use the same install without starting over! Interesting to see your rig!

Looks at the VirtualBench in the video. Thinks: "That's nifty!". Goes to look at the price. Cleans coffee off screen and keyboard. (That is a VERY generous gift!)

You mentioned the faff of re installing drivers. You can back them up with command prompt to wherever you want such as a thumb drive , by using DISM /online /export-driver /destination:C:\DriverBackup You just have to create the destination folder first and point the command to it when you instigate. All your drivers will be in one place ready to reinstall. Hope this is helpful to someone.

The Rosewill Line-M case that's featured in the video is definitely one of few MicroATX cases that can be bought new that has all of these: Four front USB ports Two included 120mm fans At least one 3.5" and 5.25" drive bay No side window That makes it my case of choice for builds that are function-first.

So how many of you guessed that the 8-bit Dance Party was coming when the audio cables were connected to the C64? 😂👍

Happy to hear about your new computer. The button on the powersupply is so you can test if there are shorts on any of your devices. pressing it will power the supply on and turn on the devices it is plugged into. A Green light means the power rails to those devices are good and there isnt a short. It isnt too smart as it is mainly looking for shorts but can be useful none the less. You will not be replacing any of those fans with off the shelf ones. The 4 pin connector on the Dell Prescision and Optiplex line of computers is not your standard 4 pin connector. As for the rear fan, it is a Sunon branded fan, but one of the neat things is it uses MagLev technology instead of ball bearings or shaft bearings. So that fan would be equivalent to the Corsair ML fan. It is very very powerful. I have one that has been continuously on for well more than 10 years (always on) and it started making some odd noises. Sadly there is no way to lube it like you have shown in some of your other videos and replacements cost about 15-20 dollars. You will be better off looking for a Delta fan made for the Dell workstations if you need to replace it... or get to splicing cables! If you need to replace the powersupply there are adapters out there including one from a company called Longdex. I picked one up and could send it to you if you ever need it. Also i might have some spare drive rails for the machine as well. Glad you are happy with your new machine and i hope it will give you many years of good service. Yours Turely The Linux guy who sent you some linux stickers and a PCI SCSI card before you started doing Mailbag videos ~_0

Nice to see that Windows now moves so easily from machine to machine! XP absolutely did not like being moved, and I think even Win7 would blue-screen upon encountering a different motherboard (or at least a different chipset).

You have payed the blood sacrifice to the machine god. The PC will work well & reliably for years to come :)

I have the same T1700 in storage. I used it as a DVR for a few years and that thing was a beast. That adaptec card caused flashback to year 2002 when that exact adaptec card fried a rare Alphaserver and then another server I had. After it killed the 2nd machine I suspected something was wrong with the adapter.

Speaking as an IT admin, Lenovo and Dell are the kings of non-standard PSUs in otherwise ATX-compliant cases. A real pain if you have a failure. I used to invest in a small number of PSU adapter cables "just in case", though that doesn't help if there's a weird form factor to the PSU. Good thing you're so handy with electronics in case you ever need to hack an ATX PSU to replace the Dell one.

I own a Dell Precision T1700. Has worked absolutely flawlessly since day one. Great machine.

You know Adrian... I only ever am able to understand tiny fractions of what you achieve on your channel and I'm often left feeling stupid....but your enthusiasm and passion is infectious! You are a very wonderful and intelligent man and the world is more awesome because of you! X

This is definitely a computer that's meant to be a workstation for a company, and you'll see VGA ports on a lot of those as a lot of companies still have VGA hardware that they don't want to replace until it dies. Also, the days of cutting yourself on PC cases is only over for enthusiast PCs/cases. This one will have been built down to hit a price point that makes bean-counters happy, and if there was a hardware problem they'd probably just send it in for a warranty replacement instead of having on-site IT do repairs.

I have a bunch of those Precision T1700s. Good case design, good power supply. Nothing exciting about anything on the motherboard but it's reliable and should get the job done. I should have some spare drive rails if you want them. Dell power supplies haven't had physical power switches in decades. They are definitely nonstandard which can be a pain if you have to replace them, but I've only had one or two fail out of hundreds of Dells I've dealt with at work.

I believe the reset button is underneath the front bezel. It's at the end of the small wire that you thought was a temp sensor. That's how my Dell server machine is built anyways.

Love this video! Behind the scenes things like this, plus seeing you deal with semi-modern tech, is a refreshing change!

USB 3 was pretty flaky in the first few years, only Intel's chips seemed to work well. The USB group must've tightened the spec as it works great on recent AMD and ARM devices.

PS/2 is actually standard still on workstation/server towers. As is VGA.

It was awesome seeing your reaction to the new computer.. well new to you. Thank you for sharing.

Excellent work Adrian! Some fairly new, some legacy, a good mix! Definitely an upgrade without being too up-to-date!

As soon as Adrian said “it’s been a while since…” I knew exactly what was coming… 8-bit dance party! 😁👍

Thanks, always appreciate when retro YTers talk about the work involved behind the scenes.

These Dell (and HP) workstation machines are awesome. You can usually find them pretty cheap on eBay or local computer recycling stores. Obviously these were very expensive machines when new, so they are built quite reliably. I've helped some friends by getting workstations like these, and throwing in a modern GPU and SSD to make a decent gaming rig on a budget.

Looking up the serial number for that Dell Precision T1700 we find that it was delivered with that E3-1241 V3 you identified, this is basically a locked (non-overclockable) i7-4770K, or if you prefer you could think of it as an i7-4770 with very slightly higher base clock but identical turbo frequency. Xeon E3's are basically just i3/i5/i7s, the E5 are the ones that use different chips. You nailed it, slightly newer and faster but not massive. The Dell build spec also says it originally had TWO AMD FirePro W4100 workstation GPUs (roughly Radeon 7750 equiv but expensive, 50W TDP each) so together they could drive 8! monitors, those were clearly was replaced at some point though but I assume that's why it got the (slightly) bigger PSU model - Dell likely wouldn't allow that config without the PSU upgrade. The official "NVEnc support matrix" says the 750 Ti in it now supports all three types of h.264 encoding/decoding (4:2:0, 4:4:4 and lossless) but none of the newer h.265 encode/decode methods. I'm fairly confident it's better than the old AMD card for encoding and is definitely a lot faster overall too - not that it'll probably matter for this. VirtualBench DC psu: Spec sheet says it's capable of providing three voltages, they can be set to 0-6V/0-1A, 0-25V/0-0.5A and 0 to -25V/0-0.5A respectively, with very precis voltage and current limiting (and readback). Looks neat for quickly powering small things, even if it would have been nice if it the "main" rail was a bit more powerful and/or it had four voltages (for +/-5V & +/-12V). OTOH, it specifically notes that the two 0-25V rails share zero point but is "isolated" which should mean you can use a cheap 5A or 10A voltage/current controlled single output bench supply to provide "main" (5V) power, connect that the rail 2/3 zero point to the negative/zero side on the bench supply and tell it to generate say +/-12V referenced of that. The 0-6V/0-1A output is apparently NOT isolated however - I'm guessing that means it can't (easily) be used to generate a -5V supply, it might be possible to generate a different positive voltage (3.3V?) but I'd suggest checking the manual first for that, it should explain the exact limitations but I'm not going to dig that deep.

Watching this on a 2011 Dell Precision! ✊

Fantastic. It's great when things work. It's also great watching someone who's great working on great computers. So much fun. Thanks.

thanks for sharing.. I am a fan of all generations of pc's ... a few years more and those will be retro..

i really needed that 8-bit dance party today! made my cold rainy oregon weekend much better..

Onward and upward with more capture options :) Love it. Adding contemporary PC tech content gives a great behind the scenes view of how your setup works. Cool video.

Dell Precision Workstations are great - they last forever. I have a T5600, T1700, and even an old 410 with dual P3s as one of my retro workhorses. With pretty much all the ports internally and externally including SCSI I can pretty much throw any retro drive at it.

I bought a new computer case a while back and still wanted one 5.25 and on 3.5 inch bay (call me old fashioned). I like to have the capacity to burn media. The 3.5 inch bay got a card reader / extra usb ports. You got a pretty cool setup.

Happy new computer day! If you ever get around to organizing your cabling, I'd love to see a video of the process. There's something uniquely satisfying about cable organization.

So Dell is still producing cutting edge technology!

I'm so sad that I only recently found your channel because I just sold a Core 2 Quad system for a pittance that would have been a great "bridge" system for your workshop. It had IDE and FDD controllers and two PCI slots, but it was a quad-core, 64-bit system with great SATA SSD support, two PCIe Gen 2.0 x16 slots, and dual gigabit NICs. The only catch was it took weird 1.8v DDR3 RAM, but I had a working 8GB kit. Now I know who to tell when cool stuff lands in my workshop!

I have a Dell T5500 which I bought second hand. I notice that the drive bay cover you removed to install the ZIP drive has four screws attached to the inside of the bay cover. Neat idea

I was pretty excited for you that it's working now, both the capture and the zip drive. Just reinstalled my own zip drive, after finding it. Looking at the c64 directly off the pc has me contemplating doing the same with my capture device.

Nice! I love that it still has multiple PS/2 ports & 5.25″ drive bays. The most modern cases today don't make any allowance for said bays and pretty much just flaunt their RGB bling! It is what it is but it just ain't the same.

Great video Adrian! I love new computers as well as old ones!

I really like DELL PC’s had several and just seem to work! Also can be picked up dirt cheap second hand as they’re in such abundance from offices when they upgrade. Really, really easy to take apart as well. Hardly even need a screwdriver but we’ll made as well.

Excellent work Adrian love your channel thank you again.

That Xeon E3-1241 v3 CPU is essentially similar to an i7-4770 with a slightly higher base clock (3.5 MHz vs 3.4 MHz) except that it lacks the i7's integrated graphics. The three screws on the back of the drive bay cover are used for mounting the additional optical drive. The manual ought to explain that.

I was sad to see that black case going but happy to see the new Dell is just as nice.

750Ti is still a relatively good card and yes it does have hardware encoding. All Nvidia cards since the 6 series have it.

So good to see someone happy that their PC works like they want to.

Ive been rocking a t1650 for a while now which is very similar to this. Its rock solid its up time can be measured in years.

I also have a 750Ti, and the reason I chose it is because it can drive a 4k display at 60 Hz, and it was cheap by the time I bought it. Nothing below that level in this generation has that capability. That doesn't mean 60 FPS is guaranteed, of course. I don't have it driving a 4k display, but it's driving four more normal displays (two DVI ports, two HDMI ports). The system it lives in sounds like your bench machine from two iterations ago -- it's still an AMD Athlon 64 x6. It won't ever see official Windows 11 support, but I don't think your Xeon is going to either. In any case, I did some OBS streaming using NVenc and it is still an order of magnitude faster than using the CPU.

Great video and nice upgrades

Good to see you putting this machine to good use and saving it from E-waste

Adrian the three screws on the cover are for the drive. The shoulders will allow the drive to slide into the case and the lock into the locking mechanism. Two screws on the open side and the third on the front of the far side of the drive.

Awesome to get your bench computer upgraded

I still have a Dell Precision 490, dual quad core CPU's with 32GB of ECC DDR3 RAM. Works great.

My wife and I bought a pair of these systems brand new back in the day, and they're absolute beasts. We use those as desktops. She's rocking an RTX2060, 32GB of RAM and I have a GTX1650 and 16GB of RAM. Incredibly well-built and long-lasting machines. There's a 5 1/4 Dell option that includes a slim DVD-RW drive and a card reader unit. It's pretty handy.

Hi Adrian. I have 3 of those precision t1700’s. 2 core i5-4590 and 1 xeon e3-1246 v3. All three work great. These t1700’s are great machines.

Yes, old motherboards used a "third party" chip for USB 3. On the board, there's probably a VIA chip that's the USB 3 controller. It's possible that chip has gone bad.

ECS motherboard. Explains all your issues. It's what PC-Chips rebranded themselves when their own name got too infamous for them to sell anything.

Hi Adrian and thanks for the frequent videos! One thing you should try is reflashing your UEFI / BIOS! They tend to loose bits over time which could explain the problems you encountering. As you mentioned ECS something else sprung to mind: Capacitors! On your newish Dell: Please do yourself a favour and monitor the PSU! They tend to fail silently which causes USB issures as well. You are right: This chassis doesn't use rails for the 5,25 inch drives. However: They use longer screws (which are captured with the plastic thing at the back). The UEFI of this PC has a whitelist of GPUs so changing the GPU is not an option. With the XEON-Processor I think only ECC RAM is going to work for upgrades, if you desire to do so!

Have a lovely Christmas 🎄 ⛄

Great work Adrian! You are now ready to do a c64 repairathon! 😁👍

A big thumbs up for the cut finger on the case, that was the retro part of the video ;) Its thank god curable with some Haribos :D

Yes! "It freakin' works" + 8-bit Dance Party. What's not to love?

Love the "dredge" part PC. This is how I learned to do Atari 2600 repairs...basically taking the ugliest hodgepodge parts (case, switches, motherboard, etc that function) and piecing them together. Now i have a working 2600 that I'm not afraid to mod or take a *ahem* drill bit to.

(1) MICRO ATX. MiniATX *was* a standard with a formal spec, but it was part of the ATX spec that predated MicroATX and was withdrawn when the (separate and independent, actually) MicroATX spec was released. (2) That board may or may not be MicroATX regardless; Dell has a habit of being so flagrant about violating standards, specs, and form factors with what they put in desktops that it arguably crosses the line into outright flaunting it because they can. With eBay etc around, it's more a matter of annoyance than anything else, but it makes repair work considerably harder -- which is the point, after all; the idea is to try and force you to send your PC into Dell for repairs so they can upcharge you *twice*. The system you build on your own will always be far cheaper than any prebuilt, and probably a goodly bit better. Certainly it will be better suited to your individual needs! ...so that motherboard may just be a "Dell SFF" 'form factor' -- something bizarre that Dell cooked up to fit the case because it fit. But to me it looks like a MicroATX mobo. (3) While I've never personally had occasion to use a SATA to IDE converter -- yet -- one of my close friends runs the local tech shop and has told me repeatedly that literally he's never had one that worked. I believe he's had several... (4) DVI and HDMI use the same exact protocol except that HDMI supports audio output and DVI allows an analog (VGA) piggyback. That's why you can convert them with "just wires" adapter plugs. (5) Dell power supplies are, historically, quite rugged and slightly over-specc'd for the systems in question, and this system will be from that era. (6) That cooler is essentially a Dell branded Intel Stock Cooler. It's crap and it will be noisy for the cooling it offers, which will be sub-par. Most $30 offerings on Amazon from disposable Hong Kong sounding brand names will outperform it. (Everything is relative. Even if it's quiet overall, there are better options... (7) Don't encrypt your drives. It will only make your data entirely unrecoverable when something hits the fan, so to speak -- and that is absolutely a "when" not an "if". Also, speaking from experience: don't trust backups, *especially* cloud backups. Terms of Service and such change, and they are not required to change in ways that avoid excluding you. (8) LOL @ cheap cases. *ALL* cheap cases will slice you like an onion, and *ALL* prebuilts have cheap cases. A First-Aid Kit is a good thing to have if you service computers regularly... new or old ;)

Awesome video!

Nice to see a fellow member of the Dell Precision gang. T3610 here

your hand gestures at the beginning reminded me of Mr Bill and Sluggo show from SNL.. glad to see Mr hand got a tech job 8)

I was running one of those scsi cards to an lto3 tape drive on my Skylake pc - my board still has pci too:) Only challenge was clearance for the extra unused 64bit pins! Moved to pci-e for lto4 though as the card was bottlenecking

Yeah, hear you on the drive bay issue. I have no need for optical or floppy drives anymore, but I like the option of somewhere to put some new I/O. Like, say USB 4.0 comes out, I can easily hook up a PCIe card with USB 4 header/bus and slap a multi-port USB hub into one of the drive bays and I have front USB 4.

That LGR bottle looks cool!

5:30 Hah, right as you pointed out the micro-SD reader I was talking to a friend about how I'm using the cheapo one that came with my 3D printer, and realized it's the exact same one!

@ 11:30 there is a crack in your voice like you've tried everything you could to possibly save its life but you just can't and have to say goodbye to an old friend, I felt that. :( RIP Bench PC

I have the exact same T1700 as my main PC. Ex-Workstation so has a Nvidia Quadro card instead of a GeForce but will play GTA V with no problems. Although even though has a VGA port on the motherboard, there is no onboard graphics with the Xeon CPU. It’s a solid workhorse, Windows 11 works well on it although not officially supported. Linux is fast on it as well. I use a SSD for the OS, and then Intel Hardware RAID with 2 physical HDs for data.

My office still has many of these machines. I'm using one as I type at my desktop.

Wow, small world. My office PC at work is a T1700 motherboard in the exact same Rosewill Micro-ATX case that your original bench PC was in, with that same 365W Dell PSU. I made a custom adapter for the power switch and front-panel LEDs by hacking a Dell power switch assembly. It's possible to mount a standard 92mm tower air cooler on a Dell motherboard (Escotech did a video on that), which can give you better CPU thermals than the stock Dell cooler. (I used an EVGA one, but the Coolermaster Hyper TX3 EVO also works great.) These Haswell Dell systems are so boring and reliable, totally love them.

This was so awesome

Hey i use that same brand of HP SSDs, is pretty good for old machines, like my SFF ThinkCentre M73 machine added extra performance boost and most instantaneous boost in boot speed under OpenSUSE.

I had a home machine 15 yrs ago, with an Adaptec 29160 scsi controller, along with some 15000 RPM scsi discs, when I was a Compaq Proliant accredited platform specialist (cough cough) ;-)

Nice video Adrian. I should probably get a lab-PC as well. I only have one desktop PC that I use for everything. It's actually placed in a "technical room" where all my network gear is placed as well. And my office is in the next room and I've routed all the cables for my main setup through the wall. That works fine, it's only about 2 meters through the wall from the PC to my 4 monitors. However. The lab part of my office is a further 3 meters away. There I have another monitor and USB hub and multiple 5m USB extension cords for multiple cameras (you can't use them together through a hub). I also have an Elgato CamLink that I use with my RetroTink and other devices. I sometimes struggle with bandwidth issues as well, but it's sooo nice to have everything connected to one single PC.

Great 8-bit dance moves, Adrian! @43:06

About two years ago I scored a free new in box unused Dell Precision T1700 with a 4th gen Intel Core i5. Installed a pair of SSD, 32GB RAM, and gave it to a friend as his lab / gaming server. The PC before I gave it to him was on loan to a client as their remote access server running Hyper-V 2019 and a pair of remote desktop servers for staff remote access. That machine lasted onsite a whole year at the client before they purchased a new real server. At home, my main desktop PC is a Dell Precision R5500 (fully upgraded & spec'd out) - an absolute beast of a machine! The PSU is the new standard that is being rolled out in the near future across all PCs. There are adapters on eBay that let you connect a 3rd party standard PSU to the Dell mainboard.

Vote up, keep it up, thanks for sharing the video :)

19:15 Those Dell power supplies are anything but run-of-the-mill. They are super unique to the computers they connect to, along with the dell motherboard. I would look into replacing this computer for some more standardized parts. Props to them for using a 12V only power supply and using the logic board to distribute the 5V and 3.3V to the rest of the components though. 31:25 One thing I have found to be a great convenience as well, is to get small 1ft to 3ft extension cables, and run them to the desk near the monitors.

Is this what my patreon money is going towards??? I wholeheartedly approve!

That generation of Dell "office" and workstation machines is really solid.

Yes.... the floppy drives get crazy with Win10/11. I would say it's Windows Defender's fault. Not only accesses the drive frequently and also hides autoexec.bat and config.sys annoyingly. I believe the USB3 slow speed is caused by some setting from registry. You could try Ubuntu live and check if it happens the same.

My Q6600 used to refuse to complete POST too until I found out one of the pins on the memory slot was burned out. Only found out when I upgraded the ram and it refused to boot, and it would often hang with bus errors. Maybe check the slot connectors? Great video ✌

Retired Business Dells are awesome if you want something that will literally just work. Pretty bulletproof. I have a modern Ryzen gaming rig, but my laptop is a trash picked Dell Latitude 5450. It’s awesome because they are meant to be fairly easy to service being business machines. I’ve smashed the screen once and replaced it in 10 minutes, and just recently I had to replace the battery.

I've had a similar problem with an older system I now use as a backup system where plugging a 2.5" external drive for internal drive backup had previously worked just fine plugged into one of the high amperage (1.5A) USB 3.0 front ports, but it recently started exhibiting slow operation and occasional (recoverable) drive corruption during backups. Using one of the in-series LCD display USB diagnostic dongles, it turned out that the ports were no longer capable of reliably powering the external drive without lowering the 5V line voltage too far. So, I just plugged a powered USB 3.0 hub I had on-hand into it and everything is now fine. It might be a loose or oxidized plug connection to the motherboard which I'll have to check.

You could always grab a reasonably priced USB 3.0 add-ons and card. You can grab a reasonably priced bis mastering USB 3.0 card that also have two or more USB 2.0 ports.

It's scanning for NICs Reporting it twice Adding some disks So the PC runs nice SATA clause is coming tonight!

You need to get together with a bunch of retro-youtubers and some friends and let your nerd hang out by listening to 8bit Dance Party while dancing and post it for New Year's.

Damn dude that's a lot of taskbar icons :)

If you have not already done it, I would recommend installing the latest BIOS update from Dell. The version you are running here is very old and the one listed on their site (version A28) is designated as "urgent".

You need a SID that has a SPDIF output that can connect to the SPDIF on the HDMI Video card so the audio comes out of the monitor.

New toys are just as good as old toys

My main PC is an Optiplex 7010 with Linux Mint, Core i5 3550, 32GB of RAM and a 1050Ti, still a VERY capable machine despite being 10 years old next year!

Ah! I wish I had known you can put a PCI-X card into a PCI slot!