Trying to Make a 18 Year Old Pentium 3 Desktop Usable in 2019 (IBM Eserver X220) 

I received one of these from my first IT internship around 2003(ish). They had decommissioned due to it not booting but all it took was reseating the ram. I threw an ATI card in it and installed Windows 2000 and was pretty much a dedicated Morrowind Machine until World of Warcraft came out. It even ran that up until Burning Crusade when I knew I needed to upgrade to stand any chance of raiding since 40 man raids made it struggle just a hair. Needless to say I was stoked seeing someone else giving one of these some love. Nice work man.

If that’s a standard ATX case; I want one! It’s, as we used to say, “so dope”.

Get a 8400gs pci video card, it unlike the 6200, the 8400gs has gpu accelerating so firefox and chrome will work MUCH better on windows 7. Geforce drivers were released for the 8400gs. (GeForce 342.01 Driver)

Was looking at your older vids and have to say you have improved your pacing and editing alot. Keep up the good work!

God, I would love to have that case to build a sleeper system in. Still, it gives me home for screwing around with a 1.4ghz celeron board that'll take 2gb RAM I have lying around here to play with.

Dam its a shame it doesnt have an AGP slot. You can get much better gpu on AGP that might have driver support. and because there was no drivers working in windows the CPU had to do most of the graphics rendering :(

Personally, I would've used a light weight DE like LXqt or XFCE on Debian instead of Gnome, since Gnome can definitely be a resource hog. LXqt is not LXDE, btw.

Can we just talk about how beautiful that case is 0.0 i'm such a simp for IBM designs lmao.

That thing is a Linux dream machine. Granted drivers are a pain in the ass but with some poking around it would become awesome. Love how little computing power it needs :)

try to put GeForce GT 520 (PCI version of course) - this is the strongest PCI card available but it is little bit rare

Now that's a old system kept expecting a little mushroom cloud to come out of the motherboard when you ran the tests. Like the new set its warmer and has personalty giving it that professional edge. Reminds me i need to water my little cactus plant lol.

I have that case for my current machine. It's very ergonomic, 3 hard drive bays (3.25") with rail in a sliding cage, 2 5.25" fixed bays, 2 3.5" fixed bays. It's a cool case for a sleeper PC and looks very nice. I love the IBM PC case.

That case looks good.

This case looks pretty nice! You should do a sleeper build with it!

That case is kinda awesome looking though. Would be a fun modern sleeper build.

Why were u trying to use proprietary driver for Linux? Old binary drivers on modern OS is like trying to run Windows 7 drivers on Windows 10 - it may work but will be unstable. Open source driver (which is default on Ubuntu) is really the best choice for that old hardware. BTW I still use Toshiba Tecra R10 (around 2008) as my main laptop and with small changes (SSD and more RAM) it is really enough for web browsing, watching videos, light gaming and most of my work.

🙂 thanks for the interesting test, neato yay Win7 ✌️😏📀

It would be interesting if it was able to actually do server stuff, like gaming servers. If it could properly run a Counter Strike or a Killing Floor server would be certainly an interesting value proposition.

This is the best video for a Pentium III machine

video about P3 machine means instant like... :P also remember that the 6200 was always a low end card, which a decent agp card (sadly not possible in that machine) most games would run even better

You made it usable now!!

Great Video mate, Tiny Core Linux, Puppy Linux, antiX Linux or Bodhi Linux are good lightweight Linux distributions that you can use on your older PC.

Hey do you plan to do another video about this?:) while trying out haiku beta 2?

on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview test, did you tried rolling the clock a bit back to where that version of the preview you tried thinks it's that time?

I like older hardwaretoo, I've been using a notebook, Dell 131L, since 2007. These hollidays it was the only computer available and I was able to do most of needed on it, like buying tickets, watching 720p videos, browsing the internet, downloading and reading pdf using Mendeley. RU-vid was a bit slow albeit still usable. I even edited a smal video from my camera using opencut (it was painful but worked ), recoded and exported to my phone to upload to Instagram. I was surprised how much usefulness this notebook still retains after 12 years. I upgraded the cpu to the best I could find online, added up to 3gb of ram and an old 120 gb ssd. My best experience was on peppermint Linux.

Would a pci gt610 work? I put one in a dell dimension 3000 and it ran windows 7 like a breeze with only 2gb ram and a single core 3ghz processor.

The case look so sexy and a little newer than it’s age

I really like the aesthetics of this server case

have never clicked that notification so quickly

You can made a beutifull mod with this case!

Those slots under the PCI slots are they ISA or PCI-X (not express) if so you can try to find Some matrox cards

tbh that case looks pretty good, turning it into a sleeper build PC will be a great idea.

Can I change the motherboard, I have a x series 225? What kind of motherboard

Should i use 2×2gb of ram in socket370 (Pentium3)

Writing this from vicinity of Tokyo, Japan. I also happen to own one of these with 512MB*2 RAM and 1.26GHz-Dual config. Now, let me mention that I did try to use it as a daily-use PC back in 2006-2007 while trying to run WinXP Pro, and that doing so to get satisfactory results wasn't easy either. I recall I installed nvidia GeForce MX440 (PCI) to resolve the graphic-performance issues and that was okay. The part I had issues I couldn't find a single work-around for was getting the sound to play properly under SMP (I recall that below-described issues were not present under one-CPU). I only managed to get choppy sound out of this box no matter what method I tried. First tried SB Live! via PCI, tried all possible PCI slots and the sound was choppy. Assuming that its driver wasn't meant for heavy usages under SMP, next tried some generic UAC1.0 devices (namely YAMAHA Cavit DP-U50 and RP-U200, and TI PCM2704C) via the mobo's onboard USB. Still with no improvement. Expected that an add-in PCI-to-USB2.0 (built around an NEC μPD720101) would solve the problem but got no success. Running a light-load LAMP server (in CLI, based on distros like debian) on this machine does serve most purposes I ask for at satisfactory levels, but that's all for me. Sadly, a RasPi that's far less power-hungry does the job faster and more efficiently, so x220's having a post-retirement life in the attic. I still keep the machine in my attic though (like I said) since I love the "pointy" designs of IBM-made hardware of this age. Anything that's comparable design-wise with this IMHO is HP's zx2000, xw6*00, xw8*00 and xw9*00. Maybe I will make mods to the x220's casing, in order to fit in a more-generic, more modern set of CPU/Mobo/RAM/VGA.

Why not buy a pci-x 64 bit to agp adapter? In this video I liked that you put a real graphics card and more ram, but I think this system can do better

Hello from Norway m8!

How usable would it be on a lightweight desktop environment rather than GNOME?

this computer still looks very stylish in 2019

Now I wonder if you throw an Aegia Physx PCI card in that will it do any difference.

This system would've worked better on Windows XP, it wasn't designed for modern OS and was a pretty decent rig for its time. I used to have a Pentium 3 and later a Pentium 4 PC with dedicated graphics cards on both back in the day and they'd run games from back then smoothly. Great video though!

That IBM Eserver is really Amazing! Maybe I can make this With Modern Components for Gaming... ;-)

You can use XP drivers for the the integrated video on 32 bit 7 :)

In Linux you will have better performance (And stability) with a Radeon card, they have a really good open source driver. You can also install the savage driver (xserver-xorg-video-savage)

What about a geforce 610 PCI or a HD5450 PCI?

Do the same thing but with a server around the era and use it like a regular 2020 pc. If possible

I have an ASUS TR-DLX dual Tualiatin with 1.4s and 4GB. I just have XP on it. It kicks anything in the 2000-2010 era. Fun stuff.

I remember clearly being able to decode 720p on a pentium 3 700mhz so with dual 1.4ghz you should be able to do 1080p no problem with the right codecs installed.

Did you try 480p video on YT?

OUCH @ trying Gnomeshell on that ... I wonder how much better the performance would be if (I think they even have live versions of new releases though I am rusty Debian-wise) it was Debian with say LXDE or XFCE on it (same DE as Xubuntu of course)

Please make a follow up video where you turn this into a file server using Open Media Vault.

Geforce 8xxx or a semi-modern 710 PCI would fix most of your problems and could ensure smooth RU-vid playback via hardware decoding.

Any chance on a revisit?

CPU-wise, dual Tualatin 1.1 GHz should be at least as fast as a Banias as long as you're using a multicore-aware OS, and those work fine in Linux. But you can't do anything anymore unless you have some GPU power under the hood. Shame that PCIe to PCI adapter wouldn't work in it.

You might want to get a PCI 8400GS/8500GT...I think that 6200 might have been having some hardware issues, looked like it was artifacting for a second too

You need to manually install the drivers using the .ini file in the extracted files folder

Unfortunately very few motherboards (Like the Supermicro P3TDDE, MSI Pro266TD, and Iwill DVD266-R.) came with the features more modern computing require to have much use; such as an agp slot paired with either an ATI HD3850 or 4670. Could still get more power through the use of a Zotac GT430, 520, or 610 PCI graphics card. It is absolutely possible to play a lot of games 2008 or before; and some lighter games after that time period. Someone like MrOffordef has plenty of videos showcasing what is possible and can be an entertaining browse.

That gfx card is very slow you should use a better pci card, the coolest you can use is he voodoo 5 5500 pci on windows xp which will make it a very solid gaming machine for the year 2001 capable of running all the early 2000 titles very well

Now i want one.

that was beast back in the day it could used to do storage server or windows 2003 server, windows 2008

Can you upgrade the CPUs or it is impossible Like a Pentium 4 with hyperthreading

A GeForce 8400 GS PCI would've got you hardware video playback and more modern drivers, if you feel like trying again :D

2x Pentium III, 2GB SDRAM, Geforce 6200A, Lubuntu=still kind of useable for basic web browsing. Interestingly, whether I was using Windows XP Pro or Lubuntu, the machine felt far faster than my old laptop, with; a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 HT, 2GB DDR and Radeon 9000igp.

Hmm odd that video was a slide show. I got blue ray rips to run no problem on an Athlon Thunderbird 1.2ghz with a Radeon 3450 gpu to run smooth. I was surprised. Video acceleration on that gpu was limited though, and couldn’t find an agp gpu with modern enough video features at the time.

nvidia Forceware vista x86 drivers from 2006-2007 work on win7, FYI

yep.. windows 8 should run as well on it, I tried w8 on athlon XP (also w/o SSE2 support) and it worked.

why not linux mint 19.1? and use an ati radeon card?

Best budget xp build? Targeting the x64 build of xp

Hey man.. a 20 year old PC still using up to date software and is usable? I'd say that's a win.

Can you run this PC in Android OS or Bliss OS if it runs smoothly just for experiment.

Maybe try Puppy Linux? There are specific flavours of it that are designed for old hardware like this.

I would try Lucid Puppy or Precise Puppy Retro in it for daily driving. Any of the Puppy 4.X.X distros will work fine it. I even got Chrome 7 to run in a similar machine with it. As far as RU-vid goes, get a RU-vid download app for any 32 bit machine without the latest SSE support, Windows or Linux. It's slower but far less frustrating than trying to watch the slide show.

The RAM and graphics really took it down. The 6200 is a pos card. That really makes a a difference if it had a AGP slot.

Would you have ever considered using Q4OS, or Debian? Debian should't be hard to run, and Q4OS, which is based on Debian, only requires a 300 Megahertz CPU(making it a great choice for old machines).

32 bit operating system is 3gb max is it not?

Wow, you got a better framerate in Crysis than you did in RU-vid.

Why would you run Gnome on a Pentium 3?

A good solution for the graphics would be to add a usb pcie slot to it and place an Ati Radeon next to it!

I'm trying to get nvidia-173 drivers working on my Geforce FX5500 card in Ubuntu 14.04. Anyone got it to work? I see forums and threads online where some people have got it to work under Ubuntu 14.04.1 or a distro based on it. If someone knows a way, I have a started a topic on it here superuser.com/questions/1500000/unity-launcher-missing-after-login

We have one of these old IBM servers for our phone switching system. It still works believe it or not. Runs NT Terminal server like a dream. But I wouldn't go far beyond XP on this thing. Windows 7 might boot, but lord knows that's too heavy. Windows 2000 would be probably a more perfect option to be honest. Even XP sp3 might be a bit heavy considering. I wouldn't mind such a toy for my collection. I enjoy still running older operating systems like OS/2 I could imagine this would run that without much complaint. But, that's just the geek in me talking. Anyone for OS 4.52? lol

you need a PCI to PCIe converter and a newer display adapter to get the videos to play well. thats what I've done for my Pentium 4 system

Would appreciate if you uploaded Geekbench results

I wonder how would HD 5450 PCI handle this.

I was given a brand new intel se7505vb2 workstation/server board for free, ive put in 2x xeon 2.8 processors, an agp x8 512mb asus graphics card, soundblaster 7.1 card, wifi card, 4x case fans glowing red, 2x dvd multi format drives, a card reader, an ide 80gb system drive and a 500gb sata drive, a floppy drive, twin soundcard fan cooler with a 1030watt psu that runs windows 7 nicely 😉 oh and its all in a nice brand new biege workstation case 😀 its not a great gaming machine but it plays 1080p videos very smoothly and the sound is clear, multi media wise it great 😎

Windows 7 is a little overkill for this anyway. It would be a nice XP machine though. I have a 1999 Dell Latitude laptop with a Pentium 3, and it's pretty perfect for playing old games from the early Windows era. Quake, HL, Age of Empires, Anno 1602 etc... and it's very neat for that.

You should try putting a gt 520 pci inside it. Less driver problems xD.

Anyone knows the dimensions of that server case? I want to buy it for a mod

Get a zotac gt 520 pci card its the best modern-ish gpu u can run on such a old hardware

I'm trying to revive my Dell PowerEdge 1300 with a Pentium III and another empty CPU slot. Runs at 400 MHZ and 1 gig of RAM. Horrendously slow and Windows server 2003 has been installing for 2 days now lol. Yikes

Try GT610 aka GT520. Zotac has both cards in PCI variants.

It kinda sounds like the gpu bios might be corrupt

I wonder how well a 4x Pentium 3 system would run now. Back in the day, these systems weren't really useful since most software was written for single thread systems.

why not windows server 2008?

I'm Not worried about Windows XP I'm pretty sure you can't run anyting modern on that operating system anyway, except like some steam games

The best operating system for your ibm is probably windows 2000 pro or windows xp pro, you can reskin both these operating systems to look more modern as i have an old packard bell p4 3.2ghz ht running xp media edition that ive reskined to look like windows vista with the sounds to go with it called 'vista inspirat' with 'vista preview' which gives the whole new feel to you o/s 😉

I already told you on the previous video that gpus previous to the 8000 series are not supported anymore after Ubuntu 16.04. And even among the 6000 series that you decided to use you choose one of the crappyest ones. BTW it's strange that the 304 driver gives you problems in Ubuntu 16.04, i know for sure that works on the pcie version of 6000s series cards. I like your videos, but you should have used a Gt610, or at least a gt520, or gt430. A pentium 3 when oveclocked can often outperform a pentium 4, this system is heavily gpu bottlenecked.

Should have used Gentoo Linux, it's Debian specifically maintained for old systems (even older than Pentium 3). Also, with shitty graphics support, you can probably run the whole thing as a server via CLI.

How's it going??? So something I'd like to point out is you are using these newer operating systems with this older hardware. No problems there. Why not try and use Win2k, with modified installations of newer firefox installations, and google chrome running in Win2k. I do this all the time on my classic gaming machines. Secondly your Nvidia 6200 is plain bad. It is unfortunately the memory modules that have failed. The main issue with this system is it does not have AGP support making it near impossible to get a decent video card. I run 1080p with an older ATI Radeon X1650 512MB video card, running windows 2000. If you are interested I can send you info on my builds, and you can do your own research. I'm also willing to send you a system I have completed running a modern version of firefox, 1.2GB SD RAM, and the video card mentioned above to play around with. It has an Athlon 1.2GHz on it as well, and runs linux like a champ. Of course it has it's limitations, but otherwise has good video performance. Let me know if you are interested in that for a video.

Why would you test it with Crysis and L4D when Quake 3 and Unreal 2004 would run perfectly

I remembered that you had tried to run a GTX 1060 on it. But you should've run the 9 series on it instead.