I upgraded an old Dell XPS 200 and I am left with an Intel Pentium D 2.8GHz and 1GB of RAM. Does anyone want it? The CPU seemed pretty slow, but I'd imagine if you had a board for it and added and old vid NVIDA card the GPU could do the bulk of your SETI work. Anyhow, its free to a good home to the first one who wants it. I will pay for shipping too. I'll charge it back to the aliens when you discover them.

Pentium D 3.4. I would have done the 3.9, but that was a bit more expensive. There was a used, but tested and great condition 3.4 on Amazon for $20.00 so I bought it. Works a lot better. I also upgraded from 1GB to 4GB. Waiting now on my Nvidia Gefore 310 half sized card. That should certainly accelerate the thing as far as SETI is concerned. Not a modern card for gaming, but it is still 70 GFLOPS which will run SETI a lot faster than 1.4GFLOP per core which the CPU is putting out. Look on Amazon for these older systems, all the stuff is now cheap as can be because its years old.

I almost wonder if something was wrong with the CPU. I mean it worked, started up and ran the computer, but it was ungodly slow. With the upgrade my work units went from 17hrs to 6hrs. Agree it doesn't seem like that should have made a huge difference, but it did. I think video card, which was all of $16.00 on Amazon refurbished, should make a substantial difference in work unit processing. It's an older video card, but still vastly more floating point than the CPU. I'll probably build a more modern unit for fun once the Breakthrough Initiative units start to come in after the turn of the year. I'm thinking probably something AMD with 6 cores and a higher end video card.

Sounds to me like the thermal paste had dried up over years of heavy use. Good thermal paste should never dry up, but when you're talking about keeping the price of a system low....

My guess is that after you replace the CPU and re-affixed the fan/heat sink, it is running much cooler, therefore performing much better.

Probably so... the XPS 200 is also a crappy design scheme. The case is really small and can get very hot inside. The fan for CPU/heatsink blows air in rather than out of the box. I reversed the fan to blow out on the basis of another user's experience in keeping this system cool. That seems to have helped a great deal as well.

Thats what i`m using.

MX-4

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

Thats what i`m using.

MX-4

Same here. Good stuff!

It is made by Arctic.