Found a HP D530 on the street!

[iModFrenzy]

My friend was walking down the street a few days ago and found a HP D530 SFF on the street. Since he knows I will take any tech, he gave it to me. My plan is to try maxing it out as much as I can.(For 2005-1999 gaming)

MODS: I decided to come here since this is pretty old tech('03), not to mention I'll have to deal with people on TomsHardware/other MacRumor forums going on and on about how this computer is old and not worth it(if I haven't made it clear, it doesn't matter to me).

It has some good specs, and runs Windows XP pretty fast. It is AGP 8X(5V volt only)slot.

Pentium 4 2.53ghz
1GB DDR
Intel 82865G Graphics(Intel GPU…)
40GB HDD

I want to throw in a Pentium 4 Extreme 3.4Ghz(hopefully the cooling will handle it, if not just go buy another cooling fan). I haven't used AGP slots at all, nor have any knowledge on it so I am not sure what to get(being that this is a SFF makes my life even harder)

Some games I want to play are Half Life(82865G should handle it),Doom,Quake.

Some heavy ones, Red Faction, FEAR, Half Life 2(Surprisingly not that demanding but the G82 won't handle it I assume.)

Maybe chuck OS X on it

 

[gavinstubbs09]

I would guess this computer is strictly IDE for connections internally, but thank goodness for SATA PCI cards

 

[Mr. Buzzcut]

Good luck. Not much more than a space heater, unfortunately. Would otherwise make a nice NAS.

 

[keysofanxiety]

I want to throw in a Pentium 4 Extreme 3.4Ghz(hopefully the cooling will handle it, if not just go buy another cooling fan).

In my experience, if there's one thing HPs are the worst for above all else, it's cooling. I doubt the cooling system can even handle the original chip.

Best of luck anyway! If you don't have any joy, you can always use it if your hob stops working ...

 

[MagicBoy]

Honestly, I wouldn't bother throwing any money at it. 865 graphics are useless for even retro gaming. The D530 was designed as business desktop. You'll need a low profile AGP card, which are pretty rare and the PSU will be right on the edge, especially with 10 year old caps in it. Best you are likely to find is an AMD 3450, and the AGP bodge drivers (GPU is designed as PCIe native) are glitchy.

Forget the P4-EE. Anything faster than a 3.0GHz will likely be unsupported and generate too much heat.

Free isn't always good. You'd get better performance gaming via a Parallels VM on an Intel Mac.

Sorry.

 

[mzs.112000]

Honestly, I wouldn't bother throwing any money at it. 865 graphics are useless for even retro gaming. The D530 was designed as business desktop. You'll need a low profile AGP card, which are pretty rare and the PSU will be right on the edge, especially with 10 year old caps in it. Best you are likely to find is an AMD 3450, and the AGP bodge drivers (GPU is designed as PCIe native) are glitchy.

Forget the P4-EE. Anything faster than a 3.0GHz will likely be unsupported and generate too much heat.

Free isn't always good. You'd get better performance gaming via a Parallels VM on an Intel Mac.

Sorry.

There are some good AGP GPU's on amazon, one even has OpenGL 2.0, and 512mb of vram.
The Pentium 4 in any of its incarnations was useless for anything other than heating a room
Oh, with the stock performance, of that PC you might as well use VirtualPC on a quad G5 2.5GHz, for gaming, even then it might be faster than a P4, but IDK for sure because I have not used VPC on a G5.

 

[MagicBoy]

An Intel Mac running Parallels would show it a clean pair of heels. My old P4 got virtualised into Parallels and it plays the installed games as well if not better than the period hardware.

Reminds me, I've not had a play of Sim City 4 for a while...

 

[mzs.112000]

You could put In a 128gb kingspec ssd, it would be faster than any mechanical hdd, and cheaper than a PCI SATA card. Also you can get 2GB DDR RAM. Then put put Linux on it with DOSBox, Wine, and other emulators for gaming.