Anyone in here know anything about this pc? I mean full on technical stuff??
Anyone in here know anything about this pc? I mean full on technical stuff??
not meaning to suck eggs, i was on the dell website the other day and they have very detailed spec sheets that might help.
Is it the studio xps?
What info exactly you after?
Im wanting to get rid of the Restrictive dell Bios. The MB is made by foxconn and i think its the same as an NF4SLI7AA but not 100% sure. The dell number is OHX 241. Dell are complete dick heads and keep everything secret!!Originally Posted by tiff_lee
Good old bios locking, you sure you want to start flashing the board? its the easiest way to turn it into a paperweight!
Have you looked at the board itself for any id/model numbers etc?
I haven't as yet mate, thats what i need to know, ie what to look for etc? This board although 3 years old is a socket LGA775 and has a number of processors available to it. The Dell bios wont recognise most and wont support overclocking. The Foxconn bios will.
Just looking on the surface of the board should reveal some details although you may have to remove some components.
Look around the pci slots and cpu area for a board name or model number, from what the dell website says the board uses a nforce 4 chipset although whether it would be a dell branded board or something else I dont know.
Ok mate will have a butchers. It seems it has dell numbers and foxconn numbers which makes things difficult. Yeah it has the nforce 4 chipset which is pretty much what the foxconn mb has.
Yeah foxconn actually make most of the boards for all the brands then they are just re-branded. If you can get a foxconn number you might be able to get something from their site http://www.foxconnchannel.com/support/downloads.aspx
Ok chief many thanks. Fingers crossed i can do something as i think the processor would cope with a little overclocking, or i could get a Pent 960 3.6ghx dual core and ramp that up to 4ghz!!
Are you well into your Pc's chief??
I got the XPS700 which supports overclocking.......never used the damm thing and it cost me £3k +
think its time to get rid of the bloody thing
What is the process of overclocking?
To be fair, i got the xps600 cheap and plopped in a new graphics card. It runs grid and left4dead flawlessly which really suprised me. All i want is more control over the BIos etc to get the best from the system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overclocking
Me and a mate of mine tried to mod a Dell mobo years back on an older optiplex machine, it was nigh on impossible to do so in the end we just got a PROPER mobo to do the job! If you've got the socket 775 bud try going for a decent Asus mobo with the P45 chipsets, they love a good overclock! http://www.ebuyer.com/product/150285
I got my Intel Duo 3GHz CPU up to 3.6GHZ with this same board and some good kingston ram no problems!
Yeah I am into my pc's not as much at the min though as i'm concentrating on my car.
As unicron' said you may well have trouble as they basically try and cripple the board with a locked bios although its a joke really as you buy an xps if you are an enthusiast surely?
If you do go down the route of buying a new motherboard personally and this is speaking from experience I would NOT buy any nvidia based chipsets or an ASUS board.
I work away from home so I built a second desktop to leave at home for weekends and picked up a cheap mobo and cpu to use with my other spare bits.
The cpu I bought was a E4300 which cost less than £30, standard clock is 1.8Ghz but runs easily over 3Ghz at which speed has better performance than a far more expensive E6600.
Cheers for the help chaps. Thing is i think the processor can go a lot faster so it would be the board i would be looking at changing. Also being a dell the case is great but it fixes the small ATX? type board down differently. It would mean i may have to modify the case. Also im not sure if the dell psu will work with other bits of kit. Its a 650watt which should be ok, but its the voltages and connectors which would prove a pain as well as the didicated power on and reset buttons etc which seem to be proprietry hardware.
So i'll try and flash it with a foxconn bios. Is there anyway i can revert back to the dell bios if it doesnt work??
I know what you mean about the Dell boards being slightly different to normal ATX type boards so it's just a case of comparing where the fixings go. I would personally buy a cheap case (£30 or so), try the PSU, as long as it has the correct power connectors e.g. sata power, mobo power, atx power, gfx power etc... you should be fine. If in doubt though, there's plenty of decent 600W+ PSU's out there to buy, just make sure you buy a decent make e.g. artic cooling, cooler master, OCZ etc...
As for ASUS mobos, I have never had any problems with them but then it depends on how hard you push them. I know my mate broke one a while back but he bought another one quite happily, plus they seem to clock well with the right hardware. I'm not brilliant at overclocking but from my experience with this board it seems to do quite well.
If you do decide to flash your bios you might find it hard to revert back to an old one, trial and error I'm afraid mate.
By the sounds of it you have a micro ATX board, the only problem with going down the new/2nd hand mobo route is that if you end up buying a new case and new psu you would of perhaps been better off building your own in the first place.
If you flash the board with the foxconn bios and it doesnt work you will not be able to revert to the dell bios the board will be bricked/dead/useless etc it will not post or do anything.
That's the danger with bios flashing it is the easiest way to render your board useless.
Even if you did manage to sucessfully flash with a foxconn bios and then still want to revert to the dell one you would have to get hold of a dell bios to flash it with.
From reading this
http://www.nvidia.com/content/nforce...l_CPU_List.pdf
the nforce4 only supports early core2duo chips and if the board you have is a 'NVIDIA nForce4 SLI XE' then it wont support any. However this is merely chipset support which would only be available after bios updates so if you can't get hold of a suitable update then the board wont even recognise a core2duo chip.
To be honest the rewards reaped for overclocking a P4 isn't really going to be that much at all it'll just use more power and generate more heat with a small gain if any. The trouble you will goto in order to get a suitable bios along with the risk of bricking the board isn't worth it IMO.
Ah, I didn't know it had a P4 CPU... They do get hot and are no way as overclockable and robust as the later duo core cpu's! There are soft mods around for CPU overclocking, done through boot up profiles if you are still keen to up the performance.
I was just guessing its a P4 from looking at the dell website.
You could always try overclocking from within windows.
Ok chaps, the cpu is a Pentium D 930 3.0ghz dual core 800mhzFSB. 0F62, (SL94R) LGA775
The MB is Nvidia nForce4 SLI X16 MCP with SLI (DELL OXH241) Foxconn made
Ram is 4 x 512 DDR2 667MH.
Bios A11 DXG051.
The pc has really good fans and heat sinks so a little overclocking would hopefully be ok. Anything would help really. What do you guys recommend to do windows overclocking etc??
You could try using ntune to start off with
http://www.nvidia.com/object/ntune_5.05.54.00.html
see how you get on with that.
Hey that looks pretty good! Does it work though??
It should do the nforce4 chipset is supported, or so it says.....
How accurate and stable it will be remains to be seen.
Give it a go, worst case scenario you get a bad overlock, blue screen and time to reformat!
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