I went to a LAN party this past weekend and couldn’t help but admire the abundance of custom PC’s with all their fancy plexiglass cut outs and neon lighting, etc. I currently have a Dell 4400. My warranty is about to expire on this bird and I’m curious if I buy a new case how much of what I’ve got in the Dell can be transferred over to the new case? I do know that my graphics card, audio card, hard drive, cd/dvd, etc are not proprietary to the mother board and can easily be transferred. But can the motherboard itself be transferred?
Computer hardware upgrades are just not really my strong suit. Any feedback or advice would be much appreciated! THANKS!
I just built myself a new system about a week and a half ago. Anyway, it’s rather difficult to give any advice when I’m not particularly clear on what you’re going after. Do you just want it to look cool? Do you want to upgrade certain parts to improve performance?
If you want it to look cool, with flashy lights and plexiglass, chances are, you wouldn’t be happy with your motherboard and many of your parts because they would look rather dull.
If you want to improve performance, since your current system has a P4… you’ll need to pretty much need a new motherboard and everything, in which case you can get one with flashing lights and other stuff that I imagine would look really nice in one of thsoe plexiglass cases.
Can you be a bit more specific about what you’re looking to do?
I guess at this point I’m not as interested in upgrading so much as just changing the aesthetics. Although you make a good point about the current innards of the Dell not looking as nice. I would love to upgrade, but financially it’s just not going to happen right now. Plus the P4 seems to really do well for me. I still play HL2, Bioshock, UT3 Demo, etc etc all on full resolution and have no problems whatsoever.
Without doing a lot of modification if you are artistic at all you could paint your computer case some funky color and paint some artwork on it. Or use ready-made vinyl decals. LEDs can be purchased to add some flash.
Quartz is most likely correct, in that, you probably won’t be able to transplant your system; if you can, it probably won’t be simple. That is, I would expect you’d probably have to buy a new motherboard which means it’s probably worth it (or in several cases, necessary) to upgrade components.
As for the aesthetics, part of why it won’t look as good, isn’t just because the parts are old, but a lot of motherboards specifically designed for aesthetics have nifty leds on them that flash… otherwise, the plexiglass case is just "oh look… a bunch of circuits.
As for those games you mention AFAIK most of them are a few years old, no? If that’s all you’re going to be playing, chances are you could probably build a whole new spiffy looking system relatively inexpesnively. My new system, which is pretty much top-end gaming, I put together for under $1500 which includes a $500 video card (but doesn’t count the 24" monitor ). My new motherboard is covered with lights, but I didn’t opt for a plexiglass case, so I only see them coming out of the ventilation holes (hey, it was a good price, and it’s one of the best boards out there). If you were to get a new case, and you have to buy a new motherboard, you’d probably want to get that sort of motherboard.
Either way, if you’re not looking for performance much beyond what you have now, you could probably suffer to build something for a LOT less money than I spent.
My office PC is a Dell very similar to yours. I haven’t taken measurements of the motherboard, but it’s rectangular and not particularly small, so I suspect it’ll fit a generic case. However I think my system lacks a CPU fan; instead a plastic shroud connects the case fan to the CPU heat sink. If you transplant this onto a generic case, you’d need to replace the heatsink with one that has a fan. Also, it looks like the cables for the front-panel USB connector might be non-standard as well.
). My new motherboard is covered with lights, but I didn’t opt for a plexiglass case, so I only see them coming out of the ventilation holes (hey, it was a good price, and it’s one of the best boards out there). If you were to get a new case, and you have to buy a new motherboard, you’d probably want to get that sort of motherboard.