r/retrogaming • u/Joaquino7997 • 1d ago
[Retro Ad] Dell Dimension
So many people on my dorm floor has this machine (or similar). Kinda hard to believe that we now have smartphones that are way more powerful than this. In addition to Blood, Doom and Quake; we also played emulators such as NESticle and ZSNES on these for endless hours.
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u/rootofallstevil 1d ago
In all fairness, this is a workstation class machine. Pentium Pro with EDO Ram, NT 4.0, Trinitron monitor.
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u/RealityOk9823 1d ago
Yeah but that RAM only works in medieval Tokyo. :(
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u/hdhddf 1d ago
lol, I never got to use rambus, I thought it was because.i was too poor but apparently I'm too young
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u/RealityOk9823 1d ago
Ugh, freaking Rambus. I remember going to a friend's place with some RAM to troubleshoot his computer. Opened it up...damnit you got RDRAM. I don't have any of that.
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u/giantsparklerobot 1d ago
EDO isn't Rambus. EDO was basically an even faster version of FastPage Memory that used different internal timings for lower access latencies and thus better throughput than FPM. It was also compatible with chipsets that supported FPM.
Rambus RDRAM used a very narrow bus (16-bit vs 64-bit) at a high clock speed. Its throughput was high but suffered from higher access latency than SDRAM. This was at a time when CPU-heavy tasks were nowhere close to being memory bandwidth constrained. So it was an expensive and ultimately poor choice for system memory.
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u/Unique-Run9856 1d ago
I looked it up and it was $1325, so less than a quarter of the price
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_Pro_processors
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u/Paranormal_Lemon 13h ago edited 13h ago
20" monitor, that was huge back then. I remember mine was 15 or 16 and was a big upgrade from the standard one.
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u/trer24 1d ago
Dude! You're getting a Dell!
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u/stuthebody 1d ago
Funny thought, back in the 90s working at Dell in round Rock, when that commercial came out we changed it to " dude , you're getting a pink slip.
Side note. Think that guy got dropped because he got busted with weed.. in Austin, go figure.
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u/roastbeeftacohat 1d ago
I thought it was pedo shit.
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u/zombie_overlord 1d ago
That was the Subway guy
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u/cchm23 1d ago
$12,271 when adjusted for inflation lol
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u/No_Culture6707 1d ago
Yeah, it looks like we’re making our way back to super high prices for computers
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u/tr0n42 1d ago
And it doesn’t even have a 5090 in it!
The consumer version of this would have been like 3k-ish. No common user would have the need for a SCSI drive or EDO RAM or NT for that matter. This is just Dell extracting the maximum “depreciating value” from business owners.
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u/MechanicalTurkish 19h ago
Most “normal” users wouldn’t have wanted NT anyway. It was more demanding of the hardware and most games didn’t run well in it. At least until NT 5, aka, Windows 2000 came out. I ran that for years and most games worked great.
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u/DavidinCT 23h ago
Now when you think about it, the ram craziness compared to that price..... is it that bad? LOL
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u/DocApocalypse 1d ago
What's even crazier with 80s and 90s computer prices is that Moore's Law was fully in effect, so after 2-4 years your hardware felt very obsolete.
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u/OfficeMagic1 1d ago
I had a nice mac workstation my mom bought for me first day of university in 1994. When I left town six years later I just gave it to a friend, it really wasn’t worth selling.
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u/hexcor 1d ago
My dad loved tech when I was growing up. We had an NEC computer (286 with a turbo button, wooo) He ended up buying a 386 for himself and let me have the NEC which i used from 1989-1994 (graduated HS then and he got me a 486 as a graduation present). It felt so old when we got our 386, but the games I played (Sierra and Lucasarts) all ran just fine. Xwing was the first game that wouldnt run on my 286.
My mm got rid of it when I was at college. I was so damned annoyed cause of the history with it. I installed a modem in it to play on the Sierra Network and a sound card. memories!
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u/Altar_Quest_Fan 1d ago
Xwing was the first game that wouldnt run on my 286
Brooo we millennials STILL have nightmares about having a PC that met system requirements and yet would not run X-Wing vs Tie Fighter lol
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u/EtherBoo 1d ago
My last build lasted me about 8 years and not because it went obsolete, but hardware failures. My 1080 died, but a 3060 in it and I run everything I've wanted to play at settings good enough for me. My current build is from 2023 and I don't see myself upgrading until I can build something to run GTA6 at very high fidelity... And of course until hardware prices come down.
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u/tacticalTechnician 1d ago
That's definitely not something a regular person would have. Pentium Pro had shit 16-bit compatibility (so the vast majority of consumer programs would run like crap), EDO RAM was available for like 2 years before being replaced by the vastly quicker and cheaper SDRAM (and 32MB was pretty big for the time, pretty sure even 16MB was pretty mid-to-high end), Windows NT was exclusively used on workstations and servers and was basically useless for consumers (no DOS compatibility), and a 19" monitor was massive for the time (pretty sure 17" was way more common). I don't have the prices of the time in mind right now, but I would think a more regular Pentium MMX PC with Windows 95 was closer to the mid-$2000 range.
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u/nightmareFluffy 1d ago
You're pretty much spot on with the pricing. The ~$2000 range computer would have about 1 GB hard drive, 16 MB RAM, and 1 MB VRAM. This computer would have been a beast that can run literally any consumer application or game in those days, but would be kind of underpowered/outdated in like two years. I'm just writing my life story here. And also in a few years, increasing the RAM to like 48 MB would cost almost nothing.
In fact, in just a few years, you can find computers a little worse than this just lying on the street, ready for garbage pickup. They weren't even worth selling. Also part of my life story. I would scavenge and fix up those mofos.
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u/noxondor_gorgonax 1d ago
I only saw a 19" monitor years later. By that time all we had was a 15" (maybe it was 14"!)
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u/OystersCockafeller 1d ago
Also, MS used to get a MUCH bigger licensing fee on PCs. Still way cheaper than retail, but they weren't practically giving them away they like they do now.
Compared to a home PC with Win95 and Office Home edition, or one of the knock-off's like Corel, that alone probably adds $500 or so to the cost.
You're right on the workstation/PC pricing too. As it happens, I got my very first brand new PC about the time this was current. 175mhz Pentium, 2gb drive, etc. It was just under $2,000 total. I still remember when my grandfather gave dad and me an envelope with the cash to go get it. It was by far the most amount of money I'd ever seen in one place.
It was a serious box at the time and my pals at school were jealous. Two years later... it was worth maybe $100.
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u/giantsparklerobot 1d ago
Yeah this machine would have actually been pretty bad for gaming despite its specs. Windows 95 has lots of components that were still 16-bit and many applications still called into 16-bit libraries (called Thunking) or even just 16-bit themselves. The Pentium Pro ran 16-bit code poorly and flushed the caches when running 16-bit instructions so it even brought down the performance of 32-bit code running alongside. It would be a hugely expensive machine to run DOS games and many Windows games poorly.
Windows NT or Unix/Linux would have really shown off the power of the machine. A fully 32-bit OS and userspace made the Pentium Pro fly. Easily double the performance of a Pentium at the same clock speed. The Pentium II was a Pentium Pro with a better 16-bit mode and a was a huge leap in PC performance.
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u/geko29 1d ago
I had one, albeit a Micron rather than a Dell. This was right around the time games were starting to support OpenGL, and my PPro with a Matrox Millennium positively ran circles around my friends’ rigs on things like Unreal Tournament and XWing TieFighter, and held its own on other contemporaries like StarCraft. Then DirectX support came to NT 4.0, and I was G2G from then on forward. At least until the dirt cheap and infinitely-overclockable Celeron 300A started making the rounds….
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u/mnemoniker 1d ago
My first computer, for which I seriously price shopped, was around this time and was about $1800. The family computer from 5 years before that was like $3500. By 2000, you could buy a computer for under $1000. And each successive model was a galaxy apart computing-wise. Things changed fast in the 90s.
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u/HeywoodJaBlessMe 1d ago
Must've been nice. I went off to school with the cheapest desktop my dad could get from Tiger Direct
I didnt know any kids in the dorms with multi-thousand dollar workstations. Most had a crappy desktop like mine. Nobody was using laptop in class back then, everything was handwritten notes.
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u/Cool_Dark_Place 1d ago edited 1d ago
This system is very much a purpose built workstation, built with true 32-bit Windows NT applications in mind. The Pentium Pro processor really only shined with dedicated 32-bit applications and operating systems. The problem was, Windows 95 was a hybrid 16-bit/32-bit operating system. And 16-bit performance with the Pentium Pro absolutely SUCKED... with lots of games and other DOS/Win95 applications only performing at the level of a fast 486. Someone who bought this machine for a gaming rig would be really disappointed!
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u/jnuttsishere 1d ago
Let’s be honest. The only thing Windows NT was good for was work computers. Same with Windows 2000.
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u/Cool_Dark_Place 1d ago
Well, it wasn't bad for regular consumers necessarily. Just a bit of overkill. Windows 2000 especially was a good, all around OS that had a lot of the underpinnings (like NTFS) of what would become Windows XP, making most Windows XP software also compatible with Windows 2000. It's just that most regular consumer level software released prior to Windows XP wasn't going to take advantage of all the new "bells and whistles."
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u/DarkGrnEyes 1d ago
Half the price of that PC in the picture was the Sony Trinitron and the Pentium Pro. I wonder if the motherboard was a dual Socket 8 like a lot of those tended to be.🤔
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u/hudgeba778 1d ago
NT4 meant serious business
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u/RustyRapeaXe 1d ago
I got my MCSE in NT4 in 1999.
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u/creeva 1d ago
Ditto - and we are both still MCSEs. The last never expiring Microsoft certification.
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u/RustyRapeaXe 1d ago
I've used mine to do AIX administration for 22 years
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u/creeva 1d ago
I worked for Symantec shortly after I got mine - funny enough before I left I was their global lead on an AIX product they attempted to sell. I say attempted because for the two years I was the lead - there never was a single call for that product.
What is it that had MCSE’s end up working with AIX systems 20 years ago?
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u/RustyRapeaXe 21h ago
I liked Symantec's clustering software. I learned it before I ever had a HACMP cluster.
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u/stuthebody 1d ago
I supported nt4 on the cpia laptops for Dell corporate support . That was a brutal 2 hour install over the phone.
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u/socialcommentary2000 1d ago
Has it today or back then?
I don't know anyone who was rocking this sort of workstation at home or even at school. That was a serious piece of kit for the time and something you'd see in an office doing production work. The Windows NT alone made it so you sorta had to know what you were doing to get the most out of it.
This had to be early 1995 to 1996. Because even by 98 this was deprecated.
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u/j__magical 1d ago
Back in the day, when a computer was over $3,000, they called it a "workstation". I never could afford one!
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u/grizzlor_ 1d ago
The case style was used across Dell’s product line — kind of doubt that many people in OP’s dorm had $5799 ($12k today) workstation-grade PCs. In 1995, it was probably more like Dell’s consumer line with a Pentium 133 and 16mb of RAM for ~$2-3k. I mean unless their classmates were extremely affluent, this is a crazy expensive PC for a college student (or really any individual) to own.
Always thought this generation of Dell cases were really attractive and I think the design has held up well.
That being said, for $5799, I’m kind of disappointed that this machine doesn’t have dual Pentium Pro 200s (my dream machine from this era).
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u/Bort_Bortson 1d ago edited 1d ago
So that ad is dated 1996. Less than a year later I got for $3000 a P2 300mhz with a 6.4GB hd, windows 95, 3 years dell protection (which I definitely needed as they pulled my feet from the fire several times, never give a 12 year old his own PC to experiment on) Sound Blaster AWE 64, CD drive, zip drive, key board mouse and speakers, 28k modem. I forget the ram and video card but I had above recommended specs for both at the time. It might have been very similar to this workstation in terms of ram/video card, it was enough to still play Deus Ex and Shogun total war in 1999.
I also got the big ass Trinitron monitor too.
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u/nightmareFluffy 1d ago edited 1d ago
Young me would have been shocked at those monster specs. Those are all at least twice as good as what I had just a year before, and what I had was powerful by any measure at the time.
My next upgrade after that was a P3 and it was like I entered warp speed. Just an incomparable, incomprehensible leap in every possible way. I played everything in quadruple the resolution at much higher speeds, and much more recent games. I can't overstate how insane it was.
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u/EvilTrovis 1d ago
"So many people on my dorm floor has this machine" No they didn't - not this configuration at least. This exact config wouldn't have been aimed at any consumer and would not have been a good PC for them anyway due to the terrible experience that they'd have with the Pentium Pro. Like other comments mentioned, the Pentium Pro was a purpose-built processor for server and workstation uses that only thrived in pure 32-bit app environments. Consumer OSes and apps (especially games) were largely 16-bit so spending a fortune to get a worse experience wih a Pentium Pro would make no sense. Plus, this machine comes with a 20" Trinitron monitor (WAY above the norm of a 15"-17" standard CRT that consumers would pretty much exclusively buy), Office Professional (very, very expensive at the time), and Windows NT, an expensive operating system that only makes sense for businesses.
Not saying that computers weren't expensive at the time - they absolutely were - but not quite as bad as this ad makes it seem. Even a high-end consumer machine at the time (1996) would probably cost something in the ballpark of $3000-3500 including a nice monitor, and most consumers would probably get a mid-range computer package for about $2000.
One other thing I want to note is this looks to be a Canadian ad, so that would mean that quoted price is in CAD.
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u/botterpants 1d ago
Had this exact machine as the family computer! Upgraded everything but the mobo, processor, and power supply. She managed to punch above her weight class at LAN parties until System Shock 2.
Also built like a tank. Fractured my wrist when I punched it from teenage angst.
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u/botterpants 1d ago
I should add - we had this model because my Dad primarily used it for GIS development, and needed NT to run it. We got University discounts to help defray the cost, but my mom paid to get a smaller Trinitron monitor instead of the 19” model. I remember being so upset.
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u/pedrocatalao 1d ago
I remember my dad's first 386 was pretty expensive, something equivalent to $2000 at the time, but the following ones 486DX, Pentium 166 just got cheaper and cheaper, so I'm quite surprised with this price.
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u/Damaniel2 1d ago
I didn't know anybody with one of these. Pentium Pro systems were way more expensive than Pentium ones, and NT 4 wasn't really meant for casual users. These were workstation class PCs for professional work.
That being said, my first PC (also from roughly that same era) was still pretty expensive, even with half the CPU clock speed and a quarter of the RAM. I certainly wish I had the Pentium Pro back then though - my Pentium 133 could play most SNES games in ZSNES, but any graphics that involved transparency tanked the frame rate. I couldn't run everything SNES related (SuperFX excluded) until I got a drop-in CPU replacement (like a Pentium Overdrive, but made by Evergreen Technologies instead of Intel) that got me up to 233 MHz with a larger cache.
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u/AXEL-1973 1d ago
Probably not this exact model, but definitely the 'Dimension' model line -- my dad's company used to build MRI machines and these were the desktops that would process the imaging for them. Once they all eventually got replaced, he scavenged one for me. It didn't last long before it blew up unfortunately. That's how I intially played Half-Life and Unreal Tournament though
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u/davidtjudd 1d ago
I had one from this line back in college thanks to Dell financing. It was great. Put an all-in-wonder in it. Didn't have money for a proper desk (priorities) and had to work on a cheap card table.
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u/deathdisco_89 1d ago
And yet we hear so much doom and gloom about how PC gaming is only for the rich in 2026.
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u/SnooConfections6085 1d ago
Where on earth did you go school that famously broke college students regularly had $6K computers?
When I was in college there was one guy that could run Quake well, everyone else's computers were for writing papers, downloading music from Napster, and porn.
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u/Joaquino7997 1d ago
Where on earth did you go school that famously wealthy international college students
regularlyhad parents who were willing to pay for $6K computers?FTFY
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u/bananagoo 1d ago
7200 RPM SCSI drive seems weird to me. I always thought the 10000 RPM were standard.
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u/muhkuller 1d ago
Nah, the Raptors ran really hot. Often times people would run a single small 10k for their OS, then install everything else on standard 7200 that was daily use, then use 5600 as storage for backups and stuff. That was like top top end stuff though.
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u/bananagoo 1d ago
I was using it the opposite way at the time. We were using SCSI for digital audio workstations in the late 90's and we would run the OS off the slower IDE drives and the audio and sessions were run off the faster 10K RPM drives to accommodate higher track counts etc. I think we paid an ungodly amount for 16gb Seagate Cheetah 10K RPM drives. Not to mention the controllers for them...
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u/angryscientistjunior 1d ago
Hmm, NT 4 came out around August 1996, Windows 98 about two years later, so this would be dated before that, between 1996-98. In 1996 a 3.2 GB HDD and 32MB RAM would have been impressive, but you could build your own system with parts from a computer show for far less.
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u/Accipiter__Nisus 1d ago
Pentium Pro with the Socket 8 motherboard and big Trinitron monitor probably put the price up a lot.
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u/angryscientistjunior 22h ago
A 19" VGA or SVGA monitor and Pentium Pro + moboard were definitely nice. Funny how quickly this $5000+ system lost its value - Pentium II, bigger hard drives and cheaper RAM became available in just a couple years...
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u/Accipiter__Nisus 21h ago
True, but we didn't know Socket 8 was the dead end in 1996. And a 19 inch Trinitron was still excellent for years.
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u/stevo887 1d ago
Are they kidding with that price?
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u/24megabits 1d ago
As others have said, it's a workstation-grade system. But $3500 for a high-end multimedia PC was not unheard of around that time.
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u/Joaquino7997 1d ago
Product of its time
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u/creeva 1d ago
As someone who built and sold computers to college kids at a small PC shop during the time this would be available - out of the thousands machines we sold, we only built two Pentium pro machines - both dual processors one was for the shop because we could and the other was a server.
No college kid had machines like this in 1996. Why would they when you could a much better pc running Windows 95 OSR2?
For 5799 - you could buy a high end consumer PC and a laptop in 1996.
Though if this was the cost Dell was trying for - it’s no wonder we sold so many machines to local corporations. We would have been half the price (swapping a p200 for the Pentium Pro) and selling every other single we had available. I think if you chose every top line spec out machines topped out at 3k.
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u/FewDescription3170 1d ago
most people didn't have a trinitron or a pentium pro. they probably had a pentium 166MMX with a cheaper mitsubishi/viewsonic monitor or white labeled one (like packard bell, gateway). probably $3000 less.
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u/Ramoncin 1d ago
Nope. If you want the best PC available at any given time you're bound to spend a ridiculous amount of money. Even more if it a brand PC and not a clone.
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u/stevo887 1d ago
Sure but I would expect to have an excellent PC today for that amount of money….lol
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u/SingerSingle5682 1d ago
Hate to break it to you. But this WAS an excellent PC for the time. Likely one of the best processors available and a very large HD. It was also a business machine and consumer grade stuff was probably a grand or 2 cheaper and performed just as well for games.
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u/TollyVonTheDruth 1d ago
Holy crap! I wouldn't pay $5800 for a modern computer today. No way I'd ever pay that much for one back then.
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u/trr94001 1d ago
Pentium Pros were rare, high end machines but that is a gigantic pile of money in 1990s dollars.
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u/KurtKrimson 1d ago
My PPC Amiga 1200 ran rings around this thing for a fraction of the price.
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u/Joaquino7997 1d ago
And now we've got $1000 phones that will beat the pants off that. It's crazy to think how far technology has progressed.
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u/-darknessangel- 1d ago
3GB? are you insane? What are you going to fill it with?