Hi everybody, Trying to upgrade C521 to its maximum. It had sempron 1.8, very old bios and 512Mb of ram pc2-4200. It could only run XP and old Ubuntu. I dropped Athlon64x2 2.3GHz, updated bios to 1.1.11 and changed ram to 4Gb pc2-6400. Despite specification says it accepts up to 1Gb dimms in each of 4 slots I dropped 2x2GB dimms in 2 dual mode slots and it works! It runs now w7 and fedora17 as a speed devil And it runs so silently that I even first got scared: fan stopped working! Well, it looks now great but I noticed that the processor runs @ 2.2GHz (should be 2.3) having its capacity of 3GHz. Its current voltage is 1.2v but it should be 1.4v (?..seems to me). Also Vram is 1.8v but it could be up to 2.1-2.2v (?...). However the dell bios (looks like award) has obviously none overclocking options. Is it possible to unlock the bios or use one from different model to get somehow overclocking capabilities?
Dell Dimension 521 upgraded Hi, I have been running my Dimension 521 for some while with AMD 64X2 6000+, and 8GB of Memory without any fails other than the faulty Bios supplied by Dell and never fixed! only problem is it fails to collect the video card during boot and requires a reboot to start again! now running Windows 8 and Office 2013 with great success. I never found, but did search, any way to access settings other than the basics in Bios but it does seem to work fine without any adjustments. They built a good machine, mine is 6 years old and still steaming with the one annoyance.
8Gb ram? Wow... I used several hw utilities and one of them (perhaps popular here RW) reported 16Gb of ram installable on this mobo! I thought it's an error...also I never heard about 4Gb ddr2 sticks. But well, 8Gb is quite enough for visible future imho. This machine belongs to my friend whose daughter found it actually on a scrap yard. He complained about "very old and very slow computer" It runs now better than one of mine and no problems with video since it's still "native" 6150LE though I though to drop there 1Gb Nvidia 8400GS, passive cooling, low profile (30 bucks). But as you wrote it could be a problem with it? Well but what to do with the bios? I hoped it could be modified somehow. I saw folks here does "bios mods" though I didn't understand yet what it actually is. If I could overclock the cpu to its full capacity - 3GHz (all utilities show this) it would be one more good gift to my fellow. I have another Dell - Latitude D800 and I know that folks flashes to it M6's bios and it works fine and ram could run with higher speeds - just a sample. So I thought that maybe it's possible to flash another dell bios to that C521? PS. Forgot to mention that I also got a problem with C521: win7 64bit is installed and runs fine but no luck with either Fedora 17 64bit or Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10 64 bit . However 32 bit versions are installed and run fine.
I have only tried Windows on the 521, from XP through to Win 8 all work fine. 8GB is overkill but then memory is cheap now, and I have plenty of "headroom" when running memory intensive stuff! I don't know if overclocking would work well at all and 3GH cpu's should be cheap now, I bought mine for $100 a while back from someone who found it wouldn't work on his magic box!
Actually yes, but it's simply interesting to squeeze maximum from that machine as it is now. In meantime I extracted A17AS.bin from DMC521-010111.exe by Dell and I also found a tread ... something like "We can mod dell's bioses - mystery is over!" where a guy stated that he unlocked a number of bioses with a proggy named "modbin". Unfortunately it's not quite straightforward to download it... Well anyway I probably couldn't mod my bios myself: the modbin is about just a hundred Kb so it's not an intuitive stuff.