Fanless Windows XP retro gaming on Dell FX130

Overview

The Dell FX130 is a completely fanless thin client with no moving parts, designed for long system life. I’ve upgraded it with Windows XP and put it through its paces with classic games like StarCraft, Counter-Strike 1.6, and Quake 3. Can a 1GHz VIA Eden CPU with S3 UniChrome9 graphics handle retro gaming? Let’s find out!

Key Moments

• 0:00 Introduction to the Dell FX130 fanless system
• 1:30 Hardware specs: VIA Eden 1GHz, 1GB RAM, 4GB flash storage
• 3:00 Opening the case and internal overview
• 5:00 Removing the motherboard (4 screws + battery)
• 7:00 First boot into Windows Embedded Standard (XP-based)
• 8:30 Installing and playing StarCraft
• 12:00 Counter-Strike 1.6 gameplay test
• 15:30 Quake 3 with OpenGL rendering
• 18:00 Final thoughts and recommendations

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hello and welcome to my channel. In a previous video, I went over a similar computer to the one I’m showing you today. The one in the other video that I have is the FX 170. This one is the FX 130. They look very similar, but they’re different internally. They have different CPUs and different chipsets. So I’m gonna go through this one and show you what it’s all about. So let’s get started!

All right, first thing I’m going to show you is the exterior of the device. In the front, it’s got the power button, it’s got an activity light for networking, it’s got a headphone jack, microphone jack, and two USB 2.0 ports in the front.

There’s a little stand that is screwed in using this screw right here. In the back of the unit, you have a 12-volt power input, a PS/2 keyboard connector, so you don’t have to give up one of the USB ports to a keyboard if you like. You could have four USBs and a PS/2 keyboard. You have a DVI port with VGA, so the way you can tell is that you have these four little holes right here—that’s for RGB and another signal that VGA needs. That way you can use this adapter or any other DVI to VGA adapter and convert your DVI to VGA. Okay?

You also have two additional USB 2.0 ports and an ethernet port here.

All right, so now I’m gonna go ahead and open this up for you and show you what’s inside. Okay, to open this up, it’s pretty simple. So you just take off the stand. If you look this way, you can see inside—the memory inside. So you’re gonna take off this cover, and that’s done by taking off these four screws right here.

[Takes off screws] All right, so four screws off. What we do is there’s a little lip right here—just pull it off, and the cover comes off. Notice that this is not a symmetrical cover. There are three little lips right here, and that’s the front of the unit. So when you look at this side right here, there’s three little indentations there where those lips go in.

All right, so now that we’re inside, let me show you a little bit of what’s in here. First thing you notice is this big heatsink. This is—underneath here is the CPU and the chipset. The CPU is a VIA Eden one gigahertz chip, and it’s a VIA chipset with a Chrome 9, like S3 Chrome 9 video card embedded on the chipset.

It’s got a one gigabyte DDR2 SODIMM. So you can take this off. I don’t think that this unit is upgradeable to two gigabytes. I believe that it’s one gigabyte as is, all you get. But that’s the two gigabyte—sorry, that’s the one gigabyte DDR2 module right there. Put it back in there.

This is a four gigabyte IDE flash memory module. This unit originally came with a one gigabyte module, and I upgraded it to a four gigabyte. Underneath that module is a battery for the clock. This is a little speaker right here. If you look here, that’s a little speaker. So it does have very faint onboard audio, which actually, this is not beeps—this is not like a PC speaker. It’s actually playing back the sound effects from the onboard sound card. Cool!

So that’s all there is in there. I’m not going to take this off. If you want to take off the motherboard, the way you would do that is there are four screws holding down the motherboard. There’s one underneath that shield, there’s another one right here, there’s one in this corner, and there’s one down there. And then after you take those four off, you have to take off this and that, and then the whole entire board slides off like that.

All right, so let me put this back together and get a monitor up, and we’ll see it boot up.

Okay, here we are. I plugged in a USB mouse, a USB keyboard, a USB CD-ROM drive in the front here, and a simple 15-inch Dell LCD. It’s a 4:3 ratio, so using that VGA adapter that I showed you earlier. Let’s go ahead and power this up, and I’ll show you through what’s installed.

Okay, turn on the power. I’m going to go into the BIOS if you press F2. So it’s a Phoenix BIOS. So you can see, nothing special. You go through here and you see that you have a four gigabyte hard drive. There’s a secondary IDE channel, but there’s no access to it. It’s got one gig of RAM, but it has 982MB because 64 megs of that goes to the video RAM. So you can set the boot priorities if you plug in a USB disk. You can change the setting here, too, so that you can actually change the priority of the disk. You can boot from the CD, the hard drive, typical stuff.

Here you can enable boot from local, from the network, or you can disable that. Or enable the onboard audio. You can set the amount of RAM that you want to allocate for the video. I have it set for 264 megs. If you need—if you have a game or something that requires more video RAM, you can play with the setting here.

Here’s like everything is set up for high speed and USB support for keyboard and mouse. Power management—nothing here to mess with. I will leave that alone unless you know what you’re doing.

Okay, so I’m going to exit without saving, and we’ll let it boot up.

Okay, so I went ahead and actually added something else that I was missing to my little setup here—some USB-powered speakers with some RGB lights that I got from Amazon recently. And that way we can actually listen to something. [Tests audio] Cool! So that works.

This is Windows Embedded Standard. It’s Windows XP Pro, basically, but it’s like it takes up less space. It’s got all the updates, got Service Pack 3. As you can see here, it’s running on a VIA Eden one gigahertz with one gig of RAM. All the drivers are installed. The video driver is a VIA Chrome 9HC IGP—integrated graphics processor. All the drivers are installed. The hard drive—there is 2.7 gigabytes free on this drive. If you want to extend it, you can simply just add a small little USB drive. I usually add a 64 gig drive for storage. Windows XP makes it really easy. You can actually install all your software to that drive, and you never have to actually fill up your C drive. It works really well, especially for games. You can just install all your games to the external drive.

All right, so that’s basically it. There’s nothing—this is a fresh install of Windows XP. And now what I want to do is I’m going to go ahead and install StarCraft so that we can play something that is period-specific to this era. This is a game that was available for Windows XP and Windows 95 and 98. So let’s see how it works.

Okay, I’m gonna try to install this. All right, so StarCraft is installed. I’m gonna go here to the start menu, StarCraft. Let’s play StarCraft. But let me lower the volume a little bit here. All right, StarCraft!

[Plays game intro and gameplay]

Okay, so let’s skip this intro. It’s kind of a cool intro, but let’s skip it. Cool, that’s bad—that’s good. All right, let’s do single player. Let’s start.

[Mission briefing]

As you can see, it works really well. It’s really fast for these type of games. This is an excellent little machine. It takes up very little space. And yeah, 10 minutes up and running. So actually, that’s like two minutes after installing the software. So I don’t know how to exit this thing. Escape, maybe? I’ll quit. There you go.

And that’s it! Okay, so let me go ahead and install something else and get back to it.

All right, so I just installed another one here. It’s called Counter-Strike. This is Counter-Strike 1.6, and we’re gonna see together if this game actually loads on this VIA Eden one gigahertz with an S3 Chrome 9 video card.

All right, so I’m gonna launch Counter-Strike Warzone. Okay, so I’m gonna go to New Game. Let me go to Options and see something here. Video—and put it 800 by 600. All right, let’s see. New Game, number of CPU players: 9, normal game. I have no idea. All right, let me start.

Okay, that’s taking a little bit, but at least this hasn’t crashed. “You are playing Counter-Strike 1.6.” Okay, terrorist forces. Select team. I don’t know. That’s a sign. And I’ll select—oh, that works pretty good! This is software rendering. Oh, I was just shot! Oh, damn it! Well, you can see that it works!

All right, so another game that I wanted to try out here on this machine is Quake 3. So Quake 3 should exercise some of the OpenGL or DirectX features of this machine. So let’s see if it works. I’m 50/50 on this. I’m not sure whether I have DirectX properly configured or not. So let’s see.

[Launches Quake 3]

Okay, that’s a good sign! Setup, game options. Okay, system—640 by 480. GL extensions on. Display. All right, let me see. Single player. Let’s try that. Fight! Bring it on!

[Gameplay]

Oh my god! Oh my god! I killed myself! This is crazy! Wow! I don’t even last 30 seconds there. You go—first kill! But I’m pretty much gonna last like—and I killed myself. I blew myself up.

Cool, so that works, right?

All right, well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. This is a little FX130 from Dell. And if you like this kind of stuff, be sure to subscribe. I also sell these units, and I’ll put a link in the description below where you can actually buy one from me. And yeah, let me know in the comments what you think, if you’d like for me to try another game in another video with this machine or something else. Let me know, right? Well, stay cool, and talk to you next time. Bye!