Product

Dell Dimension XPS Gen 3 Series.

System Configuration

• Dell Dimension XPS Gen 3 Series.
• Processor: Pentium 4 Processor 550 (3.4GHz) with Hyper Threading, 1MB cache. Intel processors have numbers rather than speeds nowadays. The Hyper Threading functionality of the processor can be disabled in the BIOS, if you prefer (Performance -> Hyper-Threading). Running with Hyper Threading enabled means that Linux will recognize two processors, so you must run a kernel with SMP compiled in when hyperthreading is enabled. Of course, SuSE SLES-9 provides an SMP kernel and installs it correctly, as do most recent linux distributions, so it's not so much of a big deal these days. For running multiple CPU-intensive applications hyperthreading does give a significant speedup.
• Memory: 2x512MB (1GB) Dual Channel DDR2 unbuffered non-ECC SDRAM at 533MHz (aka PC2-4200). System can also take 400MHz memory (aka PC2-3200), and mixing speeds is allowed but then the faster memory will run at the slower speed. The minimum memory configuration is 256 MB, the maximum is 4 GB and there are four memory slots. Dell's recommendation is to always install matched pairs of the same size and speed DDR2 memory modules.
• Motherboard: Dell proprietary U7084 motherboard (available here) with Intel 925X Express chipset. 800MHz FSB (frontside bus). Eight DMA channels, 24 interrupt levels.
• Graphics: 128MB PCI Express x16 (DVI/VGA/TV-out) ATI Radeon X800 SE. This seems to be an OEM card made for Dell with half the memory of the boxed ATI X800 cards with PCI Express x16 interfaces. Boxed ATI cards with 128MB seem to only be available with AGP interfaces. Any ideas?
• Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS (D) Card w/Dolby 5.1 (digital output), and IEEE 1394 (firewire port).
• First Hard Drive: 160GB Serial ATA drive: Western Digital WDC WD1600JD-75HBB0.
• Second Hard Drive: 80GB Serial ATA drive: Maxtor 6Y080M0.
• DVD Optical Drive: NEC ND-3100AD (16x DVD+R dual layer writer).
• CD-R/RW Optical Drive: Samsung SW-252S (48x CD-RW).
• Firewire ports: Two. One at the front, one at the back of the machine. The one at the back is connected to the Audigy 2 sound card, and the one at the front connects to the IEEE 1394 socket on the motherboard.
• USB-2 ports: Two at the front, six at the back.
• Network: on-motherboard: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 01). Uses the "tg3_new" driver in SuSE SLES-9, see: /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/tg3-new.c and tested to work fine for both gigabit and 100 baseT.
• Power supply: Proprietary Dell design, built into bottom part of of case and so separate from system, 460W.
• Physical: 42 lbs (19 kg), height: 19.3" (49.1 cm), width: 8.7" (22.2 cm), depth 19.2" (48.8 cm). Watch out, the top pannel slides off very easily. This machine is very quiet for regular CPU usage. When the CPU is heavily used, an extra fan kicks in which increases the noise level significantly. Using a ten meter video cable (preferably DVI), works just fine to move the machine away from the workstation.
• Monitor: DELL 24" 2405FPW LCD flat panel. This monitor has a DVI connector, and works correctly in linux with the radeon driver by setting the "MonitorLayout" option to "TMDS, CRT".
• Monitor: DELL 19" E193FP LCD flat panel. This monitor has an analog connector, rather than digital (DVI), so a converter (not supplied) would be needed to use two monitors simultaneously, as the ATI card has one VGA and one DVI output (as well as S-VIDEO output). This monitor has a response time of 16ms, and as far as I can see, it's quite suitable for playing games. The native resolution is 1280 x 1024 with refresh frequency of 60 Hz (optimal), 75 Hz (max). Pitch: 0.294mm x 0.294mm. Brightness is 250 CD per square meter, very bright indeed.
• BIOS: The password reset jumper block is in between the front pannel connector and the serial ATA connectors to the hard drive, and is marked "PASS". The color of the backlight LEDs in the front panel can be changed in the BIOS, under the "Onboard Devices" menu rather than "System" menu as documented in the Dell manual. There are also four helpful diagnostic LEDs on the back of the machine, which can report a plethora of hardware issues should such arise. The most common one in my use so far has been a PS/2 keyboard extension cable connector, which results in the BIOS hanging with {green, orange, orange, green} status on the LEDs. This status is, amazingly, not documented in the Dell manual. It appears that the nonstandard keyboard provided by Dell will not work on any sort of PS/2 extension cable. Replacing it with a standard IBM Model M keyboard, everything works fine.

Installation and SATA considerations

The AHCI mode of the ICH6-R serial ATA chipset, although its specification is open and published by Intel, is still rather new and Jeff Garzik's driver code isn't in any Linux distribution I could find. See Jeff's Serial ATA (SATA) Linux status report for the latest on the AHCI driver. The machine comes with the BIOS set to run the ICH6 in AHCI mode.

Since the machine also luckily came with two separate drives, one empty and the other containing some weird software from a big company that should know better, I disconnected the SATA-0 cable from the first drive and after removing the SATA-2 connector from the second drive, connected the SATA-0 cable to the empty second drive. If you look closely at the motherboard, you can see the SATA numbers "0", "1", "2", "3" at various positions close to the cluster of connectors for the blue SATA cables. Then I went into the BIOS (by pressing F2), and in the "Drives" section I selected "RAID Autodetect / ATA" instead of "RAID Autodetect / SATA". Essentially, this makes the drive run in ICH5-like mode instead of in AHCI mode, so the linux installer can see it by using the ata_piix driver without the need to update libata to add in AHCI support. I left the SATA-2 connector disconnected during the install, since if I remember correctly the linux drive was only detected if it was the only one connected. For pointers to more detailed discussion of ICH5, see Rick Moen's Knowlegdebase article on Serial ATA.

I then installed SuSE SLES-9 SP1 Beta 1, selecting the "ACPI disabled" installation option. I'm not sure if disabling ACPI is absolutely necessary for the install to be successful, but the first attempt to install with ACPI enabled resulted in a bunch of packages being reported as missing by YaST, and also the installer eventually hung when installing grub, so when that sort of thing happens, I usually disable ACPI.

You would probably be able to install any recent 2.6 based linux distribution, and have it work fine. I'm testing SLES-9, so that's why I'm putting it on this machine.

During the installation, the monitor will show weird colors (this has since been fixed in SLES-9 SP1 Beta 2). Don't worry, once you install the ATI driver (see below), X11 will be fine.

I also tested using the drive in AHCI mode with kernel 2.6.9 with the 2.6.10-rc1 patch applied, but this seems to hang for me during the ahci module load, still need to debug this. Gabriel Rosa also posted this message on the linux kernel mailing list about SATA drives (beyond the first one) not being found, but this problem seems to have been fixed and both drives show up fine in linux on my system when booting in non-AHCI mode.

The following are the boot messages showing libata's ata_piix driver finding the drives when the BIOS is configured to run the ICH6 in non-AHCI mode ("RAID Autodetect / ATA"):

SCSI subsystem initialized
libata version 1.02 loaded.
ata_piix version 1.02
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.2 to 64
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xFE00 ctl 0xFE12 bmdma 0xFEA0 irq 20
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xFE20 ctl 0xFE32 bmdma 0xFEA8 irq 20
ata1: dev 0 cfg 49:2f00 82:7c6b 83:7b09 84:4003 85:7c69 86:3a01 87:4003 88:207f
ata1: dev 0 ATA, max UDMA/133, 156250000 sectors
ata1: dev 1 cfg 49:2f00 82:3469 83:7f61 84:4003 85:3469 86:3c41 87:4003 88:207f
ata1: dev 1 ATA, max UDMA/133, 312500000 sectors (lba48)
ata1: dev 0 configured for UDMA/133
ata1: dev 1 configured for UDMA/133
scsi0 : ata_piix
ATA: abnormal status 0x7F on port 0xFE27
ata2: disabling port
ata2: thread exiting
scsi1 : ata_piix
  Vendor: ATA       Model: Maxtor 6Y080M0    Rev: 1.02
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 05
ata1: dev 0 max request 124KB
SCSI device sda: 156250000 512-byte hdwr sectors (80000 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write through
 sda: sda1 sda2 < sda5 sda6 sda7 sda8 sda9 >
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
  Vendor: ATA       Model: WDC WD1600JD-75H  Rev: 1.02
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 05
ata1: dev 1 max request 512KB (lba48)
SCSI device sdb: 312500000 512-byte hdwr sectors (160000 MB)
SCSI device sdb: drive cache: write through
 sdb: sdb1 sdb2 sdb3
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi0, channel 0, id 1, lun 0

Dual Boot Kludge

The machine came from Dell with some software pre-loaded on the SATA-0 drive (a Western Digital). As described above in the Installation section, I installed linux by disconnecting that drive and putting the second drive (the Maxtor) on the SATA-0 cable instead. Connecting the SATA-2 cable to the Western Digital drive, now linux can see both drives. To boot the pre-loaded software, the way I found to do it is to go into the BIOS, and in the "Drives" section set the SATA-0 drive (the one with linux on it) to be "Off", and change the overall setting for the drives back to "RAID Autodetect / SATA". The pre-loaded software then runs (if you can call such bizarre behaviour "running") just as it did when the Western Digital drive was originally on the SATA-0 cable, even though it's now on the SATA-2 cable. Until I can figure out why AHCI mode hangs during boot in linux, this seems a fairly convenient kludge, given that the machine only spends a few seconds to get through the startup process.

Distros tested

• SuSE SLES-9 SP1 Beta 1 with Kernel: 2.6.5-7.109.5-smp
• RedHat RHEL4
• The KnoppMyth distribution from KnoppMythR5A12, see here for more details.

Drivers for the 128MB PCI Express x16 ATI Radeon X800 SE

This section has moved to a separate page, as the card can be used in quite a few different ways, for example when using the proprietary fglrx driver, it's now possible to get a wide desktop spanning two monitors, with 3D acceleration working. The new page describing some of these more complicated configurations is here

Sound Card: Audigy 2 ZS

The Audigy 2 soundcard also works with the alsa drivers, including digital output. The line-in doesn't appear to work at all, so it's not possible to do any recording on linux using this card: tested with kernel 2.6.12.3. It seems that there's something different about this Dell OEM Audigy 2 card as compared to a standard Audigy 2, card which works fine for recording in linux.

See here for more details.

DVD+RW writer: NEC ND-3100AD

Note that the contents of /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info for the NEC ND-3100AD DVD writer in SuSE SLES-9, show "0" for the "Can write DVD-R:" field. This means that although writing using k3b to (single-layer) DVD+RW media at 4x works fine, it's not possible to write to DVD-R media. It is, however, possible to read DVD-R media created elsewhere. Quite puzzling, unless you were expecting this. When launching k3b, I had to use the root user, so did a loopback ssh login with X forwarding turned on like this, otherwise no drives were found by k3b:

ssh -X root@localhost
# Remember to enable DMA on the optical drives, before writing to them:
hdparm -d1 /dev/hda
hdparm -d1 /dev/hdb
k3b

Although k3b is able to use the NEC ND-3100AD drive to write to DVD+RW, DVD+R and CD-R media, it isn't able to write to DVD-R media. Strangely, it doesn't seem to be able to write to CD-RW media either, and errors out. Yet to investigate this. For now, k3b is able to write CD-RW media using the Samsung SW-252S CD-RW drive instead.

For reference, the contents of /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info are shown below.

cat /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info
CD-ROM information, Id: cdrom.c 3.20 2003/12/17

drive name:             hdb     hda
drive speed:            48      48
drive # of slots:       1       1
Can close tray:         1       1
Can open tray:          1       1
Can lock tray:          1       1
Can change speed:       1       1
Can select disk:        0       0
Can read multisession:  1       1
Can read MCN:           1       1
Reports media changed:  1       1
Can play audio:         1       1
Can write CD-R:         1       1
Can write CD-RW:        1       1
Can read DVD:           1       0
Can write DVD-R:        0       0
Can write DVD-RAM:      0       0
Can read MRW:           0       0
Can write MRW:          0       0
Can write RAM:          1       0


dmesg|grep hdb
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
hdb: _NEC DVD+RW ND-3100AD, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdb: ATAPI 48X DVD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache

2405FPW monitor

The Dell 2405FPW monitor has a "bug": the component input doesn't correctly filter Macrovision (e.g. from a DVD player), and passes the messy signal on through to the monitor's Genesis gm1601 scaler processor, resulting in it becoming "confused" and rendering the video with a thin "wavy" segment, usually near the top of the video. So if you're seeing this effect, don't worry, there's nothing wrong with your monitor. The 2405FPW also doesn't support HDCP, so you can't use it as a TV. Probably this is all intended by Dell, to help us get more work done. Recently, I found that the Samsung DVD-HD841 players have a useful workaround for these problems: if you power on a DVD-HD841 with no disc in the drive, and press the following sequence of keys on its remote control: "ANGLE", "4", "3", "2", "7" (which will display the message "HDCP Free") it will cause the player to turn off the HDCP on its DVI output, making it nicely compatible with the Dell 2405FPW monitor. Also, the component output, when run at either 720p (1280x720) or 1080i (1920x1080) displays no wavy lines and looks almost as good as the DVI output (colors look a bit more realistic on the DVI output), making it convenient if you prefer not to switch the DVI connector from your computer to the DVD player and back again each time.

Motherboard Details

The motherboard is a Dell proprietary U7084 motherboard (available here) with Intel 925X Express chipset. 800MHz FSB (frontside bus). Eight DMA channels, 24 interrupt levels.

• Socket LGA775 P4
• Four PCI Slots
• One 1X PCI-E Slot
• One 16X PCI-E Slot (16X PCI Express Video Slot)
• Intel 925 Express Chipset
• Hyper-Threading Technology Support
• PS/2 Mouse Port
• PS/2 Keyboard Port
• Printer Port
• Six USB 2.0 Ports
• One Serial Port
• 10/100/1000 LAN
• Four Serial ATA (SATA) Interface Ports
• One IDE Channel Supporting ATA-66/100/133
• Floppy Port
• 5.1 Surround Sound Audio System
• Four Dual Channel DIMM slots for DDR2 400/533 (4 GB MAX Memory)
• Compatible part numbers: U7084, GH004

-- PeterKnaggs - 14 Jun 2005

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