Dell Dimension L series (L433c)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’ve always been a fan of the Dell Dimension series from the late 90s. They are aesthetically pleasing, are generally pretty powerful and capable for their time, and make great Win 9x machines. Today I’ll be looking at the L series, Dell’s more budget-oriented Dimension computer, specifically the L433c.

The case still has that signature Dell Dimension flair to it but it is smaller than other Dimension cases we have looked at here prior. Prior Dimensions we have looked at both have two 5 1/4 bays as well as three 3.5-inch bays. The L series case has much more limited expansion opportunities with only a single 5 1/4 bay and a single 3.5-inch bay, though there is a dedicated bay for a 3.5-inch floppy drive so the upper one can still be utilized for something like a ZIP drive if so desired. The case does have a slightly rounded top which can make stacking an issue.

On the rear of the case, we have standard color-coded PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse along with two USB 1.x ports, a serial port, a parallel port, and a VGA port for the built-in VGA. The PSU is interestingly next to the IO ports and at the bottom of the case, we have four expansion slots.

The sound card I currently have installed is a Sound Blaster Live!

Opening the case doesn’t reveal much as the power supply covers a large percent of the motherboard. The green tab on the upper right corner of the PSU can be used to allow the PSU to lift up on a hing and out of the way, very convenient.

The chipset is a version of the Intel 810 chipset which also tells us the VGA port we saw on the back is for the integrated 810 graphics. I’ve found the integrated graphics on the 810 chipset to be surprisingly good though you can add a discrete graphics card if you would like, provided it’s a PCI card.

The on-board video is running on an AGP bus and my implementation of the 810 chipset seems to have an AIMM (AGP Inline Memory Module) which would boost the performance of the on-board video. Unfortunately, the particular version of they chipset on this board also seems to limit the CPU choice to a Celeron.

1) CPU – The CPU on this machine, as indicated by the label, is a socket 370, 433MHz Intel Celeron running on a 66mhz FSB. The C in the L433c label indicates this board is Celeron based and unfortunately will not support Pentium chips. It should be able to be upgraded to a Mendicino core 533MHz Celeron though I did not attempt this. I have read that a user claimed to be able to upgrade to a 600MHz Coppermine core Celeron but this wasn’t confirmed and I would take it with a grain of salt. The Celeron was Intels budget CPU generally running on a lower FSB than the equivalent Pentium and utilizing less on-chip cache.

2) RAM – The L433c has two slots for PC100 SDRAM. The maximum amount of memory you can upgrade to is 512MB via dual 256MB sticks. seeing as this PC runs best under Windows 98 and Windows 98 tends to have issues with memory over the 512MB mark this limitation isn’t too much of a hindrance unless you really have your heart set on running Windows XP.

3) PCI expansion – Unfortunately we are limited to four PCI expansion slots with this PC making running DOS or Windows XP achievable but less than desirable on this computer. I went with a Sound Blaster Live! card which is a great card for Windows 98 gaming and even DOS to a degree. For video, I tried running a PCI FX 5200 which I did find to get bottlenecked somewhat by the CPU.

4) floppy and dual IDE connectors

5)PSU connector – This board does use Dell’s proprietary power connector that uses an AUX style connector.

6) CMOS battery

7) Pizo speaker

I didn’t really love the L433c but as a budget machine it wasn’t bad. I was surprisingly impressed with the on-board graphics and under my Windows 98 testing it gave decent results in games from the late 90s. I feel this PC shines most when built into a Windows 98 machine as reasonably fast PCI video cards for gaming can be acquired and a Sound Blaster Live! or Vortex2 based sound card would make playing a good amount of games from the late 90s a reasonably good experience especially if you can get yourself a PCI TNT2 or faster and perhaps a PCI Voodoo 2. You could build this PC out as a DOS machine though the lack of an ISA slot for sound will hurt compatibility. Building this computer out to be an XP gaming machine is technically possible, especially with a powerful PCI video card but I suspect anything but the earliest of XP titles will likely chug along pretty poorly.