Digital Archaeology: Dell Inspiron 531s

The Dell Inspiron 531S is a slimline desktop. Dell made several models of a similar design in both Intel and AMD varieties. This particular one has a Athlon 64 X2 5000+. Hardware specs of this one include:

• CPU: Athlon 64 X2 5000+ @ 2.6 GHz
• Memory: 3 GB DDR2 @ 800 MHz
• Video: GeForce 6150LE

For more complete specs, check out the HardInfo report.

When this desktop was contemporary, this CPU was reasonably fast. the GeForce 6150LE is part of the chipset and for an integrated solution, it was pretty good for the time but if you wanted to do gaming, you would still need a discrete GPU.

The 3GB of RAM was pretty typical for the time. This machine shipped with Windows Vista. There was a 64-bit version of Vista but most OEM PCs shipped with the 32-bit version. By the time 64-bit drivers for more devices were widely available, I think things were already moving on to Windows 7.

The fastest officially supported CPU on this machine is the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ which runs at 3.1 GHz. This would be a modest upgrade with, very roughly, a 20% increase in performance. More significant upgrades would be the addition of a discrete GPU and an SSD.

Given the small size and limited power supply, the GPU selection will be limited. Something like a GT 1030 or some other card that doesn't require an external power connection would be the best card that would work for this machine. It would have to be a low profile card with associated low profile bracket.

This machine has an issue that I haven't been able to work out yet. When ever I move the window for the BOINC application, the screen scrambles and the computer freezes. I'm not sure if this is a software or hardware problem. I don't seem to have issues with any other application nor do I have problems using the BOINC app or any of the projects I run. There's no temperature problem and otherwise it seems perfectly stable. However, I've run this version of Linux and BOINC on other machines with this chipset without any problem.

Speaking of BOINC, this PC is still capable of running most of the projects I normally participate in. These projects include Einstein@home, Asteroids@home, Milkyway@home, Universe@home, World Community Grid, and Rosetta@home though 3 GB is a marginal amount for trying to run Rosetta tasks. You can see how it is doing overall at FreeDC.

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