I have that old ‘My Buddy and Me’ TV jingle in my head.

A while back… I don’t know.. two, maybe three years ago, Dell sold a server tagged the SC420. It was the successor to the 400SC. The only reason these two tags are important is because the machines rapidly became darlings among the computer geek community.

There were two main reasons for this. One was cost. Both machines sold for dirt cheap. The 400SC and the SC420 both, at various points, sold for around $200. While the stock options at this price included a 2.53GHz Celeron processor, 256 megs of DDR2 ECC RAM, and an 80-gig SATA hard drive, insane rotating deals could double your hard drive space, double your RAM, or give you a Pentium 4. Not bad for less than it would cost to build the crappiest of barebones machines.

The other reason was the undocumented potential of both machines. Though Dell definitely did not support installing anything other than Windows Server or Red Hat Linux, it quickly became apparent to anyone with any computer skill that with minimal tweaking and detective work finding drivers, Windows XP would work quite nicely.

The graphics were nothing to write home about. The 4-meg card built on the 400SC’s mainboard was only slightly outclassed by the 8-meg card built into the SC420. No gaming there. No sound either, but there are at least three open PCI slots on these machines, so that was never a problem.

And here is where things get strange. It was a cost-saving measure, I am certain, but Dell used mainboards with ‘unsupported features’. The 400SC had an AGP 3.0 slot, and the SC420 had a PCI Express slot.

Unsupported never stopped the geeks, did it?

Well, the 400SC’s part of the story ends here. I never owned one, never got into the various motherboard revisions, the jumper mods, the strange hoops the masters of the original hidden gem had to jump through. I bought the SC420. Anything with that much potential was going to pique my interest.

The deal I got in on was the Celeron 2.53 with the 80-gig hard drive and double the RAM. 512 megs of DDR2 ECC. Which was vastly more expensive than straight DDR2. I paid $239, shipped. Dell sold so many of these systems that they quickly ran out whenever they had them in stock, machines being ordered in multiples of ten in some cases. They’d quickly show up on eBay. But I got mine, and that’s all I cared about.

It’s been sitting around, all this time, pretty neglected. I haven’t paid much attention to it because, of course, I have always had numerous computers. It got lost in the shuffle. Relegated to being a plain web server. I knew it could do more, if I gave it a chance. But honestly, I don’t really like building out computers in my free time. In fact, I mostly loathe working on machines when I am not at work.

And so it languished. Until my computer-fueled meltdown and near-disavowal of all things computer. Then I took it out, dusted it off, dropped all my hard drives into it (the 305-watt PSU that came stock with the SC420 is easily beefy enough to run the 6 hard disks and single dual-layer DVD burner I have), dropped a sound card in (venerable Sound Blaster Live 5.1), and hooked it up. The results were adequate, but nothing special. I began to look up the old articles, to remember why I bought the machine in the first place.

The first thing I did was upgrade the CPU with a true Pentium 4, running at 2.8Ghz, with a meg of L2 cache, far better than the Celeron’s paltry 256 megs. Gone are the days when the Celeron was an overclocking champ. This was also the first time I had ever encountered a Socket 775 CPU. Luckily I have a sack of spare parts, and finding an upgrade CPU was not that hard. After this, the machine performed significantly better, but still not great. I had already upgraded the RAM to 2 full gigs, so I knew that wasn’t the bottleneck. No, it was the graphics subsystem. I needed to get a better graphics card.

There is a PCI Express slot on the mainboard. Dell doesn’t support its use. In fact, on the description page of the server, the following quote was always visible: “The Poweredge SC420 is ideal for your first server & network. Note: For server use only; CANNOT BE USED AS A DESKTOP. Dell does not support the use of a graphics card on the SC420.” Needless to say, that isn’t much of a deterrent. I have a PCI Express x16 ATi FireGL graphics card with 128 megs of DDR3 RAM. Not the best money can buy, but it’s a nice dual-output card that would drive two monitors just fine. Just one slight problem. The PCI-e slot isn’t x16. It’s x8. And there are little plastic dividers in the slot that make it impossible to simply drop the card in.

Fortunately for me, most x16 graphics cards will run just fine at x8. The difference has been compared to the difference between AGP 2x and 4x, or 4x and 8x. Not noticeable under nearly all circumstances. But there was still the problem of getting the card in there. I looked online, read a couple of articles, and plunged in. I went to my local mega-hardware and purchased a blowtorch. Nice propane torch you use to weld copper pipes in the home. I needed a really hot flame, as my trusty Zippo was not up to the task (I tried it).

I set up in my home office with a lit blowtorch on one side and a giant fire extinguisher on the other. I took a small flathead screwdriver, held it to the flame until it was nearly white-hot, and then plunged it into the plastic divider. It sizzled, it melted, it gave way like… well, like plastic before a white-hot piece of steel. It took 5, maybe 7 minutes, tops. Then I carefully extinguished the flame, took a razor blade, and went to work cleaning out the remaining deformed bits of plastic from the slot.

And then I popped the card in, wired the whole thing up, and hit the power button.

Success! Everything booted just fine, and Vista runs really sweet on it now. I have my pretty decent workstation, patched together from a $239 server, a salvaged video card and processor, and some extra RAM.

Dell no longer offers up servers with such hidden potential. The SC430 was a poor, poor successor, and it’s never been the same. Which is a shame. Because obviously on the rare occasion when a manufacturer DOES offer a gem like thes, it sells out fast. I can’t imagine that’s bad for business.