How much fun can you have for under £1? Some, as it turns out.

Computers can be big and awkward to ship, and most people can’t be bothered to post them. I don’t blame them — I wouldn’t want to send off a cheap PC either. It’s a hassle, and there’s every chance it won’t even survive the trip. Hardly worth the effort.

That’s why so many end up listed on eBay as “collection only,” which is probably how I managed to grab this one for just 99p

It makes you wonder how many perfectly good machines end up at the tip, which is a bit sad really. Still, we can count this one as saved.

The system I picked up came with the following specs:

T120 Background

Despite what you’d expect, there’s not much information out there on the T120. Even Wikipedia came up short, and the Wayback Machine didn’t help either.

From what I can tell, the Acer Aspire T120 was a budget‑friendly desktop when it launched back in 2003. Still, 22 years is a long time, and I guess the internet just moved on.

The Restoration

Opening the case revealed the usual grime and dust—not the worst I’ve seen, and easy enough to clean once the components were stripped out.

Socket A CPUs have an exposed die, meaning the silicon itself isn’t covered by a heat spreader, so it’s supposedly easy to damage. Despite that, I’ve never had any issues. The heatsink clips on and off much like later AMD processors, and so far I’ve managed not to crack one, though admittedly it’s a lot less stressful working on a 99p machine than it was fiddling with a brand‑new, expensive chip back in the day.

I gave the Athlon a small blob of thermal paste, cleared the dust from the heatsink, and reassembled everything without trouble.

Then came the problem. The system powered on for a few seconds, then shut itself off. After that, it refused to start again until I left it for a few minutes—at which point it would run briefly, then shut down once more. This was just while poking around the BIOS. Temperatures looked fine, and I’d seen this behaviour before, so I had a good idea — bad power supply.

A quick look through the PSU vents showed no heavy dust, but I didn’t bother opening it up – straight to the bin. The last time a PC behaved like this, the power supply eventually gave off a loud pop and out came the magic smoke. Not an experience I care to repeat, and ever since then I’ve winced every time I plug in an old PSU.

Any seasoned tech will tell you to buy a decent, branded power supply, and they’re right of course. But this was a 99p machine I hadn’t even decided what to do with and would probably end up in the loft. Dropping £50 on a Corsair unit didn’t really fit the mood, so I went hunting for a cheap replacement on eBay

The new power supply bumped up the total cost of the build quite a bit, but it also cut down the chances of a fire, so I’ll call that a fair trade.
I figured the system would draw so little power that even a bargain‑bin 500 W unit would have no trouble supplying the 150 W or so it needed. Sure enough, that solved the shutdown issue straight away, and the PC ran perfectly from then on.

Windows setup threw me a curveball, though. My usual XP Integral Edition (a slightly suspect third‑party build with all updates and an easy installer) kept failing. I had to revert to a more official copy, then use the Integral disc for updates and USB drivers. Oddly enough, I’ve used that installer plenty of times before without a hitch — not sure what went wrong this time.

The excellent Snappy Driver Installer handled most of the driver work, as usual. Despite the machine’s age, it picked up and updated every device flawlessly, making the whole process effortless.

I did double‑check to see if there was a better driver for the integrated graphics and eventually found version 6.14.10.380. Windows tried to talk me out of installing it, but I forced it through anyway, and it worked fine. The package even included S3Tray Plus — a tiny tray utility that doesn’t do much, though it looks the part sitting there.

VIA/S3G UniChrome IGP

I managed to dig up a little information about the GPU. The VIA/S3G UniChrome iGPU was an integrated graphics processor that appeared in the early 2000s as part of VIA’s KM400 (like this one) and P4M800 chipset families.

I also came across some related software online. Despite the playful name Screen Toys, there isn’t much to actually play with — but it was still a fun little discovery, and it gave me a satisfying minute or two getting it installed

This GPU is limited to DirectX 7 and doesn’t have any support for shaders of any kind, so things are going to be very limited.

Allegedly the iGPU includes an integrated video decoder that can accelerate MPEG2 video playback, such as DVDs, although I haven’t actually tested this myself yet.

While I was digging around, I put together an interesting little comparison against a few of today’s more common graphics cards… Obviously the RTX4090 is out of touch but the UniChrome Pro is sitting only a little behind the older 3080 as you can see:

Athlon XP 2600+ (Barton)

I did a bit of reading on the processor, and I’m pretty sure I had this exact model back in the day. The Athlon XP 2600+ actually came in two flavours: an earlier Thoroughbred‑B version and a later Barton‑based version, which is the one in this machine. If you’re curious (as I was), the key differences are listed below.

I wondered how this would stack up with a Pentium 4 also, so, enjoy another table:

So the Pentium gained SSE2 support and a faster FSB, both of which the Athlon XP missed out on.

The impressive part, though, was that a 1.9 GHz chip could genuinely stand alongside a 2.4 GHz Intel part. I still wonder if AMD might have grabbed more market share if they’d just named the processors by their actual clock speed instead of the whole “+” rating game. Then again, that naming probably helped them justify similar pricing.

Game Benchmarks

So, with the system all set up, it was time to actually try playing some games. The last version of FRAPS needs SSE2, which is a bit annoying, and you can’t grab older builds from their website anymore.

Thankfully, the Internet Archive came to the rescue and I was able to dig up version 3.47 from there.

Enemy Engaged: Comanche vs Hokum (2000)

1024 x 768 High Average FPS: 23 Min: 16

One of the many cheap GOG pickups, I still haven’t had time to get to grips with the controls, so I just let the demo run. It’s great to watch — a whole war unfolding, with little snapshots of Cold War‑era helicopters and tanks. At around 23 FPS it actually looked smooth enough, or at least close enough for this sort of thing.

Moto Racer 3 (2001)

Average FPS: 30 Min: 18

This one seems to cap at 30 FPS, even on more capable hardware. It was still easily playable, though — no real issues here.

Colin McRae Rally 3 (2002)

640 x 480 Low Settings Average FPS: 20 Min: 12

Not a success, 20fps seems generous, this was extremely difficult to control and looked ugly as hell.

Need for Speed: Underground (2003)

640 x 480 Low Settings Average FPS: 22 Min: 12

Hmm, a little better than the previous, I even managed to win the race. still a bit of a disaster.

Hitman: Contracts (2004)

640 x 480 Low Settings Average FPS: 22 Min: 14

Things max out again at low 20’s, playable at a push but not recommended.

In summary then, early XP era games run poorly, as should likely be expected. They do work though, without crashing, strange artifacts or other driver related problems, a small win there.

A revisit: Windows 98 and MS DOS Gaming

This update has been added over a year after the original article, for most of this time, the 99p machine was kept in the loft. For no reason I decided it was time to bring it down for another look.

If things were a little limited in a later version of Windows XP but how would this fare in games and operating systems before Y2K. The S3 graphics certainly has it’s roots in this era.

The machine now has a fresh install of windows 98SE on it which went together with minimum fuss.. I mean there is always a little more fuss than sticking XP on a machine but it’s ok. I couldnt find drivers for the sound chip so just dropped in a soundblaster live.

It turned out that the Just Stop power supply did indeed just stop, (working). I had to replace it with a random zoostrom grey supply from some past system in the loft.. if this machine is burning through power supplies then I’m not spending money on any new one.

I had a look at some DOS gaming first, using the Dos benchmark pack from the Phils Computer Labs website,

Doom (1993)

Doom should need no introduction and the system recorded an FPS of 132.90 at 640×480 resolution, so easily playable of course

X-Wing (1993)

X-Wing is an amazing game that I did play on the family 486 in my youth.

No 3d acceleration on these early DOS games and of course the AthlonXP processor is complete overkill to render the basic graphics.

No way to measure the FPS but no benefit to do so either, this is a compatibility test which was passed easily.

Quake (1996)

Proved a little harder, at 800×600 with Max settings the system was only able to achieve 24 fps? Further investigation into this definitely needed!

The CPU will be rendering these frames so we can’t blame the integrated graphics here. strange.

Morrowind (2002)

640×480 standard settings 1% Low of 15FPS, Average Framerate 19FPS

With the default details and a 640×480 resolution, Morrowind isn’t really playable.

I took a short run from the town and fought one of the worm things.. it was far from a smooth experience.

Need for Speed High Stakes/Road Challenge (1999)

640×480 High Settings, 1% Low of 1FPS, Average Framerate of 32.6FPS

Well this was a lot of fun, there was obviously a stutter or two whilst playing which brought the 1% low crashing down but, my experience in playing it was a steady 38fps over two laps.

This was a performance plateau and the fps didn’t seem to increase beyond this level.

Anyway, a good result in Direct3d mode. I did try software mode also but obviously FRAPS wasn’t monitoring things.

It felt a lot worse than the 3d accelerator mode, which was interesting – I would have assumed that the Athlon XP would have been more than capable of rendering high framerate in this game.

640×480 is the only option to play at here.

TOCA2 Touring Cars (1999)

Despite the same release year as NFS tested above, this game has far more graphic settings to play with.

Enabling everything and got the following results at two resolutions:

Another great success then, clearly late 90’s driving games are no problem for 2003 integrated graphics.

It’s a fun game, though the physics are a little strange.

Also strange is that both this and NFS have the same cap of 38fps despite being very different engines.

Synthetic Benchmarks

3d Mark 99

3d Mark 2000

3d Mark 2001SE

3d Mark 2003

Conclusion

Well, no one will be surprised: even back in its day, this wasn’t a gaming powerhouse.

With a modern SSD slotted in, though, it feels surprisingly snappy while running XP, even service pack three which was released years later than this machine.

The integrated S3 graphics was obviously terrible in any game from around 2000 onwards. It can however give useful 3d performance in late 90s 3d accelerated titles, the CPU is also overkill in anything DOS based so this is is going to remain a Windows98 Machine.

I was planning on using it to test some AGP cards but I have some nicer looking systems to choose from for that, so back to the loft it goes!

I’m still very glad I saved this one from the dump.

Ash