I like the first case, it has a retro-futuristic look to it. kinda timeless in a way. My first personal own AMD computer actually was the 2000+. The performance for the time was average to be true. I had this CPU paired with a Soltek motherboard and a FX5200 at first. But I was unlucky and the Capacitor plague strike my motherboard within a year of use and I had to send it in for repair. I got a refurbished board that was actually older than the one I sent in return and it had a huge splash of solder on the bottom left by the person who re-cap it. I saw it however and removed the pool of solder prior to installation. I used the computer for almost one more year and I got struck by Capacitor plague another time but this was on the GPU instead, A cap had swelled up and shorted out and a chip on the GPU had been on fire for a while before everything died. the GPU was wasted completely, the chip had white ashes around it and smelled like really strong magic smoke. when I tried to replace the GPU I found out that the AGP slot had been damaged on the motherboard as well due to the shorted GPU and it would not function properly. I had to make the choice to replace the whole internals of the computer and ended up buying an Asrock K7VT4A-PRO and then paired it with an AMD XP3000+ instead and a GF6600 256MB and 512mb of DDR Ram, I still went with Win98 at this build but the difference in performance was insane and everything was faster and better, I actually still have this stuff today and it still works. But later even the power supply suffered from the Capacitor plague but I repaired that one instead. This story was actually the biggest event for me to learn about the value of good capacitors and how the Capacitor plague came to the surface.
Thanks for sharing!! It sounds like you have no much with capacitors. It sounds like your new build was pretty great. I am pretty sure I have that MB.... Asus makes great stuff! Well at least you gained a pile of experience through this process.... Even though you had piles of Cap Juice to go through to get there :).
@@TheRetroRecall yes, capacitors have not been on my side of luck. I am actually sitting in my lab now and Re-capping a 200watt AT power supply. I am working to make a 12mhz 286 computer for ultra retro gaming and stuff. But for this rare board I want to be able to trust the capacitors at least as much as I can in such an old supply. And those supplies are getting rare these days so I don’t have anything to lose by putting some elbow grease into it anyway. Rubycon my man, that is what I like to see inside my electronics. The genuine ones made with the real secret formula. I don’t have a case or anything for this build. It is a weird form factor and I been searching high and low for stuff to make a complete system on a plank so to speak. I think I am close now. I am actually a bit weak for open desk design. You can actually see what I mean if you go to my channel and watch my short video on one computer I built like that. It is rather nice. The 286 is going to be something like that in the end :)
This sounds awesome!! Yes I agree and support your approach of the cap replacement in the PSU for that 286! Excited to hear how it turns out. I have a couple of PSUs that need to be repaired - want to venture to Canada? :) I didn't know you had a channel!!! I will check it out :)
@@TheRetroRecall yes indeed. My Channel is pretty old but due to many factors I am not very active with it atm but I still have stuff I want to get uploaded. I would like to visit but it would be hard to finance for me I’m afraid. But it would be really nice to go dig in a pile of computers for sure. But the repaired supply have passed my 24 hour test now so it should be good to go. I will try to come up with a nice way to assemble the computer on a board and see if I can make a video on that too. I hope to use my 40mb MFM drive as a system drive and another for storing games. Probably 8bit sound blaster for sound :) I have a ton of sound cards I can test with to find which one works the best for this computer
Awesome, I like your channel, I've been browsing. Subbed!! Who knows, someday you may find yourself in this neck of the woods... Digging through these PC's lol!
That Athlon XP system is really nice and that 512mb AGP card is actually pretty rare and expensive even today because it's one of the best cards you could have on AGP. That whole system is a really awesome find
agree I myself have a similar computer in my collection, but with a video card of only 128 MB but in my Athlon 2000+ 1.66 GHz, I don't understand why there is only 1.25 GHz in the early 2000s had an Athlon 1800+ with a 1.5 GHz processor something is wrong here
@altbeetle1998 Those Asus board models need you to set the cpu frequency yourself. I had the A7V8X-X and it was the same. It also has some preset overclocking profiles that allow you to go over the rated cpu speed without having you actually set the voltage and anything else. That board is a great overclocker
Was just gonna say that myself. Asus were always brilliant on giving ye tons of extras for yer dosh back in the day. Had an A8N SLI - Deluxe Athlon 64 4000+ back in the day myself. Rock solid. One thing I never got was why folk used the generic often crap PSUs that came in the back if cheap cases though. Guilty of it myself though, Swear thats what ruined my 7800GTX but I could be wrong.
back in the day I had that exact same motherboard (Asus A7V8X with Athlon XP 2100+ CPU if I recall correctly) I really wish I had kept all my old tech....
The middle one is so iconic for me, I've seen that design on so many systems. They were sold in different sizes and I have two like this in my collection but mine are ATX not Baby-AT, thus a bit wider to fit the PSU sideways, the groove with the LEDs continues along the 5.25 inch drives to the top and the Power button is at the top of the case to the right of the optical drive. They made good use of the additional space, bringing the buttons closer to the user having the PC under the desk. Only thing I don't like about them is the cheap power button on ATX that sometimes does not work right i.e. turning the system only momentarily on or turn it right back on again when you wanted to force shutdown, making the drives unnecessarily spin up again. This happens to both of them so looks like the switches are flaky.
Yes that's the experience with this one for sure! During a restoration I will get that switch cleaned out.. It was pretty bad. Hopefully after the clean up it will be quite nice. Retrobrite process is definitely needed here lol. Also afterwards I tested the 12x drive and no go. I am going to take that apart as well as try to repair it.
I worked in a PC store in the early 2000's my favorite cases to work on would be chenbro, at least out of our more common cases, Chieftech made some awesome cases too of course, but pricey, and my favorite case I still have for my retro build is the coolermaster wavemaster
the athlon xp 200plus cpu sytem was my first computer with a less powerful graphics card and I played many game with friends. medal of honor allied assault, battlefield 1942, homeworld empire earth StarCraft played well also. I was also able to play the original left for dead and half life 2.
Now that sounds like a good time. Not like today for sure. I lived the challenges of the hardware back in the day and the fun of always trying to fix it.
If you press Ctrl and the F1 key in those old bioses it'll give more advanced settings to play with. This is handy for tweaking things, thanks for the video :)
Why would anyone ditch that computer???? It would be a fantastic Windows XP gaming pc, I looked up the specs on the video card, it's a really good card!
I completely agree. I find a lot of the systems that I am able to 'rescue' and restore have a lot of neat retro hardware in them that prove to be great candidates for a restoration.
The last PC was certainly designed as a pure office system, as you can see from the graphics card, which was already outdated when the system came out. The CPU isn't exactly a burner either. But the case is spacious. Very nice and exciting video, I'm already looking forward to the next one.
Nice little systems! First one has the lateral covers swapped out, so the 'ventilated' cover goes on the other side with the holes pointing to the bottom. These generic cases were very common back then (at least in Spain, but I suggest worlwide). I can recognize the layout of the rear and the side covers but never seen this strange front before xD Thanks for your videos! Really love them
The Windows XP system seems like it would be good for some DirectX 9 gaming. Sadly, I too am familiar with the sound of a dying hard drive. It happened to me once on either a Dell Dimension 8200 or the eMachines T2682 that it replaced. I know the "click of death" term is typically reserved for Iomega Zip drives, but I feel that on occasion, it can apply to hard drives as well.
15:00 wow brilliant find, ready to rock! yeah Bliss is bliss, really eh! There is a short 15 minute documentary on TH-cam about the man who took the photo, and after 20 years goes back and revisits the same spot. I recommend it.
The Blue PCI slot is called "Blue Magic Slot" by ASUS. Apart from supporting ordinary PCI functions it supports Wireless LAN cards for 802.11a, 802.11b & Bluetooth standards of which ASUS will be introducing a wireless LAN card later on that will support all three standards.
1:42 I like the look of that one too. 45:54 I heard all kinds of HDD noises over the years but I have never heard one that noisy. I am very surprised it booted making all that noise.
Haha! It almost sounded like it was banging the heads or the hard disk was being dropped.. I mean it was quite loud. Then was shocked when things worked out the way they did.
I’ve had a few hard drives die in front of me. One was my windows 7 drive in my Athlon XP machine, it was a WD Scorpio 250gb 3.5” and it got the click of death. I was in Windows XP at the time so it didn’t effect the usability of the machine, unfortunately I wasn’t able to get files off(didn’t have much on it anyway) Another was the drive that is in my early 2006 iMac 17”. I believe it’s a seagate 500gb model, it died from a whole lot of bad sectors on the first half of the disk. So much so disk utility refused to work with it. MacOS 10.6.8 was toast, while XP was fine, so I managed to get that copied off. I was also able to get 10.6 installed again, but it stopped working again soon after due to file corruption.
At least you saved some of it. I'm still a fan of spinning rust. I mean I can count on one hand in all of the years and all of the drives I have used.. How many have actually died. Maybe I've just been fortunate :)
Man that was really cool! I remember the good old days getting into computer gaming with my Dad on the old 386 Doom, links 386, stunts, sky roads, Return to Castle Wolfenstein 3D and Jill of the jungle, man those were the days. The best part they didn't take up 50 GB of hard drive space for a game. God Bless my friend and have a good one.
Over the years I've seen a few clips of Maxtor Diamondmax drives clicking & even seizing up making musical tones. Here it works fine and it's the Fujitsu that croaks and stutters to the Windows 98 desktop!
Nice Video Squire, I used to build lots of PC’s from the early 90’s onwards using cheap to intermediate Cases, Some of the Cheaper ones weren’t good to work with due to the very thin metalwork and you could cut yourself quite easy on some of them, System 1: 1:20 A nice System and I like the ASUS Motherboard that’s in it and they generally give you lots of Headers to attach different peripherals to, I have an ASUS IPanel I think it’s called and I’ll put that with my ASUS CUSL2 Motherboard when I get round to building it, I also like Gigabyte, ABIT & MSI Motherboards too, I quite liked the early Athlon XP CPU’s and when they were setup correctly then they were cooking (No pun intended), That’s a nice looking Nvidia 7600 GS Graphics Card at: 7:48 onwards and looks a capable Card too, System 2: 17:52 I do like some of the Socket 7 Motherboards especially those with AGP, PCI & ISA Slots plus the fact that you could use SD-Ram or 72 Pin Simms and having the AT / ATX options was nice, I’ve dismantled old knackered Hard Drives to recover the Aluminium from them as you can get a reasonable amount of Aluminium from a knackered Hard Drive, I’m surprised they left it in there, System 3: 30:02 Nice looking Case and I am fond of the Slot 1 & Slot A CPU’s, I’m sure I’ve seen that Pine PC Badge here in the UK but I could be wrong, Those SIS PCI Graphics Cards weren’t anything to write home about but they did the Job I guess, That Hard Drive did not sound happy did it! 😂 Anthony - Birmingham/UK 🇬🇧
Haha! Yes - I have a friend over in the UK and he told me PINE PC's were manufactured over there? That HDD needed a lot of help - I actually did a video on just that hard drive lol. I always loved MB's in the transition era where they were moving to newer ports / interfaces while keeping the legacy ones on board. This didn't last long of course as they wanted to get end users to upgrade, however for us collectors - such a wide assortment of ports!!
Every card from that era with small heatsink under biger heatsink is NVIDIA and under that is a HSI chip which works in the opposite direction, allowing natively PCI Express GPUs to be used in graphics cards released for the AGP interface.
7600 was one of the last AGP family of cards when PCIe came out around 2008ish I believe, midgrade, probably 128-bit memory bandwidth. ATI had the HD 3850 at the time.
First PCI-e cards(PCI-e 1.0) came out 2004, 6000 series Nvidia GPU's and Ati X series GPU. 6000/7000 series cards were basically designed for PCI-e, that's why in AGP version of 7000/6000 series nvidia cards has own extra chip in PCB that makes GPU's work in AGP. Also did you know, even some version of Geforce FX series cards was designed, mostly FX 5900 cards has engineer samples for PCI-e version, but they were never released those cards.
@@ToniHiltunen1980 Nvidia did release PCIe GeForce FX cards but they're called GeForce PCX instead (PCX 5300, PCX 5750 and PCX 5900). While the GeForce PCX 5950 was never publicly released, Nvidia did sort of release it in the form of Quadro FX 1300 (same NV38 GPU as the GeForce FX 5950 but clocked lower). There's also Quadro FX 330 (with the NV35 GPU shared with FX 5900 series, again underclocked).
@@TheRetroRecall Both Nvidia and ATI have made PCIe-to-AGP bridge chips for their PCIe-only GPUs. The Nvidia bridge chip is called HSI (High Speed Interconnect) while the ATI bridge chip is called Rialto, named after an area in Venice, Italy and ironically there's the Rialto Bridge crossing the canal.
Stuff getting this old I always do a first visual inspection on the caps before anything. And this reminds me for some reason of the very first gpu I got that had a fan. I thought that was the 'coolest' thing. Lol. And a blue pcb. I still have it somewhere. Good stuff.
That was a fun video, thanks. The first system; I'm thinking Kara was a gamer, because some of that hardware (especially the video card) was gamer-oriented. The last system was my favorite. Don't you just love those old-school "tallboy" cases? And oh man, that hard drive! I've been there, and I wouldn't be surprised if the next time you powered that system up, you got a black screen with the words "no operating system found" lol Really surprised it didn't post a SMART warning, though---maybe it's not enabled in BIOS?
Haha you're welcome. I agree.. The first system was clearly focused on gaming. Hahaha I felt so bad for the HDD.. yet had no issues laughing at the terrible dying sounds (I'm a terrible person haha). We shall see what happens when I go to power it back up!
I think SMART wasn't in the BIOS at the time most hard drives had SMART values that you could read out but there was no standard way for interpretation of those values terms of how imminent a failure is so the BIOS didn't know what it meant, each manufacturer reported different params with different meaning. Add to that if the PC was decommissioned and stored and had no signs of trouble the last time it was running, SMART could've never known anyway.
On the first pc, the little cooler below the main gpu cooler is a AGP bridge because when it first released it was a pcie card but many people dont have pcie-based computers so it was made into a agp card.
Oh that HDD on that 3rd PC. My skin was crawling. When you said "can we play games" I was going "No, no, no, no, no. Just put that HDD out of its misery." My experience with a HDD dying in front of my eyes was with a Windows 7 PC. Event Viewer had a fun time logging those errors. It wasn't the boot drive so my Windows was fine, it was an extra HDD fitted that had my games on it. When I exported that log to CSV, imported into Excel and did a print preview, it wouldn't printed 32 pages of log file mostly consisting of errors. Fun times.
@@TheRetroRecall Yeah. It's one thing to watch someone as their HDD dies, but it's a unique experience to see one right in front of your eyes. Though my HDD's demise was quicker than the HDD in your video. If machines could dream of horror, this would be it. 😁
That HD in the 3rd PC was sounding like the back up band for Carmen Miranda. It had a good beat and you can dance to it,so I give it an 87 on the hit parade. Having had systems similar to all three of those pcs,it really is a walk down memory lane in this video. It looks like the slot 1 can handle up to a 366 Pentium.
Pretty nice set. System 1 is pretty much turn-key to XP gaming for 2000's games. Maybe early 2010's! I have a almost same config on system 2. Only in ATX form factor for both case and motherboard instead of AT. S3 Virge has excellent DOS compatabillity as it's 2D core is the same as the S3 Trio64.Pair it with a voodoo ;). System 3 is also a wealth of potential. Intel 440BX chipset is very stable and well loved by the retro community. That HDD does not sound very health. Sounds like it is recalibrating by smacking the heads back to the start. Could be very wrong about that. Those Fujitsu drives are pretty good though. SiS graphics are not very good to put it mildly. Sadly I blew up a motherboard similar to this one a couple of years ago. With a hole in the chipset :(. Still don't know how that hapend.
the first pc I bought over 20 years ago with my money was one of these asus big boards with a athlon xp1500, sound blaster audigy, surround, lg cd burner, ibm 80gb hdd
@@TheRetroRecall i dont remember the gpu.. I had the first riva tnt ever in my pentium 166, then on a pentium 200mmx, then on an amd 450.. I traded my pci riva tnt for a voodoo 5 5500!!! because the guy had no agp.. I had the last legendary voodoo car witch later on I sold it for nothing.. and today this card is gold...
System # 3 - that is the noisest hard drive I've ever heard. It's probably on its way out. I see on the desktop a folder named Sermons, so this system was probably used by a pastor. With rust it probably sat the floor
Had an Asus P2B slot 1 Pentium 3 in the early 2000's running Windows ME edition. I honestly liked ME and i know its a crappier version of 98 and completely unstable but i found that there were alot of things you could do on the settings that they wouldn't let you do on NT or XP. Can't remember what all it was because that was 20 some odd years ago but that was my first PC and I just happened to get it through my old work lol they didn't want it anymore and somehow they put it out in the breakroom and i snagged it lol
The last system looks like quite a budget build with a 266 Celeron, SIS was sort of the poor man's GPU, Vibra 16 was the low cost sound card. But it is a 440BX board which is great I thought it must be a BX with the heatsink but a budget system could've come with a LX which is only 66 MHz FSB quite limiting. Just make sure you have enough spinning rust with less than 73 Gigs for it.
Haha. Yes, even the budget systems have their place in the proverbial food chain :). I think the Pentium system was a winbond MB, not sure about this one just yet.
I have a few of those SPDIF I/O riser cards from ASUS that came with motherboards I've bought. They are pretty useful if you have external ADCs & DACs. Unfortunately, the Asus SPDIF risers aren't all the same and often motherboard specific so, even if you have other ASUS boards with SPDIF headers, you can't always just use a riser off a different one, even when the ribbon cable is the same. You'll want to match the numbers up via the manuals. Just thought I'd mention it having the experience with those. I'm an ASUS fan and always buy their mobos when building PCs for myself, family, and friends.
This is great info to have and thank you! I never really played around with that functionality when I was younger.. It will be cool to test it out now.
@@TheRetroRecall ah sorry, from your comment in the video it seemed that there were only 3 PCI slots, but couldn't see behind all those ribbon cables that there was the forth one hiding.
@@TheRetroRecall very fortunate! id be happy with at least some spare part's that i need for some machine's, pity how the hobby is fairly pricy for regular people.
Yeah it's gone up high because of the demand I think. My desire is just to share this old tech with everyone, being back some memories and preserve the equipment.
That second system... I probably built 1000 systems just like it back in the day... And am I the only PC tech who HATED slotted CPUs instead of socketed ones?
Haha. I loved them. I think even more so now as they didn't last all that long and are a bit more coveted by the retro community. I don't have all that many, yet I have a pile of the socketed ones. What did you hate about the slot 1 / slot A interface?
@@TheRetroRecall Although I've come to appreciate the aesthetics, I thought they were ugly at the time. Also, the Celeron CPU was originally released for slot 1, which were a total nightmare for me. People wanted cheap PCs, but then complained when they didn't perform the same as their buddy's expensive PC even though they were warned ahead of time. I didn't mind slot 1 when I was doing a quality build with them, but because of the PC market at the time that was getting less and less often by then.
On the first one someone installed the side panels the wrong way around, the panel with the ventilation holes should be on the left side of the drive bays to be more effective. Also I'm wondering why the BIOS splash screen says it has gigabit ethernet but device manager only shows 10/100 maybe wrong driver or the splash is misleading.
your microphone or audio setup is compressing the sound so much that the sound of that weirdly dying hard disk drive in the last system doesn't come across really well sadly 😢
System n°1 cpu frequency is not set correctly. When the RTC battery go bad in these system, FSB go back to 100Mhz, Athlon XP2000+ is 133Mhz FSB and 1.66Ghz (12.5x133)
My first computer was a 286 running a version of MS-DOS that I have no clue what it was. I bought that thing for US$ 75.00. At the time I could not comprehend the journey I was about to embark upon.
I have made my own PCs for many years and have lots of parts so I made a Windows 98SE around a AMD Athlon XP 3200+ and a ASrock K7VT6 motherbord,I have a NVida 6600 GTS 128MB RAM. I did this so I can run some older titles and games as Windows 10 compatablty is rubbish. All my drives use SATA. The ASrock websight still has all of the files for this old machine. But one thing I do is install nGlide so it gives me VooDoo. I haver done one using Windows XP 32bit and 64bit. My first PC had a 200MMX CPU
First pc has the last of the Nvidia agp graphics cards there & a 512 mb version as well is quite the find, certainly a card to put too use in a late era agp system like a socket 775 Pentium 4 or pentium D, or socket 939, am2 agp system. pc nr 3 I'd make into a windows 98 - windows 2000 gaming pc build with a slocket adapter too put in a socket 370 pentium 3 between 750 mhz - 1 ghz, geforce 3 or ati equivalent agp gpu, maybe a ati 9550.
8:55 I have a very similar GeForce 7600 GT in my collection. The card is quite good, however it is officially not compatible with Windows 98, using a modded ForceWare it works in some systems but had issues on others with that driver, especially with i865-Chipset. But yeah for AGP you'll get not much further, even this card should be a PCI-E card with an AGP bridge chip. I'd recommend something older for better compatibility, however. Works well under 2000/XP though.
ive ironically have had the 1st 2 cases while the second case i had the atx version i think ii had a board with similar or older configuration than the one shown in the picture
Honestly the Pentium mmx system is perfect for a DOS/Windows 95 gaming PC. All it needs is a sound card. The Pentium is fast enough to run any game from the era, and the Virge DX is great for 2D games or the era, even in DOS.
#3 is a Pine Technology TL-BX31, Retroweb has a 2000 BIOS, not sure if the current BIOS is Y2K and a manual... 266MHz Celeron is the no L2 cache slugeron
Haha mine was as well! A dx4100. I want to rebuild it lol. I think I had 4mb and later 8. With a 850 MB HDD that I upgraded to 2.1gb. What would I ever had done with all of that space!! Lol
@@TheRetroRecall You're welcome. Back in the days, I used 1800+ version. Stock speed 1533 MHx. I managed to clock it to around 2400 MHz on an Abit AN7 motherboard. Had to use water cooling to keep it stable though.
That Pine PC is definately a budge model. I don't think the 3.2Gb Fujitsu drive would have been original though, the SiS graphics and Celeron 266 (the cacheless one!) would have been horrible for multimedia.
i have had the 7600 GTS 512 whitch is better then then thr GS you have but the OC versions of any of the 512mb agp cards are very very rare. the best to pair this with the athlon x64 2.0ghz or the P.4 3.0HT edtion because i had these paired with these cpus usually with 2GB ram fully populated. I used to OC the ram for the athlon because it proforms better with oc'd ram not many boards allow any overclocking but memory overclock was very good for old athlon xp or athlon64 just a tip.
The computer i first buld was a 80286 with a 25 mhz processor.. i dont think Asus was around back then.. i think brands didnt really mather much back then? first Asus probably was around the pentium 2 or 3 era for me ( my dad kicked me of his 8088 .. he didnt know i was building a faster one haha )
OH wow the Athlon XP system is close in spec to the custom build I did a few months back "aside from the AGP video card and motherboard." That said scored greatly alone with that system given how expensive AGP cards are compared to PCIE ones.
@@TheRetroRecall SO SORRY FOR THE LATE REPLY!! Honestly if paired with the right CPU/RAM I would say would be able run doom 3, half life 2, far cry 1-2, fallout 3, oblivion, new Vegas, resident evil 5, fable the lost chapters, Halo 1-2 "og pc ports" assassins creed 1-2 etc. Any game 1999-2004 should run with no issues at all if any.
@@TheRetroRecall No problem man if my dell laptop from 2009 with an ATI Radeon hd 4300 dedicated GPU w/256mb of vram can run the same games, you should be fine. Hell it can run most of the games I just mentioned at 480-720p medium/low @ 30fps and doom 3/half life 2 at 60fps. Edit sorry about all the updates, time change is killing me.
@@TheRetroRecall i think its a mid level ok card.. I used to have a 7600GT.. and there was the 7800 7900 too... GS is lower than gt... but as long its 7600 its ok... because they had 7500 7400 7300 etc.. its like today.. 3060 is ok.. 3050 suks.. 1060 its ok, 1050 suks..
Honestly branded systems are such a big pain I don't like them either. Their PSUs are often not ATX sized, they use proprietary front panel headers so you have to use their case and there some use special drive rails not allowing certain drives, unclear CPU and memory support or jumper config, not enough spacing for certain cards, special hardware on board for which you can't find drivers for and the list goes on and on.
The AGP card is nothing special - the additional heatsink is for a PCI-E to AGP bridge. It was in a time where PCI-E was the new standard while AGP cards still had to be made. They used a PCI-E bridge that would translate the signals from AGP to PCI-E and back with a little extra delay. Nothing special.
Thanks for the info! That seems to be the general consensus with the comments. Even still, it was no slouch from what I'm hearing as it could run games of the era decently.
I have a 7600 gt laying around but for retro gaming its useless. It uses shader model 3.0 instead of 2.0 which older games use. It is not strong enough for late xp gaming. Still the athlon xp is probably bottlenecking it. A radeon 9700 pro will probably better match it.
Good to know, I've gotten different reviews on it for sure. I guess it really depends on the experience with it and what games people were into at the time. Thanks again!
Its not worth to run windows xp on that first system. Because you could have a better system for windows xp. I have also got a late Athlon XP motherboard with a AMD XP 2400+ And run windows 2000 on that system.. Knowing most 1999 / 2002 area games runs on windows 2000 as wel. I prefer a Pci-e system when using windows xp.. Much easier to find a graphics card for it, and they are way faster.
The case on the left is a joke. Stupid plastic doors. It might be store be the time that rest of the case is good build quality. But, my guess is the other two is better. Oh and that stock Amd fan with the thing metal blades was garbage. Clogged way to fast.
Thanks... As for the door I agree with you... I think the design is neat though. I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder for any of these cases or any cases of the time :)
Oh, I have seen some great cases from that time and better designed door. But, what I most remember from that time is doors breaking off. Esp. the big one covering up the drives. @@TheRetroRecall
I love that Athlon XP PC ngl
Agreed it was pretty cool!
I like the first case, it has a retro-futuristic look to it. kinda timeless in a way. My first personal own AMD computer actually was the 2000+. The performance for the time was average to be true. I had this CPU paired with a Soltek motherboard and a FX5200 at first. But I was unlucky and the Capacitor plague strike my motherboard within a year of use and I had to send it in for repair. I got a refurbished board that was actually older than the one I sent in return and it had a huge splash of solder on the bottom left by the person who re-cap it. I saw it however and removed the pool of solder prior to installation. I used the computer for almost one more year and I got struck by Capacitor plague another time but this was on the GPU instead, A cap had swelled up and shorted out and a chip on the GPU had been on fire for a while before everything died. the GPU was wasted completely, the chip had white ashes around it and smelled like really strong magic smoke. when I tried to replace the GPU I found out that the AGP slot had been damaged on the motherboard as well due to the shorted GPU and it would not function properly.
I had to make the choice to replace the whole internals of the computer and ended up buying an Asrock K7VT4A-PRO and then paired it with an AMD XP3000+ instead and a GF6600 256MB and 512mb of DDR Ram, I still went with Win98 at this build but the difference in performance was insane and everything was faster and better, I actually still have this stuff today and it still works. But later even the power supply suffered from the Capacitor plague but I repaired that one instead.
This story was actually the biggest event for me to learn about the value of good capacitors and how the Capacitor plague came to the surface.
Thanks for sharing!! It sounds like you have no much with capacitors. It sounds like your new build was pretty great. I am pretty sure I have that MB.... Asus makes great stuff! Well at least you gained a pile of experience through this process.... Even though you had piles of Cap Juice to go through to get there :).
@@TheRetroRecall yes, capacitors have not been on my side of luck. I am actually sitting in my lab now and Re-capping a 200watt AT power supply. I am working to make a 12mhz 286 computer for ultra retro gaming and stuff. But for this rare board I want to be able to trust the capacitors at least as much as I can in such an old supply. And those supplies are getting rare these days so I don’t have anything to lose by putting some elbow grease into it anyway. Rubycon my man, that is what I like to see inside my electronics. The genuine ones made with the real secret formula.
I don’t have a case or anything for this build. It is a weird form factor and I been searching high and low for stuff to make a complete system on a plank so to speak. I think I am close now.
I am actually a bit weak for open desk design. You can actually see what I mean if you go to my channel and watch my short video on one computer I built like that. It is rather nice. The 286 is going to be something like that in the end :)
This sounds awesome!! Yes I agree and support your approach of the cap replacement in the PSU for that 286! Excited to hear how it turns out. I have a couple of PSUs that need to be repaired - want to venture to Canada? :) I didn't know you had a channel!!! I will check it out :)
@@TheRetroRecall yes indeed. My Channel is pretty old but due to many factors I am not very active with it atm but I still have stuff I want to get uploaded. I would like to visit but it would be hard to finance for me I’m afraid. But it would be really nice to go dig in a pile of computers for sure.
But the repaired supply have passed my 24 hour test now so it should be good to go. I will try to come up with a nice way to assemble the computer on a board and see if I can make a video on that too.
I hope to use my 40mb MFM drive as a system drive and another for storing games.
Probably 8bit sound blaster for sound :) I have a ton of sound cards I can test with to find which one works the best for this computer
Awesome, I like your channel, I've been browsing. Subbed!! Who knows, someday you may find yourself in this neck of the woods... Digging through these PC's lol!
That Athlon XP system is really nice and that 512mb AGP card is actually pretty rare and expensive even today because it's one of the best cards you could have on AGP. That whole system is a really awesome find
Agreed and I didn't know that about the card.. Thanks!!!
agree
I myself have a similar computer in my collection, but with a video card of only 128 MB
but in my Athlon 2000+ 1.66 GHz, I don't understand why there is only 1.25 GHz
in the early 2000s had an Athlon 1800+ with a 1.5 GHz processor
something is wrong here
Still probably a great system!
@altbeetle1998 Those Asus board models need you to set the cpu frequency yourself. I had the A7V8X-X and it was the same. It also has some preset overclocking profiles that allow you to go over the rated cpu speed without having you actually set the voltage and anything else. That board is a great overclocker
Was just gonna say that myself. Asus were always brilliant on giving ye tons of extras for yer dosh back in the day. Had an A8N SLI - Deluxe Athlon 64 4000+ back in the day myself. Rock solid.
One thing I never got was why folk used the generic often crap PSUs that came in the back if cheap cases though. Guilty of it myself though, Swear thats what ruined my 7800GTX but I could be wrong.
Thank you for rescuing these important PC's :) QC
Absolutely! Better than in a landfill somewhere!
back in the day I had that exact same motherboard (Asus A7V8X with Athlon XP 2100+ CPU if I recall correctly) I really wish I had kept all my old tech....
Never to late to keep an eye out and build a nice reto rig! :)
The Pentium II AT system would be perfect for Windows 95 all you need is a nice sound card and a hard drive and it would be ready for games.
Agreed!
No one:
Machine #3’s HDD: “PLEASE FUCKING KILL ME!!!!!”
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
@@TheRetroRecall I’ve never heard a hard drive that sounds like it’s smacking against the inside of the chassis like that
On a side note, love your channel, pretty neat content :)
The middle one is so iconic for me, I've seen that design on so many systems. They were sold in different sizes and I have two like this in my collection but mine are ATX not Baby-AT, thus a bit wider to fit the PSU sideways, the groove with the LEDs continues along the 5.25 inch drives to the top and the Power button is at the top of the case to the right of the optical drive. They made good use of the additional space, bringing the buttons closer to the user having the PC under the desk. Only thing I don't like about them is the cheap power button on ATX that sometimes does not work right i.e. turning the system only momentarily on or turn it right back on again when you wanted to force shutdown, making the drives unnecessarily spin up again. This happens to both of them so looks like the switches are flaky.
Yes that's the experience with this one for sure! During a restoration I will get that switch cleaned out.. It was pretty bad. Hopefully after the clean up it will be quite nice. Retrobrite process is definitely needed here lol. Also afterwards I tested the 12x drive and no go. I am going to take that apart as well as try to repair it.
I worked in a PC store in the early 2000's my favorite cases to work on would be chenbro, at least out of our more common cases, Chieftech made some awesome cases too of course, but pricey, and my favorite case I still have for my retro build is the coolermaster wavemaster
Nice case (I just googled it haha)!! One thing about this old retro tech / e-waste stuff is that you never know what you are going to find!
the athlon xp 200plus cpu sytem was my first computer with a less powerful graphics card and I played many game with friends. medal of honor allied assault, battlefield 1942, homeworld empire earth StarCraft played well also. I was also able to play the original left for dead and half life 2.
Now that sounds like a good time. Not like today for sure. I lived the challenges of the hardware back in the day and the fun of always trying to fix it.
If you press Ctrl and the F1 key in those old bioses it'll give more advanced settings to play with. This is handy for tweaking things, thanks for the video :)
I didn't know that, much appreciated and you are welcome!!
Why would anyone ditch that computer???? It would be a fantastic Windows XP gaming pc, I looked up the specs on the video card, it's a really good card!
I completely agree. I find a lot of the systems that I am able to 'rescue' and restore have a lot of neat retro hardware in them that prove to be great candidates for a restoration.
The last PC was certainly designed as a pure office system, as you can see from the graphics card, which was already outdated when the system came out. The CPU isn't exactly a burner either. But the case is spacious. Very nice and exciting video, I'm already looking forward to the next one.
Agreed and thank you!!!
Nice little systems! First one has the lateral covers swapped out, so the 'ventilated' cover goes on the other side with the holes pointing to the bottom.
These generic cases were very common back then (at least in Spain, but I suggest worlwide). I can recognize the layout of the rear and the side covers but never seen this strange front before xD
Thanks for your videos! Really love them
Thank you for this interesting information and you are welcome - so happy to have you along!
love the pcs from 90s-2000s
Agreed, as do I!!!
Should Upgrade as modern motherboard :)
Ahh you mean like use the case for a sleeper pc?
The Windows XP system seems like it would be good for some DirectX 9 gaming. Sadly, I too am familiar with the sound of a dying hard drive. It happened to me once on either a Dell Dimension 8200 or the eMachines T2682 that it replaced. I know the "click of death" term is typically reserved for Iomega Zip drives, but I feel that on occasion, it can apply to hard drives as well.
For sure.. This HDD is on its last legs. I think these systems are great candidates for full restorations :)
15:00 wow brilliant find, ready to rock!
yeah Bliss is bliss, really eh!
There is a short 15 minute documentary on TH-cam about the man who took the photo, and after 20 years goes back and revisits the same spot. I recommend it.
I saw it already and yes, I agree - it was a great video!
I remember building and selling using the middle case. It was great to build in
Classic!
The Blue PCI slot is called "Blue Magic Slot" by ASUS. Apart from supporting ordinary PCI functions it supports Wireless LAN cards for 802.11a, 802.11b & Bluetooth standards of which ASUS will be introducing a wireless LAN card later on that will support all three standards.
Thanks for this info... I had no idea it existed. Going to look it up in more detail. Asus makes pretty great stuff.
1:42 I like the look of that one too.
45:54 I heard all kinds of HDD noises over the years but I have never heard one that noisy. I am very surprised it booted making all that noise.
Haha! It almost sounded like it was banging the heads or the hard disk was being dropped.. I mean it was quite loud. Then was shocked when things worked out the way they did.
I’ve had a few hard drives die in front of me. One was my windows 7 drive in my Athlon XP machine, it was a WD Scorpio 250gb 3.5” and it got the click of death. I was in Windows XP at the time so it didn’t effect the usability of the machine, unfortunately I wasn’t able to get files off(didn’t have much on it anyway) Another was the drive that is in my early 2006 iMac 17”. I believe it’s a seagate 500gb model, it died from a whole lot of bad sectors on the first half of the disk. So much so disk utility refused to work with it. MacOS 10.6.8 was toast, while XP was fine, so I managed to get that copied off. I was also able to get 10.6 installed again, but it stopped working again soon after due to file corruption.
At least you saved some of it. I'm still a fan of spinning rust. I mean I can count on one hand in all of the years and all of the drives I have used.. How many have actually died. Maybe I've just been fortunate :)
Have you ever come across any Pioneer slide-in dvdrom drives ?
I have not, I've only seen them online.
Thank you of your great retro PC video, and those systems have a lot of potential to play good old games of their era.
You are welcome!!!
Man that was really cool! I remember the good old days getting into computer gaming with my Dad on the old 386 Doom, links 386, stunts, sky roads, Return to Castle Wolfenstein 3D and Jill of the jungle, man those were the days. The best part they didn't take up 50 GB of hard drive space for a game. God Bless my friend and have a good one.
Hahaha yes, such great memories and you are right. Floppy disks is where it was at!! Thanks again and thanks for watching :)
Over the years I've seen a few clips of Maxtor Diamondmax drives clicking & even seizing up making musical tones. Here it works fine and it's the Fujitsu that croaks and stutters to the Windows 98 desktop!
Haha yes!
@@TheRetroRecall The 90's period of computing is the most nostalgic to me!
Same!
Nice Video Squire, I used to build lots of PC’s from the early 90’s onwards using cheap to intermediate Cases, Some of the Cheaper ones weren’t good to work with due to the very thin metalwork and you could cut yourself quite easy on some of them, System 1: 1:20 A nice System and I like the ASUS Motherboard that’s in it and they generally give you lots of Headers to attach different peripherals to, I have an ASUS IPanel I think it’s called and I’ll put that with my ASUS CUSL2 Motherboard when I get round to building it, I also like Gigabyte, ABIT & MSI Motherboards too, I quite liked the early Athlon XP CPU’s and when they were setup correctly then they were cooking (No pun intended), That’s a nice looking Nvidia 7600 GS Graphics Card at: 7:48 onwards and looks a capable Card too, System 2: 17:52 I do like some of the Socket 7 Motherboards especially those with AGP, PCI & ISA Slots plus the fact that you could use SD-Ram or 72 Pin Simms and having the AT / ATX options was nice, I’ve dismantled old knackered Hard Drives to recover the Aluminium from them as you can get a reasonable amount of Aluminium from a knackered Hard Drive, I’m surprised they left it in there, System 3: 30:02 Nice looking Case and I am fond of the Slot 1 & Slot A CPU’s, I’m sure I’ve seen that Pine PC Badge here in the UK but I could be wrong, Those SIS PCI Graphics Cards weren’t anything to write home about but they did the Job I guess, That Hard Drive did not sound happy did it! 😂 Anthony - Birmingham/UK 🇬🇧
Oh btw, At 17:52, If you did that with your 2 x Fingers in front of someone here in the UK then they would think that you were swearing at them! 😂
Haha! Yes - I have a friend over in the UK and he told me PINE PC's were manufactured over there? That HDD needed a lot of help - I actually did a video on just that hard drive lol. I always loved MB's in the transition era where they were moving to newer ports / interfaces while keeping the legacy ones on board. This didn't last long of course as they wanted to get end users to upgrade, however for us collectors - such a wide assortment of ports!!
LOL!! Well rest assured I am not lol.
@@TheRetroRecallI didn’t believe you were but just thought it was a Fun Fact! 😂
Every card from that era with small heatsink under biger heatsink is NVIDIA and under that is a HSI chip which works in the opposite direction, allowing natively PCI Express GPUs to be used in graphics cards released for the AGP interface.
I've been reading that. I never knew about this back in the day. So happy to have viewers like you who help spread the knowledge! Thank you!
7600 was one of the last AGP family of cards when PCIe came out around 2008ish I believe, midgrade, probably 128-bit memory bandwidth. ATI had the HD 3850 at the time.
First PCI-e cards(PCI-e 1.0) came out 2004, 6000 series Nvidia GPU's and Ati X series GPU. 6000/7000 series cards were basically designed for PCI-e, that's why in AGP version of 7000/6000 series nvidia cards has own extra chip in PCB that makes GPU's work in AGP.
Also did you know, even some version of Geforce FX series cards was designed, mostly FX 5900 cards has engineer samples for PCI-e version, but they were never released those cards.
Thanks for the info. Thanks to many others as well I'm finally getting an idea of where this fit in the video card food chain :)
I had no idea! I also never knew about the extra chip to allow the AGP interface to function. I've read that in a few places here now. Neat!
@@ToniHiltunen1980 Nvidia did release PCIe GeForce FX cards but they're called GeForce PCX instead (PCX 5300, PCX 5750 and PCX 5900).
While the GeForce PCX 5950 was never publicly released, Nvidia did sort of release it in the form of Quadro FX 1300 (same NV38 GPU as the GeForce FX 5950 but clocked lower). There's also Quadro FX 330 (with the NV35 GPU shared with FX 5900 series, again underclocked).
@@TheRetroRecall Both Nvidia and ATI have made PCIe-to-AGP bridge chips for their PCIe-only GPUs. The Nvidia bridge chip is called HSI (High Speed Interconnect) while the ATI bridge chip is called Rialto, named after an area in Venice, Italy and ironically there's the Rialto Bridge crossing the canal.
49:10 very fun man, thanks for the tour of these systems!!
Haha thanks and no problem!!
Stuff getting this old I always do a first visual inspection on the caps before anything.
And this reminds me for some reason of the very first gpu I got that had a fan. I thought that was the 'coolest' thing. Lol. And a blue pcb. I still have it somewhere. Good stuff.
Absolutely. There are also some other checks I do on or off cam, just like the PSU test. I fried a MB as a result of not testing.
That was a fun video, thanks. The first system; I'm thinking Kara was a gamer, because some of that hardware (especially the video card) was gamer-oriented. The last system was my favorite. Don't you just love those old-school "tallboy" cases? And oh man, that hard drive! I've been there, and I wouldn't be surprised if the next time you powered that system up, you got a black screen with the words "no operating system found" lol Really surprised it didn't post a SMART warning, though---maybe it's not enabled in BIOS?
Haha you're welcome. I agree.. The first system was clearly focused on gaming. Hahaha I felt so bad for the HDD.. yet had no issues laughing at the terrible dying sounds (I'm a terrible person haha). We shall see what happens when I go to power it back up!
I think SMART wasn't in the BIOS at the time most hard drives had SMART values that you could read out but there was no standard way for interpretation of those values terms of how imminent a failure is so the BIOS didn't know what it meant, each manufacturer reported different params with different meaning.
Add to that if the PC was decommissioned and stored and had no signs of trouble the last time it was running, SMART could've never known anyway.
These computers are nice builds. Nice to see. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands
Agreed and thank you!!
On the first pc, the little cooler below the main gpu cooler is a AGP bridge because when it first released it was a pcie card but many people dont have pcie-based computers so it was made into a agp card.
Holy I never knew that!!!!
Three more Nice Systems. I like that Athlon XP system and another Slot One Nice Thanks for the video
You are welcome, glad you enjoyed!
The pine system, you could install a sd to ide adapter and make it a non click drive computer.
Absolutely. I'm not entirely sure what I am going to do with this system. Let's see what happens in the restoration video!
Oh that HDD on that 3rd PC. My skin was crawling. When you said "can we play games" I was going "No, no, no, no, no. Just put that HDD out of its misery."
My experience with a HDD dying in front of my eyes was with a Windows 7 PC. Event Viewer had a fun time logging those errors. It wasn't the boot drive so my Windows was fine, it was an extra HDD fitted that had my games on it. When I exported that log to CSV, imported into Excel and did a print preview, it wouldn't printed 32 pages of log file mostly consisting of errors. Fun times.
🤣🤣 That poor HDD.
@@TheRetroRecall Yeah. It's one thing to watch someone as their HDD dies, but it's a unique experience to see one right in front of your eyes. Though my HDD's demise was quicker than the HDD in your video. If machines could dream of horror, this would be it. 😁
Bahahahahha I'm seriously laughing reading this lol.
44:02 funny hard drive sound on third pc but look like dead hard drive sound.
Haha yup, unfortunately.
That HD in the 3rd PC was sounding like the back up band for Carmen Miranda. It had a good beat and you can dance to it,so I give it an 87 on the hit parade. Having had systems similar to all three of those pcs,it really is a walk down memory lane in this video. It looks like the slot 1 can handle up to a 366 Pentium.
Bahahha the hit parade... 🤣🤣. Yes for sure.. Always a blast with these older systems and many configurations!
those look like some pretty interesting machines, I’m going to save this into my Watch later list for tomorrow!
Awesome and they are... Wait for the surprises in the video haha.
All three posted so that's a good start.!👍👍 Happy fettling.
Thank you!!!
Pretty nice set.
System 1 is pretty much turn-key to XP gaming for 2000's games. Maybe early 2010's!
I have a almost same config on system 2. Only in ATX form factor for both case and motherboard instead of AT.
S3 Virge has excellent DOS compatabillity as it's 2D core is the same as the S3 Trio64.Pair it with a voodoo ;).
System 3 is also a wealth of potential. Intel 440BX chipset is very stable and well loved by the retro community. That HDD does not sound very health. Sounds like it is recalibrating by smacking the heads back to the start. Could be very wrong about that. Those Fujitsu drives are pretty good though. SiS graphics are not very good to put it mildly.
Sadly I blew up a motherboard similar to this one a couple of years ago. With a hole in the chipset :(. Still don't know how that hapend.
Thanks for the info and advice! Sad about your blown board.. I know how hard these boards are to come by now.
listening to the death throws of a harddrive was fun.
Hahaha that poor HDD.
the first pc I bought over 20 years ago with my money was one of these asus big boards with a athlon xp1500, sound blaster audigy, surround, lg cd burner, ibm 80gb hdd
Nice build!
@@TheRetroRecall i dont remember the gpu.. I had the first riva tnt ever in my pentium 166, then on a pentium 200mmx, then on an amd 450.. I traded my pci riva tnt for a voodoo 5 5500!!! because the guy had no agp.. I had the last legendary voodoo car witch later on I sold it for nothing.. and today this card is gold...
I’ve never thought of the term “Spinning Rust” as literal Spinning Rust until this video😂
Hahaha!
System # 3 - that is the noisest hard drive I've ever heard. It's probably on its way out. I see on the desktop a folder named Sermons, so this system was probably used by a pastor. With rust it probably sat the floor
You are probably correct. Poor HDD!
Had an Asus P2B slot 1 Pentium 3 in the early 2000's running Windows ME edition. I honestly liked ME and i know its a crappier version of 98 and completely unstable but i found that there were alot of things you could do on the settings that they wouldn't let you do on NT or XP. Can't remember what all it was because that was 20 some odd years ago but that was my first PC and I just happened to get it through my old work lol they didn't want it anymore and somehow they put it out in the breakroom and i snagged it lol
Haha, I personally loved ME and didn't experience all that many issues. I did a video on it as well a while back :)
The last system looks like quite a budget build with a 266 Celeron, SIS was sort of the poor man's GPU, Vibra 16 was the low cost sound card. But it is a 440BX board which is great I thought it must be a BX with the heatsink but a budget system could've come with a LX which is only 66 MHz FSB quite limiting. Just make sure you have enough spinning rust with less than 73 Gigs for it.
Haha. Yes, even the budget systems have their place in the proverbial food chain :). I think the Pentium system was a winbond MB, not sure about this one just yet.
@@TheRetroRecall it could be QDI as they have a model called P5I430TX as shown in the BIOS and it looks similar.
Thank you!
I have a few of those SPDIF I/O riser cards from ASUS that came with motherboards I've bought. They are pretty useful if you have external ADCs & DACs. Unfortunately, the Asus SPDIF risers aren't all the same and often motherboard specific so, even if you have other ASUS boards with SPDIF headers, you can't always just use a riser off a different one, even when the ribbon cable is the same. You'll want to match the numbers up via the manuals. Just thought I'd mention it having the experience with those. I'm an ASUS fan and always buy their mobos when building PCs for myself, family, and friends.
This is great info to have and thank you! I never really played around with that functionality when I was younger.. It will be cool to test it out now.
The second computer had a network card, was it just dangling there and not actually in a PCI slot? :)
It was there, it was a low profile PCI card.
@@TheRetroRecall ah sorry, from your comment in the video it seemed that there were only 3 PCI slots, but couldn't see behind all those ribbon cables that there was the forth one hiding.
Yeah, no worries. To be honest I had to go rewatch lol!
wish i could be that lucky on finding old cabinet's in e-waste stuff, law's are being some pain on that.
For sure. I'm fortunate to have a great friends and supporters who locate these systems before being sent to ewaste. Also donations etc.
@@TheRetroRecall very fortunate! id be happy with at least some spare part's that i need for some machine's, pity how the hobby is fairly pricy for regular people.
Yeah it's gone up high because of the demand I think. My desire is just to share this old tech with everyone, being back some memories and preserve the equipment.
@@TheRetroRecall No kidding about its gone up and hard in some part's of the world, if shipping werent pricy, id be a happy camper on importing stuff.
That second system... I probably built 1000 systems just like it back in the day... And am I the only PC tech who HATED slotted CPUs instead of socketed ones?
Haha. I loved them. I think even more so now as they didn't last all that long and are a bit more coveted by the retro community. I don't have all that many, yet I have a pile of the socketed ones. What did you hate about the slot 1 / slot A interface?
@@TheRetroRecall Although I've come to appreciate the aesthetics, I thought they were ugly at the time. Also, the Celeron CPU was originally released for slot 1, which were a total nightmare for me. People wanted cheap PCs, but then complained when they didn't perform the same as their buddy's expensive PC even though they were warned ahead of time. I didn't mind slot 1 when I was doing a quality build with them, but because of the PC market at the time that was getting less and less often by then.
True! Now they have those fancy socket to slot adapters... So you could get a bit more out of them with a wider range of compatibility.
On the first one someone installed the side panels the wrong way around, the panel with the ventilation holes should be on the left side of the drive bays to be more effective. Also I'm wondering why the BIOS splash screen says it has gigabit ethernet but device manager only shows 10/100 maybe wrong driver or the splash is misleading.
For sure and I didn't notice that - great catch!!! I'll swap them around and test out that card.
your microphone or audio setup is compressing the sound so much that the sound of that weirdly dying hard disk drive in the last system doesn't come across really well sadly 😢
Thanks!
System n°1 cpu frequency is not set correctly. When the RTC battery go bad in these system, FSB go back to 100Mhz, Athlon XP2000+ is 133Mhz FSB and 1.66Ghz (12.5x133)
Thanks, I'll adjust.
My first computer was a 286 running a version of MS-DOS that I have no clue what it was. I bought that thing for US$ 75.00. At the time I could not comprehend the journey I was about to embark upon.
Love this! It was probably a pivotal moment in your computing life.
ASUS A7N8X i had that board on the 3rd custom computer i build back in...i beleive '05 but i dont recall having this "splash" screen at all :/
There may be a setting in the BIOS that gives you the option to turn the splash screen on and off.
I have made my own PCs for many years and have lots of parts so I made a Windows 98SE around a AMD Athlon XP 3200+ and a ASrock K7VT6 motherbord,I have a NVida 6600 GTS 128MB RAM. I did this so I can run some older titles and games as Windows 10 compatablty is rubbish. All my drives use SATA. The ASrock websight still has all of the files for this old machine. But one thing I do is install nGlide so it gives me VooDoo. I haver done one using Windows XP 32bit and 64bit. My first PC had a 200MMX CPU
Awesome!! Thanks for sharing this.
First pc has the last of the Nvidia agp graphics cards there & a 512 mb version as well is quite the find, certainly a card to put too use in a late era agp system like a socket 775 Pentium 4 or pentium D, or socket 939, am2 agp system.
pc nr 3 I'd make into a windows 98 - windows 2000 gaming pc build with a slocket adapter too put in a socket 370 pentium 3 between 750 mhz - 1 ghz, geforce 3 or ati equivalent agp gpu, maybe a ati 9550.
Great suggestions. I think I have most of that hardware here. Let the fun begin!
8:55 I have a very similar GeForce 7600 GT in my collection. The card is quite good, however it is officially not compatible with Windows 98, using a modded ForceWare it works in some systems but had issues on others with that driver, especially with i865-Chipset. But yeah for AGP you'll get not much further, even this card should be a PCI-E card with an AGP bridge chip. I'd recommend something older for better compatibility, however. Works well under 2000/XP though.
For sure. A lot of comments around this. I had no idea about the bridge chip.. Interesting approach for sure.
ive ironically have had the 1st 2 cases while the second case i had the atx version i think ii had a board with similar or older configuration than the one shown in the picture
Nice!!! Hopefully I brought back some Nostalgic memories for you!!
Honestly the Pentium mmx system is perfect for a DOS/Windows 95 gaming PC. All it needs is a sound card. The Pentium is fast enough to run any game from the era, and the Virge DX is great for 2D games or the era, even in DOS.
Agreed! I think a simple Sb16 would do the trick haha.
@@TheRetroRecall or even an AWE32 or AWE64. Could even do an SB16 for DOS, and an DV Live! For windows.
#3 is a Pine Technology TL-BX31, Retroweb has a 2000 BIOS, not sure if the current BIOS is Y2K and a manual... 266MHz Celeron is the no L2 cache slugeron
Perfect!! Thank you for identifying this!
I was expecting Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000.
You never know what you are going to get on these.. That's the excitement lol.
@@TheRetroRecall That's right.
My 1st PC was a dx4 with 4mb ram 😂
Never was into AMD systems they mostly just overheated
Haha mine was as well! A dx4100. I want to rebuild it lol. I think I had 4mb and later 8. With a 850 MB HDD that I upgraded to 2.1gb. What would I ever had done with all of that space!! Lol
Hard drive on that last machine is a bit miracle to even boot up! It definitely does not sound happy :(
You are very very correct. The poor HDD.
The Athlon XP 2000+ is running slow, it should run at 1667 MHz.
Maybe it has been underclocked in the BIOS.
Confirmed! Thank you!
@@TheRetroRecall You're welcome.
Back in the days, I used 1800+ version. Stock speed 1533 MHx. I managed to clock it to around 2400 MHz on an Abit AN7 motherboard. Had to use water cooling to keep it stable though.
Haha, yeah, these CPUs I remember being quite flexible but you really had to keep them cool.
That Pine PC is definately a budge model. I don't think the 3.2Gb Fujitsu drive would have been original though, the SiS graphics and Celeron 266 (the cacheless one!) would have been horrible for multimedia.
Haha for sure. Oh the fun of limitations back then! Brings back quite a bit of memories lol.
i have had the 7600 GTS 512 whitch is better then then thr GS you have but the OC versions of any of the 512mb agp cards are very very rare.
the best to pair this with the athlon x64 2.0ghz or the P.4 3.0HT edtion because i had these paired with these cpus usually with 2GB ram fully populated. I used to OC the ram for the athlon because it proforms better with oc'd ram
not many boards allow any overclocking but memory overclock was very good for old athlon xp or athlon64
just a tip.
just one thing i got the gts 7600 gts for obvioion and morrowind just fyi i know this video is very old its just infomation
Appreciate it, thank you!
No problem. I'm always looking for more info, this community is great!
The computer i first buld was a 80286 with a 25 mhz processor.. i dont think Asus was around back then.. i think brands didnt really mather much back then? first Asus probably was around the pentium 2 or 3 era for me ( my dad kicked me of his 8088 .. he didnt know i was building a faster one haha )
Haha! Thank you for sharing this!
OH wow the Athlon XP system is close in spec to the custom build I did a few months back "aside from the AGP video card and motherboard." That said scored greatly alone with that system given how expensive AGP cards are compared to PCIE ones.
Awesome and yes, I'm being told that the AGP card is a bonus! Now to see what games it would be good for!
@@TheRetroRecall
SO SORRY FOR THE LATE REPLY!!
Honestly if paired with the right CPU/RAM I would say would be able run doom 3, half life 2, far cry 1-2, fallout 3, oblivion, new Vegas, resident evil 5, fable the lost chapters, Halo 1-2 "og pc ports" assassins creed 1-2 etc. Any game 1999-2004 should run with no issues at all if any.
This is good to know! I have most if not all of these games, boxed copies :) I will definitely be trying some out to test a restoration. Thanks again!
@@TheRetroRecall No problem man if my dell laptop from 2009 with an ATI Radeon hd 4300 dedicated GPU w/256mb of vram can run the same games, you should be fine.
Hell it can run most of the games I just mentioned at 480-720p medium/low @ 30fps and doom 3/half life 2 at 60fps.
Edit sorry about all the updates, time change is killing me.
Wow that hard drive 🤣
Lol!! It never gave up.. The poor thing hahahaha
you had me at beige
Bahahahahha! This wins the internet today 🤣
That drive might actually be rusty!
Haha! It's new nickname will be 'Rusty'. Poor poor HDD.
the 7600gs was like a 3060 today
So is that a good card? I'm hearing from other comments that this card is quite sought after being an AGP card and all.
@@TheRetroRecall i think its a mid level ok card.. I used to have a 7600GT.. and there was the 7800 7900 too...
GS is lower than gt... but as long its 7600 its ok... because they had 7500 7400 7300 etc..
its like today.. 3060 is ok.. 3050 suks.. 1060 its ok, 1050 suks..
@@TheRetroRecall Entry-level 7025
7050
7100
7150
7200
7300
7350
7500
Mid-range 7600
7650
High-end 7800
Enthusiast 7900
7950
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_7_series
Thank you!!!
46:47 Windows 98 will never give up hope! :D
Bahahahahha I can't believe it continued to run! Those heads were just smashing in that drive lol.
@@TheRetroRecall Yeah thought the same how could it still read all the files needed to go to desktop, it's a miracle.
My favourite,not the branded ones.
A lot of people feel that way - you had a lot of expansion possibilities with these Custom systems where you would be more limited with the OEM ones.
Honestly branded systems are such a big pain I don't like them either. Their PSUs are often not ATX sized, they use proprietary front panel headers so you have to use their case and there some use special drive rails not allowing certain drives, unclear CPU and memory support or jumper config, not enough spacing for certain cards, special hardware on board for which you can't find drivers for and the list goes on and on.
Hahahaha how do you really feel?? Lol.
@@TheRetroRecall have some HP skeletons without RAMs, CPUs etc. lying around lol :D
The AGP card is nothing special - the additional heatsink is for a PCI-E to AGP bridge. It was in a time where PCI-E was the new standard while AGP cards still had to be made. They used a PCI-E bridge that would translate the signals from AGP to PCI-E and back with a little extra delay. Nothing special.
Thanks for the info! That seems to be the general consensus with the comments. Even still, it was no slouch from what I'm hearing as it could run games of the era decently.
I have a 7600 gt laying around but for retro gaming its useless. It uses shader model 3.0 instead of 2.0 which older games use. It is not strong enough for late xp gaming. Still the athlon xp is probably bottlenecking it. A radeon 9700 pro will probably better match it.
Good to know, I've gotten different reviews on it for sure. I guess it really depends on the experience with it and what games people were into at the time. Thanks again!
all of them will get good money on ebay for parts
For sure, but I have a hard time parting with them at the moment as they are going to be featured in future videos :)
CD
Speed controller Freeware
I've never used this before, but I've heard of it. I guess I never saw the need haha.
I have a similar AGP Card Nvidia Geforce 7600 GT 512 meg AGP in one of my desktops that card is over clockable
Awesome! I think your GT is better than my GS.. But still nice to have.
RUN SCAN DISK 😂
Hahaha what has this poor HDD done to you to put it through that misery lol!
@@TheRetroRecallI was going to suggest defrag 😂
Lmao, nooooo leave this poor hard drive in peace!!
Its not worth to run windows xp on that first system. Because you could have a better system for windows xp.
I have also got a late Athlon XP motherboard with a AMD XP 2400+
And run windows 2000 on that system.. Knowing most 1999 / 2002 area games runs on windows 2000 as wel.
I prefer a Pci-e system when using windows xp.. Much easier to find a graphics card for it, and they are way faster.
Thanks for this insight! :) always great to hear these perspectives.
asus mabe good but with via chipsets their ranking sunk and sunk
Yeah I think that may be accurate.
but system 1 isn't a 90s pc, its a early 2000s pc
True and Im pretty sure I mention that in the video.
Poor hard drive sad😢
Not time for an HDD funeral yet! Take a look at my other video!
Doesn't waste your ram on that S3 Virge ... It's 💩
Haha. Come on, it's fun! :) I have a few other cards I could try instead :)
@@TheRetroRecall ok, I'll enjoy your misery in the video...lol
Bahahahhahaa
The case on the left is a joke. Stupid plastic doors. It might be store be the time that rest of the case is good build quality. But, my guess is the other two is better. Oh and that stock Amd fan with the thing metal blades was garbage. Clogged way to fast.
Thanks... As for the door I agree with you... I think the design is neat though. I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder for any of these cases or any cases of the time :)
Oh, I have seen some great cases from that time and better designed door. But, what I most remember from that time is doors breaking off. Esp. the big one covering up the drives. @@TheRetroRecall
Yes very good point.
zamzam water
Right.