It is recommended to drill through one of the leads to internal battery when modifying those dallas RTC chips. You don't want the old battery to become additional load for your external battery.
Yes. I bet if he checked the voltage after combining the new 3 volt batter to the old 0.5 volt, the new voltage would be somewhere around 2.0 v That said, I have found that 0.5v is usually enough to keep the settings.
I love such skyscraper looking cases, so imposing yet so much potential for yummy external expansion slots! Everyone needs at least 5 floppy drives of various sizes and form factors in every case! So much expandability inside and out, front and back.
You can use superglue and baking soda to build up the plastic tab on that door and file it into the shape you want. You basically apply glue, sprinkle on the powder and it turns into a hard rock like substance, and you can just build it up a layer at a time. The chemical reaction does produce some heat, and happens quickly, so let the part cool down so the plastic doesn't deform.
My theory is that the Toshiba SCSI drive from the first machine had a fatal head crash on one of its platters, but is a multi-platter/head drive that can still read from the other one(s). Would explain how it's still readable but has a ton of bad sectors marked like that. Would love to see an autopsy of that drive at some point!
Most likely right, but even the smallest dust grain could cause it, and most likely wouldn't see anything unless you got the microscope out. Or the head was just damaged. I've taken apart a few of these where it's like half the drive died (very common back then) and you wouldn't ever see anything on any of the platers.
Another fantastic, long video full of just enough detail and explanation.. I learn something every week. The pacing of your videos is perfect. Keep it up.
That Hi-Q computer does indeed have a Enlight case, I built 2 systems in 2003-2004 and that was the exact cases I purchased. I still have one empty case with an Iomega Jazz drive in it on my shelf.
Thank you Mike for the Big Tower Retro Show , I was working at a PC Repair Shop in St. Louis called Word Pro during these years and this is some of the stuff we would see . Good to see Bigger cases like these as they are becoming more Rare :) QC
I think i bought the very last one from my PC repair shop 20 years ago, case was shite quality but it did the job. Binned the system off about 6 years ago there, Everything was practically buggered drive wise, and the motherboard was shite one anyway. laugh was i had a fault on its 1st board, so the shop "sent it away" fast forwards 10 years later, when they were shutting down or what ever, and they give me a bell, i was like what board?? he tried to say it was lost in the post, i was like aye fella, nearly 10 years and it pops up. I think i had even binned the original setup off by that point. collected the board and it went straight in the bin.
Love all of your videos, I've watched them all and look forward to you releasing a new video at the end of each week. ❤ I noticed those 866MHz Pentium 3's were only running at 520MHz, I'm guessing the settings must have been input manually and when the CMOS battery died it went back to defaults (I'm pretty sure that board is new enough to not need jumpers for setting bus speed and multiplier lol)
Wymieniłem procesor i komputer działa , o dziwo . Nauczyleś mnie , Mike Dzięki . Mam 64 lata . Pozdrawiam i dziękuję . I replaced the processor and the computer works, surprisingly. You taught me, Mike Thanks. I am 64 years old. Best regards and thank you.😁🤭👍🤝
That last tape drive is probably a Colorado Jumbo 250, maybe 120, but yeah, floppy interfaces were really popular with the CMS tape drives. They also made portable ones that used the parallel port to transfer data. Not very speedy, but they got the job done. They take QIC-80 tapes that you can compress. I still have the 2 tapes I made from my 486/66 Win 3.11 machine back in 1995, and they're still readable. I bought a NOS Jumbo 350 off eBay and it came with that extended floppy cable so you could still have both 3.5 and 5.25 drives connected. Anyway, another awesome video, Mike.
Great vid! Yea, the Colorado drives of the time used a floppy interface. You could order a FC-20 card that would speed up access quite a bit. Yours truly did a video on that, comparing the speeds!
Ol' Mike, I saw this video as the first from your channel and I am totally in love. High quality images, full knowledge of the systems and very well picked retro computing beasts from the past. Lots of things to learn from yours. Instant subscriber and die hard fan... hahaha.
Love the videos man, you're the only TH-camr I can sit down and watch the entire video. It is so entertaining for a fellow computer nerd like me. Thanks for always giving me something to do on Fridays.
Nice find and review, btw, on the last tower computer, i believe that small ISA Card with DB25 pin connector, is not a parallel port card, but a SCSI card which usually used by scanner, usually older HP or UMAX scanner (the card comes with them when you purchase these scanners), the card uses NCR/Symbios 53C400 SCSI controller chip
37:00 sounds like you need to make yourself a "programmable load". They can be made from an op-amp (plus support components), some high power resistors and several MOSFETs in parallel, bolted to a heatsink. Google "programmable load schematic". Going by your previous videos, I doubt you'd have trouble making one. Cheers.
I have that board in one of my old workstations and I love it. The only difference with the DLS model is the Adaptec 7880 SCSI controller, which is the classic AHA-2940UW but onboard. I already had a faster card so I saved some money. At that time, there were already newer and faster U160 and later U320 SCSI adapters, so buying the expensinve version made no sense. It is a fantastic board and even supports dual 1.4 P3 Tualatin, albeit with small intermediate socket boards for the voltage regulation. No mods are required. Just CPU coollers with adjustable springs to take the slack for the extra 2mm height difference. It maxes out at 4GB of RAM and supports AGP pro 4X GPUs and newer 8X but at half the bus speed. Having such a machine back in 2000-1 was a pleasure to work with and it was expensive AF. That rig along with a rpofessional 22" CRT monitor cost me almost $10K in today's money adjusted for inflation. It would run circles around SGI and Apple systems of the day. I still use today for retro software with Linux and Windows XP/7 and it can even do all modern things. This thing has paid for itself multiple times.
That 3rd system probably used a colorado memory systems QIC tape drive(i.e. jumbo 250). They used the floppy controller for the interface. Sound card is SB16 with scsi-2 interface, with waveblaster header and jumpers for internal/line-out output plus the usual jumpers for dma/high dma, and irq. Very nice.
I had a SCSI CD Drive with a Caddy that looked identical to that one in the Tri-CAD case. Mine was a CD Writer. I remember it taking ages to burn a full disk. Mine however was in an external case with a 50pin centronics plug on the external case. I used it on both my PC and my Amiga.
Your Dallas hack with a drill bit is the best I seen, and I saw a lot... That's even good to hold the solder in! I sure will try that next time! Congrats on the channel. Just one suggestion after seeing other videos... don't forget to always check the motherboards power rails for shorts. Keep up the good work.
Zwnon was a heavy advertiser in Computer Shopper in the 90s. They let you build your machine the way you wanted, video card, ram etc. I had a giant case you have already shown in a video with a PentiumPro 200 and a Imagine II number 9 ( the kick azz video card of the day, later upgraded to Orchid 3dfx sli setup). It was a huge expense back then $2000 . They pretty much beat any other vendor and had a good rep as far as I can remember. Quake at horrible FPS but still beating everybody else machine 166 etc machines, the PPRO 200 when released was a beast, the kids would cry today with the FPS numbers... the bad old dark ages.
You just made me remember something I forgot all about with that CD rom caddy I had a gigantic external cdrom drive with one of those I had forgotten all about that.
12:28 JDR Microdevices! Wow! That’s a blast from my past. I grew up in their hometown of San Jose, CA. I would go into their store on Bascom Ave every so often. Their products were generally top notch. Their people tended to be a bit rude, tho.
The PSU from system 3 looks like the guts are interchangeable with a later PSU if it turns out that it's unrepairable. Awesome goodness seen in this video, Mike!
Some really cool systems there, and quite a trip down memory lane with that JDR Microdevices power supply. JDR had some really cool stuff back in the day like POST analyzer cards and cards with breadboards on them for making interface cards. That Micronics Motherboard and Power Tronic Power Supply combo is the same pairing that early Gateway machines used, I wonder if Gateway was the OEM for Tri Star and others. It also looks like there was a scanner attached to that machine with the HP SCSI card (NCR Chipset) card and a copy of Ofoto, I would guess an HP ScanJet 4C. NCR made many of the SCSI chipsets starting in the mid 80's and yes the chipset in the other machine did say tolerant, it was a style of chipset that they started in 1990 with the Mac IIfx it was supposed to be more stable and less prone to SCSI Voodoo, but in the IIfx it was very prone to SCSI Voodoo but they were pushing the chips and the drives for throughput in that machine.
I believe I have some of the tapes that will fit into that drive. They are new and in the box that came out of an office that just never got around to using them when they threw out all of their computers that had those drives in them. Ha! I really enjoy your energy and enthusiasm, and really enjoyed your videos (and I love your watch, too!) Be well, friend!
That little transformer can likely do more than you think. Remember the 12 volt rail is only rated at 10amps. The 250 Watts is all rails combined. The 12V rail was rated at 120Watts max, but it didn't do it. Probably bad caps. With the power supply open, the heatsinks will get hot as you didn't really get any air flow over them, but you are right in that saying that PSU is pretty well rubbish. I am just playing devils advocate really.
Stopped by an estate sale last Friday. Looked around, saw some tech stuff. Picked up an EnPower TW3 EAA-89 laptop for $25USD. Never seen one before. Core Duo T2300, 1GB of RAM (512 onboard, 512 stick), 80GB HD, 945G video, 15.6" 1280x768 screen, and LOTS of ports: Four USB, firewire 400, PCMCIA and SD card, s-video, NIC and 56K, and something I've never seen in a laptop before: DVI output! Like an actual full sized DVI port. Too cool. It's in really good shape, all I needed to do was reseat the CMOS battery. Seems like a really good computer from 15 years ago. Is running XP home SP3. It also had all documents and email intact. So, PSA: When you sell a computer, wipe or destroy the HDs.
Now, a quick word about old AT psus. They had most of the load on the 5V, not on the 12V. Loading the 12V line with car lights is not technically a good idea. Look for a motorbike or an old car 6V light, and use that on the 5V, not 12V. Since there's just a single transformer for all the important voltages on an AT psu, and they're not regulated separately, you have to think that loading one rail, but not the others, would make the loaded rail "low", and make the others read "high"; exactly as it happened with that PSU that got 9.42V on the 12V but the 5V skyrocketed to 5.82V! Only a few selected gamer PSUs have a separated mains to 12V circuit and then 12V to 5V and 3V (and servers, of course)
Well this video brought back memories. When I was a teenager in High School in the early 2000s I used to play around with old systems like these. Now, I never came across any old towers like those shown here but I saw the Baby AT systems and definitely had a few of those as well as some old Digital Electric Corp 486 slim desktop systems. My favourite systems to work with these days are either Lenovo or HP business desktop systems with the relatively tool-free designs. In fact, my HP Elite Desk tower has the legacy of Compaq Deskpro computers tool-less design implemented in it even down to the size of the power supply casing.
I don't know how I found you, but this brought back memories of teenage me working on computers in the late 90s. I don't know anything about modern computers, but I followed everything you said. And to be honest? I still prefer the form factor of those old towers. I can't even begin to explain why, but I'd still kill to have a modern build in one of them.
Man I am jealous of that dual Pentium III system, bet that'll run late 90's games like Half Life flawlessly. That last system is a dream DOS gaming system too!
I would like to see him set it up and see how many games will play. Personally, I found ME could play games a lot better than XP for games that would run on either OS. But, what OS will support dual CPUs? Even today the second CPU (such as xeons) seems to add nothing to gaming even under Windows 7, 10 etc I played GTA San Andreas with a Celeron 1200 and it played pretty well under ME. Not so well under XP with the same computer. So that is a game to start with, since it is on the edge. I'm going to say I had a 64 k Radeon 7000 or something about that level.
I was so excited to sit down and watch a 1 hour MikeTech video! As a kid, coming across towers like this - with the mindset that bigger always meant better - I always thought that 'If I could ever get my hands on one of those... I could play any game in the world.' 😆 Thank you for the awesome video!
I love watching repairs on older pcs I'm only used to working on modern pcs and find this very informative.Thank you for your content.😊It's very interesting to me to see this even though I owned vintage pcs when I was a teenager I never worked on them.First pc was a Compaq 286 with two 5 and a half floppy drives using MS-DOS 3.0 such nostalgia I also owned both a Compaq 386 and 486 both running windows 3.11 for workgroups .😅I sort of miss them. The old comoaq keyboard ms felt more tactility pleasing the roller ball mice werent so great though.Had an old cannon bjc 200 printer and loved the way it printed at the time even though not perfect and a couple of dot matrix printers b&w such nostalgia.
Interesting how the two intake fans in the dual Plll system are set up as exhaust fans, and not intake. Makes sense the amount of dust in the floppy and etc as all fans now create negative air pressure inside the case.
That last system was a gem. The design and the pairing of parts was just perfect IMO. VBL Mach 2, OPL3, 486 DX2 and cache chip. RAM and his selection of drives. Dream system.
It is also better if you are a certified electronics repair tech from the 90s. They make drop-in replacements for those battery chips to this day. I have seen them on other channels dealing with retro PCs from the same era.
These full size cases were always odd to me. There's often so much wasted space inside that could never really be useful. But they are extremely cool looking to me now! I think one of the first few videos on my channel was about a Gateway P5 something and I recall even that one being massive. Also 2:04 may or may not have been a highlight of this video 😂
I knew of a few people with them, some would even drag those giant things to LAN parties. I also remember a lot of them with all the drives as low as possible since people didn't own long enough IDE/SCSI cables. There was definitely a lot of wasted space, in the early days of jank watercooling they found good use for the space though :)
I thought that most of the psu capacity in that time period was with 5V rail so even if psu would be fully functional I would not be surprised if 12V rail would not be able to handle that kind of loads.
I still have and use a big case similar to those, only it was designed for ATX-style mainboards. It's the only component in my setup that is still the same. Everything else was changed and I never had any airflow and cooling problems people have with newer cases. The only case I would it change for is an old Dell case where you had the mainboard on one side and the drives on the other. Don't know what it was called. It was sold as a high end gaming system / workstation and you could fit 14 5.25 drives in it.
I feel like those caddy CD drives are a superior design in almost every way. No mechanical tray eject to get jammed up or otherwise break; designed for high-use environments (schools, libraries). Plus they were sold in the early days when CD drives were top-end accessories, so presumably the build quality in general should be better than the drives that were installed in cost-reduced machines from the mid-90s and beyond.
Those ATI cards with a Rage Theater chipset are precious and highly sought after. They are still considered in 2024 to be the best VHS/analog capture devices ever made for the digital conversion.
I love how you tortured that first hard drive. Was hoping for the magic smoke and/or a fire lol. Some lovely systems all around, probably tall enough to support my desk.
i always see giant towers as old server machines, due to them having that many drive bays. I rebuilt my old lab server into a giant tower, well built a new one. thing weighs a ton, and that was before i added in all the drives. Id have loved to have another white server tower, but the silver Alu one will do nice, just a sod getting the sliver drives!
Ahhh good old Maxtor drives. At some point they began to add an animal to the PCB. In this case: a schnauzer dog. I've had an 850MB IDE drive with a shark on it. Later I found that Maxtor wasn't THAT reliable 😂. I absolutely love this videos. They bring back SO many memories. Keep up this amazing work!
When I first started in PCs I built an XT class clone with parts from Jdr m icrodevices. Long story short: NEVER AGAIN WILL I even entertain buying from them. It was 1987. The MCT parts were cheap VERY cheap. In the first year I went through 7 miotherboards and 8 power suplies 5 of which came D.O.A. I tell you this to use caution with that PSU as to the broken catch on the case door they were usualy Touch latches. I really enjoy these vids a the trip down memory lane. Joel
I'm pretty sure that a lot of your "parallel port cards" that you find are simple SCSI adapters that were often bundled with scanners. Unless you know for sure otherwise. They used the same D-sub 25-pin ports, but were not compatible.
This whole system reminds me of when I started seriously getting into computers back in the late 90's. I would imagine the Sound Card was probably the last thing to get upgraded on this thing. Sounds cards were so cheap and relatively decent by then that it was almost a no-brainer upgrade from any sort of ISA based sound card. They were usually garbage compared to a good PCI sound card like an SB Live, but still an upgrade over almost anything ISA based. A lot of people were still running AWE64's at the time.
I honestly could not tell the difference. I used a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 in one of my most long lived systems and could not fault it for anything. I NEVER wanted to use the CD Rom interfaces from any sound card, though.
It seemed like I used a 4 channel amp that , with a flip of a switch could take two channel input and image it to the back speakers. I wish I had not broken that amp since it and the speakers were far better than what I use now.
After your comment about hitting your shop lights when opening those AT cases, I would have inserted a glass breaking sound effect and showering glass video effect just to be funny 😄
I built one of these massive towers once containing about 6 DVD burners and 4 hard drives for a company so they could clone and mail out marketing DVDs to customers, you can imagine how messy IDE cabling and jumpers was for all that! To be fair it ran on Windows Server 2003 for years and years without ever missing a beat!
I actually got the smell of cooked on wet dust and dead skin particles when you opened up the power supply on the HIQ machine. Oh that scent.. that old damp dusty stale nasty smell I miss and love so so much. Great!!
I just found your channel and i love it. I grew up hacking these old dinosaurs together. Being born in 1980 i was learning as the tech started to boom (everything nearly doubled in speed every 6 months). I think i was 12 and installing the new windows 3.11 ugrade! Around the same time my external 2400 baud modem was replaced by a 14,4. Hacking was new and everything was vulnerable. I could go on and on. Thank you got sharing these
My Uncle (12 yrs. my Sr.; Grew up in the PC Boom) Had a Kick Ar$e IBM 386 Full Tower! That thing Was Huge; Probably where I got my OCD Love to "Fill ALL the Drive Bays!" LOL
Great video as always! Towers like that come up almost to my knees. I never really had much interaction with them. I have seen them at the Philadelphia School District building and in the offices on 8th and Snyder. Love the cd caddy as in the olden days lol. Your videos never cease to amaze me. I look forward to new videos every Friday.
I really enjoyed this video reminds of the AT pc i found abandoned on the side of the road that i dragged home, after tearing everything apart and scrubing any dust/corrosion i could find (only areas of parts directly exposed to the elements had rust/corrosion, the inside was surprisingly clean) and after reassembling everything it surprisingly posted (2gb hdd was fairly unhappy though, had bad sectors) system had a 166mhz pentium mmx, 32 mb edo ram, a motherboard i dont really remember the brand of and a trident tvga 8900b with 1mb video ram and used to be running windows 95 according to the files on the hard drive, i actually used it a bit after installing a new hdd/psu, adding a isa sound blaster carda different video cardand a fresh copy of dos 6.22 for retro gaming though i ended up parting it out due to the heavy rust on the vga, serial ports, at keyboard connector and every other external port and the cmos battery having popped and leaked onto the board having corroded some of the traces. I still have the cd drive, ram, cpu , vga card and floppy drive, with the floppy drive currently being used in my new pentium mmx 233 machine i recently put together. OH AND BTW, my reaction to the 2nd tower you showed in your video with the 2 pentium iii cpus: 🤤oohh....i want that....must have!!
![[ TEASER ] เงาะป่า - วงL.กฮ. | TMG RECORD](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/M4ObdFfcPww/mqdefault.jpg)
Friday's wouldn't be the same without you Mike.
Agreed
It is recommended to drill through one of the leads to internal battery when modifying those dallas RTC chips. You don't want the old battery to become additional load for your external battery.
Yes. I bet if he checked the voltage after combining the new 3 volt batter to the old 0.5 volt, the new voltage would be somewhere around 2.0 v
That said, I have found that 0.5v is usually enough to keep the settings.
Wow - over an hour of Mike! yay!! Awesome video (as always).
I love this channel and thanks for your dedication to retro computing!
Thank you so much!!
I love such skyscraper looking cases, so imposing yet so much potential for yummy external expansion slots! Everyone needs at least 5 floppy drives of various sizes and form factors in every case! So much expandability inside and out, front and back.
You can use superglue and baking soda to build up the plastic tab on that door and file it into the shape you want. You basically apply glue, sprinkle on the powder and it turns into a hard rock like substance, and you can just build it up a layer at a time. The chemical reaction does produce some heat, and happens quickly, so let the part cool down so the plastic doesn't deform.
My theory is that the Toshiba SCSI drive from the first machine had a fatal head crash on one of its platters, but is a multi-platter/head drive that can still read from the other one(s). Would explain how it's still readable but has a ton of bad sectors marked like that. Would love to see an autopsy of that drive at some point!
Most likely right, but even the smallest dust grain could cause it, and most likely wouldn't see anything unless you got the microscope out. Or the head was just damaged. I've taken apart a few of these where it's like half the drive died (very common back then) and you wouldn't ever see anything on any of the platers.
Ah Goldstar, the "G" half of LG before they merged with Lucky
You seem to be forgetting that it was actually the Gold and Star companies that merged. Lucky and GoldStar was a "partnership." 😉
@@orangejjay after all these years, seems to be a distinction without a difference 😉
Yay another awesome video from the gorgeous techie! ❤️
Another fantastic, long video full of just enough detail and explanation.. I learn something every week. The pacing of your videos is perfect. Keep it up.
Seeing the RealPlayer icon in the system tray of that Windows 98 machine triggered my PTSD. RealPlayer was the bane of my existence in 1998, yuck.
That Hi-Q computer does indeed have a Enlight case, I built 2 systems in 2003-2004 and that was the exact cases I purchased. I still have one empty case with an Iomega Jazz drive in it on my shelf.
Found your channel by accident. Immediately subscribed. Excellent content!!
Thank you Mike for the Big Tower Retro Show , I was working at a PC Repair Shop in St. Louis called Word Pro during these years and this is some of the stuff we would see . Good to see Bigger cases like these as they are becoming more Rare :) QC
I think i bought the very last one from my PC repair shop 20 years ago, case was shite quality but it did the job. Binned the system off about 6 years ago there, Everything was practically buggered drive wise, and the motherboard was shite one anyway. laugh was i had a fault on its 1st board, so the shop "sent it away" fast forwards 10 years later, when they were shutting down or what ever, and they give me a bell, i was like what board?? he tried to say it was lost in the post, i was like aye fella, nearly 10 years and it pops up. I think i had even binned the original setup off by that point. collected the board and it went straight in the bin.
Love all of your videos, I've watched them all and look forward to you releasing a new video at the end of each week. ❤ I noticed those 866MHz Pentium 3's were only running at 520MHz, I'm guessing the settings must have been input manually and when the CMOS battery died it went back to defaults (I'm pretty sure that board is new enough to not need jumpers for setting bus speed and multiplier lol)
Wymieniłem procesor i komputer działa , o dziwo . Nauczyleś mnie , Mike Dzięki . Mam 64 lata . Pozdrawiam i dziękuję . I replaced the processor and the computer works, surprisingly. You taught me, Mike Thanks. I am 64 years old. Best regards and thank you.😁🤭👍🤝
That last tape drive is probably a Colorado Jumbo 250, maybe 120, but yeah, floppy interfaces were really popular with the CMS tape drives. They also made portable ones that used the parallel port to transfer data. Not very speedy, but they got the job done. They take QIC-80 tapes that you can compress. I still have the 2 tapes I made from my 486/66 Win 3.11 machine back in 1995, and they're still readable. I bought a NOS Jumbo 350 off eBay and it came with that extended floppy cable so you could still have both 3.5 and 5.25 drives connected. Anyway, another awesome video, Mike.
Thanks for the info!
Superb hour of Mike goodness - load of fun towers there and some surprises,!
Using the Floppy interface for Tapedrives was actually very common on low-end systems. Expecially those Colorado drives.
Great vid! Yea, the Colorado drives of the time used a floppy interface. You could order a FC-20 card that would speed up access quite a bit. Yours truly did a video on that, comparing the speeds!
Ol' Mike, I saw this video as the first from your channel and I am totally in love. High quality images, full knowledge of the systems and very well picked retro computing beasts from the past. Lots of things to learn from yours. Instant subscriber and die hard fan... hahaha.
Thanks!
Love the videos man, you're the only TH-camr I can sit down and watch the entire video. It is so entertaining for a fellow computer nerd like me. Thanks for always giving me something to do on Fridays.
Nice find and review, btw, on the last tower computer, i believe that small ISA Card with DB25 pin connector, is not a parallel port card, but a SCSI card which usually used by scanner, usually older HP or UMAX scanner (the card comes with them when you purchase these scanners), the card uses NCR/Symbios 53C400 SCSI controller chip
1:00:10 those style of cd drives are so satisfying, i wonder how common they are to find in sata
37:00 sounds like you need to make yourself a "programmable load". They can be made from an op-amp (plus support components), some high power resistors and several MOSFETs in parallel, bolted to a heatsink. Google "programmable load schematic". Going by your previous videos, I doubt you'd have trouble making one. Cheers.
I have that board in one of my old workstations and I love it. The only difference with the DLS model is the Adaptec 7880 SCSI controller, which is the classic AHA-2940UW but onboard. I already had a faster card so I saved some money. At that time, there were already newer and faster U160 and later U320 SCSI adapters, so buying the expensinve version made no sense. It is a fantastic board and even supports dual 1.4 P3 Tualatin, albeit with small intermediate socket boards for the voltage regulation. No mods are required. Just CPU coollers with adjustable springs to take the slack for the extra 2mm height difference. It maxes out at 4GB of RAM and supports AGP pro 4X GPUs and newer 8X but at half the bus speed. Having such a machine back in 2000-1 was a pleasure to work with and it was expensive AF. That rig along with a rpofessional 22" CRT monitor cost me almost $10K in today's money adjusted for inflation. It would run circles around SGI and Apple systems of the day. I still use today for retro software with Linux and Windows XP/7 and it can even do all modern things. This thing has paid for itself multiple times.
That 3rd system probably used a colorado memory systems QIC tape drive(i.e. jumbo 250). They used the floppy controller for the interface. Sound card is SB16 with scsi-2 interface, with waveblaster header and jumpers for internal/line-out output plus the usual jumpers for dma/high dma, and irq. Very nice.
I had a SCSI CD Drive with a Caddy that looked identical to that one in the Tri-CAD case. Mine was a CD Writer. I remember it taking ages to burn a full disk. Mine however was in an external case with a 50pin centronics plug on the external case. I used it on both my PC and my Amiga.
Your Dallas hack with a drill bit is the best I seen, and I saw a lot... That's even good to hold the solder in! I sure will try that next time! Congrats on the channel. Just one suggestion after seeing other videos... don't forget to always check the motherboards power rails for shorts. Keep up the good work.
Zwnon was a heavy advertiser in Computer Shopper in the 90s. They let you build your machine the way you wanted, video card, ram etc. I had a giant case you have already shown in a video with a PentiumPro 200 and a Imagine II number 9 ( the kick azz video card of the day, later upgraded to Orchid 3dfx sli setup). It was a huge expense back then $2000 . They pretty much beat any other vendor and had a good rep as far as I can remember. Quake at horrible FPS but still beating everybody else machine 166 etc machines, the PPRO 200 when released was a beast, the kids would cry today with the FPS numbers... the bad old dark ages.
You just made me remember something I forgot all about with that CD rom caddy I had a gigantic external cdrom drive with one of those I had forgotten all about that.
12:28 JDR Microdevices! Wow! That’s a blast from my past. I grew up in their hometown of San Jose, CA. I would go into their store on Bascom Ave every so often. Their products were generally top notch. Their people tended to be a bit rude, tho.
24:46 love how it says "some bad sectors" in the legend on the right. :D
43:25 thanks for the fun run down and clean up, that was super fun! my fav so far from all your builds!
The PSU from system 3 looks like the guts are interchangeable with a later PSU if it turns out that it's unrepairable. Awesome goodness seen in this video, Mike!
Some really cool systems there, and quite a trip down memory lane with that JDR Microdevices power supply. JDR had some really cool stuff back in the day like POST analyzer cards and cards with breadboards on them for making interface cards.
That Micronics Motherboard and Power Tronic Power Supply combo is the same pairing that early Gateway machines used, I wonder if Gateway was the OEM for Tri Star and others. It also looks like there was a scanner attached to that machine with the HP SCSI card (NCR Chipset) card and a copy of Ofoto, I would guess an HP ScanJet 4C.
NCR made many of the SCSI chipsets starting in the mid 80's and yes the chipset in the other machine did say tolerant, it was a style of chipset that they started in 1990 with the Mac IIfx it was supposed to be more stable and less prone to SCSI Voodoo, but in the IIfx it was very prone to SCSI Voodoo but they were pushing the chips and the drives for throughput in that machine.
I believe I have some of the tapes that will fit into that drive. They are new and in the box that came out of an office that just never got around to using them when they threw out all of their computers that had those drives in them. Ha!
I really enjoy your energy and enthusiasm, and really enjoyed your videos (and I love your watch, too!) Be well, friend!
On third machine - NCR53C400 is a SCSI card, not a parallel port. Probably from some scanner. (at ~ 47:11 or so)
I wondered why it had no jumpers.....
I really enjoy someone giving so much TLC to old systems
That little transformer can likely do more than you think. Remember the 12 volt rail is only rated at 10amps. The 250 Watts is all rails combined. The 12V rail was rated at 120Watts max, but it didn't do it. Probably bad caps. With the power supply open, the heatsinks will get hot as you didn't really get any air flow over them, but you are right in that saying that PSU is pretty well rubbish. I am just playing devils advocate really.
You’ll always love opening a random PC, you never know what’s in it and just makes it more fun 😂
2nd case looks extremely similar to an old IBM case I use to have
Stopped by an estate sale last Friday. Looked around, saw some tech stuff. Picked up an EnPower TW3 EAA-89 laptop for $25USD. Never seen one before. Core Duo T2300, 1GB of RAM (512 onboard, 512 stick), 80GB HD, 945G video, 15.6" 1280x768 screen, and LOTS of ports:
Four USB, firewire 400, PCMCIA and SD card, s-video, NIC and 56K, and something I've never seen in a laptop before: DVI output! Like an actual full sized DVI port. Too cool.
It's in really good shape, all I needed to do was reseat the CMOS battery. Seems like a really good computer from 15 years ago.
Is running XP home SP3. It also had all documents and email intact. So, PSA: When you sell a computer, wipe or destroy the HDs.
Now, a quick word about old AT psus. They had most of the load on the 5V, not on the 12V. Loading the 12V line with car lights is not technically a good idea. Look for a motorbike or an old car 6V light, and use that on the 5V, not 12V. Since there's just a single transformer for all the important voltages on an AT psu, and they're not regulated separately, you have to think that loading one rail, but not the others, would make the loaded rail "low", and make the others read "high"; exactly as it happened with that PSU that got 9.42V on the 12V but the 5V skyrocketed to 5.82V! Only a few selected gamer PSUs have a separated mains to 12V circuit and then 12V to 5V and 3V (and servers, of course)
Well this video brought back memories. When I was a teenager in High School in the early 2000s I used to play around with old systems like these. Now, I never came across any old towers like those shown here but I saw the Baby AT systems and definitely had a few of those as well as some old Digital Electric Corp 486 slim desktop systems. My favourite systems to work with these days are either Lenovo or HP business desktop systems with the relatively tool-free designs. In fact, my HP Elite Desk tower has the legacy of Compaq Deskpro computers tool-less design implemented in it even down to the size of the power supply casing.
I don't know how I found you, but this brought back memories of teenage me working on computers in the late 90s. I don't know anything about modern computers, but I followed everything you said. And to be honest? I still prefer the form factor of those old towers. I can't even begin to explain why, but I'd still kill to have a modern build in one of them.
Man I am jealous of that dual Pentium III system, bet that'll run late 90's games like Half Life flawlessly. That last system is a dream DOS gaming system too!
I would like to see him set it up and see how many games will play. Personally, I found ME could play games a lot better than XP for games that would run on either OS. But, what OS will support dual CPUs? Even today the second CPU (such as xeons) seems to add nothing to gaming even under Windows 7, 10 etc
I played GTA San Andreas with a Celeron 1200 and it played pretty well under ME.
Not so well under XP with the same computer. So that is a game to start with, since it is on the edge. I'm going to say I had a 64 k Radeon 7000 or something about that level.
I was so excited to sit down and watch a 1 hour MikeTech video!
As a kid, coming across towers like this - with the mindset that bigger always meant better - I always thought that 'If I could ever get my hands on one of those... I could play any game in the world.' 😆
Thank you for the awesome video!
Those sound blaster 16,s are great man. I upgraded my placard bell 396 with one. Loved it.
Awww man such nostalgia ❤️🧡🩵 also I don't think the heat is coming from the weather 💪🏻💪🏻
I love watching repairs on older pcs I'm only used to working on modern pcs and find this very informative.Thank you for your content.😊It's very interesting to me to see this even though I owned vintage pcs when I was a teenager I never worked on them.First pc was a Compaq 286 with two 5 and a half floppy drives using MS-DOS 3.0 such nostalgia I also owned both a Compaq 386 and 486 both running windows 3.11 for workgroups
.😅I sort of miss them. The old comoaq keyboard ms felt more tactility pleasing the roller ball mice werent so great though.Had an old cannon bjc 200 printer and loved the way it printed at the time even though not perfect and a couple of dot matrix printers b&w such nostalgia.
46:50 wow I love that sound card, damnn!!
What a haul! So many amazing vintage computers. Thanks for sharing!
Interesting how the two intake fans in the dual Plll system are set up as exhaust fans, and not intake. Makes sense the amount of dust in the floppy and etc as all fans now create negative air pressure inside the case.
That last system was a gem. The design and the pairing of parts was just perfect IMO. VBL Mach 2, OPL3, 486 DX2 and cache chip. RAM and his selection of drives. Dream system.
Posted before testing. Might regret my words...
Finally! I've been waiting 30 years for a good review. Where can I buy one 😄
It is also better if you are a certified electronics repair tech from the 90s. They make drop-in replacements for those battery chips to this day. I have seen them on other channels dealing with retro PCs from the same era.
S1: heavily customized, a lot of pride in their professional work.
Oh man I remember those tape drives that used the floppy interface! I had one I think... so slowwww
These full size cases were always odd to me. There's often so much wasted space inside that could never really be useful. But they are extremely cool looking to me now! I think one of the first few videos on my channel was about a Gateway P5 something and I recall even that one being massive.
Also 2:04 may or may not have been a highlight of this video 😂
I knew of a few people with them, some would even drag those giant things to LAN parties. I also remember a lot of them with all the drives as low as possible since people didn't own long enough IDE/SCSI cables. There was definitely a lot of wasted space, in the early days of jank watercooling they found good use for the space though :)
I thought that most of the psu capacity in that time period was with 5V rail so even if psu would be fully functional I would not be surprised if 12V rail would not be able to handle that kind of loads.
Ah, this is so beautiful to watch!
Just loving that HIQ case, Mike..
It's my fav so far that you've displayed.
Early 2000, I got one of those super towers, lol. Wheels on the bottom. Thought it was so cool on the hardwood floors.
I still have and use a big case similar to those, only it was designed for ATX-style mainboards. It's the only component in my setup that is still the same. Everything else was changed and I never had any airflow and cooling problems people have with newer cases. The only case I would it change for is an old Dell case where you had the mainboard on one side and the drives on the other. Don't know what it was called. It was sold as a high end gaming system / workstation and you could fit 14 5.25 drives in it.
Awesome finds! Who would have thought that one had dual processors!
I feel like those caddy CD drives are a superior design in almost every way. No mechanical tray eject to get jammed up or otherwise break; designed for high-use environments (schools, libraries). Plus they were sold in the early days when CD drives were top-end accessories, so presumably the build quality in general should be better than the drives that were installed in cost-reduced machines from the mid-90s and beyond.
Those ATI cards with a Rage Theater chipset are precious and highly sought after. They are still considered in 2024 to be the best VHS/analog capture devices ever made for the digital conversion.
I love how you tortured that first hard drive. Was hoping for the magic smoke and/or a fire lol. Some lovely systems all around, probably tall enough to support my desk.
1:00:00 wow, that is just too cool! love that caddy!
that dual CPU P3 would have been a dream machine for me back in the day. I had to wait for the Athlon MPs to finally get my dual CPU love on.
i always see giant towers as old server machines, due to them having that many drive bays. I rebuilt my old lab server into a giant tower, well built a new one. thing weighs a ton, and that was before i added in all the drives. Id have loved to have another white server tower, but the silver Alu one will do nice, just a sod getting the sliver drives!
Ahhh good old Maxtor drives. At some point they began to add an animal to the PCB. In this case: a schnauzer dog.
I've had an 850MB IDE drive with a shark on it.
Later I found that Maxtor wasn't THAT reliable 😂.
I absolutely love this videos. They bring back SO many memories.
Keep up this amazing work!
When I first started in PCs I built an XT class clone with parts from Jdr m icrodevices.
Long story short: NEVER AGAIN WILL I even entertain buying from them. It was 1987.
The MCT parts were cheap VERY cheap.
In the first year I went through 7 miotherboards and 8 power suplies 5 of which came D.O.A.
I tell you this to use caution with that PSU
as to the broken catch on the case door they were usualy Touch latches.
I really enjoy these vids a the trip down memory lane. Joel
That third system is beautiful. Would love to have in my collection.
That Deer PSU is F- tier what it comes to quality. I'd throw that to recycle bin immediately.
I'm pretty sure that a lot of your "parallel port cards" that you find are simple SCSI adapters that were often bundled with scanners. Unless you know for sure otherwise. They used the same D-sub 25-pin ports, but were not compatible.
These are awesome. They have much more character than today's computers.
30:44 they were called "ATI All-in-Wonder" I remember hearing about those at the time I wanted one but I was just a small child.
This whole system reminds me of when I started seriously getting into computers back in the late 90's. I would imagine the Sound Card was probably the last thing to get upgraded on this thing. Sounds cards were so cheap and relatively decent by then that it was almost a no-brainer upgrade from any sort of ISA based sound card. They were usually garbage compared to a good PCI sound card like an SB Live, but still an upgrade over almost anything ISA based. A lot of people were still running AWE64's at the time.
I honestly could not tell the difference. I used a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 in one of my most long lived systems and could not fault it for anything.
I NEVER wanted to use the CD Rom interfaces from any sound card, though.
It seemed like I used a 4 channel amp that , with a flip of a switch could take two channel input and image it to the back speakers. I wish I had not broken that amp since it and the speakers were far better than what I use now.
After your comment about hitting your shop lights when opening those AT cases, I would have inserted a glass breaking sound effect and showering glass video effect just to be funny 😄
I built one of these massive towers once containing about 6 DVD burners and 4 hard drives for a company so they could clone and mail out marketing DVDs to customers, you can imagine how messy IDE cabling and jumpers was for all that! To be fair it ran on Windows Server 2003 for years and years without ever missing a beat!
I actually got the smell of cooked on wet dust and dead skin particles when you opened up the power supply on the HIQ machine. Oh that scent.. that old damp dusty stale nasty smell I miss and love so so much. Great!!
Zenon was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of Stoicisim. Which is very helpful during troubleshooting.
I just found your channel and i love it. I grew up hacking these old dinosaurs together. Being born in 1980 i was learning as the tech started to boom (everything nearly doubled in speed every 6 months). I think i was 12 and installing the new windows 3.11 ugrade! Around the same time my external 2400 baud modem was replaced by a 14,4. Hacking was new and everything was vulnerable. I could go on and on. Thank you got sharing these
Oh man, I had a computer with a CUV4X-D in it. Blast from the past.
My Uncle (12 yrs. my Sr.; Grew up in the PC Boom) Had a Kick Ar$e IBM 386 Full Tower!
That thing Was Huge; Probably where I got my OCD Love to "Fill ALL the Drive Bays!" LOL
Back in the day in Houston TX where I lived they called "Bodge Wires" - "Roach Wires" often because they'd remind you of roach legs
I've had good luck using O-Rings to replace the driver roller on those tape drives.
Great video as always! Towers like that come up almost to my knees. I never really had much interaction with them. I have seen them at the Philadelphia School District building and in the offices on 8th and Snyder. Love the cd caddy as in the olden days lol. Your videos never cease to amaze me. I look forward to new videos every Friday.
I think those price labels are from the sadly departed Fry's Electronics store chain. Those would be the kinds of things you could buy there.
Its awesome i just found your channel Great videos we love retro computers in all forms Binge watch time
This is so GOOD, Mike! 👍
I really enjoyed this video reminds of the AT pc i found abandoned on the side of the road that i dragged home, after tearing everything apart and scrubing any dust/corrosion i could find (only areas of parts directly exposed to the elements had rust/corrosion, the inside was surprisingly clean) and after reassembling everything it surprisingly posted (2gb hdd was fairly unhappy though, had bad sectors) system had a 166mhz pentium mmx, 32 mb edo ram, a motherboard i dont really remember the brand of and a trident tvga 8900b with 1mb video ram and used to be running windows 95 according to the files on the hard drive, i actually used it a bit after installing a new hdd/psu, adding a isa sound blaster carda different video cardand a fresh copy of dos 6.22 for retro gaming though i ended up parting it out due to the heavy rust on the vga, serial ports, at keyboard connector and every other external port and the cmos battery having popped and leaked onto the board having corroded some of the traces. I still have the cd drive, ram, cpu , vga card and floppy drive, with the floppy drive currently being used in my new pentium mmx 233 machine i recently put together. OH AND BTW, my reaction to the 2nd tower you showed in your video with the 2 pentium iii cpus: 🤤oohh....i want that....must have!!
I hope you were able to source a couple of 1.4 Tualatins for that HIQ system. It deserves nothing less.
Full tower cases.
Last seen one in school 1997
Ran as a server for the library Wyse system.
It was a386
I never heard of VRAM Zip Chips, cool!
41:55 - The classic kernel panic? :D
Nice beefy machines and biceps._
And we got some kind of desk crusher here...
Could make a epic sleeper NAS out of that first case lol
Notched case is top notch. I salute you, sir.