Giant Retro Towers - Teardown and test!
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- Опубліковано 11 лип 2024
- If you'd like to support the channel and help me to produce more videos like this, you can find me on Patreon: / miketech
You have my eternal gratitude!
Here is the second batch of giants. Time to see what treasures lay within!
0:00 Intro
0:14 System 1 Tour
1:55 S1 Disassembly and inspection
6:27 S1 Drive check and service
9:36 S1 PSU Torture
13:19 S1 RTC Hackulation and fan cleanup
15:38 S1 Testing and OS Exploration
20:42 S1 Drive Testing
26:20 S1 Cleanup and verdict
27:32 System 2 Tour
29:11 S2 Disassembly and inspection
34:09 S2 Drive check and service
36:09 S2 PSU Torture and system refresh
39:56 S2 Testing, cleanup and verdict
43:28 System 3 Tour
44:52 S3 Disassembly and inspection
49:47 S3 Drive check and service
52:40 S3 PSU Torture
54:17 S3 Testing
1:01:16 S3 Verdict
1:01:48 Outro
Friday's wouldn't be the same without you Mike.
Agreed
Wow - over an hour of Mike! yay!! Awesome video (as always).
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 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.
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 😉
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.
Yay another awesome video from the gorgeous techie! ❤️
What a haul! So many amazing vintage computers. Thanks for sharing!
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.
Found your channel by accident. Immediately subscribed. Excellent content!!
43:25 thanks for the fun run down and clean up, that was super fun! my fav so far from all your builds!
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.😁🤭👍🤝
Superb hour of Mike goodness - load of fun towers there and some surprises,!
Ah, this is so beautiful to watch!
So cool to have these systems! Nice resurrection
Love your videos Mike! Recently got back into computers because of them, they're very helpful!
Love the videos man, you're the only UA-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.
Thank you for content.😊Such nostalgia i love it.
great video, Mike! i just luv it cause it's about an hr long, i could watch even 2 or 3 hrs long videos that you make.
This is so GOOD, Mike! 👍
Just loving that HIQ case, Mike..
It's my fav so far that you've displayed.
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!
Very interesting and entertaining video, thank you!
Over an hour, I like that. Nice video as always.
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!
Its awesome i just found your channel Great videos we love retro computers in all forms Binge watch time
Using the Floppy interface for Tapedrives was actually very common on low-end systems. Expecially those Colorado drives.
Wow thanks Mike for a another great video and a long one to. Thanks for taking me back to the early days. Please keep up the great work. Kev
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.
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!
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)
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!
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.
Those sound blaster 16,s are great man. I upgraded my placard bell 396 with one. Loved it.
Brother, I just subscribed. The systems you check out are some of the greats I grew up with! SCSI Ultrawide, SCSI II... I love that era of PC. 5.25", 3.5" Diskette Drives and a CD ROM. Back when you can go GENERATIONS of upgrades and the "core" PC still kept up.
Back in the day: Max out the RAM and Overclock, and youre good to go for another decade..
Keep Posting!
Yeah,my favourite type of cases, lucky you,Mike!!!
Notched case is top notch. I salute you, sir.
Yup, it's Friday, looks like a good one!!
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!
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.
ooh i was looking forward to the big bois
1:00:00 wow, that is just too cool! love that caddy!
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.
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.
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.
Awesome finds! Who would have thought that one had dual processors!
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.
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!
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!
That third system is beautiful. Would love to have in my collection.
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.
An hour long of video - really good vid!👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻☺️
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.
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.
Proud citizen of Mikeropolis!
Finally! I've been waiting 30 years for a good review. Where can I buy one 😄
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
24:46 love how it says "some bad sectors" in the legend on the right. :D
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.
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.
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 worked at tri-star for most of the 90s, we sold a lot of those tape drives because they were cheap. They were pretty good though. We started zip tieing our cables a lot better than that around mid-90s.
Cool e-waste collection
46:50 wow I love that sound card, damnn!!
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
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...
Woo hoo. An hour of monster machines. Your humour is awesome. Bingo card needed for catchphrases. Lol. Every video brings back PC memories both good and.... not so good. Cheers!
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 really enjoy someone giving so much TLC to old systems
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.
i have no idea why i love multi cpu builds so much, theyre just cool.
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.
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!!
Aww look at you putting on the perfect amount a thermal paste ;)
Oh sweet sweet entertainment, but I'll have to wait with this one till the evening. Want to watch the whole thing properly.
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 😄
Thanks
Thank you!!
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
Nothing like som good ol' computer archaeology!
You’ll always love opening a random PC, you never know what’s in it and just makes it more fun 😂
Oh man, I had a computer with a CUV4X-D in it. Blast from the past.
I really like grey cases these ones look especially choice.
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!!
Oh man I remember those tape drives that used the floppy interface! I had one I think... so slowwww
That Deer PSU is F- tier what it comes to quality. I'd throw that to recycle bin immediately.
I never heard of VRAM Zip Chips, cool!
Full towers were always my favourites, they still are in a way.
S1: heavily customized, a lot of pride in their professional work.
Zenon was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of Stoicisim. Which is very helpful during troubleshooting.
36:24 Deer! My favorite power supply brand to make fun of. They actually weren't terrible but the name sounds so sketchy. I was helping a friend rebuild an old system one Saturday and we had the hardest time tracking down an AT power supply. We finally found a small computer store that was open, and they exactly one AT power supply in stock, Deer brand. But we couldn't be picky so we bought it, and it worked in his system.
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 :)
1:00:10 those style of cd drives are so satisfying, i wonder how common they are to find in sata