I'm pretty sure HD 2600 AGP killed itself by caking heasink in dust (no cooling). ALWAYS disassemble cooler of this types of GPU, to make sure fans work properly and fins are cleared of any dust before running the card
In the 7 years I’ve been watching this channel, mr budget guy has gone from living in a house, to the woods, to a car, a shed, homeless and now a trailer. This is my favourite UA-cam channel of all time
This is INSANE, not only are we getting such frequent videos again, but also my request for a gaming PC video is here! Thanks man! I was so worried that this channel was dying, but I can see that it is having a revival period now, which makes me very happy! Wish you all the best man, from Poland!
And the best chocolate covered marshmallows things, like soft vanilla ice cream covered blocks of paradise. can't remember what they were called.... but my goodness....nom nom
For the AGP cards, check the capacitors, been able to revive a few cards because it was the capacitors that were on their way out, not the dyes themselves.
9:47 > weird middle child - Service Pack 2 You mean, the exact WinXP version most of users actually spent time with? SP3 came out unexpectedly only a year before Win7, and 7 years into XP's lifecycle, it's not like SP2 was unusable on relevant machines before that.
Back in the day i only used WinXP SP2 ... never bothered to get the SP3 ... and usually i don't know why windows with SP3 got more unstabled but probably due to something i did that coicidence or not was when i had SP3 =P either way SP2 was good enough
I've seen software require SP3. I can't remember specifically what, but I bet the last supported versions of web browsers do. I don't know what they require from it considering it's basically a rollup pack. Requiring SP3 was probably just a way to reduce validation efforts for a an OS with declining market share.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 I also think DirectX9c required SP3 you could run just the regular X9 on SP2 I think and maybe even X9c but that was more on your own risk.
No one in their right mind got vista over xp sp3 for gaming, when windows 7 and later 8 was out, gamers only grudingly moved to 7. By then, my hardware was good enough to run windows and the games i played as vm guests, so xp sp3 was the latest i used natively.
In fact i can say, i had DX9c on my SP2 no doubt... had no issues.. i think ... Windows vista was cool and all but games were most of the time crashing or BSOD ... like Worms Armaggedon on windows vista it got the colors worng and couldn't play ... vista was bad .. dayum
It's a PCI-E card with an AGP bridge chip. You can see where the chip is when he turns the card over. That'll be why it has the six pin connector instead of molex.
I have a sapphire hd4650 and an Asus ah4560 the Asus card has molex. Both are agp with a bridge chip like the card in the video, iirc they run at 4x not 8x
If you were a gamer back then you had an Athlon 64, they absolutely DESTROYED the Pentium 4. I used to do lan parties back then and almost everyone had amd64 cpus. I had a P4 and thought it was amazing until a friend of mine showed me his pc with an Athlon 64 that curb stomped my P4. I shortly after switched to AMD and didn't look back until the core 2 duo. For that time era I think you should get a 9800 pro, or 6600gt.
In 2000 we got a Pentium 4 1.5. Thought we were really King Shit. Then my schoolfriend showed me his Athlon Thunderbird. I felt bereft inside for years.
Really puts into perspective how much we take for granted the common amenities of modern, fast computing. This video tells a story all too common back in the day. This troubleshooting process WAS computing back then. If you had a PC that wasn't top of the line, this was the adventure you embarked on whenever you decided you wanted to play a new game or do anything beyond its basic functionality. I feel in equal parts nostalgic and traumatized. Thanks, I guess.
Yep, always makes me laugh when people complain computers are hard now. Go back to the 90s and early 2Ks and my god. Used to be an achievement just to get everything working properly! I still remember games crashing in DOS nuking the Win95 install on the family PC, and getting the blame for it, until my family realised it was actually just stuff being flakey back then, with no data protection whatsoever. These days, we maybe install Windows once every few years, back then it used to be several times a year at points!
The Athlon 64s were awesome compared to the Prescott P4s. This one is unfortunately paired with awful SiS chipset. Maybe that Radeon 9700 Pro from the mystery box would be a better GPU fit.
My Pentium 4 was Northwood, and while less awful, later on I realised that very CPU isn't nowhere near the Athlons! Also Pentium D Presler, getting beaten by Core2duo easily
@@tedarmavan Pentium D can't compare to a Core 2 Duo anyway. The fastest Pentium D was easily beaten by 1.6 ghz Pentium Dual Core E2140. Core 2 Duo was way out of it's league
The SIS chipset is very good. USB works without major bugs (as opposed to say VIA), PCI goes good, IDE doesn't have any trouble either, and the DRAM controller is outright market leading in its performance, and all of it is quite stable. Though of course most mainboards of the era are capacitor-plagued, so there's that, particularly budget ones. The only unfortunate part of it is the graphics, its gaming acumen is obviously very limited, but it's also not too buggy and easily good enough to support desktop and office needs. So SIS mainboard made a really good office solution. I have a weird subnotebook thing that was made to be a little DV editing system on the go, 8.9" beautiful little screen with excellent colour and contrast, magnesium chassis, 800g weight, Pentium 3 ULV, and SIS is the only way they could have built this thing since the chipset is all integrated in a single package saving loads of board space and very power efficient. Paid something like 2 grand for it back in the day, took notes in university with it for years in LyX :D The very reduced-pitch keyboard was pleasantly tactile and responsive as well and still holds up fine. Luckily i do have the hands and fingers for it, not exactly dude sized.
@@codegenprime3362 I dunno what to say about that,i mean if they were mostly used on cheap motherboards it meant they were for cheap to begin with. I had SiS chipsets too but they were not better than VIA,Intel and Nvidia. They were just mediocre for me,and most SIS boards could support lower ram amounts and lower clocked processors compared to the others
This looks like the exact same PC my friend used to have back in the day. I used to visit home and we would play GTA VC NFS MW and GTA 3 on it for entire day. Good old days. This reignited alot of old fond memories
1st rule of thumb: NEVER connect a flash drive to a system with a pre-installed OS! I always wipe the partitions with read-only media, then proceed to install a CLEAN OS. That flash drive could potentially have been infected with virus/malware, that you would then connect to your day to day PC and ruin it. That being said, love these low budget PC reviews!
I really miss al the front I/O you had via the 3.5" and 5.25" bays on these old machines. Buying each component to fill those bays separately can be surprisingly costly nowadays.
Just finished the video, and I've got to say: this one seems worthy of a *full* restoration. As someone who loves to see old PCs like this get the total upgrade-revamp treatment, I'd love to see what can be done with this one.
I know this is firmly in the range of retro but a part of me is morbidly curious how general performance would be under a light Linux Distro and seeing how far you can push the software on such old hardware.
I have the same machine, it is almost brand new in the box. I say almost because the hard drive has 4 hours on it, so that is likely the same for the whole system. There isn't a mark on it or a spec of dust inside of it. It has all of the books, peripherals, cables and packaging material that came with it. The cords and the CDs are in a ziplock bag which is branded Compaq. I don't know why someone would have bought it new, used it for a few hours, and then stuck it back in the box, but that is what happened.
When I tinker with old XP Laptops and Desktops I use the following, put them both on a usb drive, get online first, then give them a go... Legacy Update - an awesome project that makes Microsoft update work again on all their unsupported OS's. Snappy Driver Installer - Lite - This has an ok 85-95% accuracy with updating your system drivers for older machines. I'm glad you're releasing new content again, awesome job :) Give those two bits of software a go next time, you'll be surprised how much drama and heartache they remove from the equation, I use them all the time :)
I'll never forgot picking up a HP desktop for $5 USD from a church thrift store sales. It was fairly modern (only about 4 years old, Socket 939 Athlon 64 w/ pci-e) and was full functional for hardware wise. The reason it was $5 obviously was that when you logged into windows it was full of porno viruses. Reformatted, through in a decent GPU and that was my gaming PC for a few years.
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial hahaha! Sir, I didn't even consider how Yoda-like that sentence was. But seriously, I've been subscribed for years and have to say, I am a huge fan of your content. You have the same love and appreciation I have for computer hardware and I love that. It's my birthday today, so this was a pleasant surprise to wake up to. Cheers. I hope all is well and remains that way.
Great Video, I have a real soft spot for this particular Compaq design. My parents bought me one when I was 11 to replace my aging Pentium 100mhz Dell Optiplex. You can imagine what an upgrade it was. Can't remember the specific chipset but I do remember it was socket 754 While I owned it I upgraded nearly every part save for the motherboard and hard drive: - Sempron 3100+ > Athlon 64 3400+ (Plus a fancy(ish) new aftermarket cooler) - 512mb RAM > 2GB RAM - GeForce FX 5200 > 7600GS > ATI HD 3850 (All AGP of course) - Had to replace the power supply a few years in and fix up the power button which became loose over the years. By the time I sold it to a mate for pennies, I'd saved (and learned) enough to do my own PC build. This was my first (and last) prebuilt machine that I'd owned since new, it taught me a lot about computer hardware and how it all fit together.
You cannot emphasize enough how good OS was Windows XP. Basically had 90% of functionality of Win 10/11, with ten times less bloat. With certain third party programs you could safely take it to Internet even today.
From SP2 onwards, yes. But before that, it just attracted malware like nobody's business. There was one period in 2003 where our XP SP1 Pentium 4 box would boot up with a fresh piece of spyware or adware every time.
@@RJRC_105 It had to do mostly with connecting directly to Internet (instead of using router as is usual now ) and having certain ports open by default. Windows XP firewall was lackluster in this regard, you had to configure it manually or get something third party. Also IE was only useful to download firefox 😁
XP was a good OS, only problem with it was it really needed a reprogram refresh from time to time after the registry got corrupted which no registry fix could completely solve at that time. XP was also vulnerable for viruses, I couldn't count the amount of times I got viruses from safely browsing the web... it still got infected even with latest updates and virus protection. When I jumped from XP to 7, viruses ended for me.
I'm surprised the artifacting you were initially experiencing wasn't the IGP on the North Bridge itself. That era of Compaq was notorious for BGA failure on the bridge chip from the ROHS solder fiasco. It usually manifested first by artifacting video, and would progressively work its way to the machine not booting or even powering on as more balls broke on the BGA. Those motherboards were so ridiculously fragile that just slightly flexing the board from say installing a PCI/AGP card or memory module could cause a ball to crack.
Thanks for all the effort you put into making this video sometimes we need reminding just how frustrating old hardware can be and yet how much FUN we can have just seeing what we can do with it.
I love watching your videos. I've always had wonderful times taking in elder machines and seeing how they work today, and even tuning them up. One of my favorite tragedies is when I got a Windows XP system with an Intel Atom (1GHz, 1 core, no hyperthreading), with 1 gig of DDR, and an old 80gb HDD. On XP it ran fine, though the integrated graphics hated games. I decided to install Windows 10 22H2 on it to see how it fared and... It downloaded and booted! A whopping 98% CPU and RAM usage at the desktop!
Small tip: The SIS chipsets don't like AGP graphics cards with Rialto or HSI bridge. I had a similar problem with a 478 Pentium 4 motherboard, but these cards worked perfectly on other systems. At first I thought the graphics cards were defective.
found the old family pc from 2003 lying around at my grandparents that we gave to them while ago. Had windows XP on it, of course, and pentium 4 and an nvidia FX5900 ultra. Thing was really snappy, it felt like a modern pc in terms of speed. Booted up halo combat evolved on it though and that's when I noticed how sluggish it ran. Not to mention how LOUD it was. I forgot how loud PCs were back in the day. Good luck trying to be sneaky with that thing in the night.
I didn't see this mentioned in your video, but back in the XP and Win7 days, Black Viper's Service Configurations were to go to Bible for eeking out as much performance as possible by disabling Windows services that aren't neeeded.
Nice, I did the same but put windows 10 on it & 8 GB RAM, and overclocked to 3.8 ghz and tried to run modern games on it. Ran some things surprisingly well honestly. I was getting like up to 40 FPS on Far Cry 5
My best AGP board died recently, Conroe865pe, after 8 years of loyal service. I finally decided to buy a pci-e board, even two, Asus Rampage Formula X48 and Gigabyte EP45-UD3P. The second because of q9650 in it. I put Xeon E5450 in the other. RX570 and RX480 + 8 gb DDR2 800.
I said NOOOOO out loud when I saw you removed the front stickers. It played games older than it well, barely played contemporary games, and didn't play newer games, which I think is to be expected from a, at-the-time, budget computer. Try Frog Find or Proto Web to go on the internet with an XP era PC, you'll have a better time. Great video! I just discovered your channel.
Im just about 20. Both my uncle's loved Generals, and i got into it and still occasionally play the mod Shockwave. It was an absolutely delight to see it come up on the benchmark in this video!
You know the funny thing is I ended up going to bed at 8AM the other day all thanks to Theme Hospital!! I remember it being nighttime when I fired it up and the next thing I know it was daylight 🤣
Oh man, I had this exact computer case (in Australia) with an Athlon 64 3400+, and I saved up my money from my first job and bought a geforce 6600GT in it. I bought it to play Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion which I'd seen some developer interviews for I think, although I'd never heard of the game series before that (sorry morrowind fans). It dominated the P4 3.0GHz with hyper threading that the family Dell Dimension 8400 had, which is funny because AMD were still using DDR 400 at that point and the P4 had DDR2 533. I later upgraded it to an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ dual core (great value used compared to the 4800+ which was the top-of-the-line) and 2GB RAM and installed Windows Vista (which ran great and I really loved) and then 7, and enjoyed it for several years until I got myself a laptop, and eventually built a custom desktop in 2011. I kind of miss the compaq case to be honest. This computer (and my calls to Dell about the 8400 and being talked through re-seating the RAM) are why I'm an IT technician as a career.
My first ever computer! Mine came with a big monitor and a JBL side ear speakers! My momma was the best she knew I loved computers! ❤ Miss her everyday!
So what’s fun with these and HPs of the era ( blue and grey cases) is turning them into sleeper builds. Smaller ATX PSUs (usually models with 120mm fans like the Montech Century) fit perfectly, mATX boards fit perfectly, and you can work a 120mm (Compaq) or 140mm (HP) fan in where the hard drive is. With a cheap ebay firewire card and a motherboard that has a pair of USB 2.0 headers, all the front ports work.
Really liked this video. This was era when figuring out why something doesn't work was a big challenge as symptoms and diagnostics weren't all that good and there wasn't much places on the internet where to ask. Never the less , I enjoyed my PC from that time. :)
9:00 This why I always download and save/backup my old computer's drivers on a separate HDD or gdrive, 4shared account (or any similar cloud backup that doesn't automatically delete the file after not opening it for X number of years after uploading). You're lucky enough if you still find it on Internet Archive, knowing manufacturer's they'll immediately drop the driver download support if the computer they sold are older than 5 to 10 years old after release. HP and Acer already discontinued driver download for my old HP G60 (2009) as well as Acer Aspire 4750 (2011), good thing I have mine backed up. Make it of a habit to back up drivers everyone, better safe than sorry.
Man seeing this entire video just brings me back to my teen years. Getting these computers that really weren't designed for some types of upgrades, having to jank a solution together to get stuff to work XD It's sad seeing the hardware is slowly dying from it's own age. As much as we like to see stuff preserved as best as possible, all things degrade with time. Also was i the only one who noticed the desync of the audio in the later half of the video? lol
That looks like the first model PC I bought with my own money In July of 2004. It was a liberating feeling at 14 finally having your own computer and not having to share one with your family. Probably the computer I watched my first UA-cam videos on in late 2005. Damn that was 20 years ago already lol good ol' times in the 2000s with Windows XP
At University, 20 years ago, i upgraded from an Athlon XP 2700+ to an Athlon64 3000+ MSI K8N board - the thing absolutely flew through everything and the only reason i upgraded to an Opteron 146 and eventually, an Opteron 170 was because I could, not because of any specific need. Started out with a Radeon 9700 Pro and ended up with a GeForce 7600GT AGP. I'd suggest perhaps getting the GPU re-balled and re-installed, it's probably not making great contact with the heatsink and that's whats causing the overheating. Could also be a RAM issue but that generally manifests as snow, rather than corrupt geometry.
Your old FX PC looks a lot better than mine did. I think I still have mine somewhere, too, and for some reason this made me want to dig it out and tinker with it.
Oh man that case is so freaking nostalgic. This was my first pc and i loved it with a passion. I threw a q9500 in it and had it running games up til 2017.
There were custom unattended Windows XP compilations which included hardware auto detection and drivers install. I can remember the Argentinian-made Windows Wolf, which worked fairly OK at the time for those people who needed to reinstall but didn't have a drivers disc.
On a cycle trip to Germany. Raining 9 o clock at night middle of nowhere in a tent 1 bar of reception. I am so greatful for this video thanks budget tou are a ledgend
Holy shit man this brought back so many memories this was literally the first actual PC i owned as a teenager i think i was 15 (im 37 now lol time flys) my parents bought it brand new as part of setup deal from harvey norman (its an electronic store here in Australia) it came with a monitor speakers keyboard etc i remember only ever upgrading the gpu in it to a x1950 pro anyways i will stop rambling now thanks for the video mate really enjoyed this one
I bought almost that same PC brand new from Walmart way back in the day. After a year or so the hard drive went out, so I upgraded it with a motherboard from an HP that excepted duel core Athlons, added an X2 3800+, a cheap 400w PSU from Ebay, 8gigs of 800 MHz Crucial Ballistix, Windows Vista 64, and a 9800GT. Played Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil 5 like a champ. I wish I had kept it.
I had this exact machine! My mum, with no PC knowledge, bought it from PC World. When everyone gave up trying to call it the family PC and accept, I was the only one using it I gave it some upgrades. I too upgrades the 512mb of RAM, but to 1GB, and I replaced the GPU with a nvidia 8500GT.
The first computer I ever used as a kid was one of these (different specs but exact same case)! It was my grandfather's and definitely kick started my love for computers/tech and video games!
Another fine Video Squire, Ooh, I’ve got one of those, A Customer graciously gave it to me after fixing/sorting out her Laptop plus she gave me the old Beige Compaq CRT Monitor that she used with it, This one is running Windows XP with SP3, Has 1.5Gb of RAM, An ATI Xpress 200 Series Graphics Card and a 250Gb Hard Drive, It’s been added to my Collection of Old/Retro Computers, I’ve give it a quick test & it’s working fine! 🙂 Anthony - Birmingham.
What a cozy and interesting video. Never seen your channel before but this is fascinating. Currently building a new pc, was going to re-use case but I think future me would appreciate leaving my 10 year old system built in it's original box. Maybe one day the old hardware will solve compatiblity issues with my fav old games.
I still have a few single core boards and CPUs, Ram and a few AGP GPUs from back then, Much of the hardware cables and the like, still in the packages never opened from when I was doing system building from back in the day. Love seeing these older units still working. Systems were made to last back then. One of the reasons I guess I like them. You had to do a bit more work back then to configure them, but way worth it. best 5 Bucks you spent lol Love the stream. Wished I had never got rid of all the CRTs I had a few years ago now. Still have my dads old Desktop, you know the ones you set the CRT on top of came out with Windows 95 and had been upgraded to Millennium. Was a working system, , but sets in the old barn now. Where it's been for the last 15 years or so. I'm going to get it out blow out all the spiders, mud daubers and any other critter that may think it's a home and see if I can get it running still have the keyboard for it. And by the way I'm in the Central US. Oh and by the way Steam stopped supporting Win 7 a while ago. Very few Browsers will support win 7 to these days, even UA-cam here in the US. I don't know about in the UK. Your country has different laws on support. You've given me some incentive to get off my ....well you know what I mean and get back into fixing some of these old systems and building a few of those old systems if for nothing else to play some of the Library of CD's games from back in the day. Thank you Bunches
Gawd.... I have two of these in perfect working order... Cleaned up the windows xp installs on them. New CMOS battery, defragged the drives, cleaned the dust out thoroughly... They're still snappy... Hell, I can even use modern UA-cam on them... Threw my old Radeon 7770 HD in one... No bulging caps on the Mobo amazingly... PSU's are still good... Go figure... That artifacting is probably the RAM or the CPU needs reseating... Ram could be bad as well...
Oh yea, the "SiS" Sometimes It's Sh*t. I never liked any SiS mirage or whatever they were. Maybe pop a semi decent working agp card in that like the Geforce 5200 lol. I've got about 4 of those sat in a box on a shelf. Good video you made me remember why I don't miss that era.
No,I've done all this and it doesn't make for a good experience, XP onto an SSD is probably as great as this £5 bad boy is going to get. Linux is great and I've used Ubuntu 7.04. but sometimes Windows is better for older hardware ❤
I have one of these in storage. Waiting for a recap. I used it primarily as a music server. That Bestec power supply has some interesting properties affecting sound quality.
I was daily driving similiar specs PC but with 1GB of RAM and ATI X1550 512MB until 2015. It still usable back then and I could watch youtube and use socmed webs like Facebook and Twitter. It really shows how fast technology improves for the past 9 years.
As someone that has run an AMD Athlon 64, I miss that machine so much. I had a heavily overclocked (for AMD at the time) 3000+ with 1GB of RAM before I later upgraded to a new motherboard, 2GB of RAM and an AMD Athlon 64 x2 4400+ that was decently overclocked. I miss those days when overclocking still mattered and made noticeable performance changes.
Cursed as it is, I think it's actually a solid base for a windows 98 PC, with 512MB of ram, something like a geforce4 ti and an Audigy it would be a very capable machine. And SIS ironically had good windows 9x drivers.
There's an obvious reason why it was only 5 pounds and that's pretty well demonstrated in this video. Back in 2016 i had a chance to repurpose a couple of Dell or Gateway machines given to me for free from a coworker who had moved on to more modern machines. Both machines were from around 2005 with similar specs to the one shown in the video. Both had issues with either crashed hard drives or insufficient RAM. I spent between $15-20 between each restoring them with working parts, maxing the RAM, and doing fresh installs of windows XP and sold them at the cost of the parts used to restore them. To my surprise, they were quick to sell on whichever third party site I used and the recipients none-the-less thought they were getting an enormous bargain and couldn't stop thanking me. The machines were very capable of basic work loads and browsing and honestly If they were able to get any use at all then i considered that a great success.
Ahh, the early to mid 2000s. The heyday of the prebuilt. This probably came with a matchy-matchy screen and keyboard and mouse. I also am beginning to miss those dual optical drives behind case flaps. They were strangely comfy.
i remember these old boxes, took one. gutted it and turned it into a sleeper with a few grindy modifications. looked normal outside, but on the inside it was ryzen 5000 equipped and had a rx570 8gb stuffed inside. everyone thought i was joking when i brought it to lan parties, until i maxxed the graphics on battlefield.
Big thanks to our new channel artist:
ua-cam.com/users/shortse3GDbKGNBoQ?si=JL_-6T5g1JHv19Po
They have some amazing work.
That intro is excellent :)
I'm pretty sure HD 2600 AGP killed itself by caking heasink in dust (no cooling).
ALWAYS disassemble cooler of this types of GPU, to make sure fans work properly and fins are cleared of any dust before running the card
Just our of curiosity: what model is the super thicc vertical DELL monitor?
Have a nice day.
The Vogons website may have drivers. You might save the 2600XT with a reball.
ive gotten one for 1 pound, fx 4100 4cores 4 threads 3.6ghz gtx 550ti, 500watt psu and a sick case, gigabyte 970m motherboard.
In the 7 years I’ve been watching this channel, mr budget guy has gone from living in a house, to the woods, to a car, a shed, homeless and now a trailer. This is my favourite UA-cam channel of all time
oddly relatable
dont use adblocker :D maybe he will earn on at least rent?
@@MarekKafarek-i6mi think hes just real cheap 😂
Donations make all the difference
If there’s a budget there’s a way
This is INSANE, not only are we getting such frequent videos again, but also my request for a gaming PC video is here!
Thanks man! I was so worried that this channel was dying, but I can see that it is having a revival period now, which makes me very happy!
Wish you all the best man, from Poland!
@Xeonocona ugh in my opinion that's the worst kind of music haha, I can only listen to it when I am buzzed
@Xeonocona Thanks for the recommendations, looked these up on Apple Music and found a few bangers in there. lol
And the best chocolate covered marshmallows things, like soft vanilla ice cream covered blocks of paradise. can't remember what they were called.... but my goodness....nom nom
Comfy, cozy LGR for tea sippers. Bless you, bud.
The horror of finding out your computer contains SiS devices. I completely forgot about them, "thanks" for bringing the memories back xD
were the S3G any better
SiS made VIA chipsets seem good.
Yeah, had an sis sound card in my dx2-80 486 computer back in the day... what a pile of steaming horse sh.... that was.
I have a SiS dGPU which is truly awful. Could be an XP gaming PC with a different GPU.
And you didn't know the SIS 620 graphics from Pentium II era.
For the AGP cards, check the capacitors, been able to revive a few cards because it was the capacitors that were on their way out, not the dyes themselves.
no way another budget builds video
👁👄👁
we are so back
i know! I thought for a second I must have slept for 6 months when I saw it :D
Yes way
Yeah no way on this channel unbelivability
9:47 > weird middle child - Service Pack 2
You mean, the exact WinXP version most of users actually spent time with?
SP3 came out unexpectedly only a year before Win7, and 7 years into XP's lifecycle, it's not like SP2 was unusable on relevant machines before that.
Back in the day i only used WinXP SP2 ... never bothered to get the SP3 ... and usually i don't know why windows with SP3 got more unstabled but probably due to something i did that coicidence or not was when i had SP3 =P either way SP2 was good enough
I've seen software require SP3. I can't remember specifically what, but I bet the last supported versions of web browsers do. I don't know what they require from it considering it's basically a rollup pack. Requiring SP3 was probably just a way to reduce validation efforts for a an OS with declining market share.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 I also think DirectX9c required SP3 you could run just the regular X9 on SP2 I think and maybe even X9c but that was more on your own risk.
No one in their right mind got vista over xp sp3 for gaming, when windows 7 and later 8 was out, gamers only grudingly moved to 7. By then, my hardware was good enough to run windows and the games i played as vm guests, so xp sp3 was the latest i used natively.
In fact i can say, i had DX9c on my SP2 no doubt... had no issues.. i think ... Windows vista was cool and all but games were most of the time crashing or BSOD ... like Worms Armaggedon on windows vista it got the colors worng and couldn't play ... vista was bad .. dayum
An AGP card with the six-pin connector from the PCIe spec? That's cursed.
It's a PCI-E card with an AGP bridge chip. You can see where the chip is when he turns the card over. That'll be why it has the six pin connector instead of molex.
I have a sapphire hd4650 and an Asus ah4560 the Asus card has molex.
Both are agp with a bridge chip like the card in the video, iirc they run at 4x not 8x
If you were a gamer back then you had an Athlon 64, they absolutely DESTROYED the Pentium 4. I used to do lan parties back then and almost everyone had amd64 cpus. I had a P4 and thought it was amazing until a friend of mine showed me his pc with an Athlon 64 that curb stomped my P4. I shortly after switched to AMD and didn't look back until the core 2 duo. For that time era I think you should get a 9800 pro, or 6600gt.
I had an 8600 GT by EVGA and I loved it. Paired really well with my 3.2ghz P4. I loved that PC.
In 2000 we got a Pentium 4 1.5.
Thought we were really King Shit. Then my schoolfriend showed me his Athlon Thunderbird. I felt bereft inside for years.
"I shortly after switched to AMD and didn't look back until the core 2 duo" well that didnt take long lol
And given currently, Intel is plagued with huge issues of failing gen 13 and 14 CPUs, stick with AMD for the foreseeable future ( as of july 2024 ).
I love to look back at old hardware and see what we used years ago.
Really puts into perspective how much we take for granted the common amenities of modern, fast computing. This video tells a story all too common back in the day. This troubleshooting process WAS computing back then. If you had a PC that wasn't top of the line, this was the adventure you embarked on whenever you decided you wanted to play a new game or do anything beyond its basic functionality. I feel in equal parts nostalgic and traumatized. Thanks, I guess.
For real, this takes me back. XP sp2 blew my mind for its stability at the time.
The PTSD from trouble shooting thoose systems still lingers
Well. I experienced that "painful" era of PC "gaming"😂 I remember using Pentium III paired with awful SiS graphics.. ahh
Well, the pentium 4 somehow held pretty well
Yep, always makes me laugh when people complain computers are hard now. Go back to the 90s and early 2Ks and my god.
Used to be an achievement just to get everything working properly!
I still remember games crashing in DOS nuking the Win95 install on the family PC, and getting the blame for it, until my family realised it was actually just stuff being flakey back then, with no data protection whatsoever.
These days, we maybe install Windows once every few years, back then it used to be several times a year at points!
The Athlon 64s were awesome compared to the Prescott P4s. This one is unfortunately paired with awful SiS chipset. Maybe that Radeon 9700 Pro from the mystery box would be a better GPU fit.
My Pentium 4 was Northwood, and while less awful, later on I realised that very CPU isn't nowhere near the Athlons!
Also Pentium D Presler, getting beaten by Core2duo easily
@@tedarmavan Pentium D can't compare to a Core 2 Duo anyway. The fastest Pentium D was easily beaten by 1.6 ghz Pentium Dual Core E2140. Core 2 Duo was way out of it's league
The SIS chipset is very good. USB works without major bugs (as opposed to say VIA), PCI goes good, IDE doesn't have any trouble either, and the DRAM controller is outright market leading in its performance, and all of it is quite stable. Though of course most mainboards of the era are capacitor-plagued, so there's that, particularly budget ones. The only unfortunate part of it is the graphics, its gaming acumen is obviously very limited, but it's also not too buggy and easily good enough to support desktop and office needs. So SIS mainboard made a really good office solution.
I have a weird subnotebook thing that was made to be a little DV editing system on the go, 8.9" beautiful little screen with excellent colour and contrast, magnesium chassis, 800g weight, Pentium 3 ULV, and SIS is the only way they could have built this thing since the chipset is all integrated in a single package saving loads of board space and very power efficient. Paid something like 2 grand for it back in the day, took notes in university with it for years in LyX :D The very reduced-pitch keyboard was pleasantly tactile and responsive as well and still holds up fine. Luckily i do have the hands and fingers for it, not exactly dude sized.
SIS chipsets are good they bad reputation come from using them in cheap and poor quality motherboards
@@codegenprime3362 I dunno what to say about that,i mean if they were mostly used on cheap motherboards it meant they were for cheap to begin with. I had SiS chipsets too but they were not better than VIA,Intel and Nvidia. They were just mediocre for me,and most SIS boards could support lower ram amounts and lower clocked processors compared to the others
Those PXP chips are little house fires, I actually burnt my finger on one once.
This looks like the exact same PC my friend used to have back in the day. I used to visit home and we would play GTA VC NFS MW and GTA 3 on it for entire day. Good old days. This reignited alot of old fond memories
Service Pack 2 was awesome when it came out. I still remember installing it.
1st rule of thumb: NEVER connect a flash drive to a system with a pre-installed OS! I always wipe the partitions with read-only media, then proceed to install a CLEAN OS. That flash drive could potentially have been infected with virus/malware, that you would then connect to your day to day PC and ruin it.
That being said, love these low budget PC reviews!
4:26 this feels like a sitcom ending 😂😂
The water in Pirates looks like it's just... rendering the normal map of the water as a texture. Good stuff SIS!
Glad you're back to regularly releasing videos.
Super frequently too!
I really miss al the front I/O you had via the 3.5" and 5.25" bays on these old machines. Buying each component to fill those bays separately can be surprisingly costly nowadays.
New intro looks snazzy, hoping you'll make a comeback this year as you've been sorely missed!!
I had that video glitch problem with an old HP computer. Replacing the capacitors solved the problem.
Just finished the video, and I've got to say: this one seems worthy of a *full* restoration. As someone who loves to see old PCs like this get the total upgrade-revamp treatment, I'd love to see what can be done with this one.
The dedication is unreal. I had a similar PC and I let the recycle center have it. 😂
I know this is firmly in the range of retro but a part of me is morbidly curious how general performance would be under a light Linux Distro and seeing how far you can push the software on such old hardware.
I have the same machine, it is almost brand new in the box. I say almost because the hard drive has 4 hours on it, so that is likely the same for the whole system. There isn't a mark on it or a spec of dust inside of it. It has all of the books, peripherals, cables and packaging material that came with it. The cords and the CDs are in a ziplock bag which is branded Compaq.
I don't know why someone would have bought it new, used it for a few hours, and then stuck it back in the box, but that is what happened.
When I tinker with old XP Laptops and Desktops I use the following, put them both on a usb drive, get online first, then give them a go...
Legacy Update - an awesome project that makes Microsoft update work again on all their unsupported OS's.
Snappy Driver Installer - Lite - This has an ok 85-95% accuracy with updating your system drivers for older machines.
I'm glad you're releasing new content again, awesome job :)
Give those two bits of software a go next time, you'll be surprised how much drama and heartache they remove from the equation, I use them all the time :)
I'll never forgot picking up a HP desktop for $5 USD from a church thrift store sales. It was fairly modern (only about 4 years old, Socket 939 Athlon 64 w/ pci-e) and was full functional for hardware wise. The reason it was $5 obviously was that when you logged into windows it was full of porno viruses. Reformatted, through in a decent GPU and that was my gaming PC for a few years.
Four uploads in a month, am I dreaming? Great content as per usual Budget.
maybe a last part with a linux testing of the pc would be cool, great video.
At this point this old PC has got a will of its own, and It's begging for mercy, another banger upload as always
For steam on windows 7
You need to make steam "upgrade" to a older version that still supports 7 then steam works fine w/o friends
Spoiled we are. My favorite channel. No joke.
Thank you Yoda
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial hahaha! Sir, I didn't even consider how Yoda-like that sentence was. But seriously, I've been subscribed for years and have to say, I am a huge fan of your content. You have the same love and appreciation I have for computer hardware and I love that. It's my birthday today, so this was a pleasant surprise to wake up to.
Cheers. I hope all is well and remains that way.
Great Video, I have a real soft spot for this particular Compaq design.
My parents bought me one when I was 11 to replace my aging Pentium 100mhz Dell Optiplex. You can imagine what an upgrade it was.
Can't remember the specific chipset but I do remember it was socket 754
While I owned it I upgraded nearly every part save for the motherboard and hard drive:
- Sempron 3100+ > Athlon 64 3400+ (Plus a fancy(ish) new aftermarket cooler)
- 512mb RAM > 2GB RAM
- GeForce FX 5200 > 7600GS > ATI HD 3850 (All AGP of course)
- Had to replace the power supply a few years in and fix up the power button which became loose over the years.
By the time I sold it to a mate for pennies, I'd saved (and learned) enough to do my own PC build.
This was my first (and last) prebuilt machine that I'd owned since new, it taught me a lot about computer hardware and how it all fit together.
You cannot emphasize enough how good OS was Windows XP. Basically had 90% of functionality of Win 10/11, with ten times less bloat. With certain third party programs you could safely take it to Internet even today.
From SP2 onwards, yes. But before that, it just attracted malware like nobody's business. There was one period in 2003 where our XP SP1 Pentium 4 box would boot up with a fresh piece of spyware or adware every time.
@@RJRC_105 It had to do mostly with connecting directly to Internet (instead of using router as is usual now ) and having certain ports open by default. Windows XP firewall was lackluster in this regard, you had to configure it manually or get something third party. Also IE was only useful to download firefox 😁
We'd still be using xp today if they hadn't dropped support to force us onto newer versions with more spyware to sell our data.
@@ffwastXP and 7 are the 2 kings if you are still using windows
XP was a good OS, only problem with it was it really needed a reprogram refresh from time to time after the registry got corrupted which no registry fix could completely solve at that time. XP was also vulnerable for viruses, I couldn't count the amount of times I got viruses from safely browsing the web... it still got infected even with latest updates and virus protection. When I jumped from XP to 7, viruses ended for me.
I'm surprised the artifacting you were initially experiencing wasn't the IGP on the North Bridge itself. That era of Compaq was notorious for BGA failure on the bridge chip from the ROHS solder fiasco. It usually manifested first by artifacting video, and would progressively work its way to the machine not booting or even powering on as more balls broke on the BGA.
Those motherboards were so ridiculously fragile that just slightly flexing the board from say installing a PCI/AGP card or memory module could cause a ball to crack.
Thanks for all the effort you put into making this video sometimes we need reminding just how frustrating old hardware can be and yet how much FUN we can have just seeing what we can do with it.
I love watching your videos. I've always had wonderful times taking in elder machines and seeing how they work today, and even tuning them up. One of my favorite tragedies is when I got a Windows XP system with an Intel Atom (1GHz, 1 core, no hyperthreading), with 1 gig of DDR, and an old 80gb HDD. On XP it ran fine, though the integrated graphics hated games. I decided to install Windows 10 22H2 on it to see how it fared and... It downloaded and booted! A whopping 98% CPU and RAM usage at the desktop!
A Spyware OS unsurprisingly eating CPU cycles, it's just that on a modern CPU it's below 1%.
Small tip: The SIS chipsets don't like AGP graphics cards with Rialto or HSI bridge. I had a similar problem with a 478 Pentium 4 motherboard, but these cards worked perfectly on other systems. At first I thought the graphics cards were defective.
found the old family pc from 2003 lying around at my grandparents that we gave to them while ago. Had windows XP on it, of course, and pentium 4 and an nvidia FX5900 ultra. Thing was really snappy, it felt like a modern pc in terms of speed.
Booted up halo combat evolved on it though and that's when I noticed how sluggish it ran.
Not to mention how LOUD it was. I forgot how loud PCs were back in the day. Good luck trying to be sneaky with that thing in the night.
Last time I booted the old family's desktop I wondered if it was broken... oh no, that's the normal baseline fan hurricane.
I didn't see this mentioned in your video, but back in the XP and Win7 days, Black Viper's Service Configurations were to go to Bible for eeking out as much performance as possible by disabling Windows services that aren't neeeded.
7:55 oh, that music brings some really good childhood memories
you are now the proud owner of what i shall call the "5$ windows xp computer"
I love the look of that case. I'd be thrilled to turn it into a sleeper.
perfect timing for a video like this for me, recently built an xp computer with a q9650 and a gtx 285
Nice, I did the same but put windows 10 on it & 8 GB RAM, and overclocked to 3.8 ghz and tried to run modern games on it. Ran some things surprisingly well honestly. I was getting like up to 40 FPS on Far Cry 5
My best AGP board died recently, Conroe865pe, after 8 years of loyal service. I finally decided to buy a pci-e board, even two, Asus Rampage Formula X48 and Gigabyte EP45-UD3P. The second because of q9650 in it. I put Xeon E5450 in the other. RX570 and RX480 + 8 gb DDR2 800.
@@alexanderangelov230 im using the same gigabyte motherboard in my xp computer lol
I said NOOOOO out loud when I saw you removed the front stickers. It played games older than it well, barely played contemporary games, and didn't play newer games, which I think is to be expected from a, at-the-time, budget computer. Try Frog Find or Proto Web to go on the internet with an XP era PC, you'll have a better time. Great video! I just discovered your channel.
ATI Radeon HD3850 was final HD series for AGP if I rember correctly I had 3870 GDDR4 version back in 2008
There is an ever rarer HD4670, but it’s up for debate if it’s actually better than the HD3870
Im just about 20. Both my uncle's loved Generals, and i got into it and still occasionally play the mod Shockwave. It was an absolutely delight to see it come up on the benchmark in this video!
I love that new intro, keep it up budget builds!
Loving the Transport Tycoon music !
You know the funny thing is I ended up going to bed at 8AM the other day all thanks to Theme Hospital!! I remember it being nighttime when I fired it up and the next thing I know it was daylight 🤣
Oh man, I had this exact computer case (in Australia) with an Athlon 64 3400+, and I saved up my money from my first job and bought a geforce 6600GT in it. I bought it to play Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion which I'd seen some developer interviews for I think, although I'd never heard of the game series before that (sorry morrowind fans). It dominated the P4 3.0GHz with hyper threading that the family Dell Dimension 8400 had, which is funny because AMD were still using DDR 400 at that point and the P4 had DDR2 533.
I later upgraded it to an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ dual core (great value used compared to the 4800+ which was the top-of-the-line) and 2GB RAM and installed Windows Vista (which ran great and I really loved) and then 7, and enjoyed it for several years until I got myself a laptop, and eventually built a custom desktop in 2011. I kind of miss the compaq case to be honest.
This computer (and my calls to Dell about the 8400 and being talked through re-seating the RAM) are why I'm an IT technician as a career.
I'm so glad you're back to uploading regularly.
My first ever computer! Mine came with a big monitor and a JBL side ear speakers! My momma was the best she knew I loved computers! ❤ Miss her everyday!
So what’s fun with these and HPs of the era (
blue and grey cases) is turning them into sleeper builds. Smaller ATX PSUs (usually models with 120mm fans like the Montech Century) fit perfectly, mATX boards fit perfectly, and you can work a 120mm (Compaq) or 140mm (HP) fan in where the hard drive is. With a cheap ebay firewire card and a motherboard that has a pair of USB 2.0 headers, all the front ports work.
Man i knew you'd had a slow output due to uni. Damn this is impressive amount of videos. Really appreciate your work 👍👍👍
i love the new intro bro keep doing u brotha
Really liked this video. This was era when figuring out why something doesn't work was a big challenge as symptoms and diagnostics weren't all that good and there wasn't much places on the internet where to ask. Never the less , I enjoyed my PC from that time. :)
9:00 This why I always download and save/backup my old computer's drivers on a separate HDD or gdrive, 4shared account (or any similar cloud backup that doesn't automatically delete the file after not opening it for X number of years after uploading). You're lucky enough if you still find it on Internet Archive, knowing manufacturer's they'll immediately drop the driver download support if the computer they sold are older than 5 to 10 years old after release. HP and Acer already discontinued driver download for my old HP G60 (2009) as well as Acer Aspire 4750 (2011), good thing I have mine backed up. Make it of a habit to back up drivers everyone, better safe than sorry.
Man seeing this entire video just brings me back to my teen years. Getting these computers that really weren't designed for some types of upgrades, having to jank a solution together to get stuff to work XD It's sad seeing the hardware is slowly dying from it's own age. As much as we like to see stuff preserved as best as possible, all things degrade with time. Also was i the only one who noticed the desync of the audio in the later half of the video? lol
Great vid you have taught me so much and im even working on a video about a laptop i found in the trash
Windows 11 is so clean but there's something about the XP colours and UI that I'm getting nostalgic for. 😂
That looks like the first model PC I bought with my own money In July of 2004. It was a liberating feeling at 14 finally having your own computer and not having to share one with your family. Probably the computer I watched my first UA-cam videos on in late 2005. Damn that was 20 years ago already lol good ol' times in the 2000s with Windows XP
sounds like a perfect pc for an experiment with linux ;-)
Ugh, SiS brings back so many bad memories from my days working in PC retail. Awful, awful chipsets. Still better than VIA though.
God I love when budget PC channels test Morrowind on these rigs
Sometimes we have to bust out the 4 CD Pack complete with map just to test it.
At University, 20 years ago, i upgraded from an Athlon XP 2700+ to an Athlon64 3000+ MSI K8N board - the thing absolutely flew through everything and the only reason i upgraded to an Opteron 146 and eventually, an Opteron 170 was because I could, not because of any specific need. Started out with a Radeon 9700 Pro and ended up with a GeForce 7600GT AGP.
I'd suggest perhaps getting the GPU re-balled and re-installed, it's probably not making great contact with the heatsink and that's whats causing the overheating. Could also be a RAM issue but that generally manifests as snow, rather than corrupt geometry.
Your old FX PC looks a lot better than mine did. I think I still have mine somewhere, too, and for some reason this made me want to dig it out and tinker with it.
Oh man that case is so freaking nostalgic. This was my first pc and i loved it with a passion. I threw a q9500 in it and had it running games up til 2017.
I love how the monitor commends you on your prudent purchasing decision.
There were custom unattended Windows XP compilations which included hardware auto detection and drivers install. I can remember the Argentinian-made Windows Wolf, which worked fairly OK at the time for those people who needed to reinstall but didn't have a drivers disc.
35 min video, this is going to be a treat.
On a cycle trip to Germany. Raining 9 o clock at night middle of nowhere in a tent 1 bar of reception. I am so greatful for this video thanks budget tou are a ledgend
Holy shit man this brought back so many memories this was literally the first actual PC i owned as a teenager i think i was 15 (im 37 now lol time flys) my parents bought it brand new as part of setup deal from harvey norman (its an electronic store here in Australia) it came with a monitor speakers keyboard etc i remember only ever upgrading the gpu in it to a x1950 pro anyways i will stop rambling now thanks for the video mate really enjoyed this one
And now throw a working dedicated graphics’s card in to the machine. And let the fun begin.
Someone hasn’t finished the video yet 😎
Video was a bit longer than expected. Just edited it with adding the word “working”.
Nice retro machine though.
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial Was just going to ask the same, glad that it's in the makings.
@@Xilebo09 Ye that 2600XT has bad VRAM or main chip BGA solder issues
I bought almost that same PC brand new from Walmart way back in the day. After a year or so the hard drive went out, so I upgraded it with a motherboard from an HP that excepted duel core Athlons, added an X2 3800+, a cheap 400w PSU from Ebay, 8gigs of 800 MHz Crucial Ballistix, Windows Vista 64, and a 9800GT. Played Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil 5 like a champ. I wish I had kept it.
That gpu is definatly on its way out soon. 😂
I had this exact machine! My mum, with no PC knowledge, bought it from PC World.
When everyone gave up trying to call it the family PC and accept, I was the only one using it I gave it some upgrades. I too upgrades the 512mb of RAM, but to 1GB, and I replaced the GPU with a nvidia 8500GT.
The first computer I ever used as a kid was one of these (different specs but exact same case)! It was my grandfather's and definitely kick started my love for computers/tech and video games!
Another fine Video Squire, Ooh, I’ve got one of those, A Customer graciously gave it to me after fixing/sorting out her Laptop plus she gave me the old Beige Compaq CRT Monitor that she used with it, This one is running Windows XP with SP3, Has 1.5Gb of RAM, An ATI Xpress 200 Series Graphics Card and a 250Gb Hard Drive, It’s been added to my Collection of Old/Retro Computers, I’ve give it a quick test & it’s working fine! 🙂 Anthony - Birmingham.
What a cozy and interesting video. Never seen your channel before but this is fascinating. Currently building a new pc, was going to re-use case but I think future me would appreciate leaving my 10 year old system built in it's original box. Maybe one day the old hardware will solve compatiblity issues with my fav old games.
I still have a few single core boards and CPUs, Ram and a few AGP GPUs from back then, Much of the hardware cables and the like, still in the packages never opened from when I was doing system building from back in the day. Love seeing these older units still working. Systems were made to last back then. One of the reasons I guess I like them. You had to do a bit more work back then to configure them, but way worth it. best 5 Bucks you spent lol Love the stream.
Wished I had never got rid of all the CRTs I had a few years ago now. Still have my dads old Desktop, you know the ones you set the CRT on top of came out with Windows 95 and had been upgraded to Millennium. Was a working system, , but sets in the old barn now. Where it's been for the last 15 years or so. I'm going to get it out blow out all the spiders, mud daubers and any other critter that may think it's a home and see if I can get it running still have the keyboard for it. And by the way I'm in the Central US.
Oh and by the way Steam stopped supporting Win 7 a while ago. Very few Browsers will support win 7 to these days, even UA-cam here in the US. I don't know about in the UK. Your country has different laws on support. You've given me some incentive to get off my ....well you know what I mean and get back into fixing some of these old systems and building a few of those old systems if for nothing else to play some of the Library of CD's games from back in the day. Thank you Bunches
Loving the choice of transport tycoon music
sounds like SimCity music in the back ground. Love older computers. Thanks for sharing
THE KING RETURNS, this channel teaches me neat info before my time while feeding my enjoyment of Jank PC Builds
Gawd.... I have two of these in perfect working order... Cleaned up the windows xp installs on them. New CMOS battery, defragged the drives, cleaned the dust out thoroughly... They're still snappy... Hell, I can even use modern UA-cam on them... Threw my old Radeon 7770 HD in one... No bulging caps on the Mobo amazingly... PSU's are still good... Go figure... That artifacting is probably the RAM or the CPU needs reseating... Ram could be bad as well...
Oh yea, the "SiS" Sometimes It's Sh*t. I never liked any SiS mirage or whatever they were. Maybe pop a semi decent working agp card in that like the Geforce 5200 lol. I've got about 4 of those sat in a box on a shelf. Good video you made me remember why I don't miss that era.
Put a better CPU and 2GB of RAM, install Linux, enjoy a good usable computer.
No,I've done all this and it doesn't make for a good experience, XP onto an SSD is probably as great as this £5 bad boy is going to get.
Linux is great and I've used Ubuntu 7.04. but sometimes Windows is better for older hardware ❤
@@bhogg6693 Ubuntu? That explains the bad experience, try Arch, then u will see what a good OS is.
I have one of these in storage. Waiting for a recap. I used it primarily as a music server. That Bestec power supply has some interesting properties affecting sound quality.
I was daily driving similiar specs PC but with 1GB of RAM and ATI X1550 512MB until 2015. It still usable back then and I could watch youtube and use socmed webs like Facebook and Twitter. It really shows how fast technology improves for the past 9 years.
So happy to see the new videos, now I can rewatch the new videos as well as the old ones!
My second childhood computer (or very similar). How fun to see it again!
As someone that has run an AMD Athlon 64, I miss that machine so much. I had a heavily overclocked (for AMD at the time) 3000+ with 1GB of RAM before I later upgraded to a new motherboard, 2GB of RAM and an AMD Athlon 64 x2 4400+ that was decently overclocked. I miss those days when overclocking still mattered and made noticeable performance changes.
Such builds really bring back memories :D
No way i made a sleeper build with this exact case 😱
Cursed as it is, I think it's actually a solid base for a windows 98 PC, with 512MB of ram, something like a geforce4 ti and an Audigy it would be a very capable machine. And SIS ironically had good windows 9x drivers.
There's an obvious reason why it was only 5 pounds and that's pretty well demonstrated in this video. Back in 2016 i had a chance to repurpose a couple of Dell or Gateway machines given to me for free from a coworker who had moved on to more modern machines. Both machines were from around 2005 with similar specs to the one shown in the video. Both had issues with either crashed hard drives or insufficient RAM. I spent between $15-20 between each restoring them with working parts, maxing the RAM, and doing fresh installs of windows XP and sold them at the cost of the parts used to restore them. To my surprise, they were quick to sell on whichever third party site I used and the recipients none-the-less thought they were getting an enormous bargain and couldn't stop thanking me. The machines were very capable of basic work loads and browsing and honestly If they were able to get any use at all then i considered that a great success.
Ahh, the early to mid 2000s. The heyday of the prebuilt. This probably came with a matchy-matchy screen and keyboard and mouse. I also am beginning to miss those dual optical drives behind case flaps. They were strangely comfy.
i remember these old boxes, took one. gutted it and turned it into a sleeper with a few grindy modifications. looked normal outside, but on the inside it was ryzen 5000 equipped and had a rx570 8gb stuffed inside. everyone thought i was joking when i brought it to lan parties, until i maxxed the graphics on battlefield.