You hit the nail on the head in terms of what the computer scene was like around the turn of the century. While high-end stuff is fun, this type of box was what was most common in the wild. I worked in tech support for about a decade from ‘98 onwards, and this type of system was almost always what I came across. Like you said, the more exotic stuff is a part of the history, sure, but let us not forget the time as we lived it (especially those of us without bottomless pockets and access). Great work, as always!
Yeah, I remember that my mum had a couple of pc's, the old one ran on Windows 98 and the cool one (the one I used most of the time) was a high end compaq running windows XP. You rarely saw anything that wasn't Compaq, Packard Bell, Gateway or e machines in the wild. Only the boss or the creatives at their studios had the vaios, macs qosmios or thinkpads. Heck, even then those computers were owned by the companies, not by the employees.
It's definitely more fun to have a bunch of cheap equipment that you can swap around and mess with, than have one Voodoo 4 card that, if it dies, well... it'll be a lot more expensive to fix or replace, and now you can't use your system.
I kinda miss the "How's it goin'?" intro. I thought it was a fun little bit of personal flavor for the channel. Your content, as always, continues to be fantastic.
I love videos about standard, run-of-the mill machines like this, much for the same reason that I don't collect special edition game consoles. I like having the "normal one" of retro gear. And besides, the solid-state storage solution is already going to be a huge performance boost for this machine, at least when reading and writing to storage. Once exception to my "normal one" rule: it's hard to live with passive matrix laptop displays. :)
Haha, small world, that IDE2SD adapter you printed was my design. And yeah, it's for a different board layout which was extremely common online (at least a few years ago), but the telltale difference was the boards took full size SD cards, while yours is microSD.
@Lurch Video games these days require more storage space to contain the directory entries for the assets than MS-DOS games took for the entirety of the software. So, as much as I can sympathize with the sentiment (and dislike day-one patches and physical media that is little more than an entitlement key), that's not really fair.
There's a bit of a trend in retro computing circles to focus on benchmarks and performance tuning -- which is fine. Some people really get a kick out of squeezing performance out of a particular hardware config. But, I had a Cyrix 6x86 CPU back in the day, and I have one again now. It's interesting. It's definitely not a speed demon, but who cares? If I need speed, I can move from Super Socket 7 to Slot 1, or to S370, or S478, or . . . . My in-the-day Cyrix was a total dog's breakfast. Unstable, not that performant, and overall just the worst mobo / CPU combo I ever owned. But, it was a part of my history, so I built another with the same (almost) CPU. This time, I got the lower power version of the chip, so the mobo linear voltage regulator isn't running beyond its means. I remember being able to instantly shrink heat-shrink tubing on the tiny fins of the regulator back in the 90s. I have no doubt that was part of the problem. For what it is, it's a fun little system. Being SS7, I can't use an Intel chipset, and I've always had issues with VIA chipsets -- this one was no exception. Problems with compatibility with a Matrox Mystique on the first build, and a mobo swap to a later chipset fixed that, but did not pair well with Win 98 and the 4-in-1 drivers I used. Typical VIA stuff. With Win 95 OSR2, it's running well, and I have the satisfaction of knowing I tamed the beast, breaking it like a young horse, and now we're getting on just fine.
"Miss out on what computing was actually like decades ago". This is also applicable to the car community, where everyone wants to make their 1970 Chevy Chevelle a 454 SS 4 speed, when most people were still driving base model six cylinder Ford Falcons and Dodge Darts. Yeah, V8 options existed, but most of them were not high performance, tire smoking machines.
The old socket looks machine made but the ps2 if you pause on 1:50 looks man made 100%. The top right of the ps2 is scuffed and the bottom right offers 3MM of metal ha.
This was intended to be a home PC. Most likely a local computer store that would sell generic pre-built systems. They buy whatever is cheapest and if that means drilling a hole in the case, then a hole is getting drilled.
9:20 Yes! Every retro PC build I see these days is absolutely full of high end parts that we would never have had access to back then. We lived with a lot of slowness and restrictions in performance. So glad that this is recognized
very true, no one did get the top of the line back then, and we all had our fun. but today they all act like the highest AMD/Intel is the bare minimum.
I remember back in the day where certain overpriced games would require a certain overpriced video and/or sound card in order for the game to work....I had neither the games, nor the video and sound cards to play that stuff with....I had an old NEC Ready 9012 with a 90mhz processor, and something like 16mb of RAM, and a 1GB hard drive that at the time seemed huge, yeah I filled it up within a year HAHA!!! Ended up with a 2.5GB. That computer though is what got me hooked on the game Descent. I have the original that came with that computer which was actually just a demo full 1st version but originally was shipped out as a demo game....I then ended up with the 2nd and 3rd versions of that game...and none of them work on today's computers LOL.
I feel like a year of my life was spent staring at progress bars in Cool Edit back then, while the hard drive thrashed to bits in the background. The biggest deficit I always had was exactly what nearly everyone else dealt with back then: Not enough RAM. It was expensive, so we made-do. For the rest of my builds, I never went top-of-the-line, but usually, I scraped together what I had to, to buy what I considered the best parts -- if not the fastest. E.g., 440BX, genuine Sound Blaster cards (except for a short fling with a Media Vision PAS 16), Creative CD-ROMs (OEM'd by Matsushita, or the Hex Speed variant of the Philips drive in this build), WD hard drives, etc. So a lot of the run-of-the-mill parts in builds like this are kinda "meh" to me, since I would've milked an older computer longer, rather than buying low-cost stuff like a Virge video card, or ESS sound card. There's nothing wrong with that stuff, of course, it's just that I was an enthusiast, and so I planned my upgrades meticulously. It's not my kink now either, but I do think it's interesting to see builds like this, which were mainstays of the mainstream. I have a few low-end parts in my spares for bench testing or comparison or whatever, but mostly build replicas of what I used back then.
This was pretty much my first computer build as a kid. Cyrix MII 233 with a cheap video card. Pretty much all the cheap stuff from a computer parts catalog that let me build my first computer. It's a good thing I didn't really like playing hot new games because it wouldn't play anything good. Only person I ever knew with a high end computer was my computer tech trade school teacher. Like you said, all these sought after retro parts people race for these days were not common.
Yeah. But that's also because PC gaming was an extremely small niche for middle class (and in many countries, upper middle class) people and in comparison to consoles, there weren't that many games on PC worth playing and paying for, contrary to the PC gaming nerds from back then that say otherwise only because it's what they grew up with, but it wasn't common. You also REALLY had to be into the stuff, and had to had a family member or friends that would introduce you into this world, buy magazines where it would show the latest parts or PC's, AND had to live near an area where computer parts are sold AND that they sold high-end enthusiast parts. In most cases, these were more afluent areas. Also, most people would build/buy high end only for heavy workloads requiring such power, such as professional video editing, maybe early 3D modeling, or people that worked in the film industry. In the 90's, standards changed every 4 or 5 months, APIs for video cards were sometimes exclusive to ONE card and ONE BRAND and some games were exclusive to that (and many of them were expensive). On top of that, gamepads did not have a proper standard for a long time and a lot of games that were not supposed to be played with keyboard and mouse had awful or no controller support. Then, PC peripherals were also harder to come by. Everyone played on consoles, cheaper, easy to use and often were a little ahead even. PC gaming became truly viable in the mid to late 2000's, the 2010's, stutters and all, started to become the golden decade for it, and it keeps going. Only nowadays can we say "PC is king". People who say "the PC was always king" (for gaming) are fooling themselves or never truly went outside much and interacted with the rest of humanity.
That cybersynth rendition of Passport is unironically really dope. I love and share the sentiment that value-oriented vintage machines are underrated in the vintage computer scene. Budget machines can still be tons of fun if you don't try to push them beyond their original boundaries. With emulators, anyone these days can run most vintage software at exceptional speed, so if speed is all you care for, vintage machines aren't for you. The archaeology/anthropology of these machines can be really rewarding
I got way too excited when you found the IBM x86 CPU! Despite being heavily into tech since the ‘90s I still have yet to encounter one of these. I sure wish Free Geek had a location near me!
I took Computer Network Technologies classes in high school back in the late 90's, and one of my friends from that class had a socket 7 250Mhz Cyrix CPU system he brought in for repair(bad RAM if I remember correctly), and it was about like having a low powered Celeron in your system, as even a 200Mhz AMD chip would outpace it on the same motherboard, which is part of why they became a footnote in PC history. So really you did not miss very much of anything when it comes to Cyrix.
I build hundreds of systems using that same case back in the late 90's when I worked at a computer store in Tigard, Oregon. We purchased most of those cases from Tech Data as I recall. All those components bring back lots of good memories. The hard drive was likely a Western Digital Caviar of the day.
Oh my god! This case is identical to the very first PC I had as a kid, back in 1997 exactly! I’ve been looking for this case forever and I’m so glad to see it here on your channel, seeing it brings back so many good memories :)
Awesome machine. I agree with your point that people just focus on weird high end stuff these days like those Tualatin P3 CPUs. Machines like this were the true "family PC" workhorses of the 90s. Thanks for the excellent video as always. I wish I had a place like Free Geek here in Aus! Nothing like that here.
I loved the music part! Now I wish I had this computer myself so I could experience the different songs in all the fantastic soundscapes. It'd be awesome if you shared more of this!
If this video had two extra hours of MIDI music like the kind at 11:07, I wouldn’t even have noticed that there was no more narration or explanation; I would have just kept being entranced by that funky soundscape! :D
I think this part of the video made me realize what this type of music was that I have a fondness for in the recesses of my mind. Now I kinda want to dig around for musicians that still make this particular type of music, lol
@@PrimeRibb69 The problem with Shazam is that it might recognise a MIDI file with one soundfont, but not another. You're better off finding the MIDI file itself from Win95 / the web so you can hear what your device(s) make it sound like.
The Cyrix CPU's were bad for floating point operations- which broke their neck in the emerging PC gaming era. However, they were pretty fast for office works and as you mentioned- cheap-but the damage on their reputation was already done.
Definitely made it to the end! You tell a good story. As the years go by, preservation of computer history is more and more important. Looks like you got a little gem there!
I had a Fujitsu PC with a Cyrix 200+, which performed worse than the 166MMX a friend of mine had at the time. The Cyrix' power resulted in some low res gameplay to be able to play some games at all at a recognizable framerate at LAN parties, but heck, I loved the system! It was affordable and as noone else seemed to have a Cyrix, I felt like I had to stick with it somehow 😄 , always drawn to underdogs. Very nice video, thanks for sharing!
My first build was made possible due to a Cyrix MII... I remember seeing all the expensive CPU's in the parts catalog and mailing away for what was simply labeled "Cyrix 233" when my parts came in I was all excited that it was an MII, I was thinking I scored the equivalent of a Pentium 2 for whatever cheap price I paid, like $50 or something... 😆 Then I learned later that it was super weak... But I kept it for a year or so, overclocking it and finally killing it trying to force over 300mhz (really 250, or whatever the true frequency was that equaled pr300 in their calculation. I learned a lot from that computer.
My brother and I had a beige-box PC a bit like this back in '97-'98, which our dad had put together. It had PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard (like our 486 PC before it). But we had an AMD K6 CPU in it, instead of a Cyrix. That no-brand PC became mine once my brother quit using it in the 2000s. And due to a personal lack of money, I kept using it -- with Win98 on it -- until 2007, when I could finally afford an upgrade to something more current. I think it got recycled around 2010ish. Even with all the differences, seeing a "regular" PC of this era is still kinda nostalgic. Thanks again for another enjoyable video, Colin! 😎
Holy Shit.... I literally had that exact same case as a kid. That little square on the front of the case had a picture of a cheetah, so you know it was fast. I remember playing all sorts of PC games on it like Pajama Sam, Put Put, Spy Fox, etc. Can't recall my specs, but I do remember I had windows XP running on it and it just crawled. I can still remember the distinctive clicking of the hard disk whenever you clicked on anything.
XP on a system like that? Yikes. I know the pain, I attempted to install XP on my first PC which had a Celeron 400 with 64 MB of RAM. "the box says I can do it" I said. Let's just say it wasn't on there for long.
I had the same one too. I would play gameboy roms on it in the late 90’s. A gameboy rom would barely fit on a floppy drive but thats how my friend gave them to me.
I completely agree about the comment about basic mundane computers often being overlooked by the retro community. They are more nostalgic to me because they were more common.
i never thought i would find myself here considering I'm not really a techy person, but I think I've found a new passion for old/retro tech?? this is genuinely so cool and makes me sad I wasn't in the era where this tech existed.
"Generic" is a word close to my heart. I built so many systems like this from spare parts back in the early 2000's. I bought loads of retired/broken PCs and had so many ISA and PCI cards accumulated over the years, along with plenty of Socket 7 and Slot-1 motherboards, with various CPUs. Bought new cases and PSUs, put them in, and then sold as refurbished. Wasn't a high profit margin on each system, but put a whole bunch of older machines back to work instead of going to the landfill. I miss having so many PC parts in storage, having the knowledge that whatever I may need, I had somewhere. I had totes full of IDE, floppy, VGA, power cables. Also had 2 bins just full of drives, mostly fully functional, along with another couple bins full of fans of every size I could ever need. Then I got married and had to get rid of everything.
My first real taste of computers was the one my dad had gotten around 1996/97. I jumped on it for a week every night, and being a HUGE KISS fan, I was able to find that KISS was very prominent on the internet during that time. As a matter of fact, KISS-related sites and chat sites were more so than any other band at that time, which was cool. It would be a year or so later when I would get a WebTV (I still have it in my storage building out back.) And then, later on, a computer. Now, I have servers and computers all over the place. This is my life now. Watching you diving into this old system and seeing the old ads for computers brought back some good old memories. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I built many Cyrix-based systems back in the day. Also AMD K6. I only switched to Intel architecture because it was necessary for running GigaSampler, a hard-drive based music sampler that did not play nice with the K6 implementation of MMX instructions. The late 90s were so. Uch fun for the sheer variety of hardware. Thanks for sharing.
That Amptron board had a bios update that allowed it to use up to 350 MHz CPU's (mine has a 333MHz K6-2 in it). It's also missing the ATX Form Factor card, giving it an additional PS/2 port, IrDA, and 2x USB 1.1 ports. You can add the USB ports by treating the first 10 pins (5 top and 5 bottom, closest to the back of the board) as a standard USB header and connecting the ports to it, however you need to remove the extra ground pin connector on the top row (5th pin) as that I think is tied to the IrDA port and can cause issues.
I had the exact same case - minus the turquoise power button and LED display, so I guess the even cheaper version 😅 I don’t remember any case you’d buy in the PC shop would have a brand on it, they were just called ‘Minitower Case’ and came in non-descript boxes, like yours. Everyone seemed to think ‘who cares, it’s just a case!’ Luckily, these times have changed 🙂
This kind of PC was all the rage at my work place in the later '90s. Micron I think was the brand we had. It looked great back in the day, and eventually could play Windows Pinball! I forget how 'hardware' focused these units were, with the big ugly plugs, cards for everything inside the box. Thanks for the trip down PC memory lane!
I'm always impressed when someone can find a NOS system. The late 90s was a wild time. The many vendors and countless configurations. At least the owner didn't get stuck with pre-installed Windows Me like so many of us did.
I got my first machine with 95% match to your discovery ! in 1997 ! it got a Cyrix MII PR300, with just 16 MBytes of SDRAM upgraded it to 32 MB the year after ! and the graphic card was a S3 Diamond with just 2 MB of memory, few years later i bought a SIS AGP PCI interface 8 MB with support for Direct 3d directx 7 !! there were beautiful times i played on it such Need For Speed 3, 4, Resident evil 2, 3, Diablo 2....😄😄😀, thank you for getting us back to such beautiful times !
These days, having average parts in a vintage computer is more unusual than having the highest end parts. I genuinely love this PC, I hope you can add some more expansion and options to it that we all would of had back in the 90's
Seeing you open the case and go over the parts was like a trip back into the time of going to computer shows on the weekend to buy parts exactly like these. Wandering aisles set up with tables piled with parts in oem trays or new packages right out of shipping boxes labeled "made in Taiwan". We'd look for deals, buying no-name or obscure-name parts to fit a budget.
Great video Sir!! I just had one of my pc customers drop off his main PC, but also left me a giant "mega tower" PC from 2003. It has an AMD Athlon 2500+. I plugged it in and it still works. Even the hard drive in it is healthy!! Just installed XP on it and it's working fantastic.. I love the videos you post!! Keep up the great work Sir!
I worked at a computer shop around that time and one possibility was that this was built for a school. We had a contract with the local county school system to build hundreds of low end computers. I could very well be that this one was built as part of a large order as a spare, but was never needed, so went unused. The scratches from the screws for the hard drive could have been from testing, and the hard drive removed prior to it being donated. It probably spent its entire life in that box sitting in a store room either at the school or in the shop it came from before being donated to Free Geek.
Grew up with the same exact pc case from 1997. It had a pentium 150mhz processor. We used to make the front digital display output different things with jumpers. Decades later i came across a pentium 200mhz processor with a crazy heatsink and fan, same socket and it booted right up!
I suspect the half installed video card was caused by the shipping. This sometimes can happen. Good thing your case was still packed in its original packing material !
I absolutely agree that "run-of-the-mill" retro hardware is often more interesting than exotic and rare stuff. Sure, those are fascinating in their own way. But what makes that "average" hardware interesting is the fact those things were what most people used. That alone makes it special.
Love everything about this video and have an IBM PR200 on display on my desk just because I love the 6x86 PR200 marketing right on the CPU as if you might have a little window on your PC showing off the CPU while in use. Looking back I do sometimes regret building computers like these for people back in the 90's but the savings were real and flagship systems were out of reach for most of us.
My first PC used this case, it is so nice to see it! I still have its gutter, a Pentium 100. I also think that retro computing should not cover only performance machines, it is awesome to view how a daily use work machine was. Awesome video, as always, thanks!
Awesome video, thanks for bringing back so many good memories. I once had that exact same case, and I had a Cyrix 6x86 CPU inside as well. It was my budget gaming computer. Love your videos, and cannot wait for another.
As much as I loathed Cyrix back in the day I'd love to find a PC to this. It's so extremely generic that it's a perfect experience of what a computer was like, back in the day. Add a 3dfx card and go ham with retrogaming. Love it! I'd have been over the moon to find this, and am somewhat jealous
Thank You, For showing the Cheap experience that most of us had in the 90s .Not to mention all the scams the computer producing companies were pulling on us as well.Great score, Great video!
Used to have one of those IBM CPU's many years ago. The biggest problem I found was keeping the CPU cool. So back then I took the case off and placed a desk fan blowing onto the motherboard. Worked a treat🤣🏴
I agree with your comments at the end wholeheartedly. The PC explosion in the 90s was accomplished not by pure innovation but by the flood of generic, low-cost clones all racing towards the bottom line with little regards to aesthetics or features. It was the $499 PC that brought computers to the world, not the $30k SGI.
My first PC build was a cheap Cyrix setup. It was pretty terrible and didn't even have floating point arithmetic built in. I still loved it. Still in the loft somewhere❤️
Thank you for making this video. I used to build systems back in the late 90s, so these components are very familiar to me, it's a real trip down memory lane. I hated those cheap cases, cuts to my fingers were common.
I saw those pc's alot in public space use. That cyrix proc really brought back memories. Bad ones. I don't know how many of those I replaced for customers when I worked in the computer store. Love your videos.
This is about what my systems would have been at the time. Back then you could do a lot more "incremental" upgrading, being able to re-use 70% or more of your components as you changed parts (maybe a newer CPU this time, later a better motherboard that could use the same CPU, etc). These days if your machine is more than a year or two old, about all you'll be able to use id the hard drives and optical drives (and YES, I still use optical drives for my projects, now get off my lawn).
Reminds me of my second P.C, an AST with a Cyrix 6x86 PR166 that runs at 133mhz. It had an 8x cd-rom drive, 32 megabytes of EDO RAM, and a 2 gigabyte hard drive. The only difference is that it is a machine from '95-'96. The machine is still special to me.
This was most likely a 'feature' PC. Local computer shops would sell them, but rather than build the machine themselves, they'd order from a 'builder' warehouse - often a small company renting a suite in a light industrial park somewhere. You could set these 'builder' companies up with very little capital at the time. These companies would typically not deal with the general public directly. I used to work for such a builder in the 1990s; we'd build these machines by the dozens. Hardware was ordered in lots of 50 or 100 or 250 pieces (to get significant price breaks), and often lowest possible dollar. OS installation was done via imaging, rather than the step-by-step setup. 30 minutes for a hardware build, 10 minutes to image the OS and often freeware stuff like Star Office onto its hard drive, and get it out the door. Each of us would often build three to five rigs at a time since they'd be identical in spec. Not quite 'production line' but close. These likely sat in a storage room somewhere as the market advanced beyond the build spec, so parts were yanked out to build newer rigs. The hard drives were often the first to get pulled and transferred, I suspect something similar with the graphics cards.
this reminds me of the computers we built in Highschool circa 1997, I still have scars from stamped/punched metal expansion bays. they came as a kit and each student had the option to pay $200 to keep the unit upon compellation of the class.
The machine you reviewed is referred to as a "white box" PC. It is a mass produced PC using generic parts that is geared for computer stores to put their badges on and resell as a house built computer. I worked at Ingram Micro around 1997 building Compaq DeskPro EN/EP computers and they built these on the next line over from me.
A seemingly pedestrian PC, embodying an incredibly narrow transitionary period of bizarre dual AT/ATX hardware, with a cross-branded IBM/Cyrix CPU? This thing is AWESOME.
What I call a "bread and butter" PC of it's time. Nothing fancy, no frills, but perfectly usable and does most things adequately for the price. I remember owning something similar, and I just upgraded the graphics card to play games. Sometimes Cyrix and AMD produced really good value CPUs compared to Intel, and occasionally faster per clock too.
With the right upgrades this could have some decent performance for the time by the looks of it. Like a voodoo 2 8 mb or lower end voodoo 3 pci version, a bit nicer soundcard like a soundblaser zs or 5.1, a 16 - 32 gb microsd for some games like half-life, quake 2 too fit on there, maybe more if needed. Ram too 64 - 128 mb via the sd ram slots, that ali chipset the motherboard has handles sdram pretty well despite being a budget chipset at the time, so I'd go this route with a k6-2. Cpu swap too a K6-2 400 mhz, article on the retroweb says it's supported at least on the cpu list there, which might be incomplete while k6-2+ & k6-3 cpus. So might be able too do all k6 cpus on this board even if support isn't mentioned. Do remember too set I/O voltage too 3.3v instead of 5v or you'll toast the next chip you put into this probably as i think that cyrix chip asks for 5v i/o. Otherwise I'd see it working fine with the 2x multiplier trick as AMD designed these chips too run the multiplier at 6x instead of 2x when that is selected for older motherboards. So 6x66 mhz for a 396 mhz cpu clock would be pretty solid performance right ? So maybe a k6-2+ or k6-3 would work as well if you happen too have one of those chips around too test with. Can likely use any socket 370 heatsink that isn't getting in the way of the isa or pci cards slotted into the system & you'll be good too go for cooling even at 2.6v vcore for a k6-3 or k6-2+ but with what i found you'll be able too set 2.2v and leave it there just fine & almost be able too run it passively with a larger 370 heatsink so that & like a variable resistor fan set too a fairly silent speed would be real nice in this.
My high school had PCs with that exact case my freshman year, ca. 2000. They were Pentium 233 MMX machines with Milwaukee PC branding, and they were slow back then! The labs with the 333MHz PC300GLs were a treat.
Love this video! Cyrix CPUs have long been a beloved joke for me, but your perspective of how they made computing more accessible helped reset my attitude on them. Thank you.
Great video but one thing that sticks out to me is the CPU being PR300. It clearly states on it 3 x 75MHz on the CPU, so it would operate at a real frequency of 225MHz. If the board doesn't support that FSB, then you'd likely set it to 3.5 x 66MHz to get the 233MHz that you state. Maybe even 4 x 60MHz to get 240MHz. You wouldn't want to use 4.5 x 50MHz FSB. That would just be crippling to the CPU.
Man!! .. I just realized how much I miss @RetroSpector78 😕... was the only one dedicated exclusively to this type of everyday machines 🤔...... cool vídeo as always Colín 😏 👍..
My cousin had a case exactly like that. And I had one exactly like that but with three 5-inch drive bays. It mightve originated from Mecer, but I can't remember. It was so long ago. I love that case. It's simple and elegant. I really don't like overdesigned cases with needless grills and segmented ridges. I'd buy that case from you if I didn't live in South African.
Cool episode. Yep. the average pc is the most authentic. I had a packard bell 386sx 25mhz and had many great memories while drooling over 486 processors at best buy
A friend of mine from my youth had a machine in this same case that he got in late 94, early 95. It was a package sold by a local computer store. IIRC, it was a P120, 8mb of ram, 520mb hard drive, a cheapo sound card, and a "quad speed" cd-rom drive. It came with a monitor, a set of those Juster multimedia speakers, and had Windows 3.11 installed on it. The monitor died within the first year, then expansion cards were dying one after another. I remember putting an ISA video card from a 486 in it just to get it working again, the original card was PCI. I really don't know how the cheap parts market got to be so saturated with crap like that. It wasnt like how it is today where you can buy a 100 dollar mini pc from amazon, you kind of expect it to be shit. I am sure that machine I am speaking of cost 1000 dollars, during the same era where a budget machine from a big box store of the same spec wouldve been 150-300 dollars more.
Thx for the video. I worked at a small mom n pop computer store in the mid to late 90's during and after high school. We sold these generic cases. This was one of my favorite cases, it was classy IMO. You also had to be mindful about how sharp the metal egdes were in does days. Metal papercuts.
This reminded me of what my school district got before they contracted with Dell in the late 90s. Sort of like a stopgap between no Network to totally networked PCs.
I've always been a sucker for the tan towers of yesterday. I kind of miss when computers required just a little more effort from the users. There was just something about fitting the parts, setting jumpers, installing drivers, etc., that made you feel more engaged with the computer.
That case looks extremely familiar. I think my grandparents bought a PC in the late 90's that used it. It was the last time I saw an AT system since getting into PCs.
To me, pushing a low spec machine to it's limit is way more interesting than a high end vintage build. Especially when I track down inexpensive parts that can get such a low spec machine punching above it's weight class and make it suitable for gaming. To use a car guy's analogy here, most of the vintage PC gamers out there want to spend thousands building a hotrod from scratch while I'm perfectly happy doing some budget mods to a period economy car. I'll admire that sleeper budget build over any high end build any day.
I couldn’t agree more. I like the high end as much as anyone, but I too like to go back and look at the everyday computers of yesteryear. Take my Packard Bell Multimedia L198 for example, it’s a simple yet decently capable machine that doesn’t break the bank(back when it released and now)
I had a similar case with the same color buttons, 2 5.25 drive bays, and a 3.5 floppy, my motherboard was PC Mainboard with the SIS6326 Chipset, which had no PS/2 Ports, so it used a RS-232 port Serial Mouse, Slot 1 Intel Celeron 333, 256MB Ram, 40GB HD and Windows 98SE- upgraded to WME at 1 point.
Had a board like that. Super socket 7 throw a pentium mmx 233 in it and managed to clock it at over 300 mhz. With a voodoo 4 slapped in there it managed to run quake 3 arena over 60fps at 1024x768. Was impressed.
My guess this machine had a warranty replacement and it was just easier to stick the customers HDD in the new machine. Another option could be that the customer bought it, stuck a CDRom in it and decided they didn’t like the performance of the Cyrix chip and the computer shop did an upgrade not long after the initial purchase, but again, kept the users HDD. Either scenario was normal for a small independent, local computer shop of the time.
These transitional motherboards are interesting, 1997 was the year when ATX started to take over so these boards gave you a lot of options. Also the M2 was a competent enough CPU especially when paired with a Voodoo so I wouldn't even call this low end for the time, budget sure but capable enough. There were still some 486-class machines in use in 97, that was the low end/rapidly reaching obsolescence computing experience, especially coaxing them into running Windows 95. An alternative build would be with something interesting and rarer like a Verité or a PowerVR card, both were 'budget' options compared to the 3DFX but are now very hard to find.
I installed a cyrix 6x86 133 in my 486 50mhz to help it limp until I graduated hs 😂it was supposed to be a p75 equivalent but it really wasn't. It was enough to make the pc I got in 94 be able to run in 99, technological obsolescence was brutal back then 😭
You hit the nail on the head in terms of what the computer scene was like around the turn of the century. While high-end stuff is fun, this type of box was what was most common in the wild. I worked in tech support for about a decade from ‘98 onwards, and this type of system was almost always what I came across. Like you said, the more exotic stuff is a part of the history, sure, but let us not forget the time as we lived it (especially those of us without bottomless pockets and access). Great work, as always!
Yeah, I remember that my mum had a couple of pc's, the old one ran on Windows 98 and the cool one (the one I used most of the time) was a high end compaq running windows XP. You rarely saw anything that wasn't Compaq, Packard Bell, Gateway or e machines in the wild. Only the boss or the creatives at their studios had the vaios, macs qosmios or thinkpads. Heck, even then those computers were owned by the companies, not by the employees.
It's definitely more fun to have a bunch of cheap equipment that you can swap around and mess with, than have one Voodoo 4 card that, if it dies, well... it'll be a lot more expensive to fix or replace, and now you can't use your system.
I kinda miss the "How's it goin'?" intro. I thought it was a fun little bit of personal flavor for the channel. Your content, as always, continues to be fantastic.
I too miss the intro. And the outro.
Agree
I love videos about standard, run-of-the mill machines like this, much for the same reason that I don't collect special edition game consoles. I like having the "normal one" of retro gear. And besides, the solid-state storage solution is already going to be a huge performance boost for this machine, at least when reading and writing to storage.
Once exception to my "normal one" rule: it's hard to live with passive matrix laptop displays. :)
Haha, small world, that IDE2SD adapter you printed was my design. And yeah, it's for a different board layout which was extremely common online (at least a few years ago), but the telltale difference was the boards took full size SD cards, while yours is microSD.
Hey man, if you're right, I commend you for a design in any case. I would love a 3D printer down the line for things exactly like this.
So cool you saw your own design 😁
"Miss out on what computing was actually like decades ago". Couldn't have said it better myself.
Agreed. I like these kinds of machines. The powerhouses are cool, but the low-to-mid range machines have their charm.
Yeah, this would have been a $600 bargain basement system back in the day. The Sony VAIO that I had at the time would have totally curb stomped it.
@Lurch Based
@Lurch Video games these days require more storage space to contain the directory entries for the assets than MS-DOS games took for the entirety of the software. So, as much as I can sympathize with the sentiment (and dislike day-one patches and physical media that is little more than an entitlement key), that's not really fair.
There's a bit of a trend in retro computing circles to focus on benchmarks and performance tuning -- which is fine. Some people really get a kick out of squeezing performance out of a particular hardware config. But, I had a Cyrix 6x86 CPU back in the day, and I have one again now. It's interesting. It's definitely not a speed demon, but who cares? If I need speed, I can move from Super Socket 7 to Slot 1, or to S370, or S478, or . . . .
My in-the-day Cyrix was a total dog's breakfast. Unstable, not that performant, and overall just the worst mobo / CPU combo I ever owned. But, it was a part of my history, so I built another with the same (almost) CPU. This time, I got the lower power version of the chip, so the mobo linear voltage regulator isn't running beyond its means. I remember being able to instantly shrink heat-shrink tubing on the tiny fins of the regulator back in the 90s. I have no doubt that was part of the problem. For what it is, it's a fun little system.
Being SS7, I can't use an Intel chipset, and I've always had issues with VIA chipsets -- this one was no exception. Problems with compatibility with a Matrox Mystique on the first build, and a mobo swap to a later chipset fixed that, but did not pair well with Win 98 and the 4-in-1 drivers I used. Typical VIA stuff. With Win 95 OSR2, it's running well, and I have the satisfaction of knowing I tamed the beast, breaking it like a young horse, and now we're getting on just fine.
Man those Bios screens bring back some memories...
"Miss out on what computing was actually like decades ago". This is also applicable to the car community, where everyone wants to make their 1970 Chevy Chevelle a 454 SS 4 speed, when most people were still driving base model six cylinder Ford Falcons and Dodge Darts. Yeah, V8 options existed, but most of them were not high performance, tire smoking machines.
I love how the keyboard and mouse ports literally look like the holes were drilled in the case metal as an afterthought
It might be that simple. I had this case with a pentium 166, and I drilled the hole.
They were likely punched with a tab you bent back and forth until it snapped off.
I think this was only done on request.
The old socket looks machine made but the ps2 if you pause on 1:50 looks man made 100%. The top right of the ps2 is scuffed and the bottom right offers 3MM of metal ha.
This was intended to be a home PC. Most likely a local computer store that would sell generic pre-built systems. They buy whatever is cheapest and if that means drilling a hole in the case, then a hole is getting drilled.
9:20 Yes! Every retro PC build I see these days is absolutely full of high end parts that we would never have had access to back then. We lived with a lot of slowness and restrictions in performance. So glad that this is recognized
very true, no one did get the top of the line back then, and we all had our fun. but today they all act like the highest AMD/Intel is the bare minimum.
I remember back in the day where certain overpriced games would require a certain overpriced video and/or sound card in order for the game to work....I had neither the games, nor the video and sound cards to play that stuff with....I had an old NEC Ready 9012 with a 90mhz processor, and something like 16mb of RAM, and a 1GB hard drive that at the time seemed huge, yeah I filled it up within a year HAHA!!! Ended up with a 2.5GB. That computer though is what got me hooked on the game Descent. I have the original that came with that computer which was actually just a demo full 1st version but originally was shipped out as a demo game....I then ended up with the 2nd and 3rd versions of that game...and none of them work on today's computers LOL.
I feel like a year of my life was spent staring at progress bars in Cool Edit back then, while the hard drive thrashed to bits in the background. The biggest deficit I always had was exactly what nearly everyone else dealt with back then: Not enough RAM. It was expensive, so we made-do.
For the rest of my builds, I never went top-of-the-line, but usually, I scraped together what I had to, to buy what I considered the best parts -- if not the fastest. E.g., 440BX, genuine Sound Blaster cards (except for a short fling with a Media Vision PAS 16), Creative CD-ROMs (OEM'd by Matsushita, or the Hex Speed variant of the Philips drive in this build), WD hard drives, etc.
So a lot of the run-of-the-mill parts in builds like this are kinda "meh" to me, since I would've milked an older computer longer, rather than buying low-cost stuff like a Virge video card, or ESS sound card. There's nothing wrong with that stuff, of course, it's just that I was an enthusiast, and so I planned my upgrades meticulously. It's not my kink now either, but I do think it's interesting to see builds like this, which were mainstays of the mainstream. I have a few low-end parts in my spares for bench testing or comparison or whatever, but mostly build replicas of what I used back then.
This was pretty much my first computer build as a kid. Cyrix MII 233 with a cheap video card. Pretty much all the cheap stuff from a computer parts catalog that let me build my first computer.
It's a good thing I didn't really like playing hot new games because it wouldn't play anything good.
Only person I ever knew with a high end computer was my computer tech trade school teacher. Like you said, all these sought after retro parts people race for these days were not common.
Despite that it would have still been cracking at Rollercoaster Tycoon and Red Alert.
Yeah. But that's also because PC gaming was an extremely small niche for middle class (and in many countries, upper middle class) people and in comparison to consoles, there weren't that many games on PC worth playing and paying for, contrary to the PC gaming nerds from back then that say otherwise only because it's what they grew up with, but it wasn't common.
You also REALLY had to be into the stuff, and had to had a family member or friends that would introduce you into this world, buy magazines where it would show the latest parts or PC's, AND had to live near an area where computer parts are sold AND that they sold high-end enthusiast parts. In most cases, these were more afluent areas.
Also, most people would build/buy high end only for heavy workloads requiring such power, such as professional video editing, maybe early 3D modeling, or people that worked in the film industry.
In the 90's, standards changed every 4 or 5 months, APIs for video cards were sometimes exclusive to ONE card and ONE BRAND and some games were exclusive to that (and many of them were expensive).
On top of that, gamepads did not have a proper standard for a long time and a lot of games that were not supposed to be played with keyboard and mouse had awful or no controller support. Then, PC peripherals were also harder to come by.
Everyone played on consoles, cheaper, easy to use and often were a little ahead even. PC gaming became truly viable in the mid to late 2000's, the 2010's, stutters and all, started to become the golden decade for it, and it keeps going.
Only nowadays can we say "PC is king". People who say "the PC was always king" (for gaming) are fooling themselves or never truly went outside much and interacted with the rest of humanity.
That cybersynth rendition of Passport is unironically really dope. I love and share the sentiment that value-oriented vintage machines are underrated in the vintage computer scene. Budget machines can still be tons of fun if you don't try to push them beyond their original boundaries. With emulators, anyone these days can run most vintage software at exceptional speed, so if speed is all you care for, vintage machines aren't for you. The archaeology/anthropology of these machines can be really rewarding
I got way too excited when you found the IBM x86 CPU! Despite being heavily into tech since the ‘90s I still have yet to encounter one of these. I sure wish Free Geek had a location near me!
I took Computer Network Technologies classes in high school back in the late 90's, and one of my friends from that class had a socket 7 250Mhz Cyrix CPU system he brought in for repair(bad RAM if I remember correctly), and it was about like having a low powered Celeron in your system, as even a 200Mhz AMD chip would outpace it on the same motherboard, which is part of why they became a footnote in PC history. So really you did not miss very much of anything when it comes to Cyrix.
I build hundreds of systems using that same case back in the late 90's when I worked at a computer store in Tigard, Oregon. We purchased most of those cases from Tech Data as I recall. All those components bring back lots of good memories. The hard drive was likely a Western Digital Caviar of the day.
I had that same case growing up, must have been cheap and popular
Oh my god! This case is identical to the very first PC I had as a kid, back in 1997 exactly! I’ve been looking for this case forever and I’m so glad to see it here on your channel, seeing it brings back so many good memories :)
I feel ya. This was the case I used to build my first PC.
It also was the case of my first PC as a kid in 1997!
Awesome machine. I agree with your point that people just focus on weird high end stuff these days like those Tualatin P3 CPUs. Machines like this were the true "family PC" workhorses of the 90s. Thanks for the excellent video as always. I wish I had a place like Free Geek here in Aus! Nothing like that here.
I loved the music part! Now I wish I had this computer myself so I could experience the different songs in all the fantastic soundscapes. It'd be awesome if you shared more of this!
If this video had two extra hours of MIDI music like the kind at 11:07, I wouldn’t even have noticed that there was no more narration or explanation; I would have just kept being entranced by that funky soundscape! :D
The track is called Passport Please by Passport Designs. Shazammed it.
I think this part of the video made me realize what this type of music was that I have a fondness for in the recesses of my mind. Now I kinda want to dig around for musicians that still make this particular type of music, lol
@@PrimeRibb69 The problem with Shazam is that it might recognise a MIDI file with one soundfont, but not another. You're better off finding the MIDI file itself from Win95 / the web so you can hear what your device(s) make it sound like.
The Cyrix CPU's were bad for floating point operations- which broke their neck in the emerging PC gaming era. However, they were pretty fast for office works and as you mentioned- cheap-but the damage on their reputation was already done.
Definitely made it to the end! You tell a good story. As the years go by, preservation of computer history is more and more important. Looks like you got a little gem there!
I had a Fujitsu PC with a Cyrix 200+, which performed worse than the 166MMX a friend of mine had at the time. The Cyrix' power resulted in some low res gameplay to be able to play some games at all at a recognizable framerate at LAN parties, but heck, I loved the system! It was affordable and as noone else seemed to have a Cyrix, I felt like I had to stick with it somehow 😄 , always drawn to underdogs. Very nice video, thanks for sharing!
I remember that time period. I always wondered about the Cyrix but I didn't know anyone who had it.
My first build was made possible due to a Cyrix MII... I remember seeing all the expensive CPU's in the parts catalog and mailing away for what was simply labeled "Cyrix 233" when my parts came in I was all excited that it was an MII, I was thinking I scored the equivalent of a Pentium 2 for whatever cheap price I paid, like $50 or something... 😆 Then I learned later that it was super weak... But I kept it for a year or so, overclocking it and finally killing it trying to force over 300mhz (really 250, or whatever the true frequency was that equaled pr300 in their calculation.
I learned a lot from that computer.
My brother and I had a beige-box PC a bit like this back in '97-'98, which our dad had put together. It had PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard (like our 486 PC before it). But we had an AMD K6 CPU in it, instead of a Cyrix.
That no-brand PC became mine once my brother quit using it in the 2000s. And due to a personal lack of money, I kept using it -- with Win98 on it -- until 2007, when I could finally afford an upgrade to something more current. I think it got recycled around 2010ish.
Even with all the differences, seeing a "regular" PC of this era is still kinda nostalgic. Thanks again for another enjoyable video, Colin! 😎
Holy Shit.... I literally had that exact same case as a kid. That little square on the front of the case had a picture of a cheetah, so you know it was fast. I remember playing all sorts of PC games on it like Pajama Sam, Put Put, Spy Fox, etc. Can't recall my specs, but I do remember I had windows XP running on it and it just crawled. I can still remember the distinctive clicking of the hard disk whenever you clicked on anything.
My best friend got a pentium 100 in a case just like that! I was envious because I only had a 486 😭
found pc from 2005-2006 in the exact same case fo 10$ in early 2020
XP on a system like that? Yikes. I know the pain, I attempted to install XP on my first PC which had a Celeron 400 with 64 MB of RAM. "the box says I can do it" I said. Let's just say it wasn't on there for long.
I had the same one too. I would play gameboy roms on it in the late 90’s. A gameboy rom would barely fit on a floppy drive but thats how my friend gave them to me.
I completely agree about the comment about basic mundane computers often being overlooked by the retro community. They are more nostalgic to me because they were more common.
i never thought i would find myself here considering I'm not really a techy person, but I think I've found a new passion for old/retro tech?? this is genuinely so cool and makes me sad I wasn't in the era where this tech existed.
"Generic" is a word close to my heart. I built so many systems like this from spare parts back in the early 2000's. I bought loads of retired/broken PCs and had so many ISA and PCI cards accumulated over the years, along with plenty of Socket 7 and Slot-1 motherboards, with various CPUs. Bought new cases and PSUs, put them in, and then sold as refurbished. Wasn't a high profit margin on each system, but put a whole bunch of older machines back to work instead of going to the landfill.
I miss having so many PC parts in storage, having the knowledge that whatever I may need, I had somewhere. I had totes full of IDE, floppy, VGA, power cables. Also had 2 bins just full of drives, mostly fully functional, along with another couple bins full of fans of every size I could ever need. Then I got married and had to get rid of everything.
My first real taste of computers was the one my dad had gotten around 1996/97.
I jumped on it for a week every night, and being a HUGE KISS fan, I was able to find that KISS was very prominent on the internet during that time. As a matter of fact, KISS-related sites and chat sites were more so than any other band at that time, which was cool.
It would be a year or so later when I would get a WebTV (I still have it in my storage building out back.)
And then, later on, a computer.
Now, I have servers and computers all over the place. This is my life now.
Watching you diving into this old system and seeing the old ads for computers brought back some good old memories.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Nice to see these old PC's up and running again. Good job.
I built many Cyrix-based systems back in the day. Also AMD K6. I only switched to Intel architecture because it was necessary for running GigaSampler, a hard-drive based music sampler that did not play nice with the K6 implementation of MMX instructions. The late 90s were so. Uch fun for the sheer variety of hardware. Thanks for sharing.
But that also made it really stressful 😅
Old stuff is cool. I love this little machine. Thank you for letting Passport finish playing.
That Amptron board had a bios update that allowed it to use up to 350 MHz CPU's (mine has a 333MHz K6-2 in it). It's also missing the ATX Form Factor card, giving it an additional PS/2 port, IrDA, and 2x USB 1.1 ports. You can add the USB ports by treating the first 10 pins (5 top and 5 bottom, closest to the back of the board) as a standard USB header and connecting the ports to it, however you need to remove the extra ground pin connector on the top row (5th pin) as that I think is tied to the IrDA port and can cause issues.
I had the exact same case - minus the turquoise power button and LED display, so I guess the even cheaper version 😅
I don’t remember any case you’d buy in the PC shop would have a brand on it, they were just called ‘Minitower Case’ and came in non-descript boxes, like yours. Everyone seemed to think ‘who cares, it’s just a case!’ Luckily, these times have changed 🙂
This kind of PC was all the rage at my work place in the later '90s. Micron I think was the brand we had. It looked great back in the day, and eventually could play Windows Pinball! I forget how 'hardware' focused these units were, with the big ugly plugs, cards for everything inside the box. Thanks for the trip down PC memory lane!
Thank you for all of the videos and podcasts you have post. They are greatly appreciated.
I'm always impressed when someone can find a NOS system. The late 90s was a wild time. The many vendors and countless configurations. At least the owner didn't get stuck with pre-installed Windows Me like so many of us did.
I got my first machine with 95% match to your discovery ! in 1997 ! it got a Cyrix MII PR300, with just 16 MBytes of SDRAM upgraded it to 32 MB the year after ! and the graphic card was a S3 Diamond with just 2 MB of memory, few years later i bought a SIS AGP PCI interface 8 MB with support for Direct 3d directx 7 !! there were beautiful times i played on it such Need For Speed 3, 4, Resident evil 2, 3, Diablo 2....😄😄😀, thank you for getting us back to such beautiful times !
I actually loved the CyberSynth sounds. Real punchy slap on there. And those in the end, good soundstage. But also very lol.
These days, having average parts in a vintage computer is more unusual than having the highest end parts.
I genuinely love this PC, I hope you can add some more expansion and options to it that we all would of had back in the 90's
Well I really enjoyed this video! It’s fun to look at ordinary systems like this, and the parts that they were made up of.
Seeing you open the case and go over the parts was like a trip back into the time of going to computer shows on the weekend to buy parts exactly like these. Wandering aisles set up with tables piled with parts in oem trays or new packages right out of shipping boxes labeled "made in Taiwan". We'd look for deals, buying no-name or obscure-name parts to fit a budget.
That soundcard sounds pretty clear of interference as well, no bad hissing so would make for a fun DOS gaming machine
Great video Sir!! I just had one of my pc customers drop off his main PC, but also left me a giant "mega tower" PC from 2003. It has an AMD Athlon 2500+. I plugged it in and it still works. Even the hard drive in it is healthy!! Just installed XP on it and it's working fantastic.. I love the videos you post!! Keep up the great work Sir!
Do you remember if your PC case included blue LEDs? I lost the trace when they started to appear.
I worked at a computer shop around that time and one possibility was that this was built for a school. We had a contract with the local county school system to build hundreds of low end computers. I could very well be that this one was built as part of a large order as a spare, but was never needed, so went unused. The scratches from the screws for the hard drive could have been from testing, and the hard drive removed prior to it being donated. It probably spent its entire life in that box sitting in a store room either at the school or in the shop it came from before being donated to Free Geek.
Grew up with the same exact pc case from 1997. It had a pentium 150mhz processor. We used to make the front digital display output different things with jumpers. Decades later i came across a pentium 200mhz processor with a crazy heatsink and fan, same socket and it booted right up!
I suspect the half installed video card was caused by the shipping. This sometimes can happen. Good thing your case was still packed in its original packing material !
@@d34dbolt20 considering how cheap the rest of the machine is, I doubt it would have been something that interesting
I absolutely agree that "run-of-the-mill" retro hardware is often more interesting than exotic and rare stuff. Sure, those are fascinating in their own way. But what makes that "average" hardware interesting is the fact those things were what most people used. That alone makes it special.
Love everything about this video and have an IBM PR200 on display on my desk just because I love the 6x86 PR200 marketing right on the CPU as if you might have a little window on your PC showing off the CPU while in use. Looking back I do sometimes regret building computers like these for people back in the 90's but the savings were real and flagship systems were out of reach for most of us.
My first PC used this case, it is so nice to see it! I still have its gutter, a Pentium 100.
I also think that retro computing should not cover only performance machines, it is awesome to view how a daily use work machine was.
Awesome video, as always, thanks!
Awesome video, thanks for bringing back so many good memories. I once had that exact same case, and I had a Cyrix 6x86 CPU inside as well. It was my budget gaming computer. Love your videos, and cannot wait for another.
As much as I loathed Cyrix back in the day I'd love to find a PC to this. It's so extremely generic that it's a perfect experience of what a computer was like, back in the day. Add a 3dfx card and go ham with retrogaming. Love it! I'd have been over the moon to find this, and am somewhat jealous
Thank You, For showing the Cheap experience that most of us had in the 90s .Not to mention all the scams the computer producing companies were pulling on us as well.Great score, Great video!
Used to have one of those IBM CPU's many years ago. The biggest problem I found was keeping the CPU cool. So back then I took the case off and placed a desk fan blowing onto the motherboard. Worked a treat🤣🏴
I agree with your comments at the end wholeheartedly. The PC explosion in the 90s was accomplished not by pure innovation but by the flood of generic, low-cost clones all racing towards the bottom line with little regards to aesthetics or features. It was the $499 PC that brought computers to the world, not the $30k SGI.
My first PC build was a cheap Cyrix setup. It was pretty terrible and didn't even have floating point arithmetic built in. I still loved it. Still in the loft somewhere❤️
I absolutely love price focused budget systems even in retro. For many of us that is what we had!
Thank you for making this video. I used to build systems back in the late 90s, so these components are very familiar to me, it's a real trip down memory lane. I hated those cheap cases, cuts to my fingers were common.
This old cases are pure magic to me, a simpler but also much more complicated time in the PC world!
I saw those pc's alot in public space use. That cyrix proc really brought back memories. Bad ones. I don't know how many of those I replaced for customers when I worked in the computer store. Love your videos.
Did the Cyrix processors just stop working?
@@dave4shmups Yes. Some sort of electrical bug if I remember correctly.
That has got to be the most vanilla, generic case I’ve ever seen.
No, wait. There’s an LED display on the front. Spectacular!
I really respect you keeping this machine alive
This is about what my systems would have been at the time. Back then you could do a lot more "incremental" upgrading, being able to re-use 70% or more of your components as you changed parts (maybe a newer CPU this time, later a better motherboard that could use the same CPU, etc). These days if your machine is more than a year or two old, about all you'll be able to use id the hard drives and optical drives (and YES, I still use optical drives for my projects, now get off my lawn).
What a great find. This system was built around the time I started building my own Windows PCs, and my first was with that same Cyrix chip.
Man, I really wish that we had something like a free geek here where I live.
Reminds me of my second P.C, an AST with a Cyrix 6x86 PR166 that runs at 133mhz. It had an 8x cd-rom drive, 32 megabytes of EDO RAM, and a 2 gigabyte hard drive. The only difference is that it is a machine from '95-'96. The machine is still special to me.
My first PC had exactly the same case, except it had a label "Brothers" and white power button.
That monitor is so crisp! Great video, very interesting to see this old hardware. Appreciate you showing off the different MIDI instrument config too.
I have nostalgia looking at the old cases. I don't miss building in them at all.
I really like that CyberSynth instrument patch. It’s definitely something different but has a good sound to it.
This was most likely a 'feature' PC. Local computer shops would sell them, but rather than build the machine themselves, they'd order from a 'builder' warehouse - often a small company renting a suite in a light industrial park somewhere. You could set these 'builder' companies up with very little capital at the time. These companies would typically not deal with the general public directly.
I used to work for such a builder in the 1990s; we'd build these machines by the dozens. Hardware was ordered in lots of 50 or 100 or 250 pieces (to get significant price breaks), and often lowest possible dollar. OS installation was done via imaging, rather than the step-by-step setup. 30 minutes for a hardware build, 10 minutes to image the OS and often freeware stuff like Star Office onto its hard drive, and get it out the door. Each of us would often build three to five rigs at a time since they'd be identical in spec. Not quite 'production line' but close.
These likely sat in a storage room somewhere as the market advanced beyond the build spec, so parts were yanked out to build newer rigs. The hard drives were often the first to get pulled and transferred, I suspect something similar with the graphics cards.
this reminds me of the computers we built in Highschool circa 1997, I still have scars from stamped/punched metal expansion bays. they came as a kit and each student had the option to pay $200 to keep the unit upon compellation of the class.
The case that my first PC used back in 1997. It was really nice to see it again. Thanks a lot for this video.
This is literally my first pc i ever built. Loved this!!!
The machine you reviewed is referred to as a "white box" PC. It is a mass produced PC using generic parts that is geared for computer stores to put their badges on and resell as a house built computer. I worked at Ingram Micro around 1997 building Compaq DeskPro EN/EP computers and they built these on the next line over from me.
A seemingly pedestrian PC, embodying an incredibly narrow transitionary period of bizarre dual AT/ATX hardware, with a cross-branded IBM/Cyrix CPU? This thing is AWESOME.
I have a feeling that was a return or warranty PC and no one had time to actually look it over at the time.
Very cool.
What I call a "bread and butter" PC of it's time. Nothing fancy, no frills, but perfectly usable and does most things adequately for the price. I remember owning something similar, and I just upgraded the graphics card to play games. Sometimes Cyrix and AMD produced really good value CPUs compared to Intel, and occasionally faster per clock too.
With the right upgrades this could have some decent performance for the time by the looks of it.
Like a voodoo 2 8 mb or lower end voodoo 3 pci version, a bit nicer soundcard like a soundblaser zs or 5.1, a 16 - 32 gb microsd for some games like half-life, quake 2 too fit on there, maybe more if needed.
Ram too 64 - 128 mb via the sd ram slots, that ali chipset the motherboard has handles sdram pretty well despite being a budget chipset at the time, so I'd go this route with a k6-2.
Cpu swap too a K6-2 400 mhz, article on the retroweb says it's supported at least on the cpu list there, which might be incomplete while k6-2+ & k6-3 cpus.
So might be able too do all k6 cpus on this board even if support isn't mentioned.
Do remember too set I/O voltage too 3.3v instead of 5v or you'll toast the next chip you put into this probably as i think that cyrix chip asks for 5v i/o.
Otherwise I'd see it working fine with the 2x multiplier trick as AMD designed these chips too run the multiplier at 6x instead of 2x when that is selected for older motherboards.
So 6x66 mhz for a 396 mhz cpu clock would be pretty solid performance right ?
So maybe a k6-2+ or k6-3 would work as well if you happen too have one of those chips around too test with.
Can likely use any socket 370 heatsink that isn't getting in the way of the isa or pci cards slotted into the system & you'll be good too go for cooling even at 2.6v vcore for a k6-3 or k6-2+
but with what i found you'll be able too set 2.2v and leave it there just fine & almost be able too run it passively with a larger 370 heatsink so that & like a variable resistor fan set too a fairly silent speed would be real nice in this.
I had this EXACT same case in 1997... I think even the same motherboard! Right down to the Cyrix chip!
My high school had PCs with that exact case my freshman year, ca. 2000. They were Pentium 233 MMX machines with Milwaukee PC branding, and they were slow back then! The labs with the 333MHz PC300GLs were a treat.
Love this video! Cyrix CPUs have long been a beloved joke for me, but your perspective of how they made computing more accessible helped reset my attitude on them. Thank you.
Great video but one thing that sticks out to me is the CPU being PR300. It clearly states on it 3 x 75MHz on the CPU, so it would operate at a real frequency of 225MHz. If the board doesn't support that FSB, then you'd likely set it to 3.5 x 66MHz to get the 233MHz that you state. Maybe even 4 x 60MHz to get 240MHz. You wouldn't want to use 4.5 x 50MHz FSB. That would just be crippling to the CPU.
Man!! .. I just realized how much I miss @RetroSpector78 😕... was the only one dedicated exclusively to this type of everyday machines 🤔...... cool vídeo as always Colín 😏 👍..
Thanks for bringing the old stuff from the time frame I grew up in back to life. @this does not compute.
My cousin had a case exactly like that. And I had one exactly like that but with three 5-inch drive bays. It mightve originated from Mecer, but I can't remember. It was so long ago. I love that case. It's simple and elegant. I really don't like overdesigned cases with needless grills and segmented ridges. I'd buy that case from you if I didn't live in South African.
Cool episode. Yep. the average pc is the most authentic. I had a packard bell 386sx 25mhz and had many great memories while drooling over 486 processors at best buy
That Sony Multiscsn looks amazing
A friend of mine from my youth had a machine in this same case that he got in late 94, early 95. It was a package sold by a local computer store. IIRC, it was a P120, 8mb of ram, 520mb hard drive, a cheapo sound card, and a "quad speed" cd-rom drive. It came with a monitor, a set of those Juster multimedia speakers, and had Windows 3.11 installed on it. The monitor died within the first year, then expansion cards were dying one after another. I remember putting an ISA video card from a 486 in it just to get it working again, the original card was PCI. I really don't know how the cheap parts market got to be so saturated with crap like that. It wasnt like how it is today where you can buy a 100 dollar mini pc from amazon, you kind of expect it to be shit. I am sure that machine I am speaking of cost 1000 dollars, during the same era where a budget machine from a big box store of the same spec wouldve been 150-300 dollars more.
Thx for the video. I worked at a small mom n pop computer store in the mid to late 90's during and after high school. We sold these generic cases. This was one of my favorite cases, it was classy IMO. You also had to be mindful about how sharp the metal egdes were in does days. Metal papercuts.
This reminded me of what my school district got before they contracted with Dell in the late 90s. Sort of like a stopgap between no Network to totally networked PCs.
I've always been a sucker for the tan towers of yesterday. I kind of miss when computers required just a little more effort from the users. There was just something about fitting the parts, setting jumpers, installing drivers, etc., that made you feel more engaged with the computer.
That case looks extremely familiar. I think my grandparents bought a PC in the late 90's that used it. It was the last time I saw an AT system since getting into PCs.
To me, pushing a low spec machine to it's limit is way more interesting than a high end vintage build. Especially when I track down inexpensive parts that can get such a low spec machine punching above it's weight class and make it suitable for gaming. To use a car guy's analogy here, most of the vintage PC gamers out there want to spend thousands building a hotrod from scratch while I'm perfectly happy doing some budget mods to a period economy car. I'll admire that sleeper budget build over any high end build any day.
Totally agree, Colin. If I had a pound/dollar for every computer I used in the 90s that was like this one, I'd be able to afford an iMac G3!
The midi music reminded me of music that should be accompanied by: "Your call is important to us. Please wait for the next available representative."
Oh boy I would have had a blast with this machine when it was new! When these parts were released, I'd be getting my first pc, a 386.
I couldn’t agree more. I like the high end as much as anyone, but I too like to go back and look at the everyday computers of yesteryear. Take my Packard Bell Multimedia L198 for example, it’s a simple yet decently capable machine that doesn’t break the bank(back when it released and now)
I had a similar case with the same color buttons, 2 5.25 drive bays, and a 3.5 floppy, my motherboard was PC Mainboard with the SIS6326 Chipset, which had no PS/2 Ports, so it used a RS-232 port Serial Mouse, Slot 1 Intel Celeron 333, 256MB Ram, 40GB HD and Windows 98SE- upgraded to WME at 1 point.
Had a board like that. Super socket 7 throw a pentium mmx 233 in it and managed to clock it at over 300 mhz. With a voodoo 4 slapped in there it managed to run quake 3 arena over 60fps at 1024x768. Was impressed.
My guess this machine had a warranty replacement and it was just easier to stick the customers HDD in the new machine. Another option could be that the customer bought it, stuck a CDRom in it and decided they didn’t like the performance of the Cyrix chip and the computer shop did an upgrade not long after the initial purchase, but again, kept the users HDD.
Either scenario was normal for a small independent, local computer shop of the time.
These transitional motherboards are interesting, 1997 was the year when ATX started to take over so these boards gave you a lot of options.
Also the M2 was a competent enough CPU especially when paired with a Voodoo so I wouldn't even call this low end for the time, budget sure but capable enough. There were still some 486-class machines in use in 97, that was the low end/rapidly reaching obsolescence computing experience, especially coaxing them into running Windows 95. An alternative build would be with something interesting and rarer like a Verité or a PowerVR card, both were 'budget' options compared to the 3DFX but are now very hard to find.
I installed a cyrix 6x86 133 in my 486 50mhz to help it limp until I graduated hs 😂it was supposed to be a p75 equivalent but it really wasn't. It was enough to make the pc I got in 94 be able to run in 99, technological obsolescence was brutal back then 😭