Putting Together My Own Retro Desktop PC
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- Опубліковано 29 тра 2024
- I've worked on plenty of retro desktop computers, but for various reasons I haven't been able to keep any of them. It's about time we changed that.
Sources:
"TDK veloCD 24/10/40," Maximum PC, October 2001.
Seagate acquires Samsung's HDD business: www.computerworld.com/article...
IBM hard drive photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
"WatchDog," Maximum PC, May 2005.
"News Industry," Computerworld, June 10, 2002.
Intel D845GEBV2 specs: theretroweb.com/motherboards/...
00:00 - Introduction
01:47 - Checking out the case
03:48 - The motherboard and CPU
08:00 - Keeping cool
09:01 - An ominous warning
10:12 - A selection of drives
13:37 - You're probably bored by now
14:17 - Sound and video
16:05 - A GPU shootout...or not
17:58 - CaN iT pLaY cRySiS tHo?
19:24 - I found another video card. It still can't play Crysis
20:43 - The beginning, not the end
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Music by Soundstripe (www.soundstripe.com) and Epidemic Sound (www.epidemicsound.com).
Intro music by BoxCat Games (freemusicarchive.org/music/Bo.... - Наука та технологія
Just in case it hasn't been mentioned, Crysis required a card with at least 256MB of VRAM and 1GB minimum. Recommended is 512MB/2GB respectively.
It also required very high clockspeeds
The issue wasn't VRAM specifically
The cards probably didn't have the required instruction sets. I'm guessing Crysis needs pixel shader 3.0
@@dshadow01 You might be on to something. Crysis requires shader model 2.0, but recommends 3.0. The Geforce4 Ti supports version 1.3. The Radeon 9200 LE tops out at 1.4
LTT video from back then shows that to push the best graphic it consume 3GB VRAM
@@devaraft Did you snorted something? You got the good stuff innit?
Collin, you have no idea how this video made me feel tonight. Back in the 1997-2005 era I used to have my own custom PC shop and these parts were my day to day thing and I just felt like I was there, 25+ years ago doing a custom built for a client. Love it. You just made me feel young again by looking at old stuff haha. You are the best. Love the content. I might start my own retro build. Thanks again.
Happy to keep older stuff alive, great to see them awaking from a long time.
I hear ya. I built at 486 and now I’m building 6 more haaa
I love this period of building, this is abotu where I got on the PC bus. Really brings back memories. One of my cable management tricks for this era was to put the optical drive in the second slot down from the top and use that space above it to store the "extra" power leads off the PSU. Helped keep the clutter down.
I love the knockoff platinum and candy plastic aesthetic of this era, it really did have some character.
And that light mod? Perfect. Needs a neat case badge now too.
And the DVD drive really does fit nicely with the case.
Love the little light mod at the end, look forward to seeing more of this machine.
Glad I stayed to the end!
An alternative to cutting the 3 pin power LED header is using a pin to release the pin from the plastic header, and then move it to the 2nd position. Or you could remove both of them, and use a 2 pin header instead.
Came here to post the same thing. It’s way safer and easier IMO.
I came to the comments to say just this.
Truth told, cutting the connector was an extremely common of-the-era technique. I did the same thing literally hundreds of times while working at a small computer shop in 2000-2001. You had to bash together a PC in about ten minutes: there was no time for fooling around re-pinning connectors!
It's also a waste of a retro case to modify the cables that came with it!
Came here to write the same. Cutting the plug while you could just move the contact to the middle pin is pretty barbaric.
I heard and read horror stories about the IBM hdd manufacturing plant here in Hungary. Because of the low wages the really low-end of the working class wanted to work there. I heard that some of them were smoking (!) in the clean rooms, and putting the cig butts off in the still opened drives. Crazy times...
Wow, I did not know these IBM drives were manufactured in Hungary. This comes as a surprise. I remember having an IBM drive back in the early 2000's and it was actually smoking. But as far as I can remember, it still worked. 😅😅
@@skieinc HP machines and printers are made too in Hungary till' 2005.
@@skieinc it's also said on the Hard Drive itself 11:43
20gb IBM are solid. 40gb and 80gb are crap. And then IBM sold to someone. Hitachi or something. And their first 80gb's were good, yet noisy. They just solved stability and toughness before looking at noise.
Try adding a 100-330uF capacitor in parallel to the fan power pins to see if it will spin up - it's a trick the 3d printing community uses for Noctua fans.
That's genius. I need to remember this.
@Timothy Hoogland I'm DEFINITELY not an electronics expert, but I think it works like this: The low voltage supplied is not enough to start the fan, so the fan has large resistance and the capacitor charges. The cap then discharges and starts the fan. The fan then falls to much lower resistance and so most future current goes to the fan. Maybe the cap occasionally charges and discharges, but one is able to run the fan lower than 100%. If you know more than me, feel free to explain. I'm hopeless at circuits and components.
I miss when it briefly fashionable to just stick translucent turquoise on every computer thing, even otherwise typical beige boxes. Turquoise is one of my favourite colours, and I have to wonder if that would be the case had I grown up a few years earlier or later than I did.
I think Windows 98 and various vintages of Linux would be pretty interesting! I also have a hunch that the driver program might work just fine the second time round, though of course it could be even worse!
Those re-usable knockouts are nice though, especially since it doesn't really cost them anything else in production to slightly alter the shape they punch out - but it helps the end user dramatically.
It reminds me of the fish bowl aesthethic of literally everything. From hand soap bottles to shower curtain lmfao. Some type of pastel fish bowl aquatic vibes
I also worked in a small computer shop at the turn of the century, and this is almost exactly the kind of PC we would build for the customer, or they would build for themselves, with parts from us. XP, despite its lousy WiFi support, was a very solid OS, which made most tasks a breeze. They didn't call XP the 'F1sher Price' OS for nothing! :D
“Swoosh..” is a great forgotten word I’ll be using in casual conversation from now on…
I love watching videos of how to build PC's from "way back when". All I'm remembering fromy my days of doing, it are ripping my fingers to shreds taking out the breakaway expansion slot covers, and for the fingers that I didn't destroy, I'd get those cut up by putting the expansion audio, and graphic, cards into place! Ah those were the days. Brilliant to see this video, and the components have stood the test of time.
5:37 the DOF zoom changing the focus on each connector as you progress from right to left across the ports... brilliant. I'm subscribing just for the cinematography of that one sequence.
I LOVE this video. I remember fondly when computers had this aesthetic, and I can't believe you got such a beautiful new case. I 100% would've gone for W98, though. Everything in this system screams it: socket 478, AGP, CRT monitor, the case... I wish I had such nice hardware for my W98 machine. Greetings from Mexico, from a fellow retro machine enthusiast.
love your videos. Found and started with your first minidisc video last month during a tough time and it got me through it. please dont ever stop!
I never was a fan of the Apple colours, even when every other manufacturer copied them. I was firmly entrenched in the "being black makes it faster" camp.
Although that CD drive would look sick with LED illumination (I don't think it would screw with reading the disc since the laser is IR)
Yeah, I wasn't a fan of that design either. Especially in consumer products where everything had to look "melty" or like it was designed in a wind tunnel.
Like an mp3 player? Can't just make it a rectangle, have to make it all curvy and weird. I was actually thrilled with the iPod because it looked normal to me.
If I'm not mistaken the black PCs came after the Apple colored ones, before that it was all beige.
I love the light on the front of the case. Beautiful build.
That disc drive and case combo... I'm drooling over here.
Maybe it was just me, but the shade of blue on the disc drive doesn't fit, but alas, it does look so good.
I love this build. I love the aesthetic you went with. Right up my vaporwave loving alley
Thanks, I enjoyed this blast from the past. I'd forgotten about those rounded IDE cables, they really improved the look of my builds.
So satisfying to see! I worked in a computer store in the early 2000s and built many P4 systems. Exciting time with all the changes and developments. 20 years later I'm still into computers and testing new components on a regular basis.
I miss those cases😢.
Thank you for such amazing videos❤
Man, this video hit all the nostalgia buttons for my life right after college. Cases with a ton of fans, side panel window and interior lighting mods, such a fun time.
I think I spent more time over clocking and Tweaking then I did playing sometimes.
The ATI 9200 was the first PC component I ever purchased when I was first learning PC hardware in the early 2000s. I recently picked one up on ebay to put in a shadowbox (non-destructively). Really takes me back. Thanks for the walk down memory lane!
Me too. It was the GPU of my first custom built PC (although mine was the low profile version). Isn't it funny how he went out of his way to put a Nvidia card in this PC? UA-camrs can't help themselves, it's as if they allergic to ATI/AMD or something. Maybe they think that using an ATI/AMD card will make them look poor.
I love it. Nostalgic, I was doing this on a daily basis in Mombasa from about 96 - 2002. The small square in the front was meant for custom 'branding'. Good times.
I simply love your voice. And I'm a huge geek. Cannot get enough of your channel, Colin. 💙
This brings out memories! I had my own "PC shop" in the late 2001 and throughout 2002! Most customers back then had no idea what to look for in computers. So, they were running after prices only! Shops were competing to build the cheapest computers running the glorious Pentium 4 and Windows XP! That era saw the wide spread of SW piracy and HW counterfeit! CPUs speed were faked to appeal to the customers. I even heard of some tricks to alter the amount of RAM readout during boot!
I refused all those trickeries and chose quality, specially being a computer engineer myself. The market did not go as I hoped and the junk from china kept flooding the market! I closed the shop and switched to real estate business and never looked back to the computer market again!
Great video! It's so nice how clean your case is. I love the light mod you did too... I'll have to borrow the same idea for mine. And thanks for the tip on the TDK drive, I think I need to grab one too.
Congratulations on a decent retro-thingie build.
Subed & upvoted.
Looking forward to more with this rig.
I had that exact same case for my main PC back in the day and I've been looking for one now for YEARS to do a retro build in. Nice work building that thing!
And that was my same EXACT processor, P4 2.4c wow you literally built my PC haha
Same here, I had a PC with this case back in 2000. Did you ever locate one?
Great video, love the look of this. One of my work colleagues gave me a 'Cube' pc which I recently stuck an AMD video card in and a Pentium 4, great for my 'Vintage' games, love your videos Dude, always informative, instructional and entertaining. And its thanks to you that I now have no fear of taking laptops apart and repairing and upgrading them.
Omg i have this computer case too and I love it so much! Glad to see another person out there with the same one!
I built so many systems exactly like this, also working in PC places in 99 to 05. This was like watching a video replay of my own old memories. Quite a strange experience.
Nice build! This era is my favorite of the entire history of PCs.
me too, although I was busy with AMD Athlon XP chips and not P4's...
brings back memories. Thanks for the vid. I worked a e waste day for a affluent city in the early 2000s and I had a field day. Still have a Antec case that I need to see I I can do a build similar
Nice build! Very cool mods&additions!
As always - the content is awesome. Thank you very much
I had Radeon 9250 at some point - shitty card. It was in a new PC my Dad got me. I couldn't wait to change it to something supporting Direct X 9.0c. I upgraded to GeForce 6600GT afterwards. This started the whole GPU craze I still have ongoing. Such a great card and so many great memories with it - pure nostalgia!
Cheers for the great video!
Such a good build. I had that same TDK drive with my translucent blue Antec ATX case. I wish I had that still.
We had this case growing up. it was my favorite "family pc" from the 90's.
I still have the case, tho its pretty beat up now, I'm pretty sure we purchased it from MicroCenter in Saint Louis Park the summer of 1999, during the launch of the Athlon 1GHz cpu's.
I remember that pc's specs well, even though I was only 12 at the time.
I really wish I had seen free geek had a new (old stock). I've actually been searching for a few years to find a better condition case than our old one.
That is a super special find you have there, I really hope you take great care of it.
What a great video! Well done, sir!
Totally forgot I had this case. The added lighting is awesome
Having built several retro PC's, finding a period correct case has always been the most challenging, since most got tossed because they take up a lot more space than the rest of the hardware.
I used some to fix car body :)
wonderful video! That Pentium 4 era takes me back to the first pc that I helped build as a kid, kinda wanna build one now haha
Love it. You are spot on about using a driver to get those standoffs installed. Also, missing the IO plate is the worst! 😄
What an awesome build bro. I love it! I want to build myself a retro PC as well soon.
I used to have one of those TDK drives and I LOVED it! I was so sad when it started to malfunction.
Had this case as my first computer build. Thanks for making this video! Looking forward to future updates. Mine had either an EliteGroup or Asus motherboard, AMD Athlon 1800+ cpu, 512mb ram, the Western Digital 80GB hard drive you showed in the video and a Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti200. Wish I still had it to mess around with! Thanks again!
asus has better
Becuase asus still hosting drivers for old motherboards
Great video! I had that exact same TDK CD burner! I upgraded the one I had in my Compaq Presario 7000.
Lovely build that mate!
Great vid as usual! You finally have your own vintage PC. With the Intel mobo its so average I'd name it "Not Sure".
I have a few 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID-class HDDs that have been spinning for over 83,000 hours. This was right before Samsung sold their HDD storage division to Seagate so I guess it was a last hurrah for the engineers. Good thing the 7-year warranty was never necessary.
Good video. First time watching a youtube video from start to finish.
I LOVED the 4200Ti and that Microsoft mouse! This brings back good memories.
OK, just saw the front panel light on the front of the case at the end of the video. That rocks. I have an old Antec case from that era, arguably a better case, but man doesn't have that awesome bling on the front!!
I had that exact same case. Man, that brings me back.
I love this video/PC so much, it's so, so similar to the system I had back then!
Back in its day, I bought the same CPU 2.4Ghz. I had a very similar motherboard, Intel with the i845 chipset that supported the 533mhz bus. But I also had an nVidia Ti 4400, one step up from the 4200 you used. It was an absolute beast back in the day.
I had to sell it for finacial reasons, but when I bought my next PC (AMD Sempron 3000+) I had an ATI 9200 in that!
The Ti 4400 was around $550 AUD at the time, and the 9200 was about $120 AUD when I bought them.
I remember this early period of the 2000's so well because I had so much fun buying and building PC hardware.
I've got that exact same case. Actually I got four! Some are more yellowed that others, and the teal piece becomes slightly green due to the color mix. I've had one working 24/7 for over 10 years at my work place running XP, and it will now become a retro machine for Windows 98/2000 era games and software 🙂
That’s awesome, nice work.
I had that TDK CD burner installed aftermarket in 1999ish HP pavilion. The desktop included a Zip drive, which I loved.
I believe I installed it in 2001. It was great! The software was solid also. Good times.
loved the video man. first pc i ever built was a socket 478 p4 i got from new egg. think i had some cheap lil msi micro atx board also. believe it was red so i of course loved it being gosh like 9 years old i think. thanks for the nostalgia. my papaw taught me how to build pc's so this brought back alot of good memories.
ah man, the AGP connector, I feel old 🤣
beautiful build, that translucent blue tray in the cd reader is just FANTASTIC
Awesome video dude!
Man this takes me back. I was rocking an Athlon XP1800+ and GeForce 3 Ti 200 back in those days. A very solid combo that powered many late gaming nights. Even had that same Sony Trinitron monitor which was absolutely glorious.
I had the case in this video and that CPU/GPU combo. This video is a crazy flashback for me! I even had that 80GB Western Digital.
That CD-R drive with the peel still on was a great score.
WOOO this case was top notch, with AT shield, thats amazing.
Oh wow! That takes me back. I had that case back in the late 90s.
I had the smaller version (half the exterior drive bays). I absolutely remember it having that same aqua accent panel and buttons on the front. IIRC I bought it in 2000 or 2001 for a build. I didn't have it for much more than a year or so - probably sold it to get some cash to move on to something better.
Nice build, neatly mirrors specs to my own in 2002. But for my money today, I would have to go with a 2004 themed build with a 800mhz fsb P4, 865 chipset board, and dual-channel ddr-400 ram. Getting up to the 9600/9800 ati cards or the much newer nvidia 6600/6800 agp would also be a great move, but I saw prices of those cards today is eye-watering.
not surprised, since few people had those higher-end cards at the time. I had a 9600 but never a 9800/6600/6800. I had a 5600, though. Maybe Crysis will run with 128MB? Or would you need 256?
my man! i have this exact same build - even with a curvy designed beige case (mine looks like a nokia phone hah)! The intel d845 is a pretty stable board, the 2.4ghz P4 is solid as you mentioned and a geforce 4 ti4200 is the icing on the cake. I am using an SSD instead of spinning and went for Winows 98 instead of XP, just because I wanted something that could play any 1998 to 2001 Win9x game with ease.
love that light on the front! thanks for the great video.
Yeah, that's a pretty case, clean design... - turns on the light - I WANT IT!!!
Great build!
I love this video.
Istlll have my old p4 3.0ghz in a Chieftec case with 2gig corsair ram 200gb Seagate sata, liteon cd writer, and a 7800gs such hard nostalgia!
Oh the Memories! I bought a pre-built machine very close to this in 2003! It was from a Mom & Pop computer shop and had been built for another customer that for some reason never came to pick it up... I remember playing DOOM 3 on it beautifully! Later on, I was able to get Guild Wars and World of Warcraft running on it as well. I'm more of a Linux/MacOS kind of guy today, but I do miss Windows XP! It was probably my favorite version!
Great find Collin , I build an old AMD system in that exact same case in probably 2000 starting with pc chips M810 socket A (462 athlon 600 duron 800 then Athon 1000, I still had that case through a few upgrades to an Athlon 64 X2 in 2009 , thanks for the video
This combination of hardware would make a blazing fast Win98 retro box... You should go more recent for WinXP.
Nice PC! It remembers me of my first PC build, a P4 4.0 gHz with hypertreading, 4gigs ram and a nvidia FX5500, that machine was a blast to use, being able to push 60 fps on the original Doom 3
The combination of Pentium 4 and beige/blue case is just perfect. So iconic!
Beautiful PC, I love it.
Next time you use Snappy, be sure to use the Origin one, and check every component hovering your mouse while pressing ctrl. So you can compare time and release version between your current driver and the new one, since the system is automatic and sometimes misfires and installs the wrong one (ex. Intel often signs new drivers in the year 1968)
is there a reason for this? 1970 is where most systems seem to have a cutoff so i'm trying to see if there's a connection here
Thanks for the soothing video! Brought back some memories. I got pretty much the same PC in early 2003. Also a 845GE-based Gigabyte Motherboard + exactly the same Pentium 4 Northwood 2.4GHz/533 Mhz + 512 MB of RAM. The integrated Intel Extreme Graphics is indeed terrible, it is a DirectX7 level thing struggling even with the Windows XP's visual effects like fade-in for context menus. Even GTA3/Vice City are barely playable on it at the low settings. Good that you bypassed it straightaway. I had a similarly looking InWin case with a 250W power supply I guess, from Powerman. I had a 80GB Seagate hard drive if I remember correctly and it had an amazing feature - acoustic management - making it 100% silent for a small performance penalty. Later I installed an Nvidia GeForce 6600 into this system. The AGP 4X on the motherboard somewhat limited its performance but still gave this machine a couple more years of life.
I can certainly tell that you don't need an additional fan here, neither this CPU nor the graphics cards would ever require it, even when mildly overclocked.
Thanks again for the video!
17:40 I like how that "wow" sounds like the one that was given when the bsod happen during the Windows 98 live demonstration with Bill Gates in 1998
(search for "windows 98 bsod presentation" if you want to know more)
I'm reminded of the South Park movie "f*cking windows 98, get Bill Gates in here!"
That blue was a huge hit back then
I really miss how bright and colorful things used to be
I Used to have that case as my workhorse up till 2008, I really liked it.
My first self-built PC was an Athlon 900 system built in the full tower version of that case, it really brings back memories. You were very diplomatic though, the case had some of the worst airflow I'd ever seen. I recall removing that front cutout as you did, but I also drilled a 120mm fan hole in the side panel over the CPU. This was years before they'd become standard with the cone setup.
I just put together an "ultimate" XP machine -- all late 2012 parts.
It still can't run Crysis on Ultra High. Game's insane.
I liked the invisible speakers you hooked up to your Soundblaster Live! the best.
They really complement your setup!
;-)
Very nice video.
Thank you
Nice ending with the front case light.
Sweet rig! 🖥
Great build. Looks fantastic and perfectly 2002❤
Yay for the new TDNC computer! You should give it a name!
I Love the retro build !
Lovely build! I also had the 9200 but it was the SE version which was a bit slower. P4 1.6ghz, 768mb of ram and 40gb hdd. (i believe 2x20). Win XP was also installed. This was in 2002. Good times!
My XP build in the same case has had its fair share of upgrades overtime aswell, originally a Socket 754 Sempron 2600+ and FX5200, i learned to solder with this machine after overclocking, changing hardware throughout my young years of owner ship as a child, it couldn't run Doom 3 or Farcry like my dad wanted when he bought it as an upgrade from a 486, i promised one day i'd have a job and upgrade it so he could finally play.
12 years later such upgrades happened, a Socket 939 XGP/Pci-e combo board, A64 3400+ and my dream card, an IceQ UV reactive Ati X1650 Pro, though performance in early game engines seemed to rely on raw IPC and high clock speeds, so a recent purchase of an uncommon Dual core 4200+ for this platform didn't give me the big jump i was seeing, old games saw identical peformance clock for clock with the previous chip..but a recent upgrade to an IceQ 2600XT showed double the performance in some areas, but in Farcry the game engine did utilise the CPU more and the synthetic 3DMark 03-06 runs showed double the performance in the CPU and GPU tests leading to a big score increase, definitely better paying £35, not £300+ for an FX-53. Especially on the board that does not overclock well, biostar was never known for it..perhaps the Asus A8N32SLI-Deluxe that came with the chip may go in so i can push both chips and see if they're capable of the golden 3Ghz known to overclockers if you won the silicon lottery..
Athlon was the better option at the time unless you later on went for a S775 HT pentium 4 example, but my roots were with AMD so i wanted to keep the build as original as possible and re-use what i could, when my dad heard the Farcry intro spring to life out of the Audigy 2 ZS, he finally got to sit down all those years later and play it while running in the hundreds, not the single digits, it was a bit emotional seeing him play those old games with a smile on his face while i played the later successors alongside, it was like 2 eras mirroring eachother, from old to new, the enjoyment they gave the user, was just as fun as it was back then.
I had that case! Was pretty ubiquitous around 98-00. Remember picking it up at a huge computer show they used to have on weekends. Built a Pentium 233 MMX system with a best in class (for the period and chip)Intel TX motherboard. Great system on the cheap at the time. Interesting choices for the build here though, certainly more of an upgrade than it typically would have seen, as this case seemed to be common from maybe the point of Pentium 133 through the end of slotted Pentium 3s. I've never seen a P4 in one of these. Nice throwback all the same.
I love that Sony crt. Good video Colin. I think I am gonna make my Xp machine also dual boot with win98se.
Love it - great video as always 🎉
I remember building in those cases and having numerous cuts on the fingers with that sharp aluminium everywhere lol
One trick is to sand/file down particularly where you tin snip. You will thank yourself later if you revisit and forget how sharp it is :-)
weird enough I have that same motherboard that I just got parts to fix. except mine is slightly older and has 3 ram slots of ddr1 memory. awesome to see someone have a motherboard like mine!
I had this case back then and had P1 in it... man those memories
Hell yeah Free Geek!! I just picked up an IBM 5150 there last week
Early 2000 era wasn’t the most fancy for pc parts but its was the most time of enjoyment having a desktop machine back then was a dream I remember getting my first pc with pentium 4 and playing gta and fifa 2002 😅 and use dial up internet .
I had the same case I my very first computer back in 2001, it was a Pentium III 600mhz with 128mb of ram. What memories