Most excellent rig I’ve seen on UA-cam in ages, ha. _The mid-2000s-ness of it all._ The 6800, the UV window, cold cathodes, laser cut acrylic game logo, and of course the sheer absurdity of the case design itself. It’s like they went straight into my 2004 Computer Shopper wishlist and brought it to life. Great to see this saved!
Hah, thanks! As soon as I laid eyes on this thing I new it was going to be special somehow but it was such a time capsule the more I dug into it that I was really happy I was able to get it and preserve it as is! I didn't get around to mentioning it in the video but I'm amazed that seemingly *none* of the parts were ever upgraded. They must have just outright replaced the PC and put this one in a closet somewhere instead.
Worth noting as someone else with this bizarre case, the acrylic in the alien head is *extremely* UV reactive to the point that I think it was treated in some way. The machine I built in it had a cold cathode blacklight pointed at it as well as one red cold cathode and one LED bar of the same color pointed inward, which made the window glow bright blue from the edges while looking in at the red interior. Edit: oh he did mention it! Yeah the coating on this is way more impressive in person, it glows incredibly bright!
I still own and use to this day, two supermicro 750 cases. Steel, so heavy, but robust as heck. The only thing i've had break on those cases is some of the plastic bits.
2004 was such a special year for me, being a teenager and building my first PC, it was exactly like this. I'll never forget the guy I played Everquest II with who told me he just came back off deployment in Afghanistan and spent the money on a GeForce 6800 GT Ultra. I damn near dropped my mic when I heard him say that. Memories memories. Old tech is a wonderful, beautiful thing, in all its blue cathode ray tube CS: Source-inspired glory. Thanks for this video.
@Пыль глотаю Doom 3 leaked a couple of days before it released and my friend burned it onto a CD or maybe even a DVD. We installed it on my dad's computer and it literally fried the video card. Had a pretty bad time trying to explain to my christian dad how a game about monsters from hell broke his rig, lol.
This one in particular might not be too easy to get but there are a number of Antec cases that match the silver look this has that are very period correct. They're definitely my choice for something sill cool for the time but not super uncommon.
The cutouts in the drive door are propably there in case you put in a drive with a big enough button to be pressed by closing the door. Snapping off one of the cutouts makes room for them. The big one is propably there to accomodate for a fan controller or something similar with big knobs.
Yes, you are correct. The cutouts make room for longer optical drives as well as 3rd party 3.5" and 5.25" drive bay accessories. A lot of those had knobs that stuck out beyond the bezel. That was a big issue with the Antec clone cases that had a drive door. Higher end cd/dvd drives did not fit with the door closed.
That build reeks of my first build from years ago, really brings me back to my yard sale Athlon and K6 days. Glad to see you're restoring this old beast!
The extra fan on the PSU, extra heatsink on the GPU, the ridiculous case, god that is absolutely fantastic. Side note: I really appreciate the way you edited the vacuum bit by keeping the normal audio, very nice touch
Gigabyte tend to overheat and fry fast. I don't know much about it from back then but from around 2008 onwards Gigabyte wasn't something to look up to. Every GPU I know of fried. It's a cheaper option but also people replace the coolers day one to extend it's lifespan. I always bought ASUS components and while it was always expensive it actually lived longer then what was it rated for. MSI and Gigabyte were always known to me as trash, cheap yes but the performance and it's lifespan awful.
The light-up grille, the twin lightscribe drives, the Powmax pass-through PSU, the passive Gigabyte card... This isn't a PC. This is a love letter to 2004 PCs everywhere. What an absolute lad of a computer.
I had an Alienware Area 51 from late 2003/early 2004. P4 3.2ghz and a Radeon 9800 XT. That PC was such a beast at the time and it served me well for the following 6 years. There was something special about those old Alienware and FalconNW machines that today's system integrators just aren't able to capture.
I've been on the hunt for a ridiculous case like this for a 2006ish era retro PC, but they're difficult to find with traditional search terms. Kinda have to just look at Everything. Great find.
Searching for case manufacturer such as Raidmax or Chenming can help, you can add vintage to the search to hopefully find one for sale with more detailed info but adding "vintage" to the title pretty much guarantees the seller wants stupid money for it. I've been looking for early-to-mid 2000s Alienware cases or the Asus Ventos case and they're bringing $300+ for ones in merely OK condition.
3, 5 and 10mm LEDs (and some of the other shaped ones) are made out of resin, not acrylic. You could drill out the LED with a 2mm drill bit and remove the residue, then put in a new 3mm LED of a color to your liking. 2004 had the rise of royal blue LEDs, so a royal blue LED that leans a bit into the UV would be looking PERFECT.
@@kaitlyn__L All LEDs that have significantly more than 1000 mcd (=1 lumen which is about the brightness of one candle but concentrated to a small spot) shouldn't be stared at for longer than a few seconds. That's independent from the color / wavelength. That is, directly frontal into the lens. Diffused light is okay.
@@kyoudaiken good too know! I saw some retro bright boxes which used large royal blue and they said it would harm your retinas to look at directly, suppose it was just from being so bright.
@@kaitlyn__L Yes exactly! The most dangerous lights are UV and infrared. Well, because you cannot see it. Do NOT look at your gaming mouse sensor for longer than half a second! I forgot to turn mine off once when cleaning and I have a nasty burn on my retina in the peripheral viewing area. But weirdly enough only on my left eye. To be fair it could also be from something else as retina scans didn't find any anomalies. The spot recovered, but I cannot see in color in that area. It's really odd. But I got used to it, it is barely bothering anymore.
@@kyoudaiken I must admit I used to spend a long time looking at a couple laser mice bottoms in like 2009, but I never did after I learned about the risk there from the IR. I either have no damage, or it was in the already-existent blind spot, or something. An irony is my current mouse, a Steelseries Sensei, has a tiny LCD on the underside you can put custom images on, but since it’s a laser mouse I’m like why??? If it was regular dim red optical I could understand. Anyway.
The reason for the slow CD drives could be the cabling. Those 80 pin cables are pretty delicate and some of the shielding wires can be broken causing it to essentially become a 40 pin cable which would cause the drives to fail to negotiate full speed with the motherboard during the drive detection process.
I would get tons of people who would not be happy with the speed on the pc they build. Well they installed the old 40pin ide cable. Sold tons of 80 pin cables.
@@idahofur I did a ton of building and rebuilding of my computer over the years (surprise surprise trash picked parts don't last long) and my number one failure for drives was the 80pin IDE cable, they do not deal well with being handled a lot either.
@@idahofur Another thing that caused massive slowdown was not installing chipset drivers. If no chipset drivers are installed, you don't get DMA on the disk controllers and everything chugs. I've had to do plenty of 40->80 IDE upgrades and chipset driver installation back in the day. And irritatingly, it went into the SATA era. Microsoft doesn't install chipset drivers in many cases, and even if they do, they won't install SATA controller drivers and just use crappy generic drivers that cause the same performance problems. Intel hasn't made it any better by being assholes and deleting their entire driver backlog, and won't provide drivers for older operating systems anymore. That leaves the only option to dig through the questionable driver websites and hope you find something that works.
I'm still using a pc I built in 2007, other than my work pc I don't have anything newer. Apparently I'm using retro tech without realising, gotta love it
Max out the CPU and RAM, add the backlight, replace the thermal compound and pads on the graphics card, and recap the power supply. This is the highest end 00's build I've seen.
That PC was built around the time i had my Athlon 64 3200+ and a ATi 9800 Pro. What an era of computers. In fact that computer i had was an upgrade to my Pentium 4 1.4GHz non-HT with a GeForce 3 Ti 200 and RDRAM.
@@TatsuZZmage Big difference was the clock speed, 340 vs 310 MHz on the 9800 Pro and non Pro. And I still have a GF 3 Ti 200 here. Fine piece of hardware.
My original pc had a AMD duel core, then I got a 3rd gen i7 and stuck with intel till 9th gen intel, but the upgrade I just got is a ryzen 7900x and I am looking forward to using it.
@@TatsuZZmage 9800 Pro had higher bandwidth and higher clock speeds than the non. You can check the Wiki page that has a comparison table for all the 9x00 cards. Are you sure you’re not thinking about 9800 SE, perhaps? That one had half the bandwidth despite the “special edition” monicker.
@@TatsuZZmage The Pro still performs much better, especially in games due to the higher clock speeds. The 9800SE is about as good as a 9600 unless you can unlock the 4 extra pipes, which is by no means a sure thing
Wow. I had the black and purple version of that case as a student in 2009. Found the PC on the street and fixed it up. Had it til about 2013 and then donated it. Man this brings back memories!
I had a Raidmax Scorpio case with an Athlon 64 3700+ and GeForce 6800 GT back then, I gave it away to a friend after upgrading it and stuff like this just makes me wish I had stuffed it in my closet as a time capsule.
I bought one of these "alienware" cases back in early 2000s, it was black and nickel with blue glowing eyes and bat-like wings on the sides and a small window, it cost me around USD$40.
I still have a proper blacklight neon lights for PC from that era. I used it on a modded case with UV reactive fans and uv reactive rounded IDE cable back in time on a p4 in 2002-2003 if I remember
The amount of joy and enjoyment you show in this video has earned you a follower with me because I enjoy seeing that thing. It's a very enjoyable video!
Those doors were a godsend against annoying little brothers who LOVED pressing the buttons and were timing their mitts to be around the button middle of the action while you are gaming!
My first "build", a "barebones" kit. Was a 3ghz Prescott (s478), 512mb RAM, and added later on was an AGP 6600GT. I played A LOT of counter strike source on that rig. I miss those days.
The cutouts on the front, they may be there to add clearance when drive buttons are protruding a bit too much and get pressed when door is closed or prevent door to close ;)
@22:30 I remember the paper that Intel released in response to bent motherboards. It was a huge deal at the time and the pins on those coolers have caused soooo many issues.
This case is great. In the 2000s-early 2010s my dad had a case with a similar temperature display on the front, and it's honestly just as cool now as it was then. Glad to see you got this time capsule up and running again.
This was so cool to see! I really wanna build a computer in this style. That connector which looked like an AT power connector is actually something known as the "Auxiliary Power Connector". On some motherboards of the era it was used to provide additional +3.3v and +5v to the board. It worked in a similar fashion to the P4 connector. I find it an interesting and quirky footnote in motherboard history!
Funny thing is they started putting them on AT power supplies, which was super bad because if you exchange the wrong plugs, you either short directly to ground or you send 12v down a 5v path. I'm really glad that the ATX became standard.
I saw that exact case in the early 2000's in Toronto. I was building a computer from my sister and at the time I worked IT at the UofT campus around which there were bunch of computer stores, almost all of them had the cheap Chinese knock off cases. I bought the "sister" case to this case. Its black, it features the small "Alienware" logo on the top of the "door", the eyes in the logo were activity lights, there were no big red eyes but it had the 3 triangles on the top of the door.
Before I really considered myself a PC enthusiast at all, I loved this case, I saw it somewhere online in the mid 2000s and it has a lot to do with me being interested in PC content to this day. Never did know the name of this thing until now
Fantastic video to watch. I have a vintage Panasonic computer that is either from the 90s or early 2000s. It has no CD rom but has floppy drive. The components within are all high end quality(Asus). I cannot find a single thing on the internet about it? Not sure if it works or not, a lot of the inside connecters are unplugged. It is silver and also has a see-through plastic, side panel, to admire the quality components. It will have been a beast at the time it was made.
I remember seeing this case back then when I was upgrading my PC in 2004, I thought it was really incredibly ugly. I went with the Antec Super Lanboy in the end which I still have, it came with a carrying strap with a handle & I used to take it on the bus to my friend's house so we could play Halo 😁
Super LANboy was awesome. Built a PC for my friend in one as we went to LANs a lot. So much lighter than my steel case! Also first case I remember finally having a large front fan for good airflow. Airflow literally sucked before that. 🙈
As @Pandaren Death Knight stated below, you could have a faulty 80-pin IDE cable. One of the ones I saw in the video looked pretty yellow. Maybe it came that way? Another thing to consider is that if Windows XP detects too many errors in communications with the drive, it will automatically force the drive into PIO mode. Could be the cable, or the drive itself could be going bad. I'd probably start with the cable if it were me.
I had a build in this case. Mine was black with the red accents / eyes. I remember the temp gauge in the front was so awesome. I have looked to get another one of these cases for years but it's basically disappeared from existence. Man do i miss it. I had a Q6600 with an 8800GT in it. Maybe one day I will find that case
I remember cases like this. Everyone wanted a server tower with a window...cold cathode lighting etc. I miss those days. I remember buying the window kits and a jigsaw just to mod my case. I even made a usb glowing mousepad with plexiglass, contact paper, led's, resistors, and clear furniture cups for under chair legs to give it a little lift off the desk. Good Times!!!
So funny how this case went from being garish to nostalgic with no change other than time. 21:26 It’s a simple thing but seeing it briefly light up made me smile
Been working on building myself a pc for gaming/music production, specs are as follows, Motherboard: Asus TUF Gaming X570 Plus WiFi, CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, Ram: 2X 8Gb DDR4 3200, System Drive: 1X Crucial 1Tb NVME M.2 SSD, 1X Samsung 1Tb 2.5 inch SSD, Optical: 2X DVD Burner Drives, Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTX 1660Ti 6Gb, OS: Windows 11 22H2, runs great.
Oh my god I have this case. It's been a mystery to me for ten years, ever since I found it with most of its parts missing. I built an AMD bulldozer rig with a GTX 670, 4 TB of HDD space and 32GB RAM in it while having to fabricate new means to mount parts in it 😅 amazing to see another one!
I remember there was a case that was super popular back then but normally had a pair of 80mms in the back, I bought a Chenming knock-off because it used 1mm thick SECC steel and had a 120mm fan. I still have it laying on the floor in my kitchen, my i7-11700K/RTX 3080 system was running in that case for a while but it didn't fit a custom loop water cooling system very well
Seeing this has just brought back so many memories of my first build when I was a kid. I remember installing the MB without the standoffs and revelling in all .2secs of awesomeness! It was a valuable lesson in learning what you're wanting to do before you do it.
I made the opposite mistake, I installed all but one of the standoffs on my first Athlon 64 motherboard. I added more RAM one day then bricked the computer...turns out I cracked the board internally by pressing the RAM in since it wasn't supported right.
Its amazing to me that the more computers age and look uglier, the more i think they are so appealing. Like I would genuinely love to have a sleeper PC build with the oldest shells just for a kick in the nostalgic feels.
Got tickled pink when i saw the Gigabyte nvidia 6800 card..had the 6800 GT with the small blue lit fan on top. Was the first graphics card i ever bought. Had to replace the bad OEM TP right from the start which dropped the temperatures by ~10°C...
Wonderful to see that case rocking a solid build from the era. Well done! Just add a Soundblaster Audigy and some vintage speakers to get the 2004 experience fully realized.
You are correct, the speaker on the GPU is to beep when the power is not connected properly. My 6800GT has it too. They also put a red warning message on screen in case the sustained speaker tone doesn't tip you off that something is wrong.
The case look really like a custom rebrand made by Antec. The front of that tower, if we ignore the alien, is really Antec early 2000 look. They also had side panel latch, the individual slots latchs and some of them, internal compartment for the accessories.
@5:34 In the before time, when ATX MB connectors were moving from 20 to 24 pin and the 4/8 PIN supplemental CPU power was about to materialize, additional power to the MB/CPU came from the AT connector you see there.
that AT style plug is the old style AUX plug you saw it on the early Socket 423 and some 478 boards, it was for supplying extra 5V current to the CPU before the ATX 2.0 spec which gave us the 4pin 12v connector.
I love your excitement over this PC. It really is a time capsule to a great (if not slightly tacky!) period where PC customising really boomed in sometimes very random directions!
So fun to see this WinXP since I’ve never used WinXP on my own computer, I went from Win2k to Win7, so this is cool to see! We used to play WC3, D2, UT (1999), DoD and CS, it was fun being a kid!
Very nice. The nostalgia is fun, as is having the hardware that was out of the question a couple of decades ago for reasons of price. For example, maxing out the RAM in those computers would originally have cost thousands. My similar XP machine in a very fine Antec case was given to me. It has an E8400 processor that I could only dream of owning back then.
The number of standoff locations for installation is super intriguing, meaning it could potentially hold almost any OEM motherboard that have "non-standard" standoff locations
That looks like proper LAN-party PC! Love it! I have similar PC myself that i got from my uncle some long time ago, but it's just filled to the brim with blue LED fans :D
Such an iconic and special era of computing windows XP is. It felt like the OS that bridged the gap between the old and new. Combining everything we loved about 95 and 98 in one package.
That case (other than the alien) reminds me of the case I have and still use. I have an xclio A380 from circa 2008. Other than mine having absolutely massive special fans, the mb tray and drive mounts are almost identical. Mine has an improved expansion card retention mechanism. My giant fans have long-since died, but the case is just too nice to let go. Completely tool-less and sooo much room for everything you could want. And when the fans were working, it had enough airflow to keep even a modern i9 cool.
The 5,25" cutout is for something like a soundblaster front panel control. Those things had buttons that stick out on the front, preventing a flush front.
For 30 odd years I've always vacuumed (normal household one) and flicked of the dust with a soft bristled 1 inch painting brush, never had any trouble with that method. Excellent for cleaning water rads too! 😊
I think most of those case designes were inspired/cloned/rebadged from Aspire International (later became Apevia). Myself and friends had a lot of Aspire cases back in the late 90s early 00s before the designed became popular. Loved their designs back then because they made great cases for those looking to build monster ATX systems with multiple drives and accessories.
This was super cool and nostalgic! I'm thinking the case with red lights might have been meant for AMD and blue lights were Intel originally, so maybe this was some kind of rebuild using "AMD" case on an Intel configuration. It looked like the Intel systems had blue lights on what you could find. The features on the case like thermal display, UV acrylic, the special PSU, inside mounted retainers for drives.... I really liked the alien eyes were actually vents!
I've always been curious about where these cases in the mid-2000s came from. The same designs would show up in every online computer store, never with any branding. I assume it was just one company that was churning them out. And yeah, the speaker on the GPU would squeal loudly at you if you didn't have the power connected. Scared the crap out of me when I was 12 and building my first PC.
Chemning/Chenbro. Available in aluminum or steel. First one I've seen with a 120. Normal config is 80mm front and rear. Looks like the swing feet were removed to cut cost.
Modders did cable management. Removing unneeded PSU cables, splitting IDE cables to round them, and splicing and lengthening them. In addition to building LED light strings. You can add extra uv reactive elements by painting card edges with liquid Tide.
There were "black light" LEDs around at the time, I recall having one in my computer around 2005. Was basically just the LED at the end of a molexed cable with a holder that came with some double-sided foam tape to hold in place. Considering it was in a Shuttle-style SFF case, there wasn't any room for a cathode tube.
Most excellent rig I’ve seen on UA-cam in ages, ha.
_The mid-2000s-ness of it all._ The 6800, the UV window, cold cathodes, laser cut acrylic game logo, and of course the sheer absurdity of the case design itself. It’s like they went straight into my 2004 Computer Shopper wishlist and brought it to life. Great to see this saved!
Hah, thanks! As soon as I laid eyes on this thing I new it was going to be special somehow but it was such a time capsule the more I dug into it that I was really happy I was able to get it and preserve it as is! I didn't get around to mentioning it in the video but I'm amazed that seemingly *none* of the parts were ever upgraded. They must have just outright replaced the PC and put this one in a closet somewhere instead.
When I saw this beautiful beast, I instantly thought of your dream XP build lol.
But this is a way better example of a gaming PC of the 00's!
Worth noting as someone else with this bizarre case, the acrylic in the alien head is *extremely* UV reactive to the point that I think it was treated in some way. The machine I built in it had a cold cathode blacklight pointed at it as well as one red cold cathode and one LED bar of the same color pointed inward, which made the window glow bright blue from the edges while looking in at the red interior.
Edit: oh he did mention it! Yeah the coating on this is way more impressive in person, it glows incredibly bright!
I still own and use to this day, two supermicro 750 cases. Steel, so heavy, but robust as heck. The only thing i've had break on those cases is some of the plastic bits.
Who else read this and heard it as Clint's voice?
Props to Gigabyte for still hosting all the support software and drivers
ASUS is good like that too
They've always been solid. Stand by their warranties too.
For real
As should every company
@@wcr6121 and have better pcb on board too.
2004 was such a special year for me, being a teenager and building my first PC, it was exactly like this. I'll never forget the guy I played Everquest II with who told me he just came back off deployment in Afghanistan and spent the money on a GeForce 6800 GT Ultra. I damn near dropped my mic when I heard him say that. Memories memories. Old tech is a wonderful, beautiful thing, in all its blue cathode ray tube CS: Source-inspired glory. Thanks for this video.
@Пыль глотаю Half Life 2 and Doom 3 yes!
@Пыль глотаю Doom 3 leaked a couple of days before it released and my friend burned it onto a CD or maybe even a DVD. We installed it on my dad's computer and it literally fried the video card. Had a pretty bad time trying to explain to my christian dad how a game about monsters from hell broke his rig, lol.
@@theothertonydutch Damn, hahaha. Good story.
@Пыль глотаю I built a Pentium 4 PC so I could for Doom 3 as well. lol
@@theothertonydutch Sounds like it was a defective card. 🤔
I love that case. I'm getting ready to build an XP gaming machine. I was going to go with a plain black case but now I'm second guessing that.
This one in particular might not be too easy to get but there are a number of Antec cases that match the silver look this has that are very period correct. They're definitely my choice for something sill cool for the time but not super uncommon.
The cutouts in the drive door are propably there in case you put in a drive with a big enough button to be pressed by closing the door. Snapping off one of the cutouts makes room for them.
The big one is propably there to accomodate for a fan controller or something similar with big knobs.
Yes, you are correct. The cutouts make room for longer optical drives as well as 3rd party 3.5" and 5.25" drive bay accessories. A lot of those had knobs that stuck out beyond the bezel. That was a big issue with the Antec clone cases that had a drive door. Higher end cd/dvd drives did not fit with the door closed.
That build reeks of my first build from years ago, really brings me back to my yard sale Athlon and K6 days. Glad to see you're restoring this old beast!
This *was* the exact same case I used in my first Athlon XP build. Seeing this gave me massive flashback nostalgia.
The extra fan on the PSU, extra heatsink on the GPU, the ridiculous case, god that is absolutely fantastic.
Side note: I really appreciate the way you edited the vacuum bit by keeping the normal audio, very nice touch
Gigabyte tend to overheat and fry fast. I don't know much about it from back then but from around 2008 onwards Gigabyte wasn't something to look up to. Every GPU I know of fried. It's a cheaper option but also people replace the coolers day one to extend it's lifespan.
I always bought ASUS components and while it was always expensive it actually lived longer then what was it rated for.
MSI and Gigabyte were always known to me as trash, cheap yes but the performance and it's lifespan awful.
The light-up grille, the twin lightscribe drives, the Powmax pass-through PSU, the passive Gigabyte card...
This isn't a PC. This is a love letter to 2004 PCs everywhere. What an absolute lad of a computer.
I had an Alienware Area 51 from late 2003/early 2004. P4 3.2ghz and a Radeon 9800 XT. That PC was such a beast at the time and it served me well for the following 6 years. There was something special about those old Alienware and FalconNW machines that today's system integrators just aren't able to capture.
I had a similar "alien"-looking case. I wish cases like this would be a thing again. I love this aesthetic so much.
Me too! I had this goofy blue case with lights and a carry handle and I've been searching for an equally gaudy case ever since I got rid of it!
All modern cases look the same. Black box with glass side and rainbow fans up front. Give me something exciting and different.
@@jonesymate581 Black is the new beige! 🤣
^ looks like the bots are back lol
@@thicclink They do it inside live UA-cam streaming chats too, which is really annoying to play whack-a-mole with.
I've been on the hunt for a ridiculous case like this for a 2006ish era retro PC, but they're difficult to find with traditional search terms. Kinda have to just look at Everything. Great find.
Searching for case manufacturer such as Raidmax or Chenming can help, you can add vintage to the search to hopefully find one for sale with more detailed info but adding "vintage" to the title pretty much guarantees the seller wants stupid money for it. I've been looking for early-to-mid 2000s Alienware cases or the Asus Ventos case and they're bringing $300+ for ones in merely OK condition.
3, 5 and 10mm LEDs (and some of the other shaped ones) are made out of resin, not acrylic. You could drill out the LED with a 2mm drill bit and remove the residue, then put in a new 3mm LED of a color to your liking. 2004 had the rise of royal blue LEDs, so a royal blue LED that leans a bit into the UV would be looking PERFECT.
Aren’t those the ones that are dangerous to look at? Or is that just the higher powered royal blue ones?
@@kaitlyn__L All LEDs that have significantly more than 1000 mcd (=1 lumen which is about the brightness of one candle but concentrated to a small spot) shouldn't be stared at for longer than a few seconds. That's independent from the color / wavelength. That is, directly frontal into the lens. Diffused light is okay.
@@kyoudaiken good too know! I saw some retro bright boxes which used large royal blue and they said it would harm your retinas to look at directly, suppose it was just from being so bright.
@@kaitlyn__L Yes exactly! The most dangerous lights are UV and infrared. Well, because you cannot see it. Do NOT look at your gaming mouse sensor for longer than half a second! I forgot to turn mine off once when cleaning and I have a nasty burn on my retina in the peripheral viewing area. But weirdly enough only on my left eye. To be fair it could also be from something else as retina scans didn't find any anomalies. The spot recovered, but I cannot see in color in that area. It's really odd. But I got used to it, it is barely bothering anymore.
@@kyoudaiken I must admit I used to spend a long time looking at a couple laser mice bottoms in like 2009, but I never did after I learned about the risk there from the IR. I either have no damage, or it was in the already-existent blind spot, or something. An irony is my current mouse, a Steelseries Sensei, has a tiny LCD on the underside you can put custom images on, but since it’s a laser mouse I’m like why??? If it was regular dim red optical I could understand.
Anyway.
The reason for the slow CD drives could be the cabling. Those 80 pin cables are pretty delicate and some of the shielding wires can be broken causing it to essentially become a 40 pin cable which would cause the drives to fail to negotiate full speed with the motherboard during the drive detection process.
I would get tons of people who would not be happy with the speed on the pc they build. Well they installed the old 40pin ide cable. Sold tons of 80 pin cables.
@@idahofur I did a ton of building and rebuilding of my computer over the years (surprise surprise trash picked parts don't last long) and my number one failure for drives was the 80pin IDE cable, they do not deal well with being handled a lot either.
The drive wouldn't go over UDMA3 anyway.
@@idahofur Another thing that caused massive slowdown was not installing chipset drivers. If no chipset drivers are installed, you don't get DMA on the disk controllers and everything chugs. I've had to do plenty of 40->80 IDE upgrades and chipset driver installation back in the day.
And irritatingly, it went into the SATA era. Microsoft doesn't install chipset drivers in many cases, and even if they do, they won't install SATA controller drivers and just use crappy generic drivers that cause the same performance problems. Intel hasn't made it any better by being assholes and deleting their entire driver backlog, and won't provide drivers for older operating systems anymore. That leaves the only option to dig through the questionable driver websites and hope you find something that works.
just so you know there is no 80 pin cable. it's a 40 pin 80 wire cable. or there's 40 pin 40 wire which is half the speed as the 80 wire.
I'm still using a pc I built in 2007, other than my work pc I don't have anything newer. Apparently I'm using retro tech without realising, gotta love it
Max out the CPU and RAM, add the backlight, replace the thermal compound and pads on the graphics card, and recap the power supply. This is the highest end 00's build I've seen.
i was too young to ever remember this era of PC's but your enthusiasm through the video made me excited as well haha... great video
That PC was built around the time i had my Athlon 64 3200+ and a ATi 9800 Pro. What an era of computers. In fact that computer i had was an upgrade to my Pentium 4 1.4GHz non-HT with a GeForce 3 Ti 200 and RDRAM.
When I got a 9800 pro it was being sold at the same price as the non which my brain was pro must be better nope half the bandwidth -_-
@@TatsuZZmage Big difference was the clock speed, 340 vs 310 MHz on the 9800 Pro and non Pro.
And I still have a GF 3 Ti 200 here. Fine piece of hardware.
My original pc had a AMD duel core, then I got a 3rd gen i7 and stuck with intel till 9th gen intel, but the upgrade I just got is a ryzen 7900x and I am looking forward to using it.
@@TatsuZZmage 9800 Pro had higher bandwidth and higher clock speeds than the non. You can check the Wiki page that has a comparison table for all the 9x00 cards. Are you sure you’re not thinking about 9800 SE, perhaps? That one had half the bandwidth despite the “special edition” monicker.
@@TatsuZZmage The Pro still performs much better, especially in games due to the higher clock speeds. The 9800SE is about as good as a 9600 unless you can unlock the 4 extra pipes, which is by no means a sure thing
Wow. I had the black and purple version of that case as a student in 2009. Found the PC on the street and fixed it up. Had it til about 2013 and then donated it. Man this brings back memories!
So cool to see those games in the background, I had a case like that one, good times, Crusader No remorse, Test Drive 5, The MDK's and revolt.
That UV side panel is sooo coool. Wish we could get stuff like that today!
I had a Raidmax Scorpio case with an Athlon 64 3700+ and GeForce 6800 GT back then, I gave it away to a friend after upgrading it and stuff like this just makes me wish I had stuffed it in my closet as a time capsule.
I bought one of these "alienware" cases back in early 2000s, it was black and nickel with blue glowing eyes and bat-like wings on the sides and a small window, it cost me around USD$40.
GREAT cable management.
I still have a proper blacklight neon lights for PC from that era. I used it on a modded case with UV reactive fans and uv reactive rounded IDE cable back in time on a p4 in 2002-2003 if I remember
Wow...WXP is a operating systems throughout the ages 🖥️💻🖨️🖱️
• watching from Melaka, Malaysia 🇲🇾
I miss the old cases of the 2000s they were so cool. I have an old Raidmax case from then that's bright orange.
I think the punchouts on the front case are to accomodate drives that stick out. I have a backup tape drive that juts out just a few millimeters.
I had this case for many years, friends always thought I had a high end PC when I could hardly run WoW on low fps.
The amount of joy and enjoyment you show in this video has earned you a follower with me because I enjoy seeing that thing. It's a very enjoyable video!
Man, should have put that acrylic fan grill on a fan! I never had any LED ones, but I had some stylized metal grills back then.
Those doors were a godsend against annoying little brothers who LOVED pressing the buttons and were timing their mitts to be around the button middle of the action while you are gaming!
My first "build", a "barebones" kit. Was a 3ghz Prescott (s478), 512mb RAM, and added later on was an AGP 6600GT. I played A LOT of counter strike source on that rig. I miss those days.
The cutouts on the front, they may be there to add clearance when drive buttons are protruding a bit too much and get pressed when door is closed or prevent door to close ;)
@22:30 I remember the paper that Intel released in response to bent motherboards. It was a huge deal at the time and the pins on those coolers have caused soooo many issues.
This case is great. In the 2000s-early 2010s my dad had a case with a similar temperature display on the front, and it's honestly just as cool now as it was then. Glad to see you got this time capsule up and running again.
This was so cool to see! I really wanna build a computer in this style.
That connector which looked like an AT power connector is actually something known as the "Auxiliary Power Connector". On some motherboards of the era it was used to provide additional +3.3v and +5v to the board. It worked in a similar fashion to the P4 connector. I find it an interesting and quirky footnote in motherboard history!
Funny thing is they started putting them on AT power supplies, which was super bad because if you exchange the wrong plugs, you either short directly to ground or you send 12v down a 5v path. I'm really glad that the ATX became standard.
@@bruwin I didn't realize AT and the Aux Power connector overlapped! That's a terrible idea!
I think I have a LGA775 board that supports Crossfire here and that takes an additional molex to run two cards.
@@HappyBeezerStudios That was common too
I saw that exact case in the early 2000's in Toronto. I was building a computer from my sister and at the time I worked IT at the UofT campus around which there were bunch of computer stores, almost all of them had the cheap Chinese knock off cases. I bought the "sister" case to this case. Its black, it features the small "Alienware" logo on the top of the "door", the eyes in the logo were activity lights, there were no big red eyes but it had the 3 triangles on the top of the door.
Before I really considered myself a PC enthusiast at all, I loved this case, I saw it somewhere online in the mid 2000s and it has a lot to do with me being interested in PC content to this day. Never did know the name of this thing until now
I had this case way back when, I loved it so much.
man i want this system. great teck for its time
Fantastic video to watch. I have a vintage Panasonic computer that is either from the 90s or early 2000s. It has no CD rom but has floppy drive. The components within are all high end quality(Asus). I cannot find a single thing on the internet about it? Not sure if it works or not, a lot of the inside connecters are unplugged. It is silver and also has a see-through plastic, side panel, to admire the quality components. It will have been a beast at the time it was made.
That is the coolest case. Good video. Thank you
I remember seeing this case back then when I was upgrading my PC in 2004, I thought it was really incredibly ugly. I went with the Antec Super Lanboy in the end which I still have, it came with a carrying strap with a handle & I used to take it on the bus to my friend's house so we could play Halo 😁
Super LANboy was awesome. Built a PC for my friend in one as we went to LANs a lot. So much lighter than my steel case! Also first case I remember finally having a large front fan for good airflow. Airflow literally sucked before that. 🙈
That case is amazing, I would have to own that too. Nice video mate.
-Mom i want that alienware tower -We have alienware at home, son ( ^^ Alienware at home )
As @Pandaren Death Knight stated below, you could have a faulty 80-pin IDE cable. One of the ones I saw in the video looked pretty yellow. Maybe it came that way? Another thing to consider is that if Windows XP detects too many errors in communications with the drive, it will automatically force the drive into PIO mode. Could be the cable, or the drive itself could be going bad. I'd probably start with the cable if it were me.
I had a build in this case. Mine was black with the red accents / eyes. I remember the temp gauge in the front was so awesome. I have looked to get another one of these cases for years but it's basically disappeared from existence. Man do i miss it. I had a Q6600 with an 8800GT in it. Maybe one day I will find that case
I remember cases like this. Everyone wanted a server tower with a window...cold cathode lighting etc. I miss those days. I remember buying the window kits and a jigsaw just to mod my case. I even made a usb glowing mousepad with plexiglass, contact paper, led's, resistors, and clear furniture cups for under chair legs to give it a little lift off the desk. Good Times!!!
So funny how this case went from being garish to nostalgic with no change other than time.
21:26 It’s a simple thing but seeing it briefly light up made me smile
thats pretty much the first machine i built myself back in the day to play unreal tournament 2004 and rome total war
WOAH, I had that case in blue!
Been working on building myself a pc for gaming/music production, specs are as follows, Motherboard: Asus TUF Gaming X570 Plus WiFi, CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, Ram: 2X 8Gb DDR4 3200, System Drive: 1X Crucial 1Tb NVME M.2 SSD, 1X Samsung 1Tb 2.5 inch SSD, Optical: 2X DVD Burner Drives, Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTX 1660Ti 6Gb, OS: Windows 11 22H2, runs great.
Oh my god I have this case. It's been a mystery to me for ten years, ever since I found it with most of its parts missing. I built an AMD bulldozer rig with a GTX 670, 4 TB of HDD space and 32GB RAM in it while having to fabricate new means to mount parts in it 😅 amazing to see another one!
The case I bought in 2004 had 120mm fans and I was super stoked about it. So much airflow!
I remember there was a case that was super popular back then but normally had a pair of 80mms in the back, I bought a Chenming knock-off because it used 1mm thick SECC steel and had a 120mm fan. I still have it laying on the floor in my kitchen, my i7-11700K/RTX 3080 system was running in that case for a while but it didn't fit a custom loop water cooling system very well
Seeing this has just brought back so many memories of my first build when I was a kid. I remember installing the MB without the standoffs and revelling in all .2secs of awesomeness!
It was a valuable lesson in learning what you're wanting to do before you do it.
Ouch, yeah I’ve done that. Luckily I never got to the point of power on because I realised the board didn’t feel right.
I made the opposite mistake, I installed all but one of the standoffs on my first Athlon 64 motherboard. I added more RAM one day then bricked the computer...turns out I cracked the board internally by pressing the RAM in since it wasn't supported right.
those puch outs are to accommodate space. like the small punch outs are for SD cards, or such that would poke out
Its amazing to me that the more computers age and look uglier, the more i think they are so appealing. Like I would genuinely love to have a sleeper PC build with the oldest shells just for a kick in the nostalgic feels.
18:24 Props for even getting this in focus! Wow.
Got tickled pink when i saw the Gigabyte nvidia 6800 card..had the 6800 GT with the small blue lit fan on top.
Was the first graphics card i ever bought.
Had to replace the bad OEM TP right from the start which dropped the temperatures by ~10°C...
Wonderful to see that case rocking a solid build from the era. Well done! Just add a Soundblaster Audigy and some vintage speakers to get the 2004 experience fully realized.
You gotta go X-FI for XP! 👌
You are correct, the speaker on the GPU is to beep when the power is not connected properly. My 6800GT has it too. They also put a red warning message on screen in case the sustained speaker tone doesn't tip you off that something is wrong.
Bruh we need some wacky cases like this in 2023
That case is so fire
The case look really like a custom rebrand made by Antec.
The front of that tower, if we ignore the alien, is really Antec early 2000 look.
They also had side panel latch, the individual slots latchs and some of them, internal compartment for the accessories.
I was thinking the same. The aluminium too.
Really loved cases of that era, had a Nzxt guardian and a nemesis and was thinking about how one of those cases would work with newer boards
@5:34 In the before time, when ATX MB connectors were moving from 20 to 24 pin and the 4/8 PIN supplemental CPU power was about to materialize, additional power to the MB/CPU came from the AT connector you see there.
that AT style plug is the old style AUX plug you saw it on the early Socket 423 and some 478 boards, it was for supplying extra 5V current to the CPU before the ATX 2.0 spec which gave us the 4pin 12v connector.
I love your excitement over this PC. It really is a time capsule to a great (if not slightly tacky!) period where PC customising really boomed in sometimes very random directions!
These cases lol, i remember the ones made by Raidmax i think and their models were Scorpio or Cobra if my memory is good. Good old days
So fun to see this WinXP since I’ve never used WinXP on my own computer, I went from Win2k to Win7, so this is cool to see!
We used to play WC3, D2, UT (1999), DoD and CS, it was fun being a kid!
Very nice. The nostalgia is fun, as is having the hardware that was out of the question a couple of decades ago for reasons of price. For example, maxing out the RAM in those computers would originally have cost thousands. My similar XP machine in a very fine Antec case was given to me. It has an E8400 processor that I could only dream of owning back then.
I had the blue one from cyberpower, takes me back
I had the same case back in High school.
Ah, this is that Allenwhere/Chieftech collab case. The mid-2000's were a great time.
The number of standoff locations for installation is super intriguing, meaning it could potentially hold almost any OEM motherboard that have "non-standard" standoff locations
ATX 1.0 called for a 6-pin "aux" connector (the single AT-style connector). Never saw anything that used it.
I had an ASUS P4T back in '03 which used one. It was a socket 423
That looks like proper LAN-party PC! Love it!
I have similar PC myself that i got from my uncle some long time ago, but it's just filled to the brim with blue LED fans :D
takes me back to the good old LAN days would love to see Rainbow six 3 Ravenshield and BF1942 on it. also a UV light
Such an iconic and special era of computing windows XP is. It felt like the OS that bridged the gap between the old and new. Combining everything we loved about 95 and 98 in one package.
You need to do a build out of this thing this thing was loved and cared for and deserves to shine once again
These old SATA compatible systems are still fun to hook an SSD to as an OS boot drive.
That case (other than the alien) reminds me of the case I have and still use. I have an xclio A380 from circa 2008. Other than mine having absolutely massive special fans, the mb tray and drive mounts are almost identical. Mine has an improved expansion card retention mechanism.
My giant fans have long-since died, but the case is just too nice to let go. Completely tool-less and sooo much room for everything you could want. And when the fans were working, it had enough airflow to keep even a modern i9 cool.
Just found your channel and I'm absolutely loving it! LGR vibes and it's great to see LGR's comment as the first!
Man I can just see someone loading up World of Warcraft for the first time on this thing and living that experience 🤙🏻🤙🏻
The 5,25" cutout is for something like a soundblaster front panel control. Those things had buttons that stick out on the front, preventing a flush front.
For 30 odd years I've always vacuumed (normal household one) and flicked of the dust with a soft bristled 1 inch painting brush, never had any trouble with that method. Excellent for cleaning water rads too! 😊
Seeing old oddities like this makes me so much more excited than a modern over the top PC
That is a beauty.
5:35 I have some socket 423 boards that use that connection to supply extra 5v and 3.3v power.
I think most of those case designes were inspired/cloned/rebadged from Aspire International (later became Apevia). Myself and friends had a lot of Aspire cases back in the late 90s early 00s before the designed became popular. Loved their designs back then because they made great cases for those looking to build monster ATX systems with multiple drives and accessories.
This was super cool and nostalgic!
I'm thinking the case with red lights might have been meant for AMD and blue lights were Intel originally, so maybe this was some kind of rebuild using "AMD" case on an Intel configuration.
It looked like the Intel systems had blue lights on what you could find.
The features on the case like thermal display, UV acrylic, the special PSU, inside mounted retainers for drives....
I really liked the alien eyes were actually vents!
5:16 that remind me of my PSU bought in 2014.
It's still working like a charm. It's a quality PSU.
I've always been curious about where these cases in the mid-2000s came from. The same designs would show up in every online computer store, never with any branding. I assume it was just one company that was churning them out.
And yeah, the speaker on the GPU would squeal loudly at you if you didn't have the power connected. Scared the crap out of me when I was 12 and building my first PC.
Considering how common chieftech cases seem to be it may as well be.
Chemning/Chenbro. Available in aluminum or steel. First one I've seen with a 120. Normal config is 80mm front and rear. Looks like the swing feet were removed to cut cost.
@@piscikeeper Ah I knew I was missing something, it was Chemming lol.
That HAS to be the most "unicorn" PC I've ever seen!!! That thing has got to be put in a museum because it's just so cool and crazy!
You can use a toothbrush and a shallow tub that's bigger than the mother board and 90 to 100 percent IPA all 3 will get a board pretty clean
Awesome video from beginning to end! I really like seeing pc’s from the late 90’s to early 2000’s!!!
"we can massively improve on the cable management this thing previously had" thats wont be period accurate then 😂
Lol, I actually cut a line for time where I said "The most in acurate thing about this build will be me actually trying to do cable management"!
Modders did cable management. Removing unneeded PSU cables, splitting IDE cables to round them, and splicing and lengthening them. In addition to building LED light strings.
You can add extra uv reactive elements by painting card edges with liquid Tide.
"It's clearly some kind of x mechanism" -> I'm gonna use that sentence whenever I come across something that I don't know how it works
There were "black light" LEDs around at the time, I recall having one in my computer around 2005. Was basically just the LED at the end of a molexed cable with a holder that came with some double-sided foam tape to hold in place. Considering it was in a Shuttle-style SFF case, there wasn't any room for a cathode tube.
Pretty cool build, very much approaching the end of the AGP era, PCIE was very much in it's infancy but the first PCIE GPU's would come out in 2004.