It’s really incredible how power supplies are treated much more seriously now than they were 15-20 years ago. It just makes sense to buy a good power power supply over a cheap one. Especially when the good ones aren’t even much more expensive than the crappy no name brands.
The ECS motherboard is also known for few other names... PCChips M925ALU V5.0 in retroweb looks similar and it has ECS version manual. In the manual it says that those big jumpers are for selecting between DDR and SDR memory slots. It has both sockets in the board.
Yep, that red motherboard was part of the "PC Chips Lottery". That garbage thought process started all the way back in the 486 era, afaik. The names that were in that "lottery" were ECS, PC Chips, Amptron, and possibly Shuttle.
@@NJRoadfan Nah, PCChips bought Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) and renamed itself like that cause ECS had an better reputation. PCChips was an OEM manufacturer as well so they made the board for Amptron, Shuttle, Kobian and of course ECS.
the CD burner/dvd combo drives were common in the early 2000s as Straight dvd burners were still quite pricey. eventually prices came down, and these "Combo" drives faded away.
Yeah, besides for some businesses machines, I used the cheap cd burner/dvd-rom drive for reading everything and burning cds. The DVD burner was for burning DVDs only.
Pretty much every consumer Mac made between 2001 and 2003 had those "combo" drives. Apple even called them "combo" drives, with the "super drive" being the dvd-rw ones reserved for the pro-grade Mac's.
That Abit board has a unique feature I wish caught on more - removable sound card. It was an elegant solution - concentrate the cheap Realtek controller on a small, out of the way PCB and if you want, remove it and add something of your choice. I hate the modern trend of soldering everything into place.
A few things on the first system. That top slot that looks like a backwards PCI-E x1 is actually an AMR (Audio/Modem riser) connector. Think of it like an expansion to your rear I/O, so anything plugged in still uses CPU resources, unlike most dedicated expansion cards. Mentioned in the comments anyway, yeah CD/RW and DVD ROM combo drives were common as DVD burners still cost a fair bit back then, and you required a different laser wavelength to read and write DVDs compared to CDs. You also required a much more powerful laser (More cost) to burn a disk rather than read. The 'Very High' settings on Crysis is for DX10 so only available if you had both a DX10 card, which the 9600GT is, and Windows Vista or later to run those settings. The AA (Anti aliasing settings) drained GPU power, best to turn it off or 2x max to have a nice FPS (Frames per second). I do enjoy the earlier to late 2000's as this was the time when I started getting into PC building, to me an AMD Athlon X2 era and Core 2 Duo system seems relatively recent to me. I have installed Windows XP so many times that I still remember the installation like it was yesterday.
Went looking for this comment haha. No one seems to know what an AMR slot is nowadays. That said, my understanding and experience is they were quite rate even from SIs. I don't believe I ever saw AMR card in the wild while doing occasional repairs personally and in my workplace with SFF PCs.
I really enjoyed this one, maybe because we get to see what a bad power supply can do to a system. It reminds me of how robust PC component design has always been. I wrote my first program in 1968 and have seen it and experienced it all, and I'm in the middle of assembling a super high end PC for a customer. It just amazes me that while there are now billions and billions of transistors and tech in this thing and, as always, it all starts up perfectly and just works. Incredible. Never-ending fun. (I tell my clients it's now impossible to buy components that aren't RGB now. 🙂). Thanks Mike. Love you man!
Thanks! I still can’t believe that PSU failed so spectacularly. Sure wish I would have gotten to it first. That footage would have been priceless and those components would still be alive!
I experienced a PSU capacitor explosion before. I saw a flash coming out of the fan exhaust at the back and smoke and it turned off immediately but did not do any damage on the computer itself. I just replaced the PSU and everything worked again. I guess I was just lucky.
0:30 yea those were everywhere. DVD burners were still very expensive for a short bit in late 90s, early 2000s. So they tacked on a CD burner to a DVD-ROM and there's more budget option. I had quite a few of them from upgrades for family/friend machines after DVD burners became super cheap. They were all pretty cheaply made too so none of them really lasted. Blu ray went through a similar phase too, had blu ray readers that could burn DVD/CDs.
Man an ABIT AN8 Ultra in the wild. It is an amazing motherboard from circa 2005. It has 4 SATA2, an Nvidia nForce 4 Ultra chipset, uGuru BIOS uitility, A LOT of fan control and PC stats. I own this board with a modest 64 3500+ for now. That board is a keeper I tell you. Quite valuable too. btw I knew instantly what 04 is. It is memory. I had issues with a 64 3200+ and its memory controller once :D
Man I should dig my old one out, think I used Athalon 64 3400+ on mine with Corsair RAM, eVGA 7800 GTX then a 9800 GTX , all in a enermax case, played many 100's of hours of games on that setup.
@@charleswp71 Very nice rig. I just got a free Audigy SE 7.1 for mine. I didn't have the ABIT AudioMax 7.1 card so I had to use an old Crystal CS 4280. I also paired it with a 9500GT 1GB but I plan on putting an X1900XTX and an X2 4800+ in there at some point :D
You have no idea how many of these videos have played in the background while I work, with me chuckling when I hear you dealing with old familiar problems. From one Mike to another, thank you sir. Side note: Peelander-Z was right.... "So many Mike"
28:56 searching the bios string at the bottom of the screen returns a board: PCChips M925LR. Those big jumper clusters are for switching between SDR and DDR RAM.
The 2000s were a great time to be building PC's. I can remember building my first ever pc based on an Asus A8V socket 939, Athlon*2, 4gb of ram, and some kind of Radeon GPU. Spent a small fortune on it, and it never let me down. Couldn't bring myself to get rid of it, so it's gathering dust 😀
I still have "gathering dust" systems going back to 286 based, but those were pre builts. My first self built one was a 486 33 in a big tall tower case with a door in front of the drive bays.. It has 4 mb of ram plus two more from my Intel Advantage card from the 286. I payed a lot for the case so I still have it, though it won't fit any atx motherboard since it is AT only. It is hard to throw away something that cost 1000 dollars. That did not count the video card and sound card.
Mike I really enjoy your videos ! I'm 67 so you know I've been around since punch cards. I had those back in college. But I've been around for all the tech up until now. Built three or four Heathkit computers. It's a long story but I just wanted to let you know I like your sense of humor a lot and these videos are so entertaining.
Hey, when bending back those broken clips like on that floppy drive face plate, they're normally made of ABS plastic, so instead of super glue, use a little acetone. It will fuse the plastic together.
Oh wow that last PSU sure did some carnage… We missed on the only OS exploration because it killed the only hard drive in this video. I guess it’s pretty lucky that some parts like the CPU and floppy survived, at least it wasn’t a total loss I guess. It probably wasn’t a fun day for the previous owner when that thing blew up.
“So, I don’t know why it’s complaining. I guess it just needed me to acknowledge it?” And just like that, you’re a professional RUclipsr 😂. Hehehe. Another fun video-thanks!
Either the can wasn’t properly perforated or the pressure built up way faster than it could vent. I’ve never seen one explode like that either. Shame it took most of the system with it.
The only cap failure I've seen was on my grandfather's old pc, all the caps leaked all over, though I've intentionally popped a really really small one just because I wanted to.
The vrm's and resistors on the mobo saved the CPU and Ram from an unfortunate Ac voltage injection. 12v components have no chance at 120 unfortunately. This was a very common failure back in the day PSU's weren't built to "Fail-Safe" they failed almost exclusively catastrophically.
Funny thing with the older power supplies. They would fry before blowing the fuse inside of it. Not much of a problem with normal ATX power supplies. The ones with proprietary hookups, like Dell. Yeah! Cool to see you actually playing a game and being halfway good at it. Thanks for making my Saturday morning.
The late Rudolph Loew's AHCICD.SYS handles most AHCI controllers in DOS pretty well, and Jack Ellis's XDVD2.SYS can handle pretty much any enhanced IDE interface over SATA in DOS.
S1 - I'm glad you answered the "Can it run Crysis" meme! S2 - That's one degraded thermal pad! Xtremely cheap power supply! S3 - L&C clearly stands for Light & Crap because it took an entire system with it! You could cook eggs on that South Bridge...
I love seeing this older "gaming" computers, reminds me of my early pc building/repair days, graduated from that to travelling the country repairing and setting up cnc machines and industrial robots, feel like i owe my career to my computer hobby.
I work on server systems, these DVD/CD-RW drives are still pretty common on those even on systems manufactured in the mid 2010's. I enjoy your work, keep up the great work!
Interesting & good to watch one of your Vidz where you’re actually tinkering with Hardware that’s not as Retro as you normally show, Great Video all the same! 🙂🇬🇧
I bought a Joblot of those Intel Heatsink/Fans off eBay at: 24:53, They all came with CPUs in the retail packaging & I didn’t realise their was so many and only gave the Seller £20 if memory serves me correct! 😂
I would rate the ECS Motherboard that’s in System 2 the same as ASRock, I feel that they are both budget crappy boards, I may rethink that with ASRock as I’ve been hearing good things about them lately, I’ve always like the Pioneer CD / DVD Burners as in System 2, My Brother had that very Case in System 3 which I had when he upgraded but ended up either Selling it or Binning it many years ago, Probably when I moved in 2015…
I have seen that board before. It's an ECS P4VMM2 V5.0 or V5.0A With that one you could make the choice between two types of ram, but you couldn't mix it. If I remember correctly, the jumperblocks were mean for the selection of the ram-type.
Thank you for being so detailed in your videos. I actually own the HP Pavilion 8240 as well, and I was missing the original floppy drive. Since you said the part number in your video, I was able to go online and order one 🙂
The CD-RW/DVD-ROM drives were very common in the early 2000's. DVD-ROM drives were still quite pricey. The prices came down, so a lot of people went for the combi CD-RW/DVD-ROM drives rather than having multiple drives. For me I had a CD-ROM and a CD-RW/DVD-ROM rather than having a single drives for CD-RW and DVD-ROM.
PC 2s motherboard appears to be a PC Chips M925LR I recognised that heatsink looking like a PC Chips, and a quick google for PC Chip Pentium 4 it came up with that weird array of jumpers.
System two's mainboard is more commonly known under the PC Chips brand. especially in that early era of expensive Wilamette P4's many pc builders cut cost by installing these low end mainboards, often 30 to 40% cheaper then A-brand offerings from eg, ASUS.
1:45 Zalman 7000cu cooler, the original all-copper cooler. Those things were beasts back then, I had one of those cooling an Opteron 180 dual core in 2005. They switched to the AlCu model (alum/copper) shortly after due to their all coppers oxidizing so the original is harder to find these days.
The LG DVD-ROM/CD-RW was quite common, at least in Canada. When I worked in a small town store, we sold quite a few, every month. The ECS board ... whoo that brings back memories. I was very poor, in 2003, I upgraded a computer from a Slot 1 600mhz Pentium III ... to an ECS board with soldered 1Ghz Pentium 3. Probably a Tualatin, if I remember right.
Here in Brazil, a CD recorder with a DVD player was very common, only after a certain time did the DVD recorder become popular, specifically from the manufacturer LG. I built a lot of computers like this, then the client would buy the recorder and use the old drive just to read the DVD, so the recorder wouldn't "use up" too much. 👑
ECS was my favorite motherboard brand in the early 2000s - my brother and I built multiple gaming systems over the years using their products. You could get some boards on sale new for less than $50 shipped! Talk about a dream these days. Sure the boards were beyond simple, but they were absolute value leaders of the day IMHO. Great video sir sounds like you're recovered.
I love your videos! It was funny to see something so modern on your channel. Just as a suggestion-for a more professional look, suppress the resolution notifications on your capture device (e.g., 1080p @ 13:24).
I've seen lightning do this to systems back in the day. That's why surge protectors were recommended so much. Looks like the PSU held on just long enough to send the surge through the entire system.
Beige surprise boxes never disappoint, I recently resurrected an Optiplex GX1. This power supply really turned down an entire system, impressive but scary at the same time.
I have boards made by ecs elitegroup and abit, also a logisys psu, though it only has 1 fan but I happen to have a raidmax psu with three fans (model pm-s400w) and it is quite heavy too. I love these videos, getting old mystery systems from wherever and exploring their insides and seeing if they are salvageable. Oh and I love the whole "psu is light so it must be junk" thing, I have some psu's that I don't like to use that are very light, one being very light, and when being used the wires actually get quite warm and are quite thin too..JUNK.
Loved the first system so much! Definitely was expecting a better GPU but that GTX9600 was a beast back in it's time! Love your videos so much. But how on earth is the first comment posted like 9 hours ago and the actual video barely made it to an hour after being uploaded??? That R (RGB vibes xD) was something too. But never expected seeing a grenade cap like that. Anyway i like your vudeos so much have a nuce day... -Aziz
9:20 - Seems like at that time the going trend was to have a CD-RW drive along with a DVD-ROM in another bay. Then they went ahead and incorporated the DVD read feature into the CD-RW drives to save cost then moved onto full DVD-RW as stand alone. All probably driven by cost for OEM's. 44:35 - Might want to check the protection diode on the top right, it might be shorted (to protect itself) If it is you can remove it and it should spin up. If it works try to replace the diode.
Always love your videos. Great set of systems. I love how the game played on the second system. I loved the shut down down sound. I was really pulling for the smiley face system. I liked the happy face and wanted it to resurrect!! As always your sense of humor is the best!
ECS is Elitegroup Computer Systems Also sold as PC Chips back in the day they made some low cost motherboards and a few high end ones also. However mostly known for making very cheap bare bones motherboards. As soon as I saw the chip set heat sink I knew it had to be either PC Chips or ECS they used a very distinctive kind of font on their chipset heatsinks the marking you are looking at on there says PC 400 meaning it can support DDR 400 RAM. Anyhow I built a few socket A computers using an ECS motherboard back in the day the ECS K7S5A to be exact strange thing about that motherboard is they were known to overheat on the chipset as they used double sided thermal tape to secure it on no clip or thermal epoxy so I fixed that by using you guessed it thermal epoxy no more overheating issue anyhow great video and seeing an ECS motherboard really brings back the memories.
Back in the day: AMD AM2 4200+ x2 (now it's a keychain), dual 9600GT's in SLI (originally a 7900GT, which died and eVGA replaced it with a 7950GT), 2GB of Corsair XMS2 800, and an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe. I put on some really bad Arctic Cooling 64 Freezer Pro, which fell of playing Bioshock... which was nice. Oh! And a Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro they were basically giving away at one point because somebody at Newegg ordered 30 cases instead of 3 and for some reason they only got the cards instead of them being bundled with the massive breakout box.
4:40 Many bought opterons for gaming because they were essentially the same as the Athlon64 FX CPUs, just much cheaper. That build is spec-wise very near to what I had in 2005. (with an x850 Pro instead). This one is a nostalgic one for me :)
I'm not sure what that ECS mb model is (looks like a variant of the P4VXASD but those were mostly purple).Some of the cheaper ECS boards used that mass of jumpers to set the type of ram used on each slot. There was a set of 20 (2x10) jumpers per dram slot.
Aha System 3 - That was the same board I bought for my K6-III 450 back in 1998/9, I remember the ALi chipset. I re-used my 64Mb DIMM and 3.6Gb IBM HDD and bought an ATI Rage Pro for it...
That first machine may well have been some document scanning server or something like that instead of a gaming machine. Collecting dust in some office for many years until they finally replaced it with something better.
The first system very much reminds me of my first home build. I started with an Athlon XP 3200, and ended up with a Xeon. I ran it up until I was given a new computer in 2017 or so.
I believe the Zalman was called a Flower. The Opteron was priced the same as a normal cpu but had a lower thermal output and thus better for overclocking
Our second computer had a PCChips board, worked fine through a couple of PSU blowups but sadly it couldn't take a third one lol. The first PC I bought with my own money had a AM2+ ECS board which I actually still own. I loved that platform simply because of the number of CPUs it supported.
Oh my boy got burned ☹️ also, I was so excited when I saw that Opteron system. I always wanted one but couldn’t afford one. The last system I have never seen a south bridge get that hot.
It’s really incredible how power supplies are treated much more seriously now than they were 15-20 years ago. It just makes sense to buy a good power power supply over a cheap one. Especially when the good ones aren’t even much more expensive than the crappy no name brands.
The ECS motherboard is also known for few other names... PCChips M925ALU V5.0 in retroweb looks similar and it has ECS version manual. In the manual it says that those big jumpers are for selecting between DDR and SDR memory slots. It has both sockets in the board.
That is definitely a PC Chips board, likely released right before ECSElitegroup bought them out.
Yep, that red motherboard was part of the "PC Chips Lottery". That garbage thought process started all the way back in the 486 era, afaik. The names that were in that "lottery" were ECS, PC Chips, Amptron, and possibly Shuttle.
@@JVHShack I don't remember Shuttle being part of that bunch, but I do know that Matsonic was included in it.
@@NJRoadfan Nah, PCChips bought Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) and renamed itself like that cause ECS had an better reputation.
PCChips was an OEM manufacturer as well so they made the board for Amptron, Shuttle, Kobian and of course ECS.
@NJRoadfan Yes, it is. Here in Brazil, they were all over the place since they mobos were cheap
the CD burner/dvd combo drives were common in the early 2000s as Straight dvd burners were still quite pricey. eventually prices came down, and these "Combo" drives faded away.
Yeah, besides for some businesses machines, I used the cheap cd burner/dvd-rom drive for reading everything and burning cds. The DVD burner was for burning DVDs only.
Pretty much every consumer Mac made between 2001 and 2003 had those "combo" drives. Apple even called them "combo" drives, with the "super drive" being the dvd-rw ones reserved for the pro-grade Mac's.
Ypu, I remember I had this combo too =)
I have one of these, too. Good for installing an OS back when an OS would fit on a DVD.
Yup yup
That Abit board has a unique feature I wish caught on more - removable sound card.
It was an elegant solution - concentrate the cheap Realtek controller on a small, out of the way PCB and if you want, remove it and add something of your choice. I hate the modern trend of soldering everything into place.
A few things on the first system.
That top slot that looks like a backwards PCI-E x1 is actually an AMR (Audio/Modem riser) connector.
Think of it like an expansion to your rear I/O, so anything plugged in still uses CPU resources, unlike most dedicated expansion cards.
Mentioned in the comments anyway, yeah CD/RW and DVD ROM combo drives were common as DVD burners still cost a fair bit back then, and you required a different laser wavelength to read and write DVDs compared to CDs. You also required a much more powerful laser (More cost) to burn a disk rather than read.
The 'Very High' settings on Crysis is for DX10 so only available if you had both a DX10 card, which the 9600GT is, and Windows Vista or later to run those settings.
The AA (Anti aliasing settings) drained GPU power, best to turn it off or 2x max to have a nice FPS (Frames per second).
I do enjoy the earlier to late 2000's as this was the time when I started getting into PC building, to me an AMD Athlon X2 era and Core 2 Duo system seems relatively recent to me. I have installed Windows XP so many times that I still remember the installation like it was yesterday.
Went looking for this comment haha. No one seems to know what an AMR slot is nowadays. That said, my understanding and experience is they were quite rate even from SIs. I don't believe I ever saw AMR card in the wild while doing occasional repairs personally and in my workplace with SFF PCs.
939 is a bit too new for AMR, looks like a PCIe x1 slot just mounted in a funny place with a nonstandard pinout to me
I really enjoyed this one, maybe because we get to see what a bad power supply can do to a system. It reminds me of how robust PC component design has always been. I wrote my first program in 1968 and have seen it and experienced it all, and I'm in the middle of assembling a super high end PC for a customer. It just amazes me that while there are now billions and billions of transistors and tech in this thing and, as always, it all starts up perfectly and just works. Incredible. Never-ending fun. (I tell my clients it's now impossible to buy components that aren't RGB now. 🙂). Thanks Mike. Love you man!
Thanks! I still can’t believe that PSU failed so spectacularly. Sure wish I would have gotten to it first. That footage would have been priceless and those components would still be alive!
@@miketech1024 That PSU must have sent some serious voltage down the 12V rail when it failed.
I experienced a PSU capacitor explosion before. I saw a flash coming out of the fan exhaust at the back and smoke and it turned off immediately but did not do any damage on the computer itself. I just replaced the PSU and everything worked again. I guess I was just lucky.
0:30 yea those were everywhere. DVD burners were still very expensive for a short bit in late 90s, early 2000s. So they tacked on a CD burner to a DVD-ROM and there's more budget option.
I had quite a few of them from upgrades for family/friend machines after DVD burners became super cheap. They were all pretty cheaply made too so none of them really lasted.
Blu ray went through a similar phase too, had blu ray readers that could burn DVD/CDs.
Oh yeah, all copper Zalman flower on an Opteron 180! I had something extremely similar, they were chosen for their insane Overclockability
Same. I had an Opteron 148 (2.2ghz) @ 2.8ghz under an Arctic Freezer 64 Pro in my gaming PC. Fond memories of tuning that platform.
Man an ABIT AN8 Ultra in the wild. It is an amazing motherboard from circa 2005. It has 4 SATA2, an Nvidia nForce 4 Ultra chipset, uGuru BIOS uitility, A LOT of fan control and PC stats. I own this board with a modest 64 3500+ for now. That board is a keeper I tell you. Quite valuable too. btw I knew instantly what 04 is. It is memory. I had issues with a 64 3200+ and its memory controller once :D
It is a very nice board! A great example of mid-2000s gaming exuberance.
@@miketech1024 Sure is! By the way I love your videos. My favourite thing to do is watch one of your videos on a relaxing evening :D
Man I should dig my old one out, think I used Athalon 64 3400+ on mine with Corsair RAM, eVGA 7800 GTX then a 9800 GTX , all in a enermax case, played many 100's of hours of games on that setup.
@@charleswp71 Very nice rig. I just got a free Audigy SE 7.1 for mine. I didn't have the ABIT AudioMax 7.1 card so I had to use an old Crystal CS 4280. I also paired it with a 9500GT 1GB but I plan on putting an X1900XTX and an X2 4800+ in there at some point :D
I miss Abit. I still have one of the last socket 775 boards they ever made. Great video! Thank you!!
You have no idea how many of these videos have played in the background while I work, with me chuckling when I hear you dealing with old familiar problems. From one Mike to another, thank you sir.
Side note: Peelander-Z was right.... "So many Mike"
28:56 searching the bios string at the bottom of the screen returns a board: PCChips M925LR. Those big jumper clusters are for switching between SDR and DDR RAM.
Came here to say this, some older motherboards had 2 slots for ddr, 2 for sdram, and big jumpers to switch mode with
The 2000s were a great time to be building PC's. I can remember building my first ever pc based on an Asus A8V socket 939, Athlon*2, 4gb of ram, and some kind of Radeon GPU. Spent a small fortune on it, and it never let me down. Couldn't bring myself to get rid of it, so it's gathering dust 😀
I still have "gathering dust" systems going back to 286 based, but those were pre builts. My first self built one was a 486 33 in a big tall tower case with a door in front of the drive bays..
It has 4 mb of ram plus two more from my Intel Advantage card from the 286.
I payed a lot for the case so I still have it, though it won't fit any atx motherboard since it is AT only.
It is hard to throw away something that cost 1000 dollars.
That did not count the video card and sound card.
yup got burned like that a bunch of times when testing PCB's at work, and i always appreciate the celsius conversions ;)
Mike I really enjoy your videos ! I'm 67 so you know I've been around since punch cards. I had those back in college. But I've been around for all the tech up until now. Built three or four Heathkit computers. It's a long story but I just wanted to let you know I like your sense of humor a lot and these videos are so entertaining.
Thanks!
Hey, when bending back those broken clips like on that floppy drive face plate, they're normally made of ABS plastic, so instead of super glue, use a little acetone. It will fuse the plastic together.
Thanks!
Ive used that same abs trick for a ton of motorcycle plastics
Oh wow that last PSU sure did some carnage… We missed on the only OS exploration because it killed the only hard drive in this video. I guess it’s pretty lucky that some parts like the CPU and floppy survived, at least it wasn’t a total loss I guess. It probably wasn’t a fun day for the previous owner when that thing blew up.
“So, I don’t know why it’s complaining. I guess it just needed me to acknowledge it?” And just like that, you’re a professional RUclipsr 😂. Hehehe. Another fun video-thanks!
That power supply would have seen more than just a crapacitor let rip if someone witnessed its demise. Code Brown.
I still can’t believe those caps blew up like that. I’ve seen them vent, leak, blow the can off the base, but never seen one become a mini grenade!
Either the can wasn’t properly perforated or the pressure built up way faster than it could vent. I’ve never seen one explode like that either. Shame it took most of the system with it.
The only cap failure I've seen was on my grandfather's old pc, all the caps leaked all over, though I've intentionally popped a really really small one just because I wanted to.
@@miketech1024 staight unregulated mains does that to caps
The vrm's and resistors on the mobo saved the CPU and Ram from an unfortunate Ac voltage injection. 12v components have no chance at 120 unfortunately. This was a very common failure back in the day PSU's weren't built to "Fail-Safe" they failed almost exclusively catastrophically.
Funny thing with the older power supplies. They would fry before blowing the fuse inside of it. Not much of a problem with normal ATX power supplies. The ones with proprietary hookups, like Dell. Yeah! Cool to see you actually playing a game and being halfway good at it. Thanks for making my Saturday morning.
For that PSU to fail so catastrophically, I can't even imagine how that much power made it to the low-voltage side...
I love watching you tear these old systems down. They instantly reminded me how glad IDE is not still a thing.
The late Rudolph Loew's AHCICD.SYS handles most AHCI controllers in DOS pretty well, and Jack Ellis's XDVD2.SYS can handle pretty much any enhanced IDE interface over SATA in DOS.
Thanks! SATA in MS-DOS will be a first for me. I was a bit pressed for time this week, so couldn't look into it.
i love that you use a different AOL trial disc every time you test a cd rom drive.
S1 - I'm glad you answered the "Can it run Crysis" meme!
S2 - That's one degraded thermal pad! Xtremely cheap power supply!
S3 - L&C clearly stands for Light & Crap because it took an entire system with it! You could cook eggs on that South Bridge...
Seeing Crysis run on that machine brightened my day more than it probably should have LOL.
The 2nd PC according to its bios string seems to be a PCChips M925LR V1.1/V1.3
I love seeing this older "gaming" computers, reminds me of my early pc building/repair days, graduated from that to travelling the country repairing and setting up cnc machines and industrial robots, feel like i owe my career to my computer hobby.
I work on server systems, these DVD/CD-RW drives are still pretty common on those even on systems manufactured in the mid 2010's. I enjoy your work, keep up the great work!
Pity the PSU took out the GA-5AX motherboard. It was one of the best Super socket 7 boards around at the time.
Always enjoy these, Mike. Thank you... brings back memories.
Heh, I remember those CD burner / DVD reader drives. IIRC they were cheaper to get at the time than the CD / DVD burner combos.
@ 33:57 "Why would they do it like that?" Belt and suspenders, Mike. Belt *AND* suspenders. 😉
These y2k computers gives me joy everytime i see them.
Thank you for this very entertaining video! ❤
Always happy for new videos :) Keep up the good work!
Interesting & good to watch one of your Vidz where you’re actually tinkering with Hardware that’s not as Retro as you normally show, Great Video all the same! 🙂🇬🇧
I bought a Joblot of those Intel Heatsink/Fans off eBay at: 24:53, They all came with CPUs in the retail packaging & I didn’t realise their was so many and only gave the Seller £20 if memory serves me correct! 😂
I would rate the ECS Motherboard that’s in System 2 the same as ASRock, I feel that they are both budget crappy boards, I may rethink that with ASRock as I’ve been hearing good things about them lately,
I’ve always like the Pioneer CD / DVD Burners as in System 2,
My Brother had that very Case in System 3 which I had when he upgraded but ended up either Selling it or Binning it many years ago, Probably when I moved in 2015…
@43:30 Those ALi super socket 7 boards were great. RIP.
Cheers Mike 👍🏻 Informative as ever. Look forward to the next upload.
I have a vague recollection of a DOS optical driver that had SATA support, I'll see if I can find it again, it was quite useful back in the day
I have seen that board before. It's an ECS P4VMM2 V5.0 or V5.0A
With that one you could make the choice between two types of ram, but you couldn't mix it. If I remember correctly, the jumperblocks were mean for the selection of the ram-type.
In the year 2020, it’s at least y2k compliant? Keep up the good work “guns”, loving your videos!
@32:10 its PC Chips PC400 (PCChips-M925), the jumper along the side are for selecting between the DDR and SDR ram slots.
@1:00 Abit AN8 Ultra Mobo!
Had an Abit AN8 SLI with Optron 180 as well. great system. Still have it around.
About the jumpers, for a similar model I found:
DDR1, DDR2:
Short all J2A/B/C/D and
J3A/B/C/D pins
DIMM1, DIMM2:
Open all J2A/B/C/D and
J3A/B/C/D pins
Thank you for being so detailed in your videos. I actually own the HP Pavilion 8240 as well, and I was missing the original floppy drive. Since you said the part number in your video, I was able to go online and order one 🙂
The CD-RW/DVD-ROM drives were very common in the early 2000's. DVD-ROM drives were still quite pricey. The prices came down, so a lot of people went for the combi CD-RW/DVD-ROM drives rather than having multiple drives. For me I had a CD-ROM and a CD-RW/DVD-ROM rather than having a single drives for CD-RW and DVD-ROM.
Early Opterons were highly sought after for overclocking. also that board uses an nvidia chipset, which explains the audio
PC 2s motherboard appears to be a PC Chips M925LR
I recognised that heatsink looking like a PC Chips, and a quick google for PC Chip Pentium 4 it came up with that weird array of jumpers.
love your channel! i've got dozens of beige boxes lying around.
Hi Mike.
Man o man, I wish I had the same resources as you...
Great video, always enjoy them.
Thanks.
32:30 Looks like the case i had in my childhood, except the buttons were white and it was mini tower
Awesome video Mike as always 👍🏻
You should write an obituary for the gigabyte board 😂
System two's mainboard is more commonly known under the PC Chips brand. especially in that early era of expensive Wilamette P4's many pc builders cut cost by installing these low end mainboards, often 30 to 40% cheaper then A-brand offerings from eg, ASUS.
I went through a few combi drives back in the day, i thought they were fairly common !!!
1:45 Zalman 7000cu cooler, the original all-copper cooler. Those things were beasts back then, I had one of those cooling an Opteron 180 dual core in 2005. They switched to the AlCu model (alum/copper) shortly after due to their all coppers oxidizing so the original is harder to find these days.
The LG DVD-ROM/CD-RW was quite common, at least in Canada. When I worked in a small town store, we sold quite a few, every month.
The ECS board ... whoo that brings back memories. I was very poor, in 2003, I upgraded a computer from a Slot 1 600mhz Pentium III ... to an ECS board with soldered 1Ghz Pentium 3. Probably a Tualatin, if I remember right.
Here in Brazil, a CD recorder with a DVD player was very common, only after a certain time did the DVD recorder become popular, specifically from the manufacturer LG. I built a lot of computers like this, then the client would buy the recorder and use the old drive just to read the DVD, so the recorder wouldn't "use up" too much. 👑
ECS was my favorite motherboard brand in the early 2000s - my brother and I built multiple gaming systems over the years using their products. You could get some boards on sale new for less than $50 shipped! Talk about a dream these days. Sure the boards were beyond simple, but they were absolute value leaders of the day IMHO. Great video sir sounds like you're recovered.
DVD Reader/ CD Burner a good buy at the time. Bang of 2 drives for one unit. Predates the DVD burners.
42:13 ahh, careful buddy ! 🔥
Abit was the best back in the day, I have a few of my old Abit 939 motherboards still. I love them
I love your videos! It was funny to see something so modern on your channel.
Just as a suggestion-for a more professional look, suppress the resolution notifications on your capture device (e.g., 1080p @ 13:24).
I've seen lightning do this to systems back in the day. That's why surge protectors were recommended so much. Looks like the PSU held on just long enough to send the surge through the entire system.
Beige surprise boxes never disappoint, I recently resurrected an Optiplex GX1.
This power supply really turned down an entire system, impressive but scary at the same time.
Awesome retro PC Video as well👍👏👏👏
Thanks!
Thank you so much!!
love these videos! Thank you
Great video as usual.
I have boards made by ecs elitegroup and abit, also a logisys psu, though it only has 1 fan but I happen to have a raidmax psu with three fans (model pm-s400w) and it is quite heavy too. I love these videos, getting old mystery systems from wherever and exploring their insides and seeing if they are salvageable. Oh and I love the whole "psu is light so it must be junk" thing, I have some psu's that I don't like to use that are very light, one being very light, and when being used the wires actually get quite warm and are quite thin too..JUNK.
Oh, the DVD rom - CD burner thing :D
It was in our home PC [P4 soc.478] in around 2003 / 2004, it was called a combo drive
I think our was a Toshiba
Nice machines, nice commentary and nice editing. Enjoyed that!
CD Burners + DVD read were called COMBO DRIVES. had a few of these in Notebooks. :D
That first system was a damn decent gaming machine for its era, nice find. That makes me curious as to the specs of your personal PC.
Loved the first system so much! Definitely was expecting a better GPU but that GTX9600 was a beast back in it's time! Love your videos so much. But how on earth is the first comment posted like 9 hours ago and the actual video barely made it to an hour after being uploaded???
That R (RGB vibes xD) was something too.
But never expected seeing a grenade cap like that. Anyway i like your vudeos so much have a nuce day...
-Aziz
Thanks! Videos get pre-released to patrons, so they're able to comment before videos go public.
9:20 - Seems like at that time the going trend was to have a CD-RW drive along with a DVD-ROM in another bay. Then they went ahead and incorporated the DVD read feature into the CD-RW drives to save cost then moved onto full DVD-RW as stand alone. All probably driven by cost for OEM's.
44:35 - Might want to check the protection diode on the top right, it might be shorted (to protect itself) If it is you can remove it and it should spin up. If it works try to replace the diode.
Always love your videos. Great set of systems. I love how the game played on the second system. I loved the shut down down sound. I was really pulling for the smiley face system. I liked the happy face and wanted it to resurrect!! As always your sense of humor is the best!
32:20 the more basic the better Mike!
It's not side vents that speed it up, it's the "Go Faster" stickers, like "Intel Inside", etc.
ECS is Elitegroup Computer Systems Also sold as PC Chips back in the day they made some low cost motherboards and a few high end ones also. However mostly known for making very cheap bare bones motherboards. As soon as I saw the chip set heat sink I knew it had to be either PC Chips or ECS they used a very distinctive kind of font on their chipset heatsinks the marking you are looking at on there says PC 400 meaning it can support DDR 400 RAM. Anyhow I built a few socket A computers using an ECS motherboard back in the day the ECS K7S5A to be exact strange thing about that motherboard is they were known to overheat on the chipset as they used double sided thermal tape to secure it on no clip or thermal epoxy so I fixed that by using you guessed it thermal epoxy no more overheating issue anyhow great video and seeing an ECS motherboard really brings back the memories.
Back in the day: AMD AM2 4200+ x2 (now it's a keychain), dual 9600GT's in SLI (originally a 7900GT, which died and eVGA replaced it with a 7950GT), 2GB of Corsair XMS2 800, and an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe. I put on some really bad Arctic Cooling 64 Freezer Pro, which fell of playing Bioshock... which was nice.
Oh! And a Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro they were basically giving away at one point because somebody at Newegg ordered 30 cases instead of 3 and for some reason they only got the cards instead of them being bundled with the massive breakout box.
4:40 Many bought opterons for gaming because they were essentially the same as the Athlon64 FX CPUs, just much cheaper. That build is spec-wise very near to what I had in 2005. (with an x850 Pro instead). This one is a nostalgic one for me :)
I'm not sure what that ECS mb model is (looks like a variant of the P4VXASD but those were mostly purple).Some of the cheaper ECS boards used that mass of jumpers to set the type of ram used on each slot. There was a set of 20 (2x10) jumpers per dram slot.
Exactly. I also had a similar ECS motherboard, socket 462 with an AMD Duron processor
Thanks! That's a new one for me.
@@cristianrece7478 Duron, Athlon, Turion, Sempron, Opteron, Phenom... so many cool AMD names from back in the day.
Thank you for making these videos
You bent one of the pins on the AMD K6 CPU while you were removing the warranty sticker. Also that PSU was pure NSFW lol
Aha System 3 - That was the same board I bought for my K6-III 450 back in 1998/9, I remember the ALi chipset. I re-used my 64Mb DIMM and 3.6Gb IBM HDD and bought an ATI Rage Pro for it...
Those old opterons were very overclockable!
24:30 is a PC Chips motherboard, cant find which one thus specifically is
That first machine may well have been some document scanning server or something like that instead of a gaming machine. Collecting dust in some office for many years until they finally replaced it with something better.
The first system very much reminds me of my first home build. I started with an Athlon XP 3200, and ended up with a Xeon. I ran it up until I was given a new computer in 2017 or so.
I believe the Zalman was called a Flower. The Opteron was priced the same as a normal cpu but had a lower thermal output and thus better for overclocking
That ALi chipset became really popular now for socket7 retro PC-s. It is really good chipset.
Our second computer had a PCChips board, worked fine through a couple of PSU blowups but sadly it couldn't take a third one lol. The first PC I bought with my own money had a AM2+ ECS board which I actually still own. I loved that platform simply because of the number of CPUs it supported.
Nice to see that the K6 wasn't an AFR model.
the AN8 Ultra was the motherboard I always wanted back then :D
btw, cd-rw/dvd-rom combos were common back then, I have a samsung one laying around
fynally new video! i really like your videos and keep it up g! (:
Oh my boy got burned ☹️ also, I was so excited when I saw that Opteron system. I always wanted one but couldn’t afford one. The last system I have never seen a south bridge get that hot.
"PC-CHIPS motherboards" (the red one) ... Low-cost hardware brand, quite popular around 2001 / 2002 ... 😉
Combo drives were very common with Apple systems in the early to mid 2000’s. Hope you’re feeling much better post-flu!!
Thanks!
The second board is a PC Chips (aka ECS) M925 PC400 P4M266A. The weird jumpers at the edge are to select whether your using DDR or SDR RAM modules. .
Great video as always! I do wonder, what post analyser card do you use? I found so many cheap-llooking ones!
Thanks! I use this one: amzn.to/3FYVWuu
@@miketech1024 Thank you!