If possible, depending on what's still in one piece or not, would love to see a pc built with as many of these retro parts as you could fit. Building the goofiest looking rig with the most bombasticly 90's/early 00's guts.
@Nunya Business Well, he was apparently a bit of a primadonna asshole to his people, I think he's chilled out a bit based on how people act around him now
@@Nate_the_Nobody he, and other LMG teammembers have confirmed that his behavior on video is different from his actual behavior, he's p chill to them, especially if you see what projects he allows, most other channels wouldn't even try them.
@@Nate_the_Nobody I think he's more like one of those guys that pops off a little in the moment when they're angry and immediately feels bad about it. I remember them telling a story about how a new-ish guy screwed something up and Linus'response was "you're fired." The guy didn't know if he was being serious or not so he just kept working and Linus later apologized and confirmed that he was not actually fired.
Right? I gaurantee everyone here who's been around as long as this shots been around, have at *least* one box full of old parts, cables, gadgets and such held on to Just In Case You Need It.
3:36 - be real careful trying to run a lathe with a usb to parallel adapter. Every last one of them was notorious for being utterly useless for anything other than printers. Many of the pieces of software that existed at the time manipulated the control registers of the parallel port directly and were extremely sensitive to timing. Running it over USB completely breaks all of these applications because the timing isn't guaranteed at all. I have some old parallel port microcontroller programmers for AVR, PIC, etc. and they uses bits in the parallel port to drive clock lines among other things.
No one’s probably gonna read this, but the Zalman analog 5.1 mixer was probably for the Zalman 5.1 headset which was available, there were 3 speaker drivers in each ear cup!! To give you that surround feeling!
Yeah! The first version uses 5.1 audio jacks, and it later became USB. You could really hear the speakers in the back and front, but virtual surround was more practical so the product didn't take off. At that time, sound cards were taking off like the Creative Audigy 2, and they made a huge difference with surround speakers, which were also trending (Logitech Z560)
And yet even 20 years ago, it was trivially easy to find the latest TV shows on the Internet, because enough people managed to successfully record stuff. They failed successfully.
@@Darenz-cg9zg na. Just focused their attention on avoiding piracy (encrypted their signal, added location software to the cable boxes, lobbied congress to make certain policies, etc)
I used to work for Comcast and ya, can confirm this. Not only to try to make them obsolete but to block/restrict their usage by REQUIRING you to either rent their cable box or rent their cable card to get ANY kind of signal through the coax. For a time it did work but that only bought them ~5/10 years. Now even their cable boxes are streaming media devices. lulz.
Everything about the cpu guard had me laughing. Especially since an MSI update decided to turn my custom cpu fan curves to off a few months ago and I only caught it when I noticed the sheer heat coming off during a Phasmo game. Could have used that lovely tone.
I actually really like the idea of the CPU guard as someone who 1) uses AIO water coolers, and 2) has had pumps die... Like if they made a modern one that does PWM and either 1) had a black PCB or 2) actually used the ground to PSU so I could hide it in the case basement, I'd buy it
I don't know if the cpu guard® would have worked, seems to kick of when it detect an up in amperage or voltage due to stuck fan, and not if the motherboard isn't sendinding a spin up signal. Though maybe it could
@@Xitrial yeah it does basicy that so when a fan stops due to how the fan works it will build up a charge trying to start but if it doesn't start it can pull almost double what it suppose to and can burn up due to that fact but most fans nowadays are either too small or are built to handle the heat.
"Oh, I legitimately might need that for my lathe." That's why we keep piles of old tech around. For that one instance in ten years of randomly needing one thing.
If you work in manufacturing, old tech that kids think iS funny and stupid...will still get used years and years and years later. Windows XP is still used in a few machines where I work for example, and to service them, USB 2.0 is or native serial ports are important to have on the engineer's laptops for easy serial cable connections to virtual machines of win XP (usb 3.0 not natively supported), so USB to serial cables can be quickly employed instead of training 30+ engineers complicated or time consuming work arounds. (multiple switches of eithernet to usb was our ITs "solution" to the problem they created).
You don't even have to work in manufacturing. 5-10 year old lab instruments from big manufacturers typically have serial ports and maybe a freakish RS488 chungus connector - native USB only shows up on the newest models, but those run a freakin' operating system, and nobody wants to wait 2 minutes for a multimeter to boot. Therefore, lower end electronics RnD labs still buy USB to serial adapters by the dozen.
I love the manufacturing and lab folks who are like "Needing a random weirdo adapter? That's just Tuesday for us." No sarcasm, all respect for the hard work you guys do.
I love how Linus is like a kid who got his childhood dream in the entire video.... and then proceeds to understand that he no longer needs any of these by throwing them all into the pile
The same energy from Dave2D Optimus Prime review video! Who knew one uber cool toy and reliving Thermaltake crap quality/expensive products can shine like Xmas spirit. Merry Xmas/Happy new year
@@superchickenlips1 Yes that's why I commented. He thought it was a keyboard brush. It's a CRT monitor brush. CRT monitors are made out of glass, not covered by plastic film like today's displays. They used electrons to show an image which caused a negative charge on the display glass which attracted dust. A soft brush(I have one of those, they are really soft) can't damage a glass CRT.
Watching Linus just genuinely geek out instead of just kinda rolling along with a script and talking for the sake of making the video long enough is always a good time
"back when i was ghostwriting for hardware kanuks" I'm starting to realize I want a full biography of Linus. They're even got a store to sell it on already 😄
3:42 we actually had those things in school in like 2004. So everybody (or every workstation) had its own HDD so you could work on your PC (including network settings and wild stuff) and the next user wouldn't be affected
I had a stack of them too. They were really useful for e.g. swapping the OS drive in a system without having to open it up. With hot-swappable SATA they became far more useful, of course. Best way to make a backup is to a HDD which you can then pop out of the system and store somewhere safe :)
I'll bet we had 5-10 of these when I was a kid. My dad always had different operating systems installed for weird old hardware comparability. We had one for "games" that would would swap in. Ours also had a lock on it so that we could be grounded. I quickly leaned that you could just either unplug it, or remove it and pop it open to defeat the lock. These were super common, I remember my dad buying one at Walmart at one point, and that was before Walmart really had a computer section.
Everytime he just tossed something to the floor I had to fight the urge to scramble out of my chair!! Not only did I want some of that stuff, I have current need for one or two of those items! Having been an engineer who has had to surf E-Bay on far too many occasions for bits and bobs of older tech that had suddenly become "mission critical" for an entire company, sometimes paying multiple times the original cost... this video was almost a horror show as much as a humorous stroll down memory lane!
@Edward Paulsen It made my skin crawl to watch the cavalier way he treated this stuff, I have a half-assed collection of quirky old computer stuff (Mostly odd old mice, one of them straps to your finger and another has a built-in phone). And some old computer hardware (As you said) is needed for practical reasons, a few years ago I fixed an old CNC lathe that used a 486 as its controller. The owner didn't what to upgrade or modify it he just wanted it to work again.
Would love to see more content like this, watching you either laugh or geek out at all this old tech, not to mention explaining to a degree how they function is really freaking entertaining.
This brought me back down memory lane being an enthusiast in the early 2000’s. Flimsy molex y-splitters, the cheesy cheap packaging, everything being creaky. I still have one of those NV Coolers installed on a GPU in a MAME box.
Why am I enjoying this so much. It's making me feel old It's making me feel like my pc is outdated It makes me sad of how much fun I had when I was younger doing pc builds It also makes me miss actually building PCs and not just repairing them. But it makes me so happy
I was actually thinking CPU Guard might not be a bad look for someone with an old AIO (crapshoot when it fails) or an opaque loop. (it doesn't really need PWM cause you want it on full all the time)
I have an preaty old system wich i game on. It hase like an intel 3570k and an as rock b 75 mainboard. The System is from 2012 and it has to run preaty fast to run Borderlands 3 for example. my amd rx480 just burned, so i have to use my old geforce gtx 750 ti. i need to run active ram cooling, my system would stutter and bluescreen in like 10 min just in windows idle. so activ cooling is a thing, for me, after all^^.
@@92kosta Those small fans are a crap shot. Some are quiet and a few stays that way, but most either starts out quiet and quickly get noisy or they start out noisy and grow worse. They all die way to quickly. There are quality fans that small, but there is little chance you'll see those on product like these.
3:27 I bought exactly this adapter in the exactly same packaging like two months ago. I used it to connect a 20-years old HP printer that already outlived 3 other printers in the office.
@@lordlundar LOL, well by then you'll want to replace the print server probably with something supporting 10 gig and WiFi 42025 anyway. I have a few HPs in the basement I wonder if they're the same model? Are we talking laser or ink? A well cared for printer will last, unless of course it's a HP from 2010 onwards. I've had terrible issues with them, IT support.... And personal experience.
3:52 this was my time. I had two of these removable hard drive enclosures, for quickly swapping out hard drives. Also good for archive drives so you could remove the drives to reduce wear since they didn't spin up every time you booted the PC.
4:00 I have to add the greatest use case of all times to this product! Just buy 2 of them, mount two hdds in the sleds, mount one of the thingies in your computer, bam: You have basically two independent computers for two different people. That's how my dad set up our computer so I could mess around with my os on my own hdd and he could just remove my os drive and plug in his if he wanted to work on something. GENIUS
Another commenter mentioned that this is what they did in college back when individual computers weren't a thing. Every student had his and could just plug it to the schools computer.
And I still have one of those. Even have the adapter for power supply. Great thing, if I may say. Just that plastic casing became so brittle and changed it's originally ugly gray color to even uglier gray color. But still works as a charm and is even in use for testing some old PATA HDDs because that's the only way to connect them to the test bench, cuz I cant find a working motherboard that old with a working PATA slot and all other components working fine. This came, if I remember correctly, with an ATA to SATA connector, or I just bought that separately. And yes, there are still people that are using their old HDDs with ATA connectors and even have some (for them) precious stuff on those.
Buying out ewaste so it can forever be entombed on a warehouse shelf like God intended, the late 90s early 2000s we're so insane with the garbage they made it's almost impressive how dumb some of it is.
While at the same time a lot of stuff was amazing and its sad it disappears. eg. the TV tuner / recording cards, external hard drive bays, multi-card readers, or laptop expansion cards. Especially those expansion cards, today Linus invested in that laptop company since it allowed for 4 crappy expansion cards with a single port in each, while back in the days, PCMCIA cards allowed 4 usb ports in each card, and laptops had one and sometimes two of those on top of normal IO.
@@hubertnnn Agreed, expresscard was basically the precursor to Thunderbolt, with the added benefit of some cards being able to sit flush inside the laptop chassis. You name it, expresscard likely had it - not only USB port expansion, but also sound cards and even external GPUs! And sure expresscard might have less bandwidth than Thunderbolt, but I'm far more confident about its durability in contrast to fragile Thunderbolt ports.
@@Rainbow__cookie You can still buy new cases with 5.25" bays, it just restrict your options a bit. Fractal Define 7 comes with one and Define 7 XL has two, and those are some good high-end cases. Also, many cheap cases (read: bottom-of-the-barrel DIYPC cases) have 5.25" bays.
@@TitaniumTurbine Come on, those aren't some priceless ancient artifacts, it's cheap Chinese shit from 20 years ago that has no use to anyone outside of showing it in a video like that. What difference throwing it makes? Not like anyone would have any use for it nowadays. Those are some cool older PC gadgets but they are still 10$ mass produced hunks of plastic that are obsolete but not old enough to be remarkable in any way.
It's easy to shit on TT after all this years, but that was the norm back then. EVERYONE had similar shit on the market mostly rebranded and sometimes tweaked from some other company and TT at that point was still trying to succeed , thanks to that they made it , and they do make a lot of excellent products, thats why they are still around and kicking ass apart from other niche brands that had a hard focus on excellence which was expensive for a lot of consumers and they were gobbled up by bigger companies, or cease to exists. I mean kudos to them for trying , but market or production was not yet ready for anything similar we have on sale this days, but You do have to remember, stuff he mostly looked at here were on sale up to 16 years ago , and most of them have same design and production runs for over 30 years with small improvements or variations. I do have a lot of TT products some of them are great , some of them are questionable at best, but considering those questionable were in range of 5$-10$ items I'm not complaining.
@@idimidodjimi6760 I dunno... Some of their products are legitimately good. I really like some of their cases and fans. I like the design of some of the water cooling stuff. But, I'm really skittish about investing any real money into some of their performance products because, while some of them look really nice, I don't have much confidence that they're actually engineered well. Lots of reports of leaking water cooling stuff, wire connections being failure-prone, that sort of thing. IMO, the only thing worse than a product that was made too cheaply, is one that was made too cheaply but _looks_ like it was made well. At least if you buy something cheap, you know what you're getting. If I pay real money for something that looks the part, and it's junk, then I feel like I'm being swindled.
I have had a TT Water 3.0 AIO for... 4? years now, no issue, no noise, great performance for my 8700k... Maybe older stuff was shit, but modern day stuff is good and fine.
My dad used to make the remote backups for his small work server (2-3 users, one server) on such a device! I remember him driving the small cassettes (in his case it was not VHS, but dedicated smaller cassettes) home from the office each week in the late 90s, start of 2000s :) "Automatic" scheduled backups each week, if I recall correctly each cassette was 60GB? I don't know anymore, but it was huge amounts for the time :D we may still have some around at home as well as the fire-resistant box for the backups. That's something quite unusual to recall reading YT comments, thanks!
i remember seeing i think LGR get to visit an actual warehouse full of old hardware. it's ridiculous how far technology has come and how much old stuff is just relegated to garbage status despite having their moment in history.
It’s Computer reset and it had allowed so many videos to be made because they where either stupidly rare, expensive or both and even prototypes and one of Sierra’s bugtesting units with tester comments.
@@hxrxlx LGR initial video ruclips.net/video/rvM82T3C2Ik/видео.html Sierra ruclips.net/video/Z-VBITW94zI/видео.html Prototypes units ruclips.net/video/Wh2OCBZpzZ8/видео.html
I love that he makes his colleagues do all this extra work to split open copper plate, and also i love him fixing the manufacture defect, all the extra work def does get noticed
I used those hard drive racks at 3:40 all the time. I'd by them on sale. Some had quick swap capability some didn't. They were damned expensive if you couldn't get them on sale. I still use a couple for data storage in my server to quick swap drives when i need to access archived data on old drives. I'll keep using them until i swap my archived drives to sata. Good usage of old ide drives instead of throwing them out.
Same for me, i used them mostly because we also used them in school. Each student had a drive in a sled, were the school didn’t have to maintain or clean PC’s because you always had your own OS and crap installed on your own harddrive. All the computers in the school were equiped with the same hardware (Pentium 3 1GHZ, 128MB, onboard graphics and 100mbit LAN/Internet) - Yes we had a 1gbit internet at the school anno 2000. I also had one at home to read data from the drive when doing my homework. Stupid expensive for a student but it helped us in the long term, you always had your data on hand.
I had three of them in my tower, oh so long ago, only the top one was wired. Two of them were for me and my wife had the other one. Turn the computer off plug in your drive to the active port and reboot, three computers in one and no one messing up anyone else's stuff.
Currently, I have a hot-swap drive bay. No enclosure needed on the drive. Allows me to use internal drives as giant USB sticks at full speeds. It's fucking sick, and I hate that case manufacturers are stripping out the 5 1/4'' bays all in the name of adding (generally) unnecessary fans. The extra airflow may be great for overclockers but for everyone else who's just doing homework or office work or playing Fortnite, it's a gross waste of space.
I remember those 5 1/4" racks. I studied computer science way back when having a laptop as a student wasn't a thing yet. All computers at school had such a hard drive bay and all students got their own "mobile" hard drive that you could slide in the computer and boot from to have your own stuff ready to go. Really weird in hindsight.
Still got one, I use it to push monthly backups to the stack of harddrives I replaced for being too small. It even does hotswapping for internal drives, but there's a really unpleasant winding down sound unless it's sleeping when the drive is pulled.
I had a bunch of them at our web hosting, and server sites way back. Except ours were aluminum and used 3 thermal pads for vibration and cooling the HDD. Each enclosure also had its own little fan. We had some later models that were even hot-swappable. I'd still be using them for my personal server / PC if they had SATA versions. As of right now, I just have a Noctua fan blowing over my HDD stack.
3:49 In Poland, those 5,25" HDD drive bays were extremely popular. Almost everyone had at least one of the disks in one of those - thus being able to go to a friend and copy any content from him instead of wasting money on CD-R disks (not even mentioning floppy disks). Still have some of them in my old PCs in a basement...
I remember always removing my HDD from inside of my computer and walk to some friend with that, I wish we had such bays back in the day, external HDDs were so slow thru USB that it was better just connect it directly to IDE or later sata inside of your computer. :-)
And there were two standards of these, completely incompatible, and an eternal holy war which one was better - one had some protective circuitry so you wouldn't fry your drive if you seated it poorly, but some drives just refused to work with it, the other was just a dumb IDE pass-through, so it worked with every drive but you had to make sure it plugged in well, and there was eternal messing with switching the drives because you had a bay that wouldn't take my carrier, but your carrier wouldn't work with my drive...
Those drive bays were common in NZ too, I had a few. It did make drive upgrades easier and could be useful for backups. But before autodetect IDE they were a hassle for regular changes as you had to stop in your bios each time.
@@blakjaknz oh my, you just reminded me how painful it was to input number of plates, heads and cylinders everytime you've connected a hard drive 😆 And how breathtaking it was to see first mainboards with IDE autodetect ☺️ With those removable drives it was a pain in the ass when you had to switch drive from MASTER to SLAVE of vice versa...
It was a fun time. No off the shelf parts. So people used car heater radiators for their watercooling. They made their own waterblocks etc. You have phase change systems from Vapochill cooling CPU's to -20 degrees. And people who made it themselves from old refrigerator parts. You had no cases like today with spaces for fans so people modded their own cases. Painted them and made holes for fans etc. You could unlock the multiplier on Athlon CPU's with a pencil. Nowadays you just order part XYZ that is latest greatest and done. I remember having what I think was a Pentium 4 system in a huge tower case, water cooled. Can't remember the video card, either GeForce3 or ATI R8500. The connectors on the waterblock started leaking and short circuited & fried the whole system.
@@jiyunsun It genuinely was exciting though. I had a dual Celeron system at that time. Overclocking was a lot of fun. Lapping the celeron 466 cpu's was terrifying. A few years later I had one of the athlons that you could 'pencil trick' into overclocking.
Those removable harddrives used to be a big deal in the military when we had to pull out the hard drives and put them in a safe. I think I also have a few of those old fans somewhere, they were the only manufacturer to make non standard fans. It's also hilarious to see hoe bad the old water cooling stuff was. I'd love to see a review on the old thermaltake water cooling kits. I had the one that you mounted in the front 5 1/4 HDD slots with a tiny radiator. No wonder that old Phenom II died
I had a Thermaltake water cooling kit, after 6 months a couple of the metal connectors rusted away and everything became black, clogged with rust. That was the last Thermaltake thing I bought.
@@victorstratan Mine lasted for 4 years and was still running when the CPU died but I had that CPU pushed to the limit and didn't monitor the temps properly because I didn't know any better
I still have a thermaltake watercooling block for a 3.5" hdd, its huge haha, it came as part of the "Big Water" cooling kit (which I was still mostly running until last month), green UV reactive tubes, big orange 120mm fans and the chonkyest radiators ever
Linus that "drive bay" you said "this is even before me" is actually a swappable hard drive caddy. And they were brilliant. The idea was you can have one hard drive for business work , one for gaming or if you have multiple people sharing a computer, they all had their person install/hard drive. Just slide one in, turn the key. Unturn key, pull it out and in goes a different one
the removable hard drive was the shit. My aunt's computer did accounting but it was a powerful PC so we'd play games with her sons. She didnt want us to fuck with her job (duh) so she had her drive and we had ours. You just shut the PC down, swap the drive and reboot. It took like 3 seconds.
Thanks for making me feel old Linus for recognizing those PCMCIA cards. And at 3:44 when I was in college for my IT degree, our computer lab had those. We would each have out own hard drive we would slot in and start up the computer and have our own dedicated environment.
Logistics handles it. He teased one of his employees in a previous video saying "oh don't worry about it, Logistics will handle it". Of course the guy he was teasing worked in logistics. LoL
"This is Thermaltake doing what Thermaltake does best - ripping off someone else's product" Truer words have not been uttered. Still the case even in 2022.
In defense of Thermaltake, they make great power supplies. I had 2 EVGA PSUs blow up within 6 months of each other so I bought a Thermaltake. 5 years later and its still going strong. Voltages are rock solid under load, and within 2.5%.
@@brentsnocomgaming7813 It all depends on the model you buy. Most brands use different OEMs for different models. So if you get lucky, you can even get a good PSU from Thermaltake - if the OEM for that model is good. But i would never buy anything of Thermaltake for myself. If a customer wants it - fine. I don't want to support 20+ years of copying designes and badge-engineering and only having one own design per year.
Another specialty of Thermaltake is making weirdest shit for PCs. They made a fricking aquarium side windows for case, VU meter, some weird cases like Xasers, bizarre coolers like duo orb. TT is crazy.
3:42 - I used to have a whole stack of those things, with it at least two of the slide in racks in each of my tower computers, and I used them for quickly and easily sticking a customers hard drive into my computer to either run a virus scan on it without having to boot off that drive, or to clone the drive. It was way faster then opening up the side of the computer all the time. And was a lot more handy than keeping a caseless motherboard sitting on my workbench.
Hot swap utility bays are still useful today. I used to have one on my old desktop so I could move around all my HDD archives. Now I have a full tower so everything is centrally contained.
I really loved this video. I hope LTT buys another warehouse of old dead stock and post another video of what it has to go through and play around with.
I love that bit where he asks for the USB adapter for the lathe. I just had to locate one of those to run a laser engraver (which still only has Windows XP drivers).
Unfortunately it probably won't work, those adapters are only good for printing. The CNC systems usually need to acces the low-level hardware directly.
@@handlesarefeckinstupid It has nothing to do with current capability (parallel ports don't deliver power), but with the interface characteristics. Hardware parallel ports are very dumb. The software is in direct control of the high and low voltage levels on the connector. It's similar to using your PC as a microcontroller like an Arduino. With USB everything _must_ conform to a protocol so much more complicated circuitry is needed.
This brings me back. I remember using an Artic Cooling GPU cooler similar to that one on my old ATI X850XT back in the day on my first ever PC build, which was also my first computer. May have been a little ambitious but sometimes the deep end is the fastest way to learn. I spent something like 2 months pay on it and was damn well going to make it work. And of course I didn't have internet access without it so I was essentially going from the instructions only. Kids these days have it so good.
took me also back...built my first PC in 2004 with an Ati Radeon 9600 XT which I later upgraded with the AC cooler. Seems like a couple of years ago but it's almost 20...good times😌
@8:53 My dad once got a Dell Optiplex 745 for free and it had a Velociraptor with something like that chungus cooler in it. Still wonder if Dell shipped the PC like that as an option on their website.
I can't answer for that specific machine, but Dell definitely sold some PCs with Velociraptor drives! It was part of their "enthusiast options" just like the new XPS/Alienware with NVMe drives! Back before SSDs where a thing, that's the best thing money could buy!
If it was a DELL it probably was totally Chungus-laden. It's amazing how proprietary and poorly thought-out some of their stuff is. If you appreciate the lowest-quality components possible, you'll love DELL.
3:54 "This is before my time." You were definitely around, Linus. :P Those were popular about 20+ years ago. It was a great way to move data between PCs, back when USB 2.0 was young (or missing on some PCs) and practically useless for large data transfers.
Yeah, I was surprised by that too. At least in Poland those were pretty popular and in use in like around 96-2002, when finally CD recorders become cheaper. Way more handy than carrying "naked" hard drive.
Poor kids used normal internat HDDs instead of external HDD or flashdrive. :-D And yes, USB 2.0 was very slow for copying iso files or movies back in the day and some older computers still had only USB 1.1 so external disks were completely useless around 2005. I think FireWire was fastern, but FW was very rare in Europe, it's literally just US thing.
@@Rysysys I remember in like 2004 we were buying poor CDs for 6 Kč (that's like 1zl), it was literally for one use and after few months, it was not readable, good old times. :-)
As they say, "one man's trash is another man's treasure." Also, "Leave it in the package, it will be worth more as a new in box unopened antique collectible." Yeah I'm still waiting 9n that increased, NIB sealed value some of the junk I thought might be worth something in years to come.
linus will probably make several times more money from opening a few of them on camera for a vid than he would by waiting even 100 years then selling ALL of the literal trash that was left behind in that warehouse. stuff that wasnt resold when they went under. and stuff no employee even wanted to take home for free.
I freaking love these retro-gear videos where Linus geeks out about old tech. Reminds me of going into the ye olde computer shop circa 1994 in the little town in the middle of nowhere as a budding jr high computer nerd. I'd oogle all the crazy parts and wicked 486 machines that cost more than a used car. In the days before Amazon, Newegg, TigerDirect, or even the internet, that little suite in a building also containing an insurance office and an antique store was the only place within 80 miles one could purchase PC stuff.
I had a NV5 silencer for years, worked amazing. Also loved them because you could do a 12v mod opposed to the regular 5v it ran at out of the box. Worked for 5 or 6 years before it died.
3:42 something like that is still used now in classified secret machines. A 5 1/4” bay that takes a 3.5” drive in a sled, locked in with a key, so you can remove and stow the drive in a safe when not in use.
Was really nostalgic for me as well - remember popping into my local computer store and just seeing piles of this type of random crap in random packaging. I think maybe it was a simpler time. e.g. I'd no idea who made my PSU or the wattage - as it just came with the case. But also you'd sometimes take a punt on some random item and it would transform your PC. At Christmas I spent some time pulling drives from some old family PCs I'd built in the late 90s/eary 2000s - and found my first ge-force card (CT6960). I definitely remember picking that up and being blown away by it (and DirectX) - "what, I don't need per-game GPU drivers?"
3:42 I have two of those HDD drawers in my current case that I use as toolboxes. I keep screwdrivers, screw bags, and thermal paste in them. Very handy if your case still has 5.25" bays.
Lol, agreed! there were so many 5.25 parts, such as water cooling kits, HDD silencing, extra ventilation, and storage. And CD roms as well, it was mandatory.
as a previous cable company employee its super easy to remove the filter coming off the line and attain tv for free anyone says anything and i guess the last guy forgot to put the filter on
I had those exact HDD frames! My grandpa was the PC geek of the family, and he started using those in mid 1990-s. Every hard drive we had was in one of such cases probably until 2010-s. It was cool tho, because if you had a lot of games, you could swap your 20GB HDD for a 40GB one and play some Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit or I dunno, Warcraft II
I built around 1000 pcs with those lockable, swappable HD caddys back in the day. They were terrible. Always failing or getting stolen by school kids. 😄
Well it was literally the same key for all units, You could use the same key most commonly found on old AT cases where You could lock Your keyboard from use. Even now i have like 10 keys at least hanging around.
old meat canyon rabbit video comes to mind and its disgusting..."it ssssssssssssssssssstaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnks mmmm nice butttt. rabit bout to go 4 fingerz deap "
3:05 "Taking your floppy drive, because who needs one of those right." No you got that wrong, it was "because who needs more than one of those right." Most cases back then allowed for two 3½" floppy drives, and you really needed only one. So that's just an empty bay unless you installed something like this. And yes, drivers were still almost always supplied on floppies...
👍Those hard disk trays bring back memories! They were perfect to test hard disks, or work on another OS, and having a 'solve' for the lack of storage by being able to at least cold-swap without dealing with those full computer hoods (not like the panels we have now) or those pesky ribbon cables. ❤them!
3:42 I remember those well as I used to work in IT for a school who taught computer classes, I had to fit at least 250 of them which was a complete pain - the idea was we installed our system hard drive in them then the students had their own 'inner caddy' with another hard drive so they could swap that in for lessons where they needed to learn for example how to install an operating system from scratch, boy was I glad when the year finally came round where we refreshed all the PC hardware and could just deploy some virtual machines out instead! I reckon if I went back to my old job today though they would still have the caddys stashed away in the dark corner I left them in :)
3:45 I had one of those. As, at the time, CDRWs were not enough to download something from a friend and DVDRWs were still a pricey stuff - so my trusty old 10 GB IDE HDD was doing the work of modern USB sticks via that 5" adapter. 5:10 also RCA was a mark of a high end stuff in early 00s. Professional audio interfaces had those.
@@IsoMacintosh there were many mid-range ones (which is what most musicians could afford) that had only RCA connections on them. A peculiar example was ESI Juli@ during the time when mid-range was slowly getting features from expensive stuff in late '00s. It has 4 TS connections on one side of the board... and 4 RCA connections on the opposite one, so that people who had small/home studios (which is what those were targeted at) wouldn't have to change cables upon upgrading. So widespread RCA was.
They still make them. Heck, they make 1 and 2 bay SATA versions. Along with 3.5" versions. As in you can purchase them right now today. They're black plastic and metal with the latches popping out. But other than that still used today. Even the connector on the back of the 3.5" one looks the same as an old one I use every day in the office.
10:23 The idea of that cooler only died in the last year or two, one of the EVGA last generation cards was ALSO hybrid water (for the GPU itself) and air (for the memory). I forget which they used on the power supply parts of the card.
Surprised Linus didn't recognize immediately a rack system for HDD. It was super popular between gamers back in the days (before or during early USB days), especially during LAN parties.
Oh man, the Silencer 4 takes me back. Like you say in the video, those things were legitimately an upgrade back in the day. Now most decently powerful cards have pretty well built dual slot coolers with heat pipes and long, dense fins; but back then even early dual-slot coolers were a lot like that, and a lot of high end cards still used single slot coolers. Back when I first got in to PC gaming they were starting to become rarer, but things like the 8800 GT you showed, or the ATI HD 4850 (the step down from their then-flagship HD 4870) had single slot coolers. And even for high end cards, there were still upgrades. I remember the Arctic accelero S1 cooler - I put that thing on my gpu. The Accelero line had other versions, including some that look a lot like current triple-slot coolers, but is considered at "end of life" now.
Third-party GPU coolers were a legit upgrade back then cause most cards had tiny high-revving fans producing tons of noise. I've had a factory installed Arctic Cooling on a 6800GT and Zalman fanless on a ATI 9800 Pro. Zalman killed my card though. Some of the early 2000s peripherals are still great e.g. my PC is still housed in Antec P180 case, no reason to change it.
It's like watching an over-excited tech dad lol. I have no idea what 90% of the things were going on but watching Linus light up like this was so wholesome.
I had that exact gtx Thermaltake cooler. It was crap. Ended up replacing it with a hacky CPU cooler. Ran it through two external Zalman reserators and a 240mm radiator and 2 aquarium pumps. All mounted to a piece of plywood outside my case. Remember when my 2 year old daughter pulled on of the hoses and glycol soaked my motherboard and I lost everything. Fun times.
I am happy I did not get into water cooling until modern times, though most of that is more due to income. But I remember when radiators were hacky heater cores and reservoirs were from the PVC fittings bin from Home Depot or even just tubes draped into milk jugs or tupperware. People building TEC based water chillers, oh and open air water towers that worked like the stacks on a nuclear plant.
Are you seriously telling me Linus Tech Tips does not have a rotary tool (Dremel) to cut that water block open? Remember he asked, "How hard is for us to cut open a copper thing like this; just saw it in half." Not in all of their tech filled building do they own the most crucial case mod tool ever?
If possible, depending on what's still in one piece or not, would love to see a pc built with as many of these retro parts as you could fit. Building the goofiest looking rig with the most bombasticly 90's/early 00's guts.
Fantastic idea. I want to see the "Year 2000 flex PC"
I've got a couple of 1gb hd4650 agp cards still knocking around, one is an Asus card the other is a NOS sapphire card.
Yes. How was this not the video premise?
IT HAS A ZIP DRIVE!?!!???!?
I was thinking that before it started throwing the parts around. My heart sank as this was just pure history being ruined
Linus: "You need it? Take it!"
Also Linus: "You stole this from the office"
@Nunya Business Well, he was apparently a bit of a primadonna asshole to his people, I think he's chilled out a bit based on how people act around him now
Well we all know now from the latest LTT video that he IS the one that has stolen the most items from the LMG inventory.
@@Nate_the_Nobody he, and other LMG teammembers have confirmed that his behavior on video is different from his actual behavior, he's p chill to them, especially if you see what projects he allows, most other channels wouldn't even try them.
@@Nate_the_Nobody I think he's more like one of those guys that pops off a little in the moment when they're angry and immediately feels bad about it. I remember them telling a story about how a new-ish guy screwed something up and Linus'response was "you're fired." The guy didn't know if he was being serious or not so he just kept working and Linus later apologized and confirmed that he was not actually fired.
@Google-North-Korea Gotta watch out for the IRS 🤣
Linus: “Some of this stuff has been sitting for years”
PC enthusiasts: *_Allow me to introduce myself_*
Just here to balance out the bots a little. Nice little 50/50 mix humans/robots
@@slowfudgeballs9517 is out here doing good works
🤖
Right? I gaurantee everyone here who's been around as long as this shots been around, have at *least* one box full of old parts, cables, gadgets and such held on to Just In Case You Need It.
6:07 I had an ASUS 7800 GTX that came with that exact cooler on it stock, of course with a 3d rendered character stickered onto it.
3:36 - be real careful trying to run a lathe with a usb to parallel adapter. Every last one of them was notorious for being utterly useless for anything other than printers. Many of the pieces of software that existed at the time manipulated the control registers of the parallel port directly and were extremely sensitive to timing. Running it over USB completely breaks all of these applications because the timing isn't guaranteed at all. I have some old parallel port microcontroller programmers for AVR, PIC, etc. and they uses bits in the parallel port to drive clock lines among other things.
Don't worry. It's absolutely not possible to use this cable with MACH3. It doesn't support bit banging. End of story.
Also part of why you can get parallel ports on new motherboards especially stuff for extreme environments.
Been using usb over a yrs now..so far so good
@@ER0S4GE Prrobably highly dependend on cable length and interference from other cables.
@@zaprodk "Bit Banging"
I have something to research, now...
I love that you can still see his nerd side especially when it's a trip down memory lane.
Ok seriously who keeps liking these crappy bot comment replies (the one above me) like srsly its dumb
@@RealDlovanSl the bot itself maybe
See his nerd side? The biggest nerd on the internet?
@@yukierose9225 didnt ask
@@RealDlovanSl Other bots.
No one’s probably gonna read this, but the Zalman analog 5.1 mixer was probably for the Zalman 5.1 headset which was available, there were 3 speaker drivers in each ear cup!! To give you that surround feeling!
As someone who read that: very interesting.
wondering how this headset look and sound like
So it was basically a retro stereo console for their headphones lol
Yeah! The first version uses 5.1 audio jacks, and it later became USB. You could really hear the speakers in the back and front, but virtual surround was more practical so the product didn't take off.
At that time, sound cards were taking off like the Creative Audigy 2, and they made a huge difference with surround speakers, which were also trending (Logitech Z560)
@@yensteel damn cool
5:52 I used to work for Time Warner and can totally confirm that cable companies spend millions to make 3rd party capture devices obsolete.
And yet even 20 years ago, it was trivially easy to find the latest TV shows on the Internet, because enough people managed to successfully record stuff. They failed successfully.
You can't really do anything against somebody recording shows directly from an HDMI cable, so maybe they just gave up.
@@Darenz-cg9zg na. Just focused their attention on avoiding piracy (encrypted their signal, added location software to the cable boxes, lobbied congress to make certain policies, etc)
I used to work for Comcast and ya, can confirm this. Not only to try to make them obsolete but to block/restrict their usage by REQUIRING you to either rent their cable box or rent their cable card to get ANY kind of signal through the coax. For a time it did work but that only bought them ~5/10 years. Now even their cable boxes are streaming media devices. lulz.
Everything about the cpu guard had me laughing. Especially since an MSI update decided to turn my custom cpu fan curves to off a few months ago and I only caught it when I noticed the sheer heat coming off during a Phasmo game. Could have used that lovely tone.
I actually really like the idea of the CPU guard as someone who 1) uses AIO water coolers, and 2) has had pumps die... Like if they made a modern one that does PWM and either 1) had a black PCB or 2) actually used the ground to PSU so I could hide it in the case basement, I'd buy it
@@AmaraTheBarbarian you could design one on your own using an Arduino
me who found a way around it just keep afterburner open to cpu temperature you may never need it but it may save you one day
I don't know if the cpu guard® would have worked, seems to kick of when it detect an up in amperage or voltage due to stuck fan, and not if the motherboard isn't sendinding a spin up signal. Though maybe it could
@@Xitrial yeah it does basicy that so when a fan stops due to how the fan works it will build up a charge trying to start but if it doesn't start it can pull almost double what it suppose to and can burn up due to that fact but most fans nowadays are either too small or are built to handle the heat.
"Oh, I legitimately might need that for my lathe." That's why we keep piles of old tech around. For that one instance in ten years of randomly needing one thing.
That's exactly right lol
Been there done that, threw it out the week before.......
If you work in manufacturing, old tech that kids think iS funny and stupid...will still get used years and years and years later.
Windows XP is still used in a few machines where I work for example, and to service them, USB 2.0 is or native serial ports are important to have on the engineer's laptops for easy serial cable connections to virtual machines of win XP (usb 3.0 not natively supported), so USB to serial cables can be quickly employed instead of training 30+ engineers complicated or time consuming work arounds. (multiple switches of eithernet to usb was our ITs "solution" to the problem they created).
You don't even have to work in manufacturing. 5-10 year old lab instruments from big manufacturers typically have serial ports and maybe a freakish RS488 chungus connector - native USB only shows up on the newest models, but those run a freakin' operating system, and nobody wants to wait 2 minutes for a multimeter to boot. Therefore, lower end electronics RnD labs still buy USB to serial adapters by the dozen.
I love the manufacturing and lab folks who are like "Needing a random weirdo adapter? That's just Tuesday for us." No sarcasm, all respect for the hard work you guys do.
I love how Linus is like a kid who got his childhood dream in the entire video.... and then proceeds to understand that he no longer needs any of these by throwing them all into the pile
The same energy from Dave2D Optimus Prime review video! Who knew one uber cool toy and reliving Thermaltake crap quality/expensive products can shine like Xmas spirit. Merry Xmas/Happy new year
The pill is a monitor brush, mostly from when CRTs attracted a lot of dust to the display
Did you stop watching at this point? Linus brushed a laptop keyboard literally within 30secs of opening it.
SuperChickenLips or he’s trying to correct linus?????? Idk🤨
@@highlow8683 I wouldn't use a brush on the screen, I would use a cloth.
@@superchickenlips1 Yes that's why I commented. He thought it was a keyboard brush. It's a CRT monitor brush. CRT monitors are made out of glass, not covered by plastic film like today's displays. They used electrons to show an image which caused a negative charge on the display glass which attracted dust. A soft brush(I have one of those, they are really soft) can't damage a glass CRT.
@@MarkoHR I'm 42...
Watching Linus just genuinely geek out instead of just kinda rolling along with a script and talking for the sake of making the video long enough is always a good time
"back when i was ghostwriting for hardware kanuks" I'm starting to realize I want a full biography of Linus. They're even got a store to sell it on already 😄
That's truly something I'd read, or even better enjoy as a audiobook if read by the man himself
He will probably do it once he retires so he doesn't have to hide the negatives of the industry.
yah, we wanted to know more abt linus history
Wow, I wonder if that'll ever happen 🙄
3:42 we actually had those things in school in like 2004. So everybody (or every workstation) had its own HDD so you could work on your PC (including network settings and wild stuff) and the next user wouldn't be affected
That 'Before My Time' Comment hurt, I'm only a year older than Linus and I used them :)
I had a stack of them too. They were really useful for e.g. swapping the OS drive in a system without having to open it up. With hot-swappable SATA they became far more useful, of course. Best way to make a backup is to a HDD which you can then pop out of the system and store somewhere safe :)
I still use something similar today but for 2.5" drives. This way I can use my work os ssd when I work at home
I'll bet we had 5-10 of these when I was a kid. My dad always had different operating systems installed for weird old hardware comparability.
We had one for "games" that would would swap in. Ours also had a lock on it so that we could be grounded.
I quickly leaned that you could just either unplug it, or remove it and pop it open to defeat the lock.
These were super common, I remember my dad buying one at Walmart at one point, and that was before Walmart really had a computer section.
I was using them back in college in 2007/2008 myself for class so people would have their own drive for class
Everytime he just tossed something to the floor I had to fight the urge to scramble out of my chair!! Not only did I want some of that stuff, I have current need for one or two of those items! Having been an engineer who has had to surf E-Bay on far too many occasions for bits and bobs of older tech that had suddenly become "mission critical" for an entire company, sometimes paying multiple times the original cost... this video was almost a horror show as much as a humorous stroll down memory lane!
Find another bankrupt store and buy out the inventory! 😁
@Edward Paulsen It made my skin crawl to watch the cavalier way he treated this stuff, I have a half-assed collection of quirky old computer stuff (Mostly odd old mice, one of them straps to your finger and another has a built-in phone). And some old computer hardware (As you said) is needed for practical reasons, a few years ago I fixed an old CNC lathe that used a 486 as its controller. The owner didn't what to upgrade or modify it he just wanted it to work again.
I just bought a Pioneer cassette deck head unit from 1982. That was before the single/double DIN standard.
I felt the same but not because I wanted the hardware he showcased, but just for respect.
I'm right there with you! having several older pc's and laptops I could use some of that stuff!!
Would love to see more content like this, watching you either laugh or geek out at all this old tech, not to mention explaining to a degree how they function is really freaking entertaining.
Linus: “Come touch my hard drive.”
Me: Looks more like a floppy to me.
Minidisc? :)
@@corwinweber693 pcmcia 1mb card
@Based Madara cries in micro sd card
Might as well just *zip* it up.
It's a flash drive when you put it in.
This brought me back down memory lane being an enthusiast in the early 2000’s. Flimsy molex y-splitters, the cheesy cheap packaging, everything being creaky. I still have one of those NV Coolers installed on a GPU in a MAME box.
man you recall those turbo fighter fans? then ramped up to hella high rpms, legit sounded like a model plane starting up lol.
You mean back down memory channel
You need 2 hard drives? Gotta set the pins correctly with those IDE flimsy cables. Cable management involved folding... And it mattered for airflow!
I cringe whenever someone utters the word "molex". Worst quality power delivery EVER!
I love how he says "it's technology ", then callously throws it onto the floor....classic Linus
Old technology, modern technology values
He sees no time only technology. To the Ground!!™️
If linus drops it it must mean its good!
It is all toys now
Linus Drop Tips: The Movie
Why am I enjoying this so much.
It's making me feel old
It's making me feel like my pc is outdated
It makes me sad of how much fun I had when I was younger doing pc builds
It also makes me miss actually building PCs and not just repairing them.
But it makes me so happy
Dont worry, i feel old too especially because i only knew some of the stuff he showed, some stuff you didnt get in Europe at first at all XD
With DDR5 on the horizon, that cyclo-cooling memory fan thing might just come in handy.
I was actually thinking CPU Guard might not be a bad look for someone with an old AIO (crapshoot when it fails) or an opaque loop. (it doesn't really need PWM cause you want it on full all the time)
I have an preaty old system wich i game on. It hase like an intel 3570k and an as rock b 75 mainboard. The System is from 2012 and it has to run preaty fast to run Borderlands 3 for example. my amd rx480 just burned, so i have to use my old geforce gtx 750 ti. i need to run active ram cooling, my system would stutter and bluescreen in like 10 min just in windows idle. so activ cooling is a thing, for me, after all^^.
@@92kosta Those small fans are a crap shot. Some are quiet and a few stays that way, but most either starts out quiet and quickly get noisy or they start out noisy and grow worse. They all die way to quickly. There are quality fans that small, but there is little chance you'll see those on product like these.
I want that in my normal rig for looks.
@@blahorgaslisk7763 You know, I wonder if there's a way to model and 3d print it to where you can add your own fans
3:27 I bought exactly this adapter in the exactly same packaging like two months ago. I used it to connect a 20-years old HP printer that already outlived 3 other printers in the office.
Wow I think I would've went with a print server bring it into the Internet century
@@imark7777777 And the 20 year old HP printer would STILL probably outlive it. :)
@@lordlundar LOL, well by then you'll want to replace the print server probably with something supporting 10 gig and WiFi 42025 anyway. I have a few HPs in the basement I wonder if they're the same model? Are we talking laser or ink? A well cared for printer will last, unless of course it's a HP from 2010 onwards. I've had terrible issues with them, IT support.... And personal experience.
That's when HP really knows how to make a printer!
LTT just literally went in and be like: "I'll take your entire stock."
He flexed on us like Harry Potter and said "We'll take the lot!"
Linus has more money than the Man upstairs.
EXPC: "Praise the Loooooooord" (angelic singing)
It probably wasn't that expensive, maybe the warehouse owners were glad to get rid of the stuff.
@@MyRegardsToTheDodo they absolutely would have been glad to sell it even at a steep discount to free up warehouse space
3:52 this was my time. I had two of these removable hard drive enclosures, for quickly swapping out hard drives. Also good for archive drives so you could remove the drives to reduce wear since they didn't spin up every time you booted the PC.
4:00 I have to add the greatest use case of all times to this product!
Just buy 2 of them, mount two hdds in the sleds, mount one of the thingies in your computer, bam:
You have basically two independent computers for two different people. That's how my dad set up our computer so I could mess around with my os on my own hdd and he could just remove my os drive and plug in his if he wanted to work on something.
GENIUS
Another commenter mentioned that this is what they did in college back when individual computers weren't a thing. Every student had his and could just plug it to the schools computer.
Or if you got grounded it'd be a lot easier lol
had the same thing with my dad, my disk my mess, his disk his mess :)
@@carlost856 Yeah, we used a similar thing when I went to college just 2 years ago
And I still have one of those. Even have the adapter for power supply. Great thing, if I may say. Just that plastic casing became so brittle and changed it's originally ugly gray color to even uglier gray color. But still works as a charm and is even in use for testing some old PATA HDDs because that's the only way to connect them to the test bench, cuz I cant find a working motherboard that old with a working PATA slot and all other components working fine. This came, if I remember correctly, with an ATA to SATA connector, or I just bought that separately. And yes, there are still people that are using their old HDDs with ATA connectors and even have some (for them) precious stuff on those.
Buying out ewaste so it can forever be entombed on a warehouse shelf like God intended, the late 90s early 2000s we're so insane with the garbage they made it's almost impressive how dumb some of it is.
While at the same time a lot of stuff was amazing and its sad it disappears.
eg. the TV tuner / recording cards, external hard drive bays, multi-card readers, or laptop expansion cards.
Especially those expansion cards, today Linus invested in that laptop company since it allowed for 4 crappy expansion cards with a single port in each,
while back in the days, PCMCIA cards allowed 4 usb ports in each card, and laptops had one and sometimes two of those on top of normal IO.
@@hubertnnn card readers are still usable wish we still had 5.25 bays today i really like them
@SuperWhisk Yeah, like headphone jacks :)
@@hubertnnn Agreed, expresscard was basically the precursor to Thunderbolt, with the added benefit of some cards being able to sit flush inside the laptop chassis. You name it, expresscard likely had it - not only USB port expansion, but also sound cards and even external GPUs! And sure expresscard might have less bandwidth than Thunderbolt, but I'm far more confident about its durability in contrast to fragile Thunderbolt ports.
@@Rainbow__cookie You can still buy new cases with 5.25" bays, it just restrict your options a bit. Fractal Define 7 comes with one and Define 7 XL has two, and those are some good high-end cases. Also, many cheap cases (read: bottom-of-the-barrel DIYPC cases) have 5.25" bays.
Linus: "How could you design something this bad?"
Everyone: "It's Thermaltake!"
me with a thermaltake case :(
And people keep telling me they make quality stuff
@@alexstone691 thermalfake
@@pollux_id2557 Don't worry, their cases are stolen from reputable companies with good design teams.
@@somelokyguy6466 Nice. I have the S100.
Honestly, some of this stuff needs to be in a museum.
Naw, let’s put it loosely back in the box and just throw it at the ground like Linus. /s But seriously, that p*ssed me off more than it should have.
@@TitaniumTurbine 90% of it will never be touched again it’s fine
@@TitaniumTurbine Come on, those aren't some priceless ancient artifacts, it's cheap Chinese shit from 20 years ago that has no use to anyone outside of showing it in a video like that. What difference throwing it makes? Not like anyone would have any use for it nowadays. Those are some cool older PC gadgets but they are still 10$ mass produced hunks of plastic that are obsolete but not old enough to be remarkable in any way.
Thermaltake's motto for all time, apparently: "it's not just cheap, it's stupid"
It's easy to shit on TT after all this years, but that was the norm back then. EVERYONE had similar shit on the market mostly rebranded and sometimes tweaked from some other company and TT at that point was still trying to succeed , thanks to that they made it , and they do make a lot of excellent products, thats why they are still around and kicking ass apart from other niche brands that had a hard focus on excellence which was expensive for a lot of consumers and they were gobbled up by bigger companies, or cease to exists. I mean kudos to them for trying , but market or production was not yet ready for anything similar we have on sale this days, but You do have to remember, stuff he mostly looked at here were on sale up to 16 years ago , and most of them have same design and production runs for over 30 years with small improvements or variations. I do have a lot of TT products some of them are great , some of them are questionable at best, but considering those questionable were in range of 5$-10$ items I'm not complaining.
@@idimidodjimi6760 I dunno... Some of their products are legitimately good. I really like some of their cases and fans. I like the design of some of the water cooling stuff. But, I'm really skittish about investing any real money into some of their performance products because, while some of them look really nice, I don't have much confidence that they're actually engineered well. Lots of reports of leaking water cooling stuff, wire connections being failure-prone, that sort of thing.
IMO, the only thing worse than a product that was made too cheaply, is one that was made too cheaply but _looks_ like it was made well. At least if you buy something cheap, you know what you're getting. If I pay real money for something that looks the part, and it's junk, then I feel like I'm being swindled.
I have had a TT Water 3.0 AIO for... 4? years now, no issue, no noise, great performance for my 8700k... Maybe older stuff was shit, but modern day stuff is good and fine.
We need a mini series on this. Like every episode showcase 5 or so things. You could probably get quite a few episodes out of it
This is a good idea!
I love this idea honestly.
Or News Channel: Short Circuit Retro
The best 90’s kit I owned was a small peripheral card that allowed me to back my system up to VCR cassette. Worked really well actually.
That sounds amazing. What manufacturer made it? I'd love to find one.
@@wofwof007 This most likely isn't the exact system OP had but LGR did a great video on such a system ruclips.net/video/TUS0Zv2APjU/видео.html
Арвид?
Yes that’s the one 👍
My dad used to make the remote backups for his small work server (2-3 users, one server) on such a device! I remember him driving the small cassettes (in his case it was not VHS, but dedicated smaller cassettes) home from the office each week in the late 90s, start of 2000s :) "Automatic" scheduled backups each week, if I recall correctly each cassette was 60GB? I don't know anymore, but it was huge amounts for the time :D we may still have some around at home as well as the fire-resistant box for the backups. That's something quite unusual to recall reading YT comments, thanks!
@15:28 "its not just cheap its stupid" thats relatable on so many levels
i remember seeing i think LGR get to visit an actual warehouse full of old hardware. it's ridiculous how far technology has come and how much old stuff is just relegated to garbage status despite having their moment in history.
I remember that one. Would have loved to explore that place.
It’s Computer reset and it had allowed so many videos to be made because they where either stupidly rare, expensive or both and even prototypes and one of Sierra’s bugtesting units with tester comments.
Any links or tittle of the video of that??
@@hxrxlx LGR initial video ruclips.net/video/rvM82T3C2Ik/видео.html
Sierra ruclips.net/video/Z-VBITW94zI/видео.html
Prototypes units ruclips.net/video/Wh2OCBZpzZ8/видео.html
@@hxrxlx Also Computer that can turn from CR
ruclips.net/video/mpayqVGmKyo/видео.html
I love that he makes his colleagues do all this extra work to split open copper plate, and also i love him fixing the manufacture defect, all the extra work def does get noticed
I used those hard drive racks at 3:40 all the time. I'd by them on sale. Some had quick swap capability some didn't. They were damned expensive if you couldn't get them on sale. I still use a couple for data storage in my server to quick swap drives when i need to access archived data on old drives. I'll keep using them until i swap my archived drives to sata. Good usage of old ide drives instead of throwing them out.
Same for me, i used them mostly because we also used them in school.
Each student had a drive in a sled, were the school didn’t have to maintain or clean PC’s because you always had your own OS and crap installed on your own harddrive.
All the computers in the school were equiped with the same hardware (Pentium 3 1GHZ, 128MB, onboard graphics and 100mbit LAN/Internet) - Yes we had a 1gbit internet at the school anno 2000.
I also had one at home to read data from the drive when doing my homework. Stupid expensive for a student but it helped us in the long term, you always had your data on hand.
I had three of them in my tower, oh so long ago, only the top one was wired. Two of them were for me and my wife had the other one. Turn the computer off plug in your drive to the active port and reboot, three computers in one and no one messing up anyone else's stuff.
Currently, I have a hot-swap drive bay. No enclosure needed on the drive. Allows me to use internal drives as giant USB sticks at full speeds. It's fucking sick, and I hate that case manufacturers are stripping out the 5 1/4'' bays all in the name of adding (generally) unnecessary fans. The extra airflow may be great for overclockers but for everyone else who's just doing homework or office work or playing Fortnite, it's a gross waste of space.
My School used that. They had hundreds of computers with that. So you could just plug in your own hdd with OS and School Projects😅
Same here, it was the first time I got to know what "hot-swapping" was. It was amazing.
I remember those 5 1/4" racks. I studied computer science way back when having a laptop as a student wasn't a thing yet. All computers at school had such a hard drive bay and all students got their own "mobile" hard drive that you could slide in the computer and boot from to have your own stuff ready to go. Really weird in hindsight.
...and yet really a good idea from a security standpoint.
Yep I had these. Forgot one in a computer and had to get a second one
Still got one, I use it to push monthly backups to the stack of harddrives I replaced for being too small. It even does hotswapping for internal drives, but there's a really unpleasant winding down sound unless it's sleeping when the drive is pulled.
My college still does this
I had a bunch of them at our web hosting, and server sites way back. Except ours were aluminum and used 3 thermal pads for vibration and cooling the HDD. Each enclosure also had its own little fan. We had some later models that were even hot-swappable. I'd still be using them for my personal server / PC if they had SATA versions. As of right now, I just have a Noctua fan blowing over my HDD stack.
i love how genuinely nerdy and passionate linus is and how excited he gets over the dumbest things hahahah
HDD rack was such an upgrade after ZIP drives. The capacity, the speed... loved it!
And now we have NvMe storage at 7000 mb a second. Blows HDDs to bits.
"come touch my hard drive"
😮
3:49 In Poland, those 5,25" HDD drive bays were extremely popular. Almost everyone had at least one of the disks in one of those - thus being able to go to a friend and copy any content from him instead of wasting money on CD-R disks (not even mentioning floppy disks). Still have some of them in my old PCs in a basement...
I remember always removing my HDD from inside of my computer and walk to some friend with that, I wish we had such bays back in the day, external HDDs were so slow thru USB that it was better just connect it directly to IDE or later sata inside of your computer. :-)
And there were two standards of these, completely incompatible, and an eternal holy war which one was better - one had some protective circuitry so you wouldn't fry your drive if you seated it poorly, but some drives just refused to work with it, the other was just a dumb IDE pass-through, so it worked with every drive but you had to make sure it plugged in well, and there was eternal messing with switching the drives because you had a bay that wouldn't take my carrier, but your carrier wouldn't work with my drive...
Those drive bays were common in NZ too, I had a few. It did make drive upgrades easier and could be useful for backups. But before autodetect IDE they were a hassle for regular changes as you had to stop in your bios each time.
@@blakjaknz oh my, you just reminded me how painful it was to input number of plates, heads and cylinders everytime you've connected a hard drive 😆 And how breathtaking it was to see first mainboards with IDE autodetect ☺️
With those removable drives it was a pain in the ass when you had to switch drive from MASTER to SLAVE of vice versa...
@@blakjaknz now those were hard [to use] disks! :)
would love to see some absolute kick ass 2005-spec builds with this gear, overclocking athlons etc
It was a fun time. No off the shelf parts. So people used car heater radiators for their watercooling. They made their own waterblocks etc. You have phase change systems from Vapochill cooling CPU's to -20 degrees. And people who made it themselves from old refrigerator parts. You had no cases like today with spaces for fans so people modded their own cases. Painted them and made holes for fans etc. You could unlock the multiplier on Athlon CPU's with a pencil. Nowadays you just order part XYZ that is latest greatest and done. I remember having what I think was a Pentium 4 system in a huge tower case, water cooled. Can't remember the video card, either GeForce3 or ATI R8500. The connectors on the waterblock started leaking and short circuited & fried the whole system.
@@BertM3 nice, glad we have moved past the tape together random shit phase of pc building
@@jiyunsun It genuinely was exciting though. I had a dual Celeron system at that time. Overclocking was a lot of fun. Lapping the celeron 466 cpu's was terrifying. A few years later I had one of the athlons that you could 'pencil trick' into overclocking.
If they were still selling 2005 hardware in 2014 I'm not surprised they closed.
Those removable harddrives used to be a big deal in the military when we had to pull out the hard drives and put them in a safe. I think I also have a few of those old fans somewhere, they were the only manufacturer to make non standard fans.
It's also hilarious to see hoe bad the old water cooling stuff was. I'd love to see a review on the old thermaltake water cooling kits. I had the one that you mounted in the front 5 1/4 HDD slots with a tiny radiator. No wonder that old Phenom II died
The military still uses them, lol
I had a Thermaltake water cooling kit, after 6 months a couple of the metal connectors rusted away and everything became black, clogged with rust. That was the last Thermaltake thing I bought.
@@victorstratan Mine lasted for 4 years and was still running when the CPU died but I had that CPU pushed to the limit and didn't monitor the temps properly because I didn't know any better
I still have a thermaltake watercooling block for a 3.5" hdd, its huge haha, it came as part of the "Big Water" cooling kit (which I was still mostly running until last month), green UV reactive tubes, big orange 120mm fans and the chonkyest radiators ever
Linus that "drive bay" you said "this is even before me" is actually a swappable hard drive caddy. And they were brilliant. The idea was you can have one hard drive for business work , one for gaming or if you have multiple people sharing a computer, they all had their person install/hard drive. Just slide one in, turn the key. Unturn key, pull it out and in goes a different one
the removable hard drive was the shit. My aunt's computer did accounting but it was a powerful PC so we'd play games with her sons. She didnt want us to fuck with her job (duh) so she had her drive and we had ours. You just shut the PC down, swap the drive and reboot. It took like 3 seconds.
That’s gangster
I still used to run one of those for sifting through my archives. Very handy.
Thanks for making me feel old Linus for recognizing those PCMCIA cards. And at 3:44 when I was in college for my IT degree, our computer lab had those. We would each have out own hard drive we would slot in and start up the computer and have our own dedicated environment.
Whoever had to clean up the mess that was left in the wake of this video, you're the LTT hero
Logistics handles it. He teased one of his employees in a previous video saying "oh don't worry about it, Logistics will handle it". Of course the guy he was teasing worked in logistics. LoL
2:48 clumsy Linus is clumsy😂😂😂
"This is Thermaltake doing what Thermaltake does best - ripping off someone else's product"
Truer words have not been uttered. Still the case even in 2022.
In defense of Thermaltake, they make great power supplies. I had 2 EVGA PSUs blow up within 6 months of each other so I bought a Thermaltake. 5 years later and its still going strong. Voltages are rock solid under load, and within 2.5%.
@@brentsnocomgaming7813 It all depends on the model you buy. Most brands use different OEMs for different models. So if you get lucky, you can even get a good PSU from Thermaltake - if the OEM for that model is good.
But i would never buy anything of Thermaltake for myself. If a customer wants it - fine.
I don't want to support 20+ years of copying designes and badge-engineering and only having one own design per year.
Another specialty of Thermaltake is making weirdest shit for PCs. They made a fricking aquarium side windows for case, VU meter, some weird cases like Xasers, bizarre coolers like duo orb. TT is crazy.
@@MJ-uk6lu Dont forget the good old Thermaltake X-Ray. Essential for any big tower sitting in the admins office. :)
i still have my NAS thermaltake i fell attacked
3:42 - I used to have a whole stack of those things, with it at least two of the slide in racks in each of my tower computers, and I used them for quickly and easily sticking a customers hard drive into my computer to either run a virus scan on it without having to boot off that drive, or to clone the drive. It was way faster then opening up the side of the computer all the time. And was a lot more handy than keeping a caseless motherboard sitting on my workbench.
Hot swap utility bays are still useful today. I used to have one on my old desktop so I could move around all my HDD archives. Now I have a full tower so everything is centrally contained.
@@uss-dh7909 these ones weren’t hot swappable though. :)
"Linus dropping shit for 16 minutes" would have also been a good title for this video.
I really loved this video. I hope LTT buys another warehouse of old dead stock and post another video of what it has to go through and play around with.
I love that bit where he asks for the USB adapter for the lathe. I just had to locate one of those to run a laser engraver (which still only has Windows XP drivers).
Unfortunately it probably won't work, those adapters are only good for printing. The CNC systems usually need to acces the low-level hardware directly.
Running CNCs using parallel ports was a thing because the port had enough current to drive steppers directly. USB won't do that.
@@handlesarefeckinstupid It has nothing to do with current capability (parallel ports don't deliver power), but with the interface characteristics. Hardware parallel ports are very dumb. The software is in direct control of the high and low voltage levels on the connector. It's similar to using your PC as a microcontroller like an Arduino. With USB everything _must_ conform to a protocol so much more complicated circuitry is needed.
This was absolutely fantastic video. Linus enjoyed it, things went on a whim, and was very fun to watch.
He also dropped almost everything :) LOL
The image of Linus inhaling deeply the materials that are halfway through decomposition is priceless. He's so sweet when he gets high on electronics.
@@92kosta mmm asbestos PCB traces
This brings me back. I remember using an Artic Cooling GPU cooler similar to that one on my old ATI X850XT back in the day on my first ever PC build, which was also my first computer. May have been a little ambitious but sometimes the deep end is the fastest way to learn. I spent something like 2 months pay on it and was damn well going to make it work. And of course I didn't have internet access without it so I was essentially going from the instructions only. Kids these days have it so good.
took me also back...built my first PC in 2004 with an Ati Radeon 9600 XT which I later upgraded with the AC cooler. Seems like a couple of years ago but it's almost 20...good times😌
This is basically Linus geeking out over tech for 15 minutes. Thanks, I love it!
I want more!
He keeps on gasping over every product
I love vids like these, especially with how much fun Linus is having with all this old tech
Remembering Sony's proprietary crap, just really blows my mind that they were the ones to go with a standard storage media on the PS5.
Because PC's stuffs are the fastest. How else would they beat NVMe Gen 4.
I remember my old sony ericsson had proprietary battery charger, m2 card, and headphones. My first and last Sony Ericsson tho
@@KaiSoDaM proprietary charger and headphones were quite common back in those days
I remember having to get a magicgate card for my PSP 2000, and it costing like a third of the price of the PSP for just 2Gb.
Eh, the PS3 had a regular SATA hard drive, not sure about the ps4, but using standard storage is something they've done before.
Linus: "Who would have bought this?"
Me: I did then and still do, want to see my storage unit?
@8:53 My dad once got a Dell Optiplex 745 for free and it had a Velociraptor with something like that chungus cooler in it. Still wonder if Dell shipped the PC like that as an option on their website.
I can't answer for that specific machine, but Dell definitely sold some PCs with Velociraptor drives! It was part of their "enthusiast options" just like the new XPS/Alienware with NVMe drives! Back before SSDs where a thing, that's the best thing money could buy!
Such cases are still a thing - but nobody makes them
I use two plus have a spare one, despite having multiple M.2 and SATA SSDs
If it was a DELL it probably was totally Chungus-laden. It's amazing how proprietary and poorly thought-out some of their stuff is. If you appreciate the lowest-quality components possible, you'll love DELL.
3:54 "This is before my time." You were definitely around, Linus. :P Those were popular about 20+ years ago. It was a great way to move data between PCs, back when USB 2.0 was young (or missing on some PCs) and practically useless for large data transfers.
Yeah, I was surprised by that too. At least in Poland those were pretty popular and in use in like around 96-2002, when finally CD recorders become cheaper. Way more handy than carrying "naked" hard drive.
And by putting the OS drive in there and having a second one to swap, you got 2 computers for the price of one (and a second hdd+case)...
Poor kids used normal internat HDDs instead of external HDD or flashdrive. :-D And yes, USB 2.0 was very slow for copying iso files or movies back in the day and some older computers still had only USB 1.1 so external disks were completely useless around 2005. I think FireWire was fastern, but FW was very rare in Europe, it's literally just US thing.
@@Rysysys I remember in like 2004 we were buying poor CDs for 6 Kč (that's like 1zl), it was literally for one use and after few months, it was not readable, good old times. :-)
As they say, "one man's trash is another man's treasure."
Also, "Leave it in the package, it will be worth more as a new in box unopened antique collectible."
Yeah I'm still waiting 9n that increased, NIB sealed value some of the junk I thought might be worth something in years to come.
linus will probably make several times more money from opening a few of them on camera for a vid than he would by waiting even 100 years then selling ALL of the literal trash that was left behind in that warehouse.
stuff that wasnt resold when they went under.
and stuff no employee even wanted to take home for free.
I freaking love these retro-gear videos where Linus geeks out about old tech. Reminds me of going into the ye olde computer shop circa 1994 in the little town in the middle of nowhere as a budding jr high computer nerd. I'd oogle all the crazy parts and wicked 486 machines that cost more than a used car.
In the days before Amazon, Newegg, TigerDirect, or even the internet, that little suite in a building also containing an insurance office and an antique store was the only place within 80 miles one could purchase PC stuff.
What a fun video for Christmas day. This is like watching Linus open presents.
“Why did the water cross the Thermaltake Cooler?”
“It didn’t”
A: To fry the motherboard
I had a NV5 silencer for years, worked amazing. Also loved them because you could do a 12v mod opposed to the regular 5v it ran at out of the box.
Worked for 5 or 6 years before it died.
3:42 something like that is still used now in classified secret machines. A 5 1/4” bay that takes a 3.5” drive in a sled, locked in with a key, so you can remove and stow the drive in a safe when not in use.
@4:25 Linus: At least you had security.
**LockPickingLawyer joins the chat**
I love seeing all these old PC products. It was definitely an interesting time in PC gaming...
Was really nostalgic for me as well - remember popping into my local computer store and just seeing piles of this type of random crap in random packaging.
I think maybe it was a simpler time.
e.g. I'd no idea who made my PSU or the wattage - as it just came with the case.
But also you'd sometimes take a punt on some random item and it would transform your PC.
At Christmas I spent some time pulling drives from some old family PCs I'd built in the late 90s/eary 2000s - and found my first ge-force card (CT6960).
I definitely remember picking that up and being blown away by it (and DirectX) - "what, I don't need per-game GPU drivers?"
The BEST time man
@@goldcd directX seemed like wizardry after a whole era of fiddling around with finding versions of Quake for your 3DFX card or whatever.
3:42 I have two of those HDD drawers in my current case that I use as toolboxes. I keep screwdrivers, screw bags, and thermal paste in them. Very handy if your case still has 5.25" bays.
Lol, agreed! there were so many 5.25 parts, such as water cooling kits, HDD silencing, extra ventilation, and storage. And CD roms as well, it was mandatory.
I love the dedication to repairing something that will go to the bin, just for our entertainment.
Fun fact, Plex has a front end for TV tuner cards still.
as a previous cable company employee its super easy to remove the filter coming off the line and attain tv for free anyone says anything and i guess the last guy forgot to put the filter on
I had those exact HDD frames! My grandpa was the PC geek of the family, and he started using those in mid 1990-s. Every hard drive we had was in one of such cases probably until 2010-s. It was cool tho, because if you had a lot of games, you could swap your 20GB HDD for a 40GB one and play some Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit or I dunno, Warcraft II
I built around 1000 pcs with those lockable, swappable HD caddys back in the day. They were terrible. Always failing or getting stolen by school kids. 😄
Well it was literally the same key for all units, You could use the same key most commonly found on old AT cases where You could lock Your keyboard from use. Even now i have like 10 keys at least hanging around.
14:05 Small ElectroBOOM moment there
3:49 i actually had one of these laing around when i was i child, brings me back so much memories seeing one of them
Now we need a pc just with these parts
At 9:38 Linus just demolishes ThermalTake
That pill-shaped brush was definitely a hit with the moms who barely knew tech and wanted a cute brush to clean their keyboards.
Good news! It's a suppository.
Linus: "That stinks"
*Goes to sniff harder and closer inspection*
Also Linus: So weird...
new fetish unlocked ...
old meat canyon rabbit video comes to mind and its disgusting..."it ssssssssssssssssssstaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnks mmmm nice butttt. rabit bout to go 4 fingerz deap "
Not even five minutes in, and Linus drops something. Classic.
To be fair, most of these are intentional.....
3:05 "Taking your floppy drive, because who needs one of those right."
No you got that wrong, it was "because who needs more than one of those right."
Most cases back then allowed for two 3½" floppy drives, and you really needed only one. So that's just an empty bay unless you installed something like this.
And yes, drivers were still almost always supplied on floppies...
Computer Store: * goes bankrupt *
Linus: *"I'LL TAKE YOUR ENTIRE STOCK!"*
The amount of packages dropped by Linus really takes me back
👍Those hard disk trays bring back memories! They were perfect to test hard disks, or work on another OS, and having a 'solve' for the lack of storage by being able to at least cold-swap without dealing with those full computer hoods (not like the panels we have now) or those pesky ribbon cables. ❤them!
3:42 I remember those well as I used to work in IT for a school who taught computer classes, I had to fit at least 250 of them which was a complete pain - the idea was we installed our system hard drive in them then the students had their own 'inner caddy' with another hard drive so they could swap that in for lessons where they needed to learn for example how to install an operating system from scratch, boy was I glad when the year finally came round where we refreshed all the PC hardware and could just deploy some virtual machines out instead! I reckon if I went back to my old job today though they would still have the caddys stashed away in the dark corner I left them in :)
3:45 I had one of those. As, at the time, CDRWs were not enough to download something from a friend and DVDRWs were still a pricey stuff - so my trusty old 10 GB IDE HDD was doing the work of modern USB sticks via that 5" adapter.
5:10 also RCA was a mark of a high end stuff in early 00s. Professional audio interfaces had those.
Pretty sure professional audio interfaces had xlr and or 6.3mm connectors even back then.
@@IsoMacintosh there were many mid-range ones (which is what most musicians could afford) that had only RCA connections on them.
A peculiar example was ESI Juli@ during the time when mid-range was slowly getting features from expensive stuff in late '00s. It has 4 TS connections on one side of the board... and 4 RCA connections on the opposite one, so that people who had small/home studios (which is what those were targeted at) wouldn't have to change cables upon upgrading. So widespread RCA was.
4:20
Linus: This is technology
also Linus: tosses it
Exploring a tech store is always a pleasure!
饥饿的千斤顶
1:31 No Linus! That's not a pill, that's a Japanese vib...
I miss my swappable HD soooo much! Had so much fun, truly loved the idea and it was actually very useful to move your bytes around
They still make them. Heck, they make 1 and 2 bay SATA versions. Along with 3.5" versions. As in you can purchase them right now today. They're black plastic and metal with the latches popping out. But other than that still used today. Even the connector on the back of the 3.5" one looks the same as an old one I use every day in the office.
10:23
The idea of that cooler only died in the last year or two, one of the EVGA last generation cards was ALSO hybrid water (for the GPU itself) and air (for the memory).
I forget which they used on the power supply parts of the card.
14:16 I thought my graphics card was artifacting and it scared me shitless
If youve got more random stuff from those boxes a pt2 would be awesome
Old hardware is so fun man, the ideas were wild and goofy. it's so cool to see how far we've come.
Surprised Linus didn't recognize immediately a rack system for HDD.
It was super popular between gamers back in the days (before or during early USB days), especially during LAN parties.
Oh man, the Silencer 4 takes me back.
Like you say in the video, those things were legitimately an upgrade back in the day. Now most decently powerful cards have pretty well built dual slot coolers with heat pipes and long, dense fins; but back then even early dual-slot coolers were a lot like that, and a lot of high end cards still used single slot coolers. Back when I first got in to PC gaming they were starting to become rarer, but things like the 8800 GT you showed, or the ATI HD 4850 (the step down from their then-flagship HD 4870) had single slot coolers.
And even for high end cards, there were still upgrades. I remember the Arctic accelero S1 cooler - I put that thing on my gpu. The Accelero line had other versions, including some that look a lot like current triple-slot coolers, but is considered at "end of life" now.
Third-party GPU coolers were a legit upgrade back then cause most cards had tiny high-revving fans producing tons of noise. I've had a factory installed Arctic Cooling on a 6800GT and Zalman fanless on a ATI 9800 Pro. Zalman killed my card though.
Some of the early 2000s peripherals are still great e.g. my PC is still housed in Antec P180 case, no reason to change it.
It's like watching an over-excited tech dad lol. I have no idea what 90% of the things were going on but watching Linus light up like this was so wholesome.
I had that exact gtx Thermaltake cooler. It was crap. Ended up replacing it with a hacky CPU cooler. Ran it through two external Zalman reserators and a 240mm radiator and 2 aquarium pumps. All mounted to a piece of plywood outside my case. Remember when my 2 year old daughter pulled on of the hoses and glycol soaked my motherboard and I lost everything. Fun times.
I am happy I did not get into water cooling until modern times, though most of that is more due to income. But I remember when radiators were hacky heater cores and reservoirs were from the PVC fittings bin from Home Depot or even just tubes draped into milk jugs or tupperware. People building TEC based water chillers, oh and open air water towers that worked like the stacks on a nuclear plant.
Are you seriously telling me Linus Tech Tips does not have a rotary tool (Dremel) to cut that water block open? Remember he asked, "How hard is for us to cut open a copper thing like this; just saw it in half." Not in all of their tech filled building do they own the most crucial case mod tool ever?