It's refreshing to see a retro tech channel talk about a performance range that a lot of people realistically had at the time. I was really, really young in 1999 so I don't remember the exact specs, but I do remember my HP desktop back then chugging hard on several games. The worst culprit I remember was the Sims, especially after installing the first few expansions. Great vid! Addendum: I should also point out that there were a plethora of amazing PC games at the time that used no 3D acceleration whatsoever: RollerCoaster Tycoon, Alpha Centauri, Civilization II, StarCraft, Close Combat, Fallout, Baldur's Gate, etc. I would imagine PC gamers who didn't care for action games but loved strategy games might have saved quite a bit on PC parts.
I regret not showing off these simpler 2D games. I have a few of the one you mentioned and they indeed ran well. I imagine emulators would've also been ok on systems like this, at least for simpler systems like the NES.
@@NTGTechnology Honestly, I can't say I fault anyone for not showing 2D titles in their retro PC videos. I can't think of any that have benchmarks and they definitely don't draw views the way stuff like GLQuake or Unreal do.
I just discovered you today. Funny thing, I used to work on K6-2 3DNow when we were developing the first Hidden & Dangerous game back in '98 (nobody remembers that). And also gamed plenty on it including the first HL. I was so glad to have at least that, it wasn't bad at that time. And this HIPRO PSU of yours is actually quite a good and reputable OEM brand to this day. Granted this particular one will now be old and may turn out loud and faulty, but it was not cheap nor bad. Thanks for the memories :D
I've gone ahead and added "Budget" to the title. After a lot of thinking I think this video isn't very representative of PC gaming as a whole back then, but rather just a low end budget PC attempting to play games and that my wording was somewhat misleading. I'm sure a lot of people probably picked up on this, but I didn't want anyone to think I'm casting a bad light on late 90s PC gaming as I absolutely love that era of PCs. Hopefully this clears up any confusion, this was my first video back after a very long break so maybe I wasn't thinking totally straight.
I think the Athlon was the saviour of many a budget gamer back then. Here was a cpu as fast as a P3 but at only 2/3rd's the cost. I remember going from this same K6-2 450, all be with a VooDoo Banshee Graphcs card, to a thunderbird Athlon 850 with 256 mb ram. What a huge difference.
Stuff like this brings me back. Had an old Packard Bell up until 1999. Then my father bought gateway 733 with voodoo 3 3000! Wish I didn't throw that out when it died...
I had the same POS SiS AGP card until I finally got a discounted Voodoo 3 3500 for $35 in 2001 and it absolutely blew me away! Finally I could play Homeworld!
I was lucky to have a faster PC with a 3dfx Voodoo accelerator back then. I remember seeing NFS3 and Unreal in Glide mode, it was mind blowing to say the least.
3:02 to make matters worse, most software was specifically compiled with Intel optimizations, often resulting in inferior performance, despite the K6 being an otherwise fine CPU
I remember my PII 300 with VooDoo2 plus SBLive, was a pretty enjoyable gaming system I even had a DVD+MPeg2 accelerator for entertainment, CD-RW and ZIP drive ve for my backups... When I realized that my high end Slot-1 board was a dead end I saved for a Slot-A Athlon 500 (Pre OC to 650) and a TNT2. Was a really insane time to be an early adopter with a 6 month cadence on the 3D graphics front and CPUs that went fron 300 to 1GHz in a couple years. But hell you could always enjoy older games on low to mid range systems just like we do today.
Thanks for uploading this video it actually makes me feel happy that I have something to play on rather than having the latest and greatest Compaq presario cq60(difficult to clean or service so it thermal throttles all the time) Core 2 duo t5800 2gigs of ram GeForce 9200mge 256mb 120gb SSD Windows 10 ltsb 2015
Nice video, yeah it could get even worse than that. Back in 1998 I had a Cyrix MII PR300 (233 MHz real, but more like Pentium MMX 166 in games) on a real bad board socket7 board with Utron chipset and S3 VirgeDX graphics. But what a relief when I finally got my hands on used Voodoo1 card, which made all the games you mentioned kind of playable in 512x384 res with hardware acceleration. And BTW the K6-2 better performance in quake in 640*480 res in windows than in DOS is not an exception. It is due to that windows automatically enable write combining that helps with VGA performance in this higher resolution. Not many chips from that era could do it (mostly from Pentium II/Celeron and newer), but K6-2 chip with CXT core (which you have) supports it too. I found out myself, that booting the Windows98 and then exiting to DOS leaves the write combining enabled. But booting straight into DOS does not enable it, you will have to do it yourself using DOS utilities (Philscomputer lab had a nice video about it).
Nice video, thanks for made me remember that times! I´ve lived this, we used for gaming what we had, we hadn´t a lot of gaming parts(at least where I live) and was forced to understand this. At 99-2000 my parents bought a similar rig, to situate: Celeron 433, 32MB RAM(8 used for graphics), Fujitsu 4.3GB and so on. To be cheap even the PSU was AT instead of ATX haha this was my hardware school and I´ve upgraded memory(>64MB>160MB>320MB), put a Voodoo 3 and a Quantum Plus AS(7200RPM) and some overclocking save the day.
The machine would be gaming in no time with a budget video card upgrade. Sure, money and whatnot.. but a TNT M64 would be a huge upgrade for relatively cheap. RAM would help too but that kind of upgrade would have actually been far more expensive than a video card.
Not in all games. But certainly on those Quake and Unreal engine based games that mattered to me at the time ;-) The overclockable Mendocino was an absolute bargain and made me skip the whole K6 line until I got a Duron 700. It turned out to be a very good decision not to jump on super socket 7 early.
I wasn't around at the time, but I think this wouldn't be that low-end of a machine, even among gamers. To compare this computer to what other gamers of the time might have used, these are the results of a survey conducted by a German PC gaming magazine in 1999: Processor
The Celeron was usually a step up on the K6 line because it had the legendary (for the time) P6 FPU and on-die cache. If you got one of the really early Covington turds with no L2 at all, sure, a K6-2 would lay the smackdown, but at the same clock speed with a Mendocino there just was no comparison, the Celeron cleaned house. And I *like* the K6-2, I just have to face facts. I have a K6-III+ 550 build and while in general use it feels plenty fast -- the extra cache makes it a productivity monster -- in games it's consistently beaten by a PII-400.
I agree, the Celeron started very bad but took so much improvements to be market representative and take lead after Mendoncino and so far with Coppermine. AMD could fight again on budget market with Duron(Athlon at higher level), K6 family was no longer competitive.
@@fernandomarson Yeah, when it comes to the Duron (and later Sempron) vs the Celeron, it was just no contest in much the same way as here. Spitfire/Morgan had the massive L1 cache of the Thunderbird, with an unconventionally low 64K of L2, but especially paired with some DDR RAM and a better GPU you bought with what you'd save over a Celeron and you had an all around much better machine for very similar money. Where things started to get interesting again was with Core i when the Celeron got a second core while I believe the Sempron was still limping with a single core for a couple years?
Ahhh, I do not have great memories of using onboard SIS graphics in a machine or two back in the day. Nor the time I tried to run Mechwarrior 3 when it released with 24mb of RAM in another machine, but I had to make do for a while after a hardware failure and just play less demanding older titles than Mech 3 because I was like 12 or something so it's not like I could just go out and buy new PC hardware, which was still very expensive at 20year ago Anti-virus back then wasn't, iirc, capable of real-time monitoring of your file system. It was easier just to disable it from starting up with Windows and run it every now and then to run a scan, or to scan a suspect file. There's a bunch of other Windows things you can disable to prevent Win 98 using quite as many resources, too. I just went to Windows 2000 asap, which from memory (could be wrong), was much easier on the system resources, and allowed you to have much more control over what it was doing and using. Eventually just used something I can't remember to create custom images to install, similar to how you'd go about creating images for deployment in a business environment in end result, I suppose. Doing that was a major pain in the ass until Windows Server 2003 and the deployment tools became readily available and well documented, though I think NT4 had a version that came with the tools to do that, too. Neither Server 2003 nor NT4 are exactly suitable for a single machine for gaming, however. We have things so easy these days haha :D Great content, subbed and gonna go watch more!
WoT warning! ;-) TL;DR I enjoyed the video but this particular system and the selection of games makes 90s gaming sound worse than it was. Hey man, nice to see a new video. I agree on the bias of using fast hardware for retro gaming nowadays. We should remember that playing 90's games on 2000's hardware isn't the authentic 90's gaming experience. Here's some criticism though: I know you already adressed the "this isn't even a gaming machine" argument but I would even argue that the chipset integrated graphics make this PC one of the worst configurations for 3D gaming you could have bought new in 1999. The integrated graphics core bottlenecks the system because it shares memory bandwidth with the CPU. You have the Biostar M5SAA as far as I can tell and there's a version with dedicated video memory onboard but I can see the pads aren't populated on your board. If you cared about 3D gaming at all the same amount of money you spent on this configuration would have bought you a way more frames per second if you spent it differently. This machine is optimised for 2D Windows price/performance. This is the machine your dad had in his office that you were allowed to use on weekends, this is not a machine a young adult with his own income built for himself if he cared about 3D gaming. For an example you could have probably bought a 8GB HDD instead of a 12GB HDD and spent the savings on a Riva 128ZX PCI (~75USD in mid 1999). Additionally buying a 350MHz K6-2 instead of a 450MHz might have afforded you a 3Dfx Banshee PCI (~125USD in mid 1999). Still, even with the configuration you have the selection of games is pretty rough on the system. Half Life is *the* AAA FPS title of 1998. Quake is running totally fine at lowest settings. (320*240 in 1998 would be what 720p is in 2020; 640*480 = 1920p, 800*600 = 2k, 1024*768 = 4k. Think of running Cyberpunk 2077 and Battlefield V on an iGPU with single channel memory today.) At the same time Diablo (1997) Shadow Warrior (1997), GTA (1997), AoE (1997), AoE II (1999) or Starcraft (1998) would have probably run much better on your system. The comment is really getting long but I guess that's all there is to say. At the same price point a different configuration could have given you a much better gaming experience. Also a different selection of contemporary games would have run much more satisfyingly even on this system.
Yeah I understand what you're saying. I was definitely going for a worst case scenario, but perhaps I was a little bit hard on it. I did run StarCraft on this machine and it ran great and I really should've included it in the video, but I guess it slipped my mind. I'm going to do a follow video to this where I upgrade the machine so hopefully it can redeem itself and maybe I'll show off some simpler games before I upgrade it as well.
' this is not a machine a young adult with his own income built for himself if he cared about 3D gaming' - Whilst that may be true, some of us simply did not have the option of buying our own hardware with income quite so easily. Even the cheapest of graphics cards (well, 'graphics accelerators') were too much for my child self to afford, and parents weren't willing to buy me stuff (such as Christmas, neither was willing to buy me random expensive 'circuit boards' that they didn't understand, was also an electronics obsessed child so it'd been absolutely possible I'd try and talk them into buying weird 'circuit boards' that I shouldn't have haha). By the time I was a young teen, say around 13/14 as an example, it wasn't a problem because by that time it was 2003ish and hardware was much easier to come across, much cheaper because of the second hand market having a lot more 'back content' of cards, and because everyone was ditching their older 3D accelerators in favour of the new fancy GPUs and the much more powerful cards that started to appear from early 2000s onwards. Everything else I either had left over from when my Mum married someone else and we moved in with him and it turned out that he worked as an engineer or similar for Virtuality back in the early 90s (awesome company, look them up, he used to take me into work sometimes and give me old/broken/obsolete prototype HMDs to play with and dismantle because, y'know, was obsessed with electronics as well as computing), and so he always had a bitchin' setup for the time and upgraded often and I got the old stuff...then him and Mum separated in '97ish so that was the end of that. Everything else came from an Uncle as hand-me-downs since he was into computer hardware aside the one time my Dad paid for a usable PC to be made by one of his friends for me one and only one Chrismas (don't wanna sound ungrateful, I'm simply making a point although I have been awake two days because insomnia so apologies if it's hard to follow. I was always extremely appreciative and thankful). Just had to make do. I didn't really have the luxury of picking exactly what hardware I wanted after spec'ing out a machine until 2003 onwards or so, Not complaining, I loved every moment of it. Just an example of one of the many situations in which some of us couldn't really decide what hardware we wanted around this era :)
@@NTGTechnology Some videos, perhaps, on how you'd go about deciding what you wanted to go with to upgrade this machine and then the upgrades (I do so love watching people play with 'retro' computing tech. It stops me spending too much money building period correct machines that I have no room for after a certain amount haha). After that, some before/after comparisons maybe. Something like that. I'd watch them, at least. :) Given that I've just found your channel, you may have already done so. I haven't checked yet as I just got back in the house again and now have the rest of the day free :D
@@NTGTechnology Honestly, I think you could maybe turn that into something. Something like a video about the pitfalls you may experience and come across when trying to upgrade some of these machines? You could even go deeper into it and explain or discover and explain what it happening and why, and maybe how to fix it. At least maybe how to go about taking into consideration these issues when choosing hardware. Like a guide to help people upgrade these type of machines, problems they may encounter, how to mitigate or avoid them etc. That being said, you're the content creator here so I may be missing a point or not realising what does and does not make for good content. In short, I may be talking shit :D
Pssshhhh... this isn't at all how it was for us back then... not us who knew what we were doing. At this point I was running a dual P3 on a VP6 at 1GHz each, OC'd from 733.. Peltier cooled, water cooled on top. What would be the equivalent to a 240 radiator today, via a transmission cooler. Full tower case in yellow automotive two stage with clear. Mesh grilles on top, with fans blowing out. Copper machined water blocks, surgical tubing, barbed fittings. Submersible pump in a small grey vessel, sealed water tight with 4x allen screws on top, rubber gasket. Sub ambient temps on both cpus and all times, even under full load... Ice would grow, but was of the distilled nature... non conductive. Turning the machine off required a thaw process.... This would have been on the verge of having the V5 5500, not entirely sure what video card would have been in during the 99 era... the v5 came out in 2k... memory isn't serving what I had before that. Regardless.... ... ... ... I for sure had a better time than you're showing here. And always did, lol.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
He lives... again
*Infuscomus starts playing in the background
It's refreshing to see a retro tech channel talk about a performance range that a lot of people realistically had at the time. I was really, really young in 1999 so I don't remember the exact specs, but I do remember my HP desktop back then chugging hard on several games. The worst culprit I remember was the Sims, especially after installing the first few expansions. Great vid!
Addendum: I should also point out that there were a plethora of amazing PC games at the time that used no 3D acceleration whatsoever: RollerCoaster Tycoon, Alpha Centauri, Civilization II, StarCraft, Close Combat, Fallout, Baldur's Gate, etc. I would imagine PC gamers who didn't care for action games but loved strategy games might have saved quite a bit on PC parts.
I regret not showing off these simpler 2D games. I have a few of the one you mentioned and they indeed ran well. I imagine emulators would've also been ok on systems like this, at least for simpler systems like the NES.
@@NTGTechnology Honestly, I can't say I fault anyone for not showing 2D titles in their retro PC videos. I can't think of any that have benchmarks and they definitely don't draw views the way stuff like GLQuake or Unreal do.
I just discovered you today. Funny thing, I used to work on K6-2 3DNow when we were developing the first Hidden & Dangerous game back in '98 (nobody remembers that). And also gamed plenty on it including the first HL. I was so glad to have at least that, it wasn't bad at that time. And this HIPRO PSU of yours is actually quite a good and reputable OEM brand to this day. Granted this particular one will now be old and may turn out loud and faulty, but it was not cheap nor bad. Thanks for the memories :D
It's usually a good sign when the fan has an actual grille.
I've gone ahead and added "Budget" to the title. After a lot of thinking I think this video isn't very representative of PC gaming as a whole back then, but rather just a low end budget PC attempting to play games and that my wording was somewhat misleading. I'm sure a lot of people probably picked up on this, but I didn't want anyone to think I'm casting a bad light on late 90s PC gaming as I absolutely love that era of PCs.
Hopefully this clears up any confusion, this was my first video back after a very long break so maybe I wasn't thinking totally straight.
Epilepsy Warning: There's some CRT flickering in this video that I probably should've mentioned in the video.
I think the Athlon was the saviour of many a budget gamer back then. Here was a cpu as fast as a P3 but at only 2/3rd's the cost. I remember going from this same K6-2 450, all be with a VooDoo Banshee Graphcs card, to a thunderbird Athlon 850 with 256 mb ram. What a huge difference.
Stuff like this brings me back. Had an old Packard Bell up until 1999. Then my father bought gateway 733 with voodoo 3 3000! Wish I didn't throw that out when it died...
Man that sucks. What was wrong with it?
@@NTGTechnology It wouldn't boot. We had replaced the computer by then and It was still to recent at the time for the nostalgia bug to bite, lol.
I had the same POS SiS AGP card until I finally got a discounted Voodoo 3 3500 for $35 in 2001 and it absolutely blew me away! Finally I could play Homeworld!
I was lucky to have a faster PC with a 3dfx Voodoo accelerator back then. I remember seeing NFS3 and Unreal in Glide mode, it was mind blowing to say the least.
3:02 to make matters worse, most software was specifically compiled with Intel optimizations, often resulting in inferior performance, despite the K6 being an otherwise fine CPU
I remember my PII 300 with VooDoo2 plus SBLive, was a pretty enjoyable gaming system I even had a DVD+MPeg2 accelerator for entertainment, CD-RW and ZIP drive ve for my backups... When I realized that my high end Slot-1 board was a dead end I saved for a Slot-A Athlon 500 (Pre OC to 650) and a TNT2.
Was a really insane time to be an early adopter with a 6 month cadence on the 3D graphics front and CPUs that went fron 300 to 1GHz in a couple years. But hell you could always enjoy older games on low to mid range systems just like we do today.
That's true. I should've done a better job showcasing older/simpler games on this machine as well.
@@NTGTechnology so a perfect opportunity for a follow up video. 😁
Thanks for uploading this video it actually makes me feel happy that I have something to play on rather than having the latest and greatest
Compaq presario cq60(difficult to clean or service so it thermal throttles all the time)
Core 2 duo t5800
2gigs of ram
GeForce 9200mge 256mb
120gb SSD
Windows 10 ltsb 2015
Nice video, yeah it could get even worse than that. Back in 1998 I had a Cyrix MII PR300 (233 MHz real, but more like Pentium MMX 166 in games) on a real bad board socket7 board with Utron chipset and S3 VirgeDX graphics. But what a relief when I finally got my hands on used Voodoo1 card, which made all the games you mentioned kind of playable in 512x384 res with hardware acceleration. And BTW the K6-2 better performance in quake in 640*480 res in windows than in DOS is not an exception. It is due to that windows automatically enable write combining that helps with VGA performance in this higher resolution. Not many chips from that era could do it (mostly from Pentium II/Celeron and newer), but K6-2 chip with CXT core (which you have) supports it too. I found out myself, that booting the Windows98 and then exiting to DOS leaves the write combining enabled. But booting straight into DOS does not enable it, you will have to do it yourself using DOS utilities (Philscomputer lab had a nice video about it).
Ah I didn’t know about the write combining thing. Yeah that would explain it.
The K6-2 450 mhz with a Voodoo 2/3 or Banshee would perfectly run all games released until the year 2000.
Put in some Voodoo magic and that computer is good for old games.
I have plans for this soon.
Nice video, thanks for made me remember that times! I´ve lived this, we used for gaming what we had, we hadn´t a lot of gaming parts(at least where I live) and was forced to understand this. At 99-2000 my parents bought a similar rig, to situate: Celeron 433, 32MB RAM(8 used for graphics), Fujitsu 4.3GB and so on. To be cheap even the PSU was AT instead of ATX haha this was my hardware school and I´ve upgraded memory(>64MB>160MB>320MB), put a Voodoo 3 and a Quantum Plus AS(7200RPM) and some overclocking save the day.
64 MB of PC100 SDRAM!? YEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHH, BABYYYY
The machine would be gaming in no time with a budget video card upgrade. Sure, money and whatnot.. but a TNT M64 would be a huge upgrade for relatively cheap. RAM would help too but that kind of upgrade would have actually been far more expensive than a video card.
Informative.
Information.
The K6-2 was in games a lot slower than the Celeron Mendocino. A K6-2 450 mhz was as fast as a Celeron Mendocino 300 mhz.
Not in all games. But certainly on those Quake and Unreal engine based games that mattered to me at the time ;-) The overclockable Mendocino was an absolute bargain and made me skip the whole K6 line until I got a Duron 700. It turned out to be a very good decision not to jump on super socket 7 early.
I wasn't around at the time, but I think this wouldn't be that low-end of a machine, even among gamers. To compare this computer to what other gamers of the time might have used, these are the results of a survey conducted by a German PC gaming magazine in 1999:
Processor
The Celeron was usually a step up on the K6 line because it had the legendary (for the time) P6 FPU and on-die cache. If you got one of the really early Covington turds with no L2 at all, sure, a K6-2 would lay the smackdown, but at the same clock speed with a Mendocino there just was no comparison, the Celeron cleaned house. And I *like* the K6-2, I just have to face facts. I have a K6-III+ 550 build and while in general use it feels plenty fast -- the extra cache makes it a productivity monster -- in games it's consistently beaten by a PII-400.
I agree, the Celeron started very bad but took so much improvements to be market representative and take lead after Mendoncino and so far with Coppermine. AMD could fight again on budget market with Duron(Athlon at higher level), K6 family was no longer competitive.
@@fernandomarson Yeah, when it comes to the Duron (and later Sempron) vs the Celeron, it was just no contest in much the same way as here. Spitfire/Morgan had the massive L1 cache of the Thunderbird, with an unconventionally low 64K of L2, but especially paired with some DDR RAM and a better GPU you bought with what you'd save over a Celeron and you had an all around much better machine for very similar money.
Where things started to get interesting again was with Core i when the Celeron got a second core while I believe the Sempron was still limping with a single core for a couple years?
So true, I had a 400mhz Celeron and it really wasn't great. Still loved it though. :)
Ahhh, I do not have great memories of using onboard SIS graphics in a machine or two back in the day.
Nor the time I tried to run Mechwarrior 3 when it released with 24mb of RAM in another machine, but I had to make do for a while after a hardware failure and just play less demanding older titles than Mech 3 because I was like 12 or something so it's not like I could just go out and buy new PC hardware, which was still very expensive at 20year ago
Anti-virus back then wasn't, iirc, capable of real-time monitoring of your file system. It was easier just to disable it from starting up with Windows and run it every now and then to run a scan, or to scan a suspect file.
There's a bunch of other Windows things you can disable to prevent Win 98 using quite as many resources, too. I just went to Windows 2000 asap, which from memory (could be wrong), was much easier on the system resources, and allowed you to have much more control over what it was doing and using. Eventually just used something I can't remember to create custom images to install, similar to how you'd go about creating images for deployment in a business environment in end result, I suppose.
Doing that was a major pain in the ass until Windows Server 2003 and the deployment tools became readily available and well documented, though I think NT4 had a version that came with the tools to do that, too. Neither Server 2003 nor NT4 are exactly suitable for a single machine for gaming, however.
We have things so easy these days haha :D
Great content, subbed and gonna go watch more!
WoT warning! ;-) TL;DR I enjoyed the video but this particular system and the selection of games makes 90s gaming sound worse than it was.
Hey man, nice to see a new video. I agree on the bias of using fast hardware for retro gaming nowadays. We should remember that playing 90's games on 2000's hardware isn't the authentic 90's gaming experience.
Here's some criticism though: I know you already adressed the "this isn't even a gaming machine" argument but I would even argue that the chipset integrated graphics make this PC one of the worst configurations for 3D gaming you could have bought new in 1999.
The integrated graphics core bottlenecks the system because it shares memory bandwidth with the CPU. You have the Biostar M5SAA as far as I can tell and there's a version with dedicated video memory onboard but I can see the pads aren't populated on your board.
If you cared about 3D gaming at all the same amount of money you spent on this configuration would have bought you a way more frames per second if you spent it differently. This machine is optimised for 2D Windows price/performance. This is the machine your dad had in his office that you were allowed to use on weekends, this is not a machine a young adult with his own income built for himself if he cared about 3D gaming.
For an example you could have probably bought a 8GB HDD instead of a 12GB HDD and spent the savings on a Riva 128ZX PCI (~75USD in mid 1999). Additionally buying a 350MHz K6-2 instead of a 450MHz might have afforded you a 3Dfx Banshee PCI (~125USD in mid 1999).
Still, even with the configuration you have the selection of games is pretty rough on the system. Half Life is *the* AAA FPS title of 1998. Quake is running totally fine at lowest settings. (320*240 in 1998 would be what 720p is in 2020; 640*480 = 1920p, 800*600 = 2k, 1024*768 = 4k. Think of running Cyberpunk 2077 and Battlefield V on an iGPU with single channel memory today.) At the same time Diablo (1997) Shadow Warrior (1997), GTA (1997), AoE (1997), AoE II (1999) or Starcraft (1998) would have probably run much better on your system.
The comment is really getting long but I guess that's all there is to say. At the same price point a different configuration could have given you a much better gaming experience. Also a different selection of contemporary games would have run much more satisfyingly even on this system.
Yeah I understand what you're saying. I was definitely going for a worst case scenario, but perhaps I was a little bit hard on it. I did run StarCraft on this machine and it ran great and I really should've included it in the video, but I guess it slipped my mind. I'm going to do a follow video to this where I upgrade the machine so hopefully it can redeem itself and maybe I'll show off some simpler games before I upgrade it as well.
' this is not a machine a young adult with his own income built for himself if he cared about 3D gaming' - Whilst that may be true, some of us simply did not have the option of buying our own hardware with income quite so easily. Even the cheapest of graphics cards (well, 'graphics accelerators') were too much for my child self to afford, and parents weren't willing to buy me stuff (such as Christmas, neither was willing to buy me random expensive 'circuit boards' that they didn't understand, was also an electronics obsessed child so it'd been absolutely possible I'd try and talk them into buying weird 'circuit boards' that I shouldn't have haha).
By the time I was a young teen, say around 13/14 as an example, it wasn't a problem because by that time it was 2003ish and hardware was much easier to come across, much cheaper because of the second hand market having a lot more 'back content' of cards, and because everyone was ditching their older 3D accelerators in favour of the new fancy GPUs and the much more powerful cards that started to appear from early 2000s onwards.
Everything else I either had left over from when my Mum married someone else and we moved in with him and it turned out that he worked as an engineer or similar for Virtuality back in the early 90s (awesome company, look them up, he used to take me into work sometimes and give me old/broken/obsolete prototype HMDs to play with and dismantle because, y'know, was obsessed with electronics as well as computing), and so he always had a bitchin' setup for the time and upgraded often and I got the old stuff...then him and Mum separated in '97ish so that was the end of that. Everything else came from an Uncle as hand-me-downs since he was into computer hardware aside the one time my Dad paid for a usable PC to be made by one of his friends for me one and only one Chrismas (don't wanna sound ungrateful, I'm simply making a point although I have been awake two days because insomnia so apologies if it's hard to follow. I was always extremely appreciative and thankful). Just had to make do. I didn't really have the luxury of picking exactly what hardware I wanted after spec'ing out a machine until 2003 onwards or so,
Not complaining, I loved every moment of it. Just an example of one of the many situations in which some of us couldn't really decide what hardware we wanted around this era :)
@@NTGTechnology Some videos, perhaps, on how you'd go about deciding what you wanted to go with to upgrade this machine and then the upgrades (I do so love watching people play with 'retro' computing tech. It stops me spending too much money building period correct machines that I have no room for after a certain amount haha). After that, some before/after comparisons maybe. Something like that. I'd watch them, at least. :)
Given that I've just found your channel, you may have already done so. I haven't checked yet as I just got back in the house again and now have the rest of the day free :D
@@nicwilson89 Yes I did try upgrading it and I made a video about it, however it went pretty badly as these cheap OEM machines are very unpredictable.
@@NTGTechnology Honestly, I think you could maybe turn that into something. Something like a video about the pitfalls you may experience and come across when trying to upgrade some of these machines? You could even go deeper into it and explain or discover and explain what it happening and why, and maybe how to fix it. At least maybe how to go about taking into consideration these issues when choosing hardware.
Like a guide to help people upgrade these type of machines, problems they may encounter, how to mitigate or avoid them etc.
That being said, you're the content creator here so I may be missing a point or not realising what does and does not make for good content. In short, I may be talking shit :D
Stick a Voodoo 2 on this thing and your will be amazed with the results!
Wish I had one to try. If I ever get one I'll likely revisit this.
I owned a Cyrix then a K6/II then a pentium MMX then a Duron that was good enough for some good time until I went 775
Pssshhhh... this isn't at all how it was for us back then... not us who knew what we were doing. At this point I was running a dual P3 on a VP6 at 1GHz each, OC'd from 733.. Peltier cooled, water cooled on top. What would be the equivalent to a 240 radiator today, via a transmission cooler. Full tower case in yellow automotive two stage with clear. Mesh grilles on top, with fans blowing out. Copper machined water blocks, surgical tubing, barbed fittings. Submersible pump in a small grey vessel, sealed water tight with 4x allen screws on top, rubber gasket. Sub ambient temps on both cpus and all times, even under full load... Ice would grow, but was of the distilled nature... non conductive. Turning the machine off required a thaw process.... This would have been on the verge of having the V5 5500, not entirely sure what video card would have been in during the 99 era... the v5 came out in 2k... memory isn't serving what I had before that. Regardless.... ... ... ... I for sure had a better time than you're showing here. And always did, lol.