Collin, you have no idea how this video made me feel tonight. Back in the 1997-2005 era I used to have my own custom PC shop and these parts were my day to day thing and I just felt like I was there, 25+ years ago doing a custom built for a client. Love it. You just made me feel young again by looking at old stuff haha. You are the best. Love the content. I might start my own retro build. Thanks again.
same here, from italy. How many pcs.. for all my friends, colleagues, family, and first customers. Now, I am working all day long on cloud with no soul Dell Notebook. no feeling about these modern pcs.. I wish to back in time and re live again and again that era. every single day a new technology comes out, every day something wonderful on internet did happened, movies, musics, before social era, with my friends in the basement playing Unreal tournament on local ethernet hub. tears
Those years the golden age of custom PC computer builds. Had a local store where could grab a shopping cart and go up and down the aisles filling the cart with all the parts for a new build.
@@dshadow01 You might be on to something. Crysis requires shader model 2.0, but recommends 3.0. The Geforce4 Ti supports version 1.3. The Radeon 9200 LE tops out at 1.4
I love this period of building, this is abotu where I got on the PC bus. Really brings back memories. One of my cable management tricks for this era was to put the optical drive in the second slot down from the top and use that space above it to store the "extra" power leads off the PSU. Helped keep the clutter down. I love the knockoff platinum and candy plastic aesthetic of this era, it really did have some character. And that light mod? Perfect. Needs a neat case badge now too.
This brings out memories! I had my own "PC shop" in the late 2001 and throughout 2002! Most customers back then had no idea what to look for in computers. So, they were running after prices only! Shops were competing to build the cheapest computers running the glorious Pentium 4 and Windows XP! That era saw the wide spread of SW piracy and HW counterfeit! CPUs speed were faked to appeal to the customers. I even heard of some tricks to alter the amount of RAM readout during boot! I refused all those trickeries and chose quality, specially being a computer engineer myself. The market did not go as I hoped and the junk from china kept flooding the market! I closed the shop and switched to real estate business and never looked back to the computer market again!
5:37 the DOF zoom changing the focus on each connector as you progress from right to left across the ports... brilliant. I'm subscribing just for the cinematography of that one sequence.
I also worked in a small computer shop at the turn of the century, and this is almost exactly the kind of PC we would build for the customer, or they would build for themselves, with parts from us. XP, despite its lousy WiFi support, was a very solid OS, which made most tasks a breeze. They didn't call XP the 'F1sher Price' OS for nothing! :D
I love watching videos of how to build PC's from "way back when". All I'm remembering fromy my days of doing, it are ripping my fingers to shreds taking out the breakaway expansion slot covers, and for the fingers that I didn't destroy, I'd get those cut up by putting the expansion audio, and graphic, cards into place! Ah those were the days. Brilliant to see this video, and the components have stood the test of time.
An alternative to cutting the 3 pin power LED header is using a pin to release the pin from the plastic header, and then move it to the 2nd position. Or you could remove both of them, and use a 2 pin header instead.
Truth told, cutting the connector was an extremely common of-the-era technique. I did the same thing literally hundreds of times while working at a small computer shop in 2000-2001. You had to bash together a PC in about ten minutes: there was no time for fooling around re-pinning connectors!
The ATI 9200 was the first PC component I ever purchased when I was first learning PC hardware in the early 2000s. I recently picked one up on ebay to put in a shadowbox (non-destructively). Really takes me back. Thanks for the walk down memory lane!
Me too. It was the GPU of my first custom built PC (although mine was the low profile version). Isn't it funny how he went out of his way to put a Nvidia card in this PC? RUclipsrs can't help themselves, it's as if they allergic to ATI/AMD or something. Maybe they think that using an ATI/AMD card will make them look poor.
I love it. Nostalgic, I was doing this on a daily basis in Mombasa from about 96 - 2002. The small square in the front was meant for custom 'branding'. Good times.
I LOVE this video. I remember fondly when computers had this aesthetic, and I can't believe you got such a beautiful new case. I 100% would've gone for W98, though. Everything in this system screams it: socket 478, AGP, CRT monitor, the case... I wish I had such nice hardware for my W98 machine. Greetings from Mexico, from a fellow retro machine enthusiast.
Try adding a 100-330uF capacitor in parallel to the fan power pins to see if it will spin up - it's a trick the 3d printing community uses for Noctua fans.
@Timothy Hoogland I'm DEFINITELY not an electronics expert, but I think it works like this: The low voltage supplied is not enough to start the fan, so the fan has large resistance and the capacitor charges. The cap then discharges and starts the fan. The fan then falls to much lower resistance and so most future current goes to the fan. Maybe the cap occasionally charges and discharges, but one is able to run the fan lower than 100%. If you know more than me, feel free to explain. I'm hopeless at circuits and components.
I heard and read horror stories about the IBM hdd manufacturing plant here in Hungary. Because of the low wages the really low-end of the working class wanted to work there. I heard that some of them were smoking (!) in the clean rooms, and putting the cig butts off in the still opened drives. Crazy times...
Wow, I did not know these IBM drives were manufactured in Hungary. This comes as a surprise. I remember having an IBM drive back in the early 2000's and it was actually smoking. But as far as I can remember, it still worked. 😅😅
20gb IBM are solid. 40gb and 80gb are crap. And then IBM sold to someone. Hitachi or something. And their first 80gb's were good, yet noisy. They just solved stability and toughness before looking at noise.
I miss when it briefly fashionable to just stick translucent turquoise on every computer thing, even otherwise typical beige boxes. Turquoise is one of my favourite colours, and I have to wonder if that would be the case had I grown up a few years earlier or later than I did. I think Windows 98 and various vintages of Linux would be pretty interesting! I also have a hunch that the driver program might work just fine the second time round, though of course it could be even worse! Those re-usable knockouts are nice though, especially since it doesn't really cost them anything else in production to slightly alter the shape they punch out - but it helps the end user dramatically.
It reminds me of the fish bowl aesthethic of literally everything. From hand soap bottles to shower curtain lmfao. Some type of pastel fish bowl aquatic vibes
I loved the transparent coloured plastic era of tech, even though it was a little before my time. I would absolutely still like transparent orange gadgets today, just like the ones I wanted as they were on their way out of popularity when I was just getting old enough to ask for stuff, beyond just pointing at anything with Winnie the Pooh or Tigger on it.
I had Radeon 9250 at some point - shitty card. It was in a new PC my Dad got me. I couldn't wait to change it to something supporting Direct X 9.0c. I upgraded to GeForce 6600GT afterwards. This started the whole GPU craze I still have ongoing. Such a great card and so many great memories with it - pure nostalgia! Cheers for the great video!
So satisfying to see! I worked in a computer store in the early 2000s and built many P4 systems. Exciting time with all the changes and developments. 20 years later I'm still into computers and testing new components on a regular basis.
We had this case growing up. it was my favorite "family pc" from the 90's. I still have the case, tho its pretty beat up now, I'm pretty sure we purchased it from MicroCenter in Saint Louis Park the summer of 1999, during the launch of the Athlon 1GHz cpu's. I remember that pc's specs well, even though I was only 12 at the time. I really wish I had seen free geek had a new (old stock). I've actually been searching for a few years to find a better condition case than our old one. That is a super special find you have there, I really hope you take great care of it.
I had that exact same case for my main PC back in the day and I've been looking for one now for YEARS to do a retro build in. Nice work building that thing!
Here in Brazil I built many computers with this case, it was for Pentium 3 or Athlon/Duron, that's why the rear panel didn't match, besides it came with a big speaker, from the Windows 98/Dos era. Pentium 4 is a little too modern for him, but until it fits like a glove, this computer of yours was wonderful. 👑 *** Aqui no Brasil eu montei muitos computadores com esse gabinete, ele era para Pentium 3 ou Athlon/Duron, por isso que o painel traseiro não combinou, além de ele vim com um speaker grande, da era dos Windows 98/Dos. Pentium 4 é um pouco moderno pra ele, todavia até que encaixou como uma luva, ficou maravilhoso esse seu computador. 👑
I built so many systems exactly like this, also working in PC places in 99 to 05. This was like watching a video replay of my own old memories. Quite a strange experience.
Ahh the old IBM DeathStar. I had a ton of those go bad after less than 6 months. This was when PC building was awesome. We would do to the computer shows and buy everything there. If you paid cash they wouldn't charge tax. I miss those days.
Had a local store where went shopping for a new computer build, going up and down aisles filling a grocery store style shopping cart with the parts. Was so excellent to shop based on a set budget while making decisions for best of breed components that would fit with said budget.
Great video! It's so nice how clean your case is. I love the light mod you did too... I'll have to borrow the same idea for mine. And thanks for the tip on the TDK drive, I think I need to grab one too.
I never was a fan of the Apple colours, even when every other manufacturer copied them. I was firmly entrenched in the "being black makes it faster" camp. Although that CD drive would look sick with LED illumination (I don't think it would screw with reading the disc since the laser is IR)
Yeah, I wasn't a fan of that design either. Especially in consumer products where everything had to look "melty" or like it was designed in a wind tunnel. Like an mp3 player? Can't just make it a rectangle, have to make it all curvy and weird. I was actually thrilled with the iPod because it looked normal to me.
Man, this video hit all the nostalgia buttons for my life right after college. Cases with a ton of fans, side panel window and interior lighting mods, such a fun time. I think I spent more time over clocking and Tweaking then I did playing sometimes.
At 10:43 TDK CD burner.... I had one very similar to that, sounded like a vacuum cleaner, or like I had installed a jet engine in my PC. Later, I went to a Plextor DVD drive. That one I lost when my Age of Empires II: The Conquers Edition CD blew up in it. (It sounded like a .22 pistol going off down in my case.) I switched back to the TDK, and never worried about it much since most of my stuff was on CDs anyway.
I love this video. Istlll have my old p4 3.0ghz in a Chieftec case with 2gig corsair ram 200gb Seagate sata, liteon cd writer, and a 7800gs such hard nostalgia!
brings back memories. Thanks for the vid. I worked a e waste day for a affluent city in the early 2000s and I had a field day. Still have a Antec case that I need to see I I can do a build similar
Hahahahaha, I just put Arctic MX-4 paste between on my brand new AMD Ryzen 5 5600X! Been using the stuff for YEARS now. In 2003-2004 I had an AMD Athlon Thunderbird core that was clocked at 1GHz, and a heavily BIOS modded Nvidia Geforce 4 4400 I believe it was, and loved that machine. Upgraded in late 2005 to a 2.8GHz Prescott core Intel Pentium 4 with the same video card. I took a side grade to a cooler running, 2.5GHz Northwood B core Pentium 4 that overclocked to 3.45GHz without breaking a sweat, and a HEAVILY modded and overclocked Sapphire Atlantis (ATi) Radeon 9800Pro 128MB graphics card. After another run with a much faster Prescott, I went AMD for processor and ATi/AMD for graphics. Sorry for the rant, just miss these days when overclocking REALLY could make big performance gains.
Early 2000 era wasn’t the most fancy for pc parts but its was the most time of enjoyment having a desktop machine back then was a dream I remember getting my first pc with pentium 4 and playing gta and fifa 2002 😅 and use dial up internet .
weird enough I have that same motherboard that I just got parts to fix. except mine is slightly older and has 3 ram slots of ddr1 memory. awesome to see someone have a motherboard like mine!
My XP build in the same case has had its fair share of upgrades overtime aswell, originally a Socket 754 Sempron 2600+ and FX5200, i learned to solder with this machine after overclocking, changing hardware throughout my young years of owner ship as a child, it couldn't run Doom 3 or Farcry like my dad wanted when he bought it as an upgrade from a 486, i promised one day i'd have a job and upgrade it so he could finally play. 12 years later such upgrades happened, a Socket 939 XGP/Pci-e combo board, A64 3400+ and my dream card, an IceQ UV reactive Ati X1650 Pro, though performance in early game engines seemed to rely on raw IPC and high clock speeds, so a recent purchase of an uncommon Dual core 4200+ for this platform didn't give me the big jump i was seeing, old games saw identical peformance clock for clock with the previous chip..but a recent upgrade to an IceQ 2600XT showed double the performance in some areas, but in Farcry the game engine did utilise the CPU more and the synthetic 3DMark 03-06 runs showed double the performance in the CPU and GPU tests leading to a big score increase, definitely better paying £35, not £300+ for an FX-53. Especially on the board that does not overclock well, biostar was never known for it..perhaps the Asus A8N32SLI-Deluxe that came with the chip may go in so i can push both chips and see if they're capable of the golden 3Ghz known to overclockers if you won the silicon lottery.. Athlon was the better option at the time unless you later on went for a S775 HT pentium 4 example, but my roots were with AMD so i wanted to keep the build as original as possible and re-use what i could, when my dad heard the Farcry intro spring to life out of the Audigy 2 ZS, he finally got to sit down all those years later and play it while running in the hundreds, not the single digits, it was a bit emotional seeing him play those old games with a smile on his face while i played the later successors alongside, it was like 2 eras mirroring eachother, from old to new, the enjoyment they gave the user, was just as fun as it was back then.
I had that TDK CD burner installed aftermarket in 1999ish HP pavilion. The desktop included a Zip drive, which I loved. I believe I installed it in 2001. It was great! The software was solid also. Good times.
I had a very similar looking, not certain if it was the same, TDK drive. Installing it into the family computer was my first foray into PC building. I remember it came with an instructional video... on VHS.
Having built several retro PC's, finding a period correct case has always been the most challenging, since most got tossed because they take up a lot more space than the rest of the hardware.
11:15 Samsung consumer market drives were super solid, the most reliable you could get at the time, but the tsunami floods in Thailand destroyed key parts of the manufacturing process, so there was several months without any production at all before Samsung gave up and sold whatever was left of the HDD production stuff.
was just digging around on an old XP pc i have in the basement. Brings back a lot of memories, some of those old programs like PSP Converter, Deep Burner, Flock, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, MSN, a saved Myspace html folder, tons of stuff. Did anyone else use Omega drivers for their Radeon card back in the day? Optimized for gaming and always worked better than stock ATI drivers.
OK, just saw the front panel light on the front of the case at the end of the video. That rocks. I have an old Antec case from that era, arguably a better case, but man doesn't have that awesome bling on the front!!
Great vid as usual! You finally have your own vintage PC. With the Intel mobo its so average I'd name it "Not Sure". I have a few 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID-class HDDs that have been spinning for over 83,000 hours. This was right before Samsung sold their HDD storage division to Seagate so I guess it was a last hurrah for the engineers. Good thing the 7-year warranty was never necessary.
Windows XP era is when I properly got in to computers. Have a dedicated core2quad Q9550 XP rig with a GTX 750TI which can handle pretty much any XP game like a champ. And of-course tons of old software.
I used to have a similar case for my first Asus A7A266 based build. I would swap out operating systems with a locking drive enclosure (from CompUSA) in the top bay. I had pure MS-DOS, MS-DOS with Windows 95, Windows 98SE, and later Windows XP when I moved to the A7N8X-E Deluxe. But by then I had a ThermalTake Xaser III case. I also had extra enclosure to play with Linux distros (RedHat, Ubuntu, etc)
Had this case as my first computer build. Thanks for making this video! Looking forward to future updates. Mine had either an EliteGroup or Asus motherboard, AMD Athlon 1800+ cpu, 512mb ram, the Western Digital 80GB hard drive you showed in the video and a Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti200. Wish I still had it to mess around with! Thanks again!
Mother boards of this area, did not have overclocking options in the bios. Over Clocking the Cpu was done with the Clock and Multiplier jumpers located on the mother board.
Rounded IDE cables! I had completely forgotten until now that back in the day, i separated the lines in the IDE ribbon cables by hand and duct taped them together to simulate the air flow of the rounded ones. I probably read about it on slashdot or something.
Oh!! You have the same Sony monitor my family had when got our first family computer in 1998! I love that monitor! This brings me back! Also, please dual boot it with Windows 98! I think that would be fun too!
A case like this is exactly what I want to make my next PC. The "funny" part is I will build a completely modern PC with as much RGB as possible, then cover all of it up with the case. A tip of the hat to Andy Kaufman where only I will be in on the joke.
I had one of those 60Gb drives... It was blazing fast comparing to other drives at the time. It never failed on me, but in the end I sold it after 2 or 3 years of use as the main OS drive.
For missing I/O shields, I use Plastic Canvas or I 3D print a universal one shield. With both these methods, I just cut out the little squares to match the I/O. Plastic Canvas is a grid that is used with yarn to make craft projects.
Every millennial nerd needs a Windows XP retro pc. I built one with a 7800gtx in a LOGISYS X-Blade case. It looks and runs great, and plays Dark Messiah perfectly.
Man this takes me back. I was rocking an Athlon XP1800+ and GeForce 3 Ti 200 back in those days. A very solid combo that powered many late gaming nights. Even had that same Sony Trinitron monitor which was absolutely glorious.
I love this video/PC so much, it's so, so similar to the system I had back then! Back in its day, I bought the same CPU 2.4Ghz. I had a very similar motherboard, Intel with the i845 chipset that supported the 533mhz bus. But I also had an nVidia Ti 4400, one step up from the 4200 you used. It was an absolute beast back in the day. I had to sell it for finacial reasons, but when I bought my next PC (AMD Sempron 3000+) I had an ATI 9200 in that! The Ti 4400 was around $550 AUD at the time, and the 9200 was about $120 AUD when I bought them. I remember this early period of the 2000's so well because I had so much fun buying and building PC hardware.
The cpu is a northwood, i my opinion the best pentium 4 core ever produced. It was much faster and efficient compared to the previous willamette core and managed to be still relevant against the prescott core (at least if with the 800mhz bus version), released some time after. I had a 2.4ghz in one of my personal builds, and loved how fast it was for the time!
Collin, you have no idea how this video made me feel tonight. Back in the 1997-2005 era I used to have my own custom PC shop and these parts were my day to day thing and I just felt like I was there, 25+ years ago doing a custom built for a client. Love it. You just made me feel young again by looking at old stuff haha. You are the best. Love the content. I might start my own retro build. Thanks again.
Happy to keep older stuff alive, great to see them awaking from a long time.
I hear ya. I built at 486 and now I’m building 6 more haaa
same here, from italy.
How many pcs.. for all my friends, colleagues, family, and first customers.
Now, I am working all day long on cloud with no soul Dell Notebook. no feeling about these modern pcs..
I wish to back in time and re live again and again that era.
every single day a new technology comes out, every day something wonderful on internet did happened, movies, musics, before social era, with my friends in the basement playing Unreal tournament on local ethernet hub.
tears
Those years the golden age of custom PC computer builds. Had a local store where could grab a shopping cart and go up and down the aisles filling the cart with all the parts for a new build.
Just in case it hasn't been mentioned, Crysis required a card with at least 256MB of VRAM and 1GB minimum. Recommended is 512MB/2GB respectively.
It also required very high clockspeeds
The issue wasn't VRAM specifically
The cards probably didn't have the required instruction sets. I'm guessing Crysis needs pixel shader 3.0
@@dshadow01 You might be on to something. Crysis requires shader model 2.0, but recommends 3.0. The Geforce4 Ti supports version 1.3. The Radeon 9200 LE tops out at 1.4
LTT video from back then shows that to push the best graphic it consume 3GB VRAM
@@devaraft Did you snorted something? You got the good stuff innit?
Love the little light mod at the end, look forward to seeing more of this machine.
Glad I stayed to the end!
I love this period of building, this is abotu where I got on the PC bus. Really brings back memories. One of my cable management tricks for this era was to put the optical drive in the second slot down from the top and use that space above it to store the "extra" power leads off the PSU. Helped keep the clutter down.
I love the knockoff platinum and candy plastic aesthetic of this era, it really did have some character.
And that light mod? Perfect. Needs a neat case badge now too.
And the DVD drive really does fit nicely with the case.
You got on the pc bus? How many mbps?
This brings out memories! I had my own "PC shop" in the late 2001 and throughout 2002! Most customers back then had no idea what to look for in computers. So, they were running after prices only! Shops were competing to build the cheapest computers running the glorious Pentium 4 and Windows XP! That era saw the wide spread of SW piracy and HW counterfeit! CPUs speed were faked to appeal to the customers. I even heard of some tricks to alter the amount of RAM readout during boot!
I refused all those trickeries and chose quality, specially being a computer engineer myself. The market did not go as I hoped and the junk from china kept flooding the market! I closed the shop and switched to real estate business and never looked back to the computer market again!
“Swoosh..” is a great forgotten word I’ll be using in casual conversation from now on…
5:37 the DOF zoom changing the focus on each connector as you progress from right to left across the ports... brilliant. I'm subscribing just for the cinematography of that one sequence.
I also worked in a small computer shop at the turn of the century, and this is almost exactly the kind of PC we would build for the customer, or they would build for themselves, with parts from us. XP, despite its lousy WiFi support, was a very solid OS, which made most tasks a breeze. They didn't call XP the 'F1sher Price' OS for nothing! :D
I love watching videos of how to build PC's from "way back when". All I'm remembering fromy my days of doing, it are ripping my fingers to shreds taking out the breakaway expansion slot covers, and for the fingers that I didn't destroy, I'd get those cut up by putting the expansion audio, and graphic, cards into place! Ah those were the days. Brilliant to see this video, and the components have stood the test of time.
An alternative to cutting the 3 pin power LED header is using a pin to release the pin from the plastic header, and then move it to the 2nd position. Or you could remove both of them, and use a 2 pin header instead.
Came here to post the same thing. It’s way safer and easier IMO.
I came to the comments to say just this.
Truth told, cutting the connector was an extremely common of-the-era technique. I did the same thing literally hundreds of times while working at a small computer shop in 2000-2001. You had to bash together a PC in about ten minutes: there was no time for fooling around re-pinning connectors!
It's also a waste of a retro case to modify the cables that came with it!
Came here to write the same. Cutting the plug while you could just move the contact to the middle pin is pretty barbaric.
The ATI 9200 was the first PC component I ever purchased when I was first learning PC hardware in the early 2000s. I recently picked one up on ebay to put in a shadowbox (non-destructively). Really takes me back. Thanks for the walk down memory lane!
Me too. It was the GPU of my first custom built PC (although mine was the low profile version). Isn't it funny how he went out of his way to put a Nvidia card in this PC? RUclipsrs can't help themselves, it's as if they allergic to ATI/AMD or something. Maybe they think that using an ATI/AMD card will make them look poor.
I'm jelly of that Sony Trinitron monitor, love your narration as well.
I love it. Nostalgic, I was doing this on a daily basis in Mombasa from about 96 - 2002. The small square in the front was meant for custom 'branding'. Good times.
I LOVE this video. I remember fondly when computers had this aesthetic, and I can't believe you got such a beautiful new case. I 100% would've gone for W98, though. Everything in this system screams it: socket 478, AGP, CRT monitor, the case... I wish I had such nice hardware for my W98 machine. Greetings from Mexico, from a fellow retro machine enthusiast.
Brings back alot of memories running my old internet cafes and computer shop.
Try adding a 100-330uF capacitor in parallel to the fan power pins to see if it will spin up - it's a trick the 3d printing community uses for Noctua fans.
That's genius. I need to remember this.
@Timothy Hoogland I'm DEFINITELY not an electronics expert, but I think it works like this: The low voltage supplied is not enough to start the fan, so the fan has large resistance and the capacitor charges. The cap then discharges and starts the fan. The fan then falls to much lower resistance and so most future current goes to the fan. Maybe the cap occasionally charges and discharges, but one is able to run the fan lower than 100%. If you know more than me, feel free to explain. I'm hopeless at circuits and components.
I heard and read horror stories about the IBM hdd manufacturing plant here in Hungary. Because of the low wages the really low-end of the working class wanted to work there. I heard that some of them were smoking (!) in the clean rooms, and putting the cig butts off in the still opened drives. Crazy times...
Wow, I did not know these IBM drives were manufactured in Hungary. This comes as a surprise. I remember having an IBM drive back in the early 2000's and it was actually smoking. But as far as I can remember, it still worked. 😅😅
@@skieinc HP machines and printers are made too in Hungary till' 2005.
@@skieinc it's also said on the Hard Drive itself 11:43
20gb IBM are solid. 40gb and 80gb are crap. And then IBM sold to someone. Hitachi or something. And their first 80gb's were good, yet noisy. They just solved stability and toughness before looking at noise.
Your videos feel like visiting a zen garden. 21 minutes of raking sand. 10/10
My first PC was in that self same case. Many happy hours upgrading over the years.
love your videos. Found and started with your first minidisc video last month during a tough time and it got me through it. please dont ever stop!
I miss when it briefly fashionable to just stick translucent turquoise on every computer thing, even otherwise typical beige boxes. Turquoise is one of my favourite colours, and I have to wonder if that would be the case had I grown up a few years earlier or later than I did.
I think Windows 98 and various vintages of Linux would be pretty interesting! I also have a hunch that the driver program might work just fine the second time round, though of course it could be even worse!
Those re-usable knockouts are nice though, especially since it doesn't really cost them anything else in production to slightly alter the shape they punch out - but it helps the end user dramatically.
It reminds me of the fish bowl aesthethic of literally everything. From hand soap bottles to shower curtain lmfao. Some type of pastel fish bowl aquatic vibes
I loved the transparent coloured plastic era of tech, even though it was a little before my time. I would absolutely still like transparent orange gadgets today, just like the ones I wanted as they were on their way out of popularity when I was just getting old enough to ask for stuff, beyond just pointing at anything with Winnie the Pooh or Tigger on it.
I had Radeon 9250 at some point - shitty card. It was in a new PC my Dad got me. I couldn't wait to change it to something supporting Direct X 9.0c. I upgraded to GeForce 6600GT afterwards. This started the whole GPU craze I still have ongoing. Such a great card and so many great memories with it - pure nostalgia!
Cheers for the great video!
So satisfying to see! I worked in a computer store in the early 2000s and built many P4 systems. Exciting time with all the changes and developments. 20 years later I'm still into computers and testing new components on a regular basis.
Nice build! This era is my favorite of the entire history of PCs.
me too, although I was busy with AMD Athlon XP chips and not P4's...
We had this case growing up. it was my favorite "family pc" from the 90's.
I still have the case, tho its pretty beat up now, I'm pretty sure we purchased it from MicroCenter in Saint Louis Park the summer of 1999, during the launch of the Athlon 1GHz cpu's.
I remember that pc's specs well, even though I was only 12 at the time.
I really wish I had seen free geek had a new (old stock). I've actually been searching for a few years to find a better condition case than our old one.
That is a super special find you have there, I really hope you take great care of it.
I had that exact same case for my main PC back in the day and I've been looking for one now for YEARS to do a retro build in. Nice work building that thing!
And that was my same EXACT processor, P4 2.4c wow you literally built my PC haha
Same here, I had a PC with this case back in 2000. Did you ever locate one?
Here in Brazil I built many computers with this case, it was for Pentium 3 or Athlon/Duron, that's why the rear panel didn't match, besides it came with a big speaker, from the Windows 98/Dos era. Pentium 4 is a little too modern for him, but until it fits like a glove, this computer of yours was wonderful. 👑
***
Aqui no Brasil eu montei muitos computadores com esse gabinete, ele era para Pentium 3 ou Athlon/Duron, por isso que o painel traseiro não combinou, além de ele vim com um speaker grande, da era dos Windows 98/Dos. Pentium 4 é um pouco moderno pra ele, todavia até que encaixou como uma luva, ficou maravilhoso esse seu computador. 👑
I built so many systems exactly like this, also working in PC places in 99 to 05. This was like watching a video replay of my own old memories. Quite a strange experience.
Damn that disc drive looks sick. I want it
Ahh the old IBM DeathStar. I had a ton of those go bad after less than 6 months. This was when PC building was awesome. We would do to the computer shows and buy everything there. If you paid cash they wouldn't charge tax. I miss those days.
Had a local store where went shopping for a new computer build, going up and down aisles filling a grocery store style shopping cart with the parts. Was so excellent to shop based on a set budget while making decisions for best of breed components that would fit with said budget.
Great video! It's so nice how clean your case is. I love the light mod you did too... I'll have to borrow the same idea for mine. And thanks for the tip on the TDK drive, I think I need to grab one too.
Hi :D
I never was a fan of the Apple colours, even when every other manufacturer copied them. I was firmly entrenched in the "being black makes it faster" camp.
Although that CD drive would look sick with LED illumination (I don't think it would screw with reading the disc since the laser is IR)
Yeah, I wasn't a fan of that design either. Especially in consumer products where everything had to look "melty" or like it was designed in a wind tunnel.
Like an mp3 player? Can't just make it a rectangle, have to make it all curvy and weird. I was actually thrilled with the iPod because it looked normal to me.
If I'm not mistaken the black PCs came after the Apple colored ones, before that it was all beige.
I love this build. I love the aesthetic you went with. Right up my vaporwave loving alley
Man, this video hit all the nostalgia buttons for my life right after college. Cases with a ton of fans, side panel window and interior lighting mods, such a fun time.
I think I spent more time over clocking and Tweaking then I did playing sometimes.
I love the light on the front of the case. Beautiful build.
At 10:43
TDK CD burner....
I had one very similar to that, sounded like a vacuum cleaner, or like I had installed a jet engine in my PC.
Later, I went to a Plextor DVD drive. That one I lost when my Age of Empires II: The Conquers Edition CD blew up in it. (It sounded like a .22 pistol going off down in my case.) I switched back to the TDK, and never worried about it much since most of my stuff was on CDs anyway.
I love this video.
Istlll have my old p4 3.0ghz in a Chieftec case with 2gig corsair ram 200gb Seagate sata, liteon cd writer, and a 7800gs such hard nostalgia!
brings back memories. Thanks for the vid. I worked a e waste day for a affluent city in the early 2000s and I had a field day. Still have a Antec case that I need to see I I can do a build similar
Hahahahaha, I just put Arctic MX-4 paste between on my brand new AMD Ryzen 5 5600X! Been using the stuff for YEARS now. In 2003-2004 I had an AMD Athlon Thunderbird core that was clocked at 1GHz, and a heavily BIOS modded Nvidia Geforce 4 4400 I believe it was, and loved that machine. Upgraded in late 2005 to a 2.8GHz Prescott core Intel Pentium 4 with the same video card. I took a side grade to a cooler running, 2.5GHz Northwood B core Pentium 4 that overclocked to 3.45GHz without breaking a sweat, and a HEAVILY modded and overclocked Sapphire Atlantis (ATi) Radeon 9800Pro 128MB graphics card. After another run with a much faster Prescott, I went AMD for processor and ATi/AMD for graphics. Sorry for the rant, just miss these days when overclocking REALLY could make big performance gains.
Early 2000 era wasn’t the most fancy for pc parts but its was the most time of enjoyment having a desktop machine back then was a dream I remember getting my first pc with pentium 4 and playing gta and fifa 2002 😅 and use dial up internet .
The power LED connector does not need to be cut. Simply carefully pull up the tab on the pin, pull out the wire, and move it over.
weird enough I have that same motherboard that I just got parts to fix. except mine is slightly older and has 3 ram slots of ddr1 memory. awesome to see someone have a motherboard like mine!
My XP build in the same case has had its fair share of upgrades overtime aswell, originally a Socket 754 Sempron 2600+ and FX5200, i learned to solder with this machine after overclocking, changing hardware throughout my young years of owner ship as a child, it couldn't run Doom 3 or Farcry like my dad wanted when he bought it as an upgrade from a 486, i promised one day i'd have a job and upgrade it so he could finally play.
12 years later such upgrades happened, a Socket 939 XGP/Pci-e combo board, A64 3400+ and my dream card, an IceQ UV reactive Ati X1650 Pro, though performance in early game engines seemed to rely on raw IPC and high clock speeds, so a recent purchase of an uncommon Dual core 4200+ for this platform didn't give me the big jump i was seeing, old games saw identical peformance clock for clock with the previous chip..but a recent upgrade to an IceQ 2600XT showed double the performance in some areas, but in Farcry the game engine did utilise the CPU more and the synthetic 3DMark 03-06 runs showed double the performance in the CPU and GPU tests leading to a big score increase, definitely better paying £35, not £300+ for an FX-53. Especially on the board that does not overclock well, biostar was never known for it..perhaps the Asus A8N32SLI-Deluxe that came with the chip may go in so i can push both chips and see if they're capable of the golden 3Ghz known to overclockers if you won the silicon lottery..
Athlon was the better option at the time unless you later on went for a S775 HT pentium 4 example, but my roots were with AMD so i wanted to keep the build as original as possible and re-use what i could, when my dad heard the Farcry intro spring to life out of the Audigy 2 ZS, he finally got to sit down all those years later and play it while running in the hundreds, not the single digits, it was a bit emotional seeing him play those old games with a smile on his face while i played the later successors alongside, it was like 2 eras mirroring eachother, from old to new, the enjoyment they gave the user, was just as fun as it was back then.
I used to have one of those TDK drives and I LOVED it! I was so sad when it started to malfunction.
I had that TDK CD burner installed aftermarket in 1999ish HP pavilion. The desktop included a Zip drive, which I loved.
I believe I installed it in 2001. It was great! The software was solid also. Good times.
I HAVE 5 OF THOSE CASES IN ITALY AND IS MY FAVOURITE CASE OF ALL TIME ... I'VE BUILT SERVERS AND DESKTOPS WITH THAT CASE IS VERY GOOD
Antec always made reliable power supplies. I had one in my XP machine for over ten years and never had a problem.
I had a very similar looking, not certain if it was the same, TDK drive. Installing it into the family computer was my first foray into PC building. I remember it came with an instructional video... on VHS.
Having built several retro PC's, finding a period correct case has always been the most challenging, since most got tossed because they take up a lot more space than the rest of the hardware.
I used some to fix car body :)
I love XP Retro PCs! Especially when they are from the original era. ❤
I Used to have that case as my workhorse up till 2008, I really liked it.
I simply love your voice. And I'm a huge geek. Cannot get enough of your channel, Colin. 💙
11:15 Samsung consumer market drives were super solid, the most reliable you could get at the time, but the tsunami floods in Thailand destroyed key parts of the manufacturing process, so there was several months without any production at all before Samsung gave up and sold whatever was left of the HDD production stuff.
was just digging around on an old XP pc i have in the basement. Brings back a lot of memories, some of those old programs like PSP Converter, Deep Burner, Flock, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, MSN, a saved Myspace html folder, tons of stuff.
Did anyone else use Omega drivers for their Radeon card back in the day? Optimized for gaming and always worked better than stock ATI drivers.
wonderful video! That Pentium 4 era takes me back to the first pc that I helped build as a kid, kinda wanna build one now haha
Hell yeah Free Geek!! I just picked up an IBM 5150 there last week
Yay for the new TDNC computer! You should give it a name!
OK, just saw the front panel light on the front of the case at the end of the video. That rocks. I have an old Antec case from that era, arguably a better case, but man doesn't have that awesome bling on the front!!
I had this case back then and had P1 in it... man those memories
I had the same case I my very first computer back in 2001, it was a Pentium III 600mhz with 128mb of ram. What memories
Great vid as usual! You finally have your own vintage PC. With the Intel mobo its so average I'd name it "Not Sure".
I have a few 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID-class HDDs that have been spinning for over 83,000 hours. This was right before Samsung sold their HDD storage division to Seagate so I guess it was a last hurrah for the engineers. Good thing the 7-year warranty was never necessary.
Great video! I had that exact same TDK CD burner! I upgraded the one I had in my Compaq Presario 7000.
My first 3d accelerator was in that exact case so this invoked much nostalgia.
That disc drive and case combo... I'm drooling over here.
Maybe it was just me, but the shade of blue on the disc drive doesn't fit, but alas, it does look so good.
I had that same TDK writer! I bought mine at a local Circuit City before they went toes-up.
Windows XP era is when I properly got in to computers. Have a dedicated core2quad Q9550 XP rig with a GTX 750TI which can handle pretty much any XP game like a champ. And of-course tons of old software.
I miss those cases😢.
Thank you for such amazing videos❤
I used to have a similar case for my first Asus A7A266 based build. I would swap out operating systems with a locking drive enclosure (from CompUSA) in the top bay. I had pure MS-DOS, MS-DOS with Windows 95, Windows 98SE, and later Windows XP when I moved to the A7N8X-E Deluxe. But by then I had a ThermalTake Xaser III case. I also had extra enclosure to play with Linux distros (RedHat, Ubuntu, etc)
Had this case as my first computer build. Thanks for making this video! Looking forward to future updates. Mine had either an EliteGroup or Asus motherboard, AMD Athlon 1800+ cpu, 512mb ram, the Western Digital 80GB hard drive you showed in the video and a Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti200. Wish I still had it to mess around with! Thanks again!
asus has better
Becuase asus still hosting drivers for old motherboards
The three taller caps near the CPU heatsink might be Nichicon HM 3300uf 6.3v which were bad even if they looked okay. Just an FYI.
Mother boards of this area, did not have overclocking options in the bios. Over Clocking the Cpu was done with the Clock and Multiplier jumpers located on the mother board.
Rounded IDE cables! I had completely forgotten until now that back in the day, i separated the lines in the IDE ribbon cables by hand and duct taped them together to simulate the air flow of the rounded ones. I probably read about it on slashdot or something.
That blue was a huge hit back then
I really miss how bright and colorful things used to be
Oh!! You have the same Sony monitor my family had when got our first family computer in 1998! I love that monitor! This brings me back! Also, please dual boot it with Windows 98! I think that would be fun too!
What an awesome build bro. I love it! I want to build myself a retro PC as well soon.
Ooof now this is a serious flashback. I had both that case and the VeloCD back then.
ah man, the AGP connector, I feel old 🤣
beautiful build, that translucent blue tray in the cd reader is just FANTASTIC
So weird seeing that "swoosh" case again. That was the case on the PC I used for years, from 2002 to 2009.
A case like this is exactly what I want to make my next PC. The "funny" part is I will build a completely modern PC with as much RGB as possible, then cover all of it up with the case. A tip of the hat to Andy Kaufman where only I will be in on the joke.
Thanks, I enjoyed this blast from the past. I'd forgotten about those rounded IDE cables, they really improved the look of my builds.
The combination of Pentium 4 and beige/blue case is just perfect. So iconic!
Steve (Mac84) just bought a case that's identical to this one from me for a purpose that I have yet to find out. It's a beautiful case... for a PC.
I had one of those 60Gb drives... It was blazing fast comparing to other drives at the time. It never failed on me, but in the end I sold it after 2 or 3 years of use as the main OS drive.
I also owned this exact case. That teal cover pops off. I put some leds in there back in the day
For missing I/O shields, I use Plastic Canvas or I 3D print a universal one shield. With both these methods, I just cut out the little squares to match the I/O.
Plastic Canvas is a grid that is used with yarn to make craft projects.
Love myself a fresh *This Does Not Compute* video before sleep
Yeah, that's a pretty case, clean design... - turns on the light - I WANT IT!!!
Every millennial nerd needs a Windows XP retro pc. I built one with a 7800gtx in a LOGISYS X-Blade case. It looks and runs great, and plays Dark Messiah perfectly.
What a great video! Well done, sir!
Great choice of mouse, the microsoft optical mouse is peak xp gaming, I have one aswell on my xp machine and it is delightful.
Omg i have this computer case too and I love it so much! Glad to see another person out there with the same one!
The build you did is the exact one i used to have.
Man this takes me back. I was rocking an Athlon XP1800+ and GeForce 3 Ti 200 back in those days. A very solid combo that powered many late gaming nights. Even had that same Sony Trinitron monitor which was absolutely glorious.
I had the case in this video and that CPU/GPU combo. This video is a crazy flashback for me! I even had that 80GB Western Digital.
I built so many PCs back them like hundreds plus. I cant not imagine wanting one of those POSs.
This is so my thang. Nice!
I love this video/PC so much, it's so, so similar to the system I had back then!
Back in its day, I bought the same CPU 2.4Ghz. I had a very similar motherboard, Intel with the i845 chipset that supported the 533mhz bus. But I also had an nVidia Ti 4400, one step up from the 4200 you used. It was an absolute beast back in the day.
I had to sell it for finacial reasons, but when I bought my next PC (AMD Sempron 3000+) I had an ATI 9200 in that!
The Ti 4400 was around $550 AUD at the time, and the 9200 was about $120 AUD when I bought them.
I remember this early period of the 2000's so well because I had so much fun buying and building PC hardware.
*strange desire for Newport cigarettes intensifies*
The cpu is a northwood, i my opinion the best pentium 4 core ever produced.
It was much faster and efficient compared to the previous willamette core and managed to be still relevant against the prescott core (at least if with the 800mhz bus version), released some time after.
I had a 2.4ghz in one of my personal builds, and loved how fast it was for the time!
I just put together an "ultimate" XP machine -- all late 2012 parts.
It still can't run Crysis on Ultra High. Game's insane.
Congratulations on a decent retro-thingie build.
Subed & upvoted.
Looking forward to more with this rig.