Mystery Custom RETRO PC's...What's inside??

hello everyone and welcome back to the Retro recall I hope you're doing awesome as always here we are on the bench today we have three more custom PCS that I have no idea if they work when are they from I don't know either this is exactly what it was like back in the '90s and 2000s like the late '90s and early 2000s we had the wild west of computing I say that all the time on this channel about these different types of systems these three systems look like they are custom builds the nice thing about custom builds that I find whenever I go to ew is that you never know what you're going to get in every one of them I mean between Optical drives hard disk drives look at the random beige floppy discs in these in these black systems and you know we're missing stuff and I love that I love that about these because they're each a mystery so in these series of videos that I do I'd like to get these systems from ew and find out if I'm able to get either one of them or all all of them working I like to discover what's inside of them see if they post and you know I have knopic so I throw that in there if it has an optical drive and see if it will actually boot to an operating system if it doesn't have a hard disk so as always we have lots to do let's get right to [Music] [Applause] [Music] it [Music] [Applause] [Music] and here we are with system number one and as you know as I stated earlier on the intro in these types of videos I like to find out how many of these systems we can get posting so we'll keep track of that as we go so the first system looks like a Cooler Master custom PC and I say custom because there's no real badging or real kind of case OEM type indication that this was any sort of OEM and of course Cooler Master itself is not an oem brand so Cooler Master made very nice systems I've done a couple videos on some of the Cooler Master stuff and so if you haven't seen that that was during the server video I did which is right there that whole series was really fun to to do so those cases were just absolutely Built Well I don't get the same feeling of this case when I touch it and lift it it's very light it does have the same sort of kind of grills in the front here that allow some additional ventilation which is nice we have our LG optical drive it looks like just a beige standard 1.44 megabyte floppy drive here nothing fancy but this is something that you saw more and more on case designs in the early 2000s the front IO the USB two audio ports here we have one for our microphone one for a headset and then we have what looks like a 1394 cutout or breakout I should say but there's nothing here like it's just a a plug that you would punch out and put an actual Connection in so unfortunately this case does not come with that and of course we have continued kind of like that design for ventilation continuing down the front but the unfortunate thing about this ventilation is that it gets very dirty very easily if it's kept in a room that has a lot of dust and then down below here we have what looks like light liit te so I don't know if that's Elite or like that's supposed to be an e and then light not sure in terms of the power button we have here so just pretty standard power button in the front here I really like that kind of feel of the power button it looks like there's a rubberized Dome around the power button itself so it kind of floats in there it's kind of cool then we have what looks like a hard disk LED then we have a reset button on the front and additional ventilation but it looks of things let's continue along the side here and overall generally this case is in really good condition I mean I mean little scuffs and Marks here and there but nothing too bad let's look around the back all right so already right away I noticed there's a big gaping hole so we have don't have any power supply here in the computer so we'll have to make sure in order for the test this we'll have to get a temporary power supply which I have and here we have our motherboard io on the back here we have two PS2 a Serial port a built on VGA or built-in depending on how you want to say that and we have four USB port here so we have four plus a two in the front giving us our six built on ethernet and our audio as well that's all on the motherboard IO itself then down here it looks like we have a video card but uh I don't know what we have for a video card yet till we open up the case but we do have VGA HDMI and DVI which is very well-rounded and it looks like there is a fan populated here as well I see the four screws and a little bit of Dirk gave that away and then on the other side okay Cooler Master fashion we have some additional cooling available to us kind of like this honeycomb type design that uh gives us additional ventilation through the side panel all right we're going to take the side panel off speaking of that and look at the underside of it here just a moment yeah that's what I was referring to so we have this kind of like this the intention of this is to go right to the CPU you would just kind of adjust this in and out based on where your CPU was giving it depth so the fan is blowing the hot air off of the heat sink directly out of the computer so that's uh really handy to have for sure all right let's look at the inside of this computer in a much better view okay and here we are in the inside of the case and it's very basic for what I'm seeing here but uh yeah we'll just go through it so we have where our power supply would be obviously missing from here but uh pretty standard here and I like to go over these because you never know the condition of these cases as you're getting these from ew or you're getting donated them it's just nice to see and I do this and people have asked as me on the channel why do you go through all of this with this these junk computers and things like that well I made the determination whether or not we're going to save specific parts for you know future builds or maybe this would be a custom build or it's a really nice motherboard or maybe we'll do a recap and things like that you never know or maybe this in itself would be a worthy candidate for complete restoration so those are the things that I kind of look for when I do these things so again in the back there's our fan that we were talking about that I saw kind of saw populated there which was really nice we have an optical drive but it is SATA but unfortunately it does not look like we have any SATA cables connecting that for well obviously power because the power supply is missing nor data so I do have a couple of those so we will test that out for sure we'll have to hook it up just because we want to make sure that we can at least to see if the system will post and boot into possibly knic and then here we do have a Intel heat sink and fan assembly probably a Pentium 4 or an Intel Celeron core type of uh setup here so I'm not exactly sure we'll know that as we go in further and for the motherboard we have an MSI Ms 7529 version 1.6 motherboard so nice to see MSI I like MSI boards I know some people have different mixed opinions about them but I I've never had any real issues with them which is nice so for the memory yes I'm digging in I'm going to take the memory out so for the memory we have what looks like 1 gab of Kingston memory and my guess would be is we have two of those and my guess is wrong that's a 2 gbyte stick so we have two sticks of memory here totaling 3 gigabytes of RAM which is nice to have in any day especially that low profile Ram I really like it especially in uh these sort of designs it gets it you know tight quarters or if you have kind of any sort of boards with ram slots running under some of the long longer cards it's nice to have the lower profile for sure okay then we have our chipset here which is pretty straightforward looks like we have a coin cell battery populated there's our four pin power header here as well so to me that tells me it's more of the pendium 4 era but we'll see as we go and in terms of ports here so we have uh you know I'm looking at the motherboard itself here and I'm seeing an IDE port here which is nice so this is one of those boards that were in between in that transitionary period so we have the IDE port here as well as for SATA connectors here so that gave you lots of options for expansion within this uh kind of like this era and then of course we'd have down here a floppy uh drive cable here ribbon cable so we don't have that connected I'm just going to pull that out because we really don't need that to do any sort of testing cuz we have that beige floppy drive that's in here but we're not going to be using that right now so then we have additional kind of front IO headers to the motherboard or cabling to the motherboard here pretty straightforward Okay so in terms of a video card I like this I like this little kind of design here just kind of flip that up and then it gives you access without having to take a bunch of screws off and things like that so I'm just going to see if we're hooked in here by yeah we are let's make sure we get that out there we are so it looks like for a video card we have a low profile video card in here a PCI e16 Lane card and what do we have for I'm going to go over here for a second just dust it off because I don't want all that dirt falling back on the motherboard okay it looks like we have an HD 5550 pcie HDMI DVI and VGA 1 gab DDR3 vram video card that's not too bad so having an ATI Sapphire cardred here so we'll uh we'll definitely try this out and see what we have in terms of making sure it even works you know in terms of functioning but I mean that's a pretty well-rounded card for what it would been back in the day but again there's always more expansion so when I say comments like that that would have been a decent card well it would have been and you know a lot of people say well there's better cards well there are I mean that's the purpose of that that was the Wild West that I keep on referring to because no matter even if I bought this I this was brand new on the Shelf I bought this I pop this in the card or I pop this in the computer it would be another card out there that would be even better and within a week or two and and so it just was so exciting back then as to all the different configurations and so what would happen it would force people to to try to max out the hardware they had with the with the software they had and the games they had and different things like that so I that's why I called the wild west I thought it was absolutely exciting to be part of okay I'm going to pop that back in because I mean there's not much more to see on this motherboard outside of the two PCI slots here as well giving us some expansion this is a much smaller motherboard obviously in a larger case obviously it's nice to have this uh type of case as well though in in you know if this is in decent shape because it does give us some expansion possibilities for future build okay so I think that's pretty much it I mean the nice thing about having something simplistic like this there's nothing more to show I mean it's pretty compact motherboard for what it is so let's get this all kind of sorted out let's get the bench set up and see if we can get this system posting okay and we're back and on the bench with everything kind of set up here so there's our custom case that we have our system number one HD monitor keyboard and mouse and of course we have an external power supply ATX power supply that I have plugged in to the system I've also plugged in the optical drive uh with a SATA cable as well as the state of power just to test it out and my goodness I love the look of this when it's all together just I mean just everything kind of matches but on top of that just this screams customization for me you I'm just remembering back in the day when I would see a case like this I'd think how many more of these Optical Bays can I expansion Bays can I populate what can I switch out with in terms of a floppy Drive what can I do in terms of internal video cards and and hard Diss and you name it so definitely love seeing this sort of things on the channel okay I'm going to go ahead and hit the power button here so I'm just hitting the power switch on the ATX power supply I love power supplies that have that switch it kind of gives me an extra step uh to kind of safety step here and I'm going to hit the power button and see what happens do we have post we have post green light on the monitor I got two post beeps and nothing interesting okay let's do a reset on this and see what happens as there's something displaying on the screen because it is it it it kind of lights up the back light lights up a bit there's a post beep it kind of like goes dim then block then dim you can't I don't know how much of that you can see on this oh there we are look at that reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key so that's great news we have post everybody sorry I got sidetracked with that it's interesting it's like the it wouldn't display for some reason so I'm not I don't know what was going on there but it was definitely an image on here let's just turn the power off again I want to do a c cold boot to see if we can replicate that same symptom or not cuz it may indicate there's an issue with the video card possibly uh I know that this system also has built on video as well if we need it so let's turn the power back on and see what happens okay one post beep yeah see there's nothing on the screen and it goes dark and then kind of comes back back a bit I see a cursor this time all right so it is it is working and I'm using the uh the Sapphire card that's in there let's do a control delete and we'll tap the delete key to see if we can get into any sort of BIOS setup okay there we go look at that that's interesting it's not showing us any splash screen or anything so I don't know if there's a it might even be my monitor and I am plugged into the VGA port on the uh on the dedicated graphics so I'm not sure if that's causing any sort of difficulty versus I should be using the HDMI maybe or the DVI but uh anyway we have post everybody that's what it that's the master uh plan here okay let's go through this a little bit and uh see I I just love the look of this of this bios this is one of the more modern American Mega Trends in terms of the kind of the older style systems that's going standard steas so it is keeping the date and time there no problem so the coin cell is fine it did detect on SATA 1 the DVD Ram or multi- drive that we have in there so that's really good floppy drive a it's not connected but I mean it's just hardcoded in there let's go under system information see what we have there we are there's our CPU so we have an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU e7500 running at 2.93 GHz it's pretty awesome and CPU frequency tells you what the clock multiplier is and everything and then the BIOS version which is awesome and then our memory so sure enough there's our 3 GB of RAM great to see all that kind of put together and of course we have a whole bunch of BIOS options here that we can go through and tweak and the more options you have in the Bios the more kind of tweaking you can do to get more performance out of it as well as compatibility I'm just going through here just to see if everything's kind of working I love the hardware monitors that are built on just kind of gives you kind of an idea what's uh what's going on in terms of all the different voltages this is a brand new power supply so I'm not worried about any of that stuff um but yeah it's uh looking pretty darn good stay away from that BIOS password for sure uh let's see here bios update so you can do the flash right on here I guess um yeah back at the BIOS the USB drive you can actually pop it in and do a backup as well as do an update I guess directly from here I'm not going to do that right now obviously I don't have anything but uh interesting you can do it right from here okay so I'm going to do is go grab the NAIC CD and see if we can boot into topics okay we're going to save I I don't think I changed anything but that's fine let's see if it actually boots from the drive oh so we did see a splash screen that time okay that's good and it seems to be loading so far let's see if it works okay and here we are and we're booted into the npix graphical interface the desktop here and yeah it is working just fine it's really great to see the computer up and running like this and uh yeah I mean just just exciting to be able to uh to use this computer again the fact that it's up and running it was found in ew definitely exciting to see it booting and not to mention didn't take much work from us it just worked my some monitor problems but that's fine I would say system number one thumbs up awesome let's move on to system number two okay and here we are with system number two on the bench and it's an aopen case it's a very generic aop case you can see the open badge down here this just decided where they decided to put it and we have a couple front iio there but we'll talk about that in a moment I remember these cases back in the day and I despised them I hated the look of this kind of like rounded bezel aopen made some really nice cases and in my opinion this was not one of them but hey you know everybody has their own has their own preference and this particular case as you can see has been sitting in the sun quite a bit it's quite yellowed in my opinion it's not worth saving this would be one of those systems based on just looks that I probably wouldn't do a lot of restoration for plus I'm biased a bit cuz I just don't like the case that's fine so we have a 52sp speed optical drive here from LG looks like just a standard C Rum Drive and then we have a missing 3 and 1 12 in expansion Bay here no doubt where a floppy disc drive would have been we have power reset there's our LEDs for hard disk and our power and of course as I mentioned two USB in the front and the that's it some of these cases I've seen with some audio in the front but in this particular case we don't have that surprise surprise we don't have any side panels This is one that did not come with it but you can see the original color of the case I mean overall in terms of the actual stability of the case and the physical part of the case it's in good condition but again just that plastic bezel being very very very yellowed and on the back we have our power supply and we have our motherboard IO here again so we have two of our PS2 ports we also have what looks like a spdif out cable here I it's interesting when they make it yellow like this cuz I've seen them in yellow I've seen them in Orange cuz it kind of throws me off to be a video cable and then we have our parallel port and we have our serial Port we have four USB ports so two in the front four in the back we have six we have a 1394 firewire connection we have built-in ethernet we have three of our audio jacks here as well and then we have a dedicated video card as well that's in this card because as you can see we do not have any sort of built-in uh video on the motherboard looks like we have VGA and S video now we have additional video out there as well plus we have some ability for expansion for fans and then here it looks like we have one two 3 4 5 6 78 port rj1 card I have no idea what that does but we're going to find out as we turn this around okay there's the inside of the system let's get this all kind of turned around so we have a much better view of what's going on here okay and here's the inside of our case so we have a lot going on here in terms of cables that's for sure so we have another system here that does not have a hard disc or a floppy disc as I mentioned earlier I'm just going to pull out the extra ribbon cabl so it's kind of out of our way it is nice that it has the Asus type branding on the ribbon cable so it says oh look it's your cdrom cable and the other one said IDE cable believe it or not so interesting okay so it is a large motherboard what do we have here looks like a p4p 8800 revision 2 motherboard and it is Asus branded which is nice so that's a pretty decent board by the looks of things it's pretty uh pretty large and in charge going on here um so this must have been used in some sort of business environment specifically with this card I'm going to take that card out of there just to see what it is if I can find my Philip screwdriver here so we'll just remove it from the system and it's again as I mentioned it's it's one of those things that when you get systems like this from ew you never know what's going to be in them so it is a PCI card and it says an equinex or Equinox I should say chipset I don't know if this is some sort of a modem card it says Avent Corporation sst-40 P imagine the 8p stands for eight Port just going to look up there so everybody can kind of see that information there so yeah the chipsets here all show connectent CHiPs right across the board no doubt they're all controlling those ports individually then we have some additional chips here as well so if anybody is familiar with this please let me know in the comments because it's interesting to know what these types of cards are again if you know what this card is in the comments please let me know I'm really interested uh to see what this would be used for let's continue on here and see what we have so we have our optical drive in the front here we have another system that looks like possibly a pennium 4 or a Core 2 type system so we're going to find out as we go we have our video card here just looks like a pretty standard AGP card I'm going to pull it out just so we can kind of kind of look and see what is inside so for the card it's a Radeon 7000 it says uh 64 Meg DDR video card so you know not a bad card for what it is you know for I know for kind of like if this was used in a business environment this would have been a perfect card for that okay I'm going to pop it back in just so we have make sure that it's in the system and one thing about the days back then Cable Management wasn't always something that everyone thought about all right let's pop this card back in there okay the video card is back in now so we have our processor here like I said we have Intel branded again that's our CPU and our uh CPU and our fan assembly here and then we have our chipset everything's looking good in terms of the capacitors based on what I'm seeing I have been looking at that in the other system as well just to see we only have one ram card or Ram stick populated here one of the slots so but it does look like a couple were populated but we just have that one and let's just take it out cuz it's here it's just going to be not fun to get out maybe that's why they left it in here cuz of where it's located yeah it's quite quite hard to get with all the wires over it there not to mention it's it's quite quite in there all right for Ram we have 512 Megs of DDR 400 memory and then down here we have what looks like two IDE ports as well and we have our power and we have a floppy connector there which is great and we have another looks like a third IDE on the side here it looks like it's kind of like an angle out on the motherboard here you can see uh with see everything's in the way uh you can see kind of here the IDE side of it and then we have our coin cell here what looks like I don't know if that's another IDE this is have four IDE we have two for sure three it looks like four IDE talk about expansion and then we have 1 2 3 4 five PCI so it is like I said a P4 p800 revision 2A Asus motherboard so at the very least the motherboard if get this posted is worth it to me you know this chassis not so much but uh love these old motherboards and look some of the rubber bands that are just in pieces there on the on the board okay and then we have additional cables that go to the front IO as well as the front USB so I mean that's pretty standard stuff okay here we are back on the bench with system number two all ready to get going let's hit the power button and see what happens very last loud CPU Cooler and just flashing power LEDs or sorry hard disk activity as well as a c ROM drive nothing okay let's do some troubleshooting on this computer let's hold on the power button okay let's move this around and let's just take a look at that power supply so the first thing we're going to do is pull out if everyone can see there just making sure cuz I wasn't set up for this originally let's pull it the power supply power and take our tester just to make sure that that's functioning I'm just looking at the voltages on the front here and the 5vt 12vt 3.3 volt everything's looking really good the minus1 12 is fluctuating a bit but not too badly so that seems to be pretty good uh let's see we can try the four pin as well I know there's there was definitely some flashing going on there so I'm not exactly sure what it was uh causing a trouble for let's pop in the four pin as well as the ATX connector here yeah no that's looking pretty darn good okay so the power supply looks okay so I'm going to do is one of the things we in troubleshoot especially with that little light show we got going on there I am going to remove that extra card I know I left it in there and I wanted to leave it in there but it's possible by me disturbing it it caused some problems uh possibly something else getting hooked up in it so I'm just going to remove it just to make sure that's not causing any trouble so a little bit of Wiggle on the PCI there we are we'll pull that out and no it's cold so that's not too bad let's put that aside and I'm just going to take a look at everything here just to make sure everything's looking good and it is I'm not seeing any problem s so I'm going to pop on the ATX power supply back to the motherboard the connector there we are and we'll do the same thing here with the four pin so I removed that card everything else is plugged in everything else is looking good let's see if that made any difference for us it's doing something differently now I have post look at that so it looks like that card is causing me some troubles so I don't know if it was grounding or if it was a problem with the interface I might have to use some contact cleaner I mean it's pretty dirty inside this computer it's working now that's what's important and we'll take a look at everything here so we are seeing our 512 megabytes of ram we are showing that our Cedar Drive here is set up as secondary system here so that's all good now let's go into setup it's saying that we can't install or can't see any hard disk we understand that and uh our ddr400 memory okay let's go into our F1 and see what we have Okay so let's go down to system information looks like the date and time is not correct so it looks like we do need a new coin sell battery so it is a Pentium 4 running 2.6 GHz is what this system is nothing wrong with Pentium 4S I like them I love seeing the variety of them that they have and the various uses that uh that they used as well so then again we only have one we have our 512 megabytes of RAM and so yeah I mean it's pretty straightforward here going in here and configuring if you want to configure manually configure the processor speed and configuration we have our chipset devices configuration all of our different configurations which is great here's our onboard Hardware monitors so we have all of our different uh different temperatures and speeds and fans and all that stuff and of course you can see all the voltages there as well all right so we do have have a fully working system so far all right I'm going to open up the optical drive here and pop in nopic and see if this system is going to be able to boot into knopic okay so we definitely have a problem with the optical drive not exactly sure what's going on there I'm going to try out a different optical drive right now okay so we have our Asus quiet track optical drive here 52 3252 I haven't tried this yet I bought this at a thrift store recently so I just had it handy hopefully it Powers up and works works so far so good not to mention quite fitting for an Asus motherboard as well to have that I'm just going to pop into the BIOS real quick just to see if it does detect the um Drive there's our cdrw as a master Drive I don't know if that's going to be causing us any difficulty let's hit exit and save changes and I have knopic in the drive now and see if we're able to boot from it so it is booting off of the Asus drive that we have now so let it continue to boot oh I say that but it automatically rebooted it's interesting that it picks it up there now I had this problem before and it was memory related I'm going to try one more optical drive just to see if that is causing us trouble or not okay we're turning into optical drive Heaven here so we have have adjust link which is an aopen Drive uh 48s speed burner so we're just going to turn on the power open up the disc drive and see if we're able to boot using this and I did have this working before so I do know it does so make sure the computer detects it uh we're going to F2 for load setup defaults it's because of course the coin cell's dead let's see if it exit this time it did it's spinning up no see as soon as it started to try to boot Linux it couldn't so I think the memory could potentially be the problem here I'm going to grab another stick of memory just to see it's possibly the memory that this is not liking um it could be a number of things but that's why we test these type of environments to see if we're able to get that going let me see if I can find some memory okay so I took another stick of memory some DDR 400 memory that I had another 512 megabyte stick actually and I can't get it working I tried different slots I tried using contact cleaner and unfortunately it will not work you can see I tried different Optical drives and for whatever reason it's not loading knopic I don't know if that's necessarily an issue with the computer or there's an issue with just knopic not liking a piece of Hardware that's in here where Windows may not have a problem I'm not sure so I've spent quite a bit of time on this now trying to troubleshoot this without actually getting deeper into the system which I do plan on doing in a future video video I would say that this is kind of like half working I mean the system is posting everything seems to be working fine we know that the LG Drive does not work it wouldn't read it at all but it is working on these drives we did discover that this card had some problems uh potentially causing this prevent from booting uh it looked like almost it was causing a short because we had the LG light and the uh hard dis light kind of flashing together there okay so I would say that this system is actually posting to a point I mean we're able to get this going I still think this is kind of like we'll say one and a half systems working so far all right let's go on to system number three and here we are with system number three and definitely one of the cooler looking systems with this kind of mirror reflective type design finger print Heaven all right let's go through this so it looks like we have is this another optical drive no that's something to do with just the design of the chassis so we do have an optical drive here we have an LG super multi RW DVD multi one of those drives looks like would have been an expansion in this computer at one point we have I believe four or three additional I guess 5 and a quarter Bays but this is kind of like a just kind of like a dummy kind of front on this that would go in one of those kind of C ROM drives and behind so interesting to see then we have two blanks here we do have a 1.44 megabyte floppy disc drive here as well and we have this interesting kind of design in the front here I'm not sure what's going to display on the LCD here or not uh if anything uh so we do have power and hard disk LEDs here power and reset by the looks of things some kind of funky design for some cooling here I guess here it says USB on the front we'll flip that up and yeah sure enough we have two USB two audio and looks like a breakout for 1394 connection which is not populated okay and the side of the case looks to be in absolute pristine condition no issues by the looks of things which is nice and then on the back we have our power supply our missing IO Shield by the looks of things but we have two PS2 uh one of our serial ports are back to the town back to the game we have our VGA port we have four USB so that's six USB as well built on ethernet plus our three audio and it's nice to see the built on VGA because we are missing it looks like it may have had an expansion video at some point possibly possibly another work card or a sound card not sure not too concerned about this but it's always great obviously to have the io Shield okay let's flip it around here on this side here we have additional cooling by the looks of things this looks Factory so it's pretty nice we have the fan here and then of course we have a different design handle some additional ventilation possibly but again in pretty good shape I love these thumb screws that are here I just like to uh use them instead of using the screwdriver wherever possible so that's pretty handy pop open the casee and see what's inside I think that fan is connected yeah we're just going to disconnect that because it's on the side there we are okay we have that removed all right so let's get this all turned around and take a much better look at this computer okay let's take a look at the inside here so definitely a beefy case for sure I mean you have lots of expansion possibilities with all the different Drive kind of cage here with all the optical the you know the floppy the different drives that could potentially go in here which is pretty cool and the motherboard doesn't look to be too bad of a motherboard it is an ASRock motherboard g31 m-s it says FSB 1600 DDR 2800 and dual channel so we do have our two Ram slots populated there given my history I'm leaving those in right now not to disturb them we'll find out what they are in a moment hopefully this system will post but I am looking at the fan and heat sink situation here with the Intel branded uh device but I mean this is just caked look at that I mean this is literally caked right up so we won't be leaving this system on too long even if we do get a posted just because I don't want any risk run any risk of overheating so we do have our four pin power here as well as our ATX connector here pretty good we have PCI Express 1 and 16 Lanes which is nice to have on this and we also have two PCI ports here as well in addition to the floppy and the IDE we also have the four ports here for SATA which is really nice to have because again it's in that mid kind of area where they're transitioning away from the IDE style ribbon I even though the system is using it to the SATA which is nice and you could see it probably had uh you can see with the SATA connector there as well probably had a hard disk mounted down here at some point okay I mean this is pretty straightforward board it's nice looking board it looks like it's uh pretty capable let's just hope it does post so let's see if we can get it working okay and here we are with system number three our finale it's all set up on the bench let's hit the power button and see what happens we have power we have post isn't that isn't that easy okay it's complaining about boot device that's fine I'm not worried about that let's h control delete here hit the delete key maybe we'll get into some sort of BIOS configuration okay I just hit pause so it says ASRock it says F2 to run setup f11 for boot menu or tab to switch screen let's go F2 for setup we're in the Bios exciting we're not having any difficulty with our coin cell battery which is really nice time's wrong but the date is correct so we have the BIOS version here processor type is an Intel pendium dual CPU that's e2140 running at 1.6 GHz 2 gigs of RAM here we go so with 8 megabytes of shared memory and 1 Megabyte of gtt memory not sure what that is exactly now it is running dual channel here so we do have the two sticks here and it does show that it is running together in that configuration so that's pretty pretty darn awesome under Advance we have our CPU configuration so we can go and do a bunch of things there we're not looking to do that right now we're just looking to see and make sure everything's kind of working but everybody I mean her our hardware monitor our voltages look great now I've had people say to me and I'm going to get some comments down below and that's fine you know why don't you test the power supplies using the power supply tester before turning these on because you could potentially cause damage you know what you're absolutely correct I'm but I'm getting these systems they're literally thrown into a pile to be dis dismantled and recycled my experience has been pretty good when it comes to this thing these type of things I've only ever lost one motherboard but it was a result of my issue because I crossed the voltages on the motherboard again I've been pretty lucky with this and you can see here the voltages are running pretty well and so under our boot we do have the configuration is detecting the C ROM drive which is great because we're going to use that in a moment and security and exit all right so I am pretty happy with this so far so we do have a one gigabyte or sorry 2 GB of RAM running a pennium dual 1.6 GHz CPU so we're going to pop in the knopic CD and see if we're able to get into knopic now I'm not seeing anything on this front display I was really hoping that would light up and do something so I'm not sure if there's something I can do to configure that in behind or there's something to do with uh the BIOS if I'm able to get that going I'm not sure I'm going to have to like kind of dissect this a little bit to see or look up this case design just to see if there's something I can get that uh working so it is detecting everything here noix is booting which is nice we'll continue to uh to boot here I'm going to see what it has in terms of Graphics so it is an Intel just regular built-on Graphics so Express integrated Graphics controller similar to an Intel audio controller so pretty standard stuff in the years of these CPUs and these years of computing is that when you have these motherboards basically with all these components built on they would go to Intel they would go to different chipset manufacturers and say hey I need audio I Need video and they would integrate them into the motherboard but again you always had your expansion so you could use your expansion if you wanted to uh do more with the computer than what you originally could do with any sort of built-on uh chipset features now that said this computer does have those two missing uh breakouts in the back of the chassis itself so my understanding or at least my guess s would be that one is directly above the PCI Express slot so they probably had a dedicated graphics card in there versus using the on board and then there's another one missing there like I said earlier not sure exactly what it would have contained possibly a sound card if that's what they were using it for I mean specifically getting kind of cool design case like this so the system is still booting into knopic so we're going to go right to the desktop and here we are with system number three booting directly into the knopic 9. one uh desktop and it's working everything seems to be pretty stable and click around no problem everything's pretty quick and uh yeah I'm very impressed with this software so far and these computers yeah I would say you know it's pretty successful having system number three our finale up and running fully all right so we're going to get the bench all cleaned up and do our outro and here we are at the end and what a journey it was to get here I tell you between the three systems I wasn't sure at all if we were going to get get these systems up and running and we were able to get all three posting I would say two and a half are working because we weren't able to get KNIX running on the middle system but I think there's more we could tweak to get that going but again you know system number one we were able to get up and running we had that initial video card problem that we could see at the very beginning where it would kind of flash on flash off and eventually just seemed to correct itself I don't know if it was my monitor or if it was the VGA output or that video card not sure but I would definitely do some more test testing if we were going to restore this computer with that ATI card that we have inside that system system number two not sure it was ever use for I kind of feel like it's the ugly duckling of the three I I never liked this case I said that at the beginning never liked it but hey the chassis itself is a very solid design the system itself worked fine we have that beautiful Asus motherboard that's in there and whatever this card is I have no idea what this card is so again looking forward to hearing from everybody in the comments what what that would have been used for and we were able to get the system up and running wasn't able to post in an opics but again that could be due to many different issues which we'd have to troubleshoot in a future video if we do a restoration and behind door number three system number three posted immediately worked directly ran right into knopic no problem we have that beautiful ASRock motherboard that's in there H you know nothing fancy in terms of a video card sound card things like that because again we don't have any of those in there it looks like they were in there at one point but it's nice to have this Hardware we have great motherboards the MSI Motherboard and two Asus type motherboards that are here one being Asus and one being ASRock but great having these systems in the collection and really looking forward to restoring these systems or again I don't know what I'm doing with the middle system yet I every time I look at it I just don't know why it's here anyway all right I'm really enjoying doing this for everybody I hope you really enjoy it too if you do please give this video a thumbs up hit that subscribe button it makes a huge difference helps the channel grow helps tell the YouTube algorithm you guys are liking what you're seeing hit the notification button change it to all you be notified in new content such as this please leave a comment down below did you ever own any of the components in these systems the custom systems tell me your stories about the days when you used to build these custom computers I love hearing all the stories I love the interaction on the channel and I respond to every one of your comments thank you so much for watching always making new content we'll see you in the next video [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] bye-bye

Channel: TheRetroRecall

Views: 12,730

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Id: ZqK4KCv_xZE

Length: 44min 55sec (2695 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 13 2024