Putting Together My Own Retro Desktop PC

we've taken a look at a variety of retro desktop PCS over the years some have been fairly normal while some have not but believe it or not none of those desktops have been mined to keep this time let's change that [Music] [Music] Minneapolis non-profit free geek Twin Cities was donated a large number of new inbox PC cases from the late 90s and early 2000s mixed in with them was a complete retro computer which we checked out in a previous episode but while I was looking through the cases one caught my eye that I knew would be going home with me it was manufactured by super case but like a lot of PC parts from the turn of the Millennium there isn't really much info about it online but I remember building many computers using this exact model when I worked at a computer store in the late 90s and liked how cool it looked so as you can imagine I was pretty jazzed to find one that was still brand new there's four five and a quarter and two three and a half inch Bays on the front but what makes this case distinctive is this translucent teal swoosh shape I always thought this design aesthetic was lots of fun as it signified a much more interesting time in Computing and consumer electronics it came with a standard ATX i o Shield already installed along with a power supply that I wanted to take a closer look at the k-sides are held on with screws so I made a mental note to track down some thumb screws later on the panels are easy to slide off and reveal a pretty well laid out interior the three and a half inch Drive cage can be removed by taking out a few screws one of which was on the other side of the case so I had to pop the other side panel off there's a nice big cut out on this side for Access useful also for adjusting the position of any drives in the cage after the fact with the cage out I checked out the accessories included in the bottom of the case it's a pretty typical assortment power cable and a bag of screws but also included a second I O Shield this was for if you wanted to install a hybrid ATX board which is something we've seen previously the power supply is a 250 watt unit manufactured by deer which was an okay brand but definitely not the best I'd need to replace it for another reason though so I got it unscrewed from the case what I decided to put in its place is a 300 watt PSU from antec it was on the market for over 10 years apparently and I was able to find reviews for it on NewEgg the majority of which were very good but other than much better build quality this one also offers a 4 pin 12 volt connector for the motherboard which hints at the next component we'll be looking at while this case dates back to the late 90s I wanted to Target the early 2000s with this build specifically something to run Windows XP some people are confused by the concept of retro gaming on XP since a decent selection of titles still run on Modern versions of windows but not all of them will and of course tinkering with period correct Hardware is part of the Retro charm and here's what we'll be powering this system a motherboard from Intel model d845 gebv2 that's a bit of alphabet soup but it's a solid ATX board that was introduced in late 2002. six PCI slots plus AGP two Ram slots onboard audio video and networking and USB 2.0 all make this a competent mainstream motherboard during its time though perhaps not the most exciting thing on the market as the tape indicates it came with a 2.4 gigahertz processor and one gigabyte of ram which would be a perfect fit for Windows XP though I did want to replace the thermal paste before I got too much farther into assembly the heatsink simply unclipped from the CPU socket and sure enough it looked like this was still the original paste cleaning it off confirmed what I suspected this is a socket 478 Pentium 4. these were solid CPUs at the time and I was happy to see that it was the version with 533 megahertz bus speed which should give a nice performance boost over the previous 400 megahertz models I got the heatsink cleaned up and applied fresh paste Arctic mx4 which is probably Overkill but it's what I had on hand this is a solid CPU Cooler so there's no reason not to reuse it though I did take the opportunity to do a bit of cable management there that's much better this motherboard was made during the so-called capacitor plague era a time when poor quality caps made their way into a variety of electronics thankfully this one looks to be in good shape at least for now the motherboard has a decent selection of ports audio 10100 ethernet VGA parallel and serial along with four USB 2.0 and PS2 for keyboard and mouse unfortunately the i o Shield that came on the case didn't match and the board came to me without its original one missing Shields are a pet peeve of mine so I managed to pick up a replacement off of eBay for only 10 bucks with shipping I got it lined up with the back of the case but of course these things never go in all that easily so I went with the old school trick of tapping it into place with the handle of a screwdriver there see no problem there were a couple of extra leads on the power supply that I bundled up to keep out of the way then it came time to get the motherboard standoff screwed in so I emptied the bag of included screws a test fit with the board showed which ones I'd need to populate and I got them put in with a socket bit this is way better than trying to tighten standoffs with a pair of pliers one place where this case went cheap was the use of breakaway blanks for the expansion card slots so I picked which ones I figured I'd need and got them knocked out I got the motherboard dropped in and everything lined up perfectly the quality of computer parts especially cases was all over the place during this era as it was a time of rapid growth so little details like this tend to go a long way even if they're the norm now next up was connecting the front panel LEDs and buttons and the pinout was clearly labeled on the board so I didn't have to break out the manual a bummer is that it expected a two pin header for the power LED but the case used in older three-pin style there's an old school fix for this too and it's to Simply snip the connector down the middle with a pair of Flush Cutters turn the two halves 90 degrees and they'll Nest side by side as if they were a two pin version I got the motherboard's power supply connections sorted next trying to keep the cabling neat as I went unfortunately while the case included a decently large PC speaker there wasn't a header on the board for it not really a problem in the end though since it has an onboard buzzer this case lacks a spot for a rear fan so I wanted to at least install a front one this plastic cage can be unclipped to reveal the air Inlet I picked up a basic 80 millimeter noctua 3-pin fan I wasn't too worried about noise since it's likely the rest of this machine will end up making a racket anyway the cage not only serves as support for any long expansion cards but also lets you snap the fan directly into it it doesn't look like it'll impede airflow much either but the inlet in the case itself is a different matter I'm not sure who thought this was okay but I needed to do something about it more retro hackery was in order I unclipped the front bezel then simply chopped out the fan grill with an old pair of Cutters it doesn't matter if the results are ugly since you'd never see this with the fan in place and the bezel on this ought to help with airflow quite a bit the fan snapped into the cage then the cage snapped into the case there was a connector for it on the motherboard in a convenient spot then I wanted to do some basic tests just to make sure things were working before I got any further the machine powered on like it should but there was a pretty ominous message waiting for me shut down due to overheating I hope that was just a false alarm due to the dead clock battery it was also complaining about I got the coin cell replaced with a new one and that seemed to help these Intel boards were solid but kind of boring there's no option for overclocking for example or making other performance related tweaks I noticed that the new front case fan wasn't spinning and one option I did have was to override the speed control and force it to always be on after a reboot that fixed it since this is a low power fan I think the minimum speed the motherboard can tell it to run at isn't enough to get it moving since these kinds of fans didn't really exist back in 2002 with that sorted let's get some drives installed first up was an optical drive in this case a CD burner from TDK aside from the translucent tray to match the case this one is a good fit in that it was a solid option when it was new tdk's drives generally reviewed very well and were quite reliable the company made a number of models over the years and this one offers 48 times right 16 times rewrite and 48 times read pretty compelling speeds for the era some other removable media I wanted support for were floppies and zip disks drives for which were of course ubiquitous at the time the hard drive was a tougher decision my first option was a 40 gigabyte model from Samsung while that company is best known for its flash storage today it also produced mechanical hard drives for a number of years and its spin point line was generally a good value though perhaps not the best in terms of performance the 2010s saw a lot of consolidation in the hard drive industry though and ultimately Samsung sold this part of its business off to Seagate in 2011. another option was this 60 gigabyte IBM desk star IBM had a long history with manufacturing hard drives and for quite a while their offerings were considered high quality but in the 2000s a large number of their desktop Drive started experiencing bad failure rates so bad that they garnered the nickname death star and IBM had to settle a class action lawsuit it was such a big problem that IBM ended up selling its hard drive division to Hitachi that company inherited quite the mess but in the coming years was able to turn things around and build a reputation for producing very reliable drives but that doesn't mean this one would be the final and perhaps safest Choice was this 80 gigabyte model from Western Digital it was sealed in a static bag but the sticker indicated it was refurbished likely by the seller it probably would have been just fine but I decided a rule of the dice would be more interesting for this build and actually went with the desk star in a way it was a no lose proposition if the drive worked great if it failed well then it would just underscore IBM's troubles at the time and make for a more interesting video this drive cage made getting everything installed pretty easy though I did leave the screws a little loose so I could adjust the position of the floppy and zip drives to match up with the bezel later on I popped out the relevant front panel covers then Twisted out the metal knockouts on the chassis these are interesting in that they're actually reusable simply flip them upside down and they can be secured in place with a couple of screws can't say I've seen this before I got the drive cage put back in then installed the optical drive one thing I was a little concerned about was whether all the drives would match the color of the bezel since this case was brand new it never got yellowed but these drives were all used so they could have I got the zip and floppy lined up then tightened down their screws cables were up next during the early 2000s people were starting to pay attention to Cable Management so rounded IDE and floppy cables were a popular option among enthusiasts they helped with airflow and overall kept things more tidy so they were definitely the way I wanted to go the optical drive got an audio lead then I could hook up its own data cable power connections were next and I used velcro cable wrap to tie up the excess this left the inside of the case nicely serviceable but did emphasize that those expansion card slots were a bit lonely let's put them to work next I only needed a couple of cards and the first was something to replace the mediocre on-board audio it's a sound blaster live a very common but also high quality card from 1998 that was still very relevant in the Pentium 4 era in addition to better audio connection options it also adds a joystick port to this machine which motherboards had generally abandoned in favor of USB next was a video card because the built-in Graphics were also pretty basic I had two options and this one is a GeForce mx4000 with 64 megabytes of video RAM the other card could prove to be interesting to compare against as it's from nvidia's arch rival ATI specifically a Radeon 9200 also the 64 megabyte version for my own purposes the Radeon looked like it would be the better choice as it has a DVI output which would make direct capture for future videos much easier the GeForce card only had VGA and S video a quick poll on Twitter also leaned towards the ATI card but I installed the mx4000 first so I could Benchmark the two options I got the case buttoned up then remembered one last thing the bag of accessories included plastic feet which simply pushed into place and it looks like I'm mostly lucked out with the color match of the drives the cdrw was perfect and the floppy was very close though the zip was a shade off and although the optical was a used drive it didn't look it especially since the protective film had been left on the front of the tray I powered the system on and it seemed to come to life except I never got any video the monitor didn't wake up from sleep mode I could toggle numlock on and off so the motherboard was responding but it was clear there was a problem with that GeForce card when an AGP card is installed the motherboard disables the Onboard video something I confirmed by hooking up the monitor to the built-in port and still not getting any output that meant this card was simply dead so much for doing a head-to-head comparison with the Radeon installed I got much better results no warnings about the CPU temperature either so I think the new clock battery was indeed all it needed up next was installing Windows XP which went without a hitch the Death Star I mean desk star was holding up just fine in terms of drivers there wasn't much that was missing just the built-in networking and sound Windows even had built-in drivers for the video card and Sound Blaster live which was nice instead of digging out the missing ones I decided to try a tool I'd heard a lot about called Snappy driver installer it's a free utility that hosts a large repository of drivers across many years worth of hardware and can Auto detect and install them indeed it picked up the files I was missing and even had updated ones for some of the other components so I simply let it do its thing take out the sound driver installed and whoa what the system crashed and Rebooted Snappy driver came highly regarded but this is making a poor first impression I think I'll skip updating those other drivers for now everyone's going to ask if this thing can play crisis so let's just get that out of the way it installed without any complaints but warned that the video card wasn't supported last time I saw this happen the game crashed right away and sure enough that's what it did this time too so how about a game that's practically guaranteed to run Quake 3 Arena I set the resolution to 800 by 600 and maxed out the settings then kicked off the demo it had no problems getting through it and posted a respectable number of about 85 frames per second the 3dmark 03 Suite would be a better test of this card so I left it set to its defaults and let it do its thing a score of 10 12 isn't awesome but certainly not horrible considering this Radeon 9200 was a budget card and sold for under a hundred dollars when new it really wasn't a bad deal I wondered if perhaps the driver made much of an impact in this card's score since I was using the built-in Microsoft one I updated it to a newer version from 2006 rebooted the machine and confirmed everything looked good in device manager re-running 3dmark did produce an interesting result the score went up to 1034 that's not a huge Improvement of course but it's hard to complain about getting extra performance for free by this time I had managed to secure one more video card so we'd still end up with a bit of a shootout it's unlabeled but this is an Nvidia GeForce TI 4200 with 128 megabytes of video RAM it was a mid-range card but still pretty affordable at well under 200 bucks like the Radeon before it Windows already had drivers for this one but I jumped straight to installing newer ones just for good measure let's try crisis again because why not yup same video card warning and yep crashes right away I can't say I'm surprised what was surprising though was Quake 3's numbers this card absolutely ripped through the demo and came back at over 200 frames per second more than twice as fast as the Radeon 9200 I was excited would this translate into a similar Improvement in 3D Mark yes and no the 4200 did score a lot better at 14.78 but that's only about a 50 Improvement instead of the over a hundred percent we saw in Quake 3. not that I'm complaining since it also has a DVI output it's clear that this Nvidia card is going to be the one that'll stay in the machine that is for now the journey for this PC is far from over since it's mine to keep we'll be seeing more of it in future episodes as it'll serve as a great platform for testing out other retro PC parts and accessories I may end up even dual booting it with Windows 98 as this Hardware would be plenty capable of playing games from that era too undoubtedly there are lots more Shenanigans and retro mods to come with this machine and here's one to get us started [Music]

Channel: This Does Not Compute

Views: 126,771

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Id: nyHKHrXjybA

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023