Refurbing a 2003 Radeon 9700 Pro Gaming PC | Get into Retro PC Gaming

it has been a while since i've done a video like this and one of the main reasons for that is the scene for retro pcs is changing quite a lot it is so crazy expensive out there right now for buying old computer parts i just can't in good conscience recommend this hobby to people but my friend sunny messaged me actually about two years ago now he said oh i've got um an old pc that a friend of mine gave me is just been like sitting around in his loft i know you like old pcs do you want it so obviously i said yeah but yeah the pc was really fun so it's owned by this guy neil who actually went to my school and um so it turns out that neil was at one time the world's number one ranked player of unreal tournament and this is the pc that he used when he used to play it back in the day and he quit unreal tournament to focus on his studies because he thought that pc gaming would never form a career anyway let's take a look at this pc shall we it's pretty dirty it's pretty neglected the cables on the inside are absolutely horrible and there's this front flap here for the as you can see the case is absolutely gnarly neil has spray painted most of it black but really badly so it's like flaking off it looks really terrible neil actually told me that uh he'd also originally he'd cut a biohazard symbol into the side panel uh he was so two thousands i love it it's so edgy but it basically looks so bad that he just completely threw the panel away and bought another side panel so this is not the original side panel but it suits it and it looks okay i think what we'll probably do is we'll strip all this spray paint off and we'll go back down to case and then probably re-spray it silver just like a nice classic early 2000s silver pc that sounds about right the best bit of the build is obviously this fan controller here i'm going to boot it up but you can see straight away it's not happy i'm pretty sure it's just complaining that there's not enough power and there isn't a hard drive so i'm going to assume that all these parts work and what i'm going to do first is i'm going to take the whole thing apart and i'm going to give it a very good clean the first challenge with disassembling this pc was just the unbelievable amount of cables on the inside of this case one thing also is worth mentioning um is it also sprayed the inside of the case fire engine red the smart thing i think really would be to re-case this pc but i refuse i want this pc to have as much of neil's legacy as possible i just want to kind of make it look a little more stock and a little more fancy while i disassemble this and get the motherboard out why don't i talk about the specs in fact wait a second so here we actually do you know what i'm going to scan this in so neil's pc is made up from a gigabyte ga 8st 667 rev 3 motherboard it supports ddr333 ram four speed agp it's a pretty damn good board for the early 2000s the cpu is a pentium 4 running at 2.4 gigahertz with a 533 megahertz front side bus this is a northward pentium so i think this is actually a pretty iconic part of the pentium lineup pentium 4's got a bad rep after this but i think in this era they were pretty solid man there was a three gigahertz pentium released the same year as this and actually i think that was the first cpu to have hyper threading but for like a 2001 2003 build this cpu is gonna root it also has half a gig of team branded ddr333 ram this is double the minimum requirement for almost any game of the era and there's loads of room for overheads which is pretty cool the heart of the build is always the graphics card and this contains a radeon 9700 pro and this card is a superstar we're talking eight speed agp 128 megabytes of ddr sd ram 8 pixel pipes directx 9. in early 2003 the 9800 was actually already out so the 9700 pro would have been a slightly cheaper card but it was still an absolute banger geforce were just not in the game at this point so the 9700 pro was just about the best graphics card you could get in the years since this pc was supplied nia was also added another cd burner a usb expansion card and also an esater card he also added another half gig of crucial and a 256 mega stick of ram from samsung for a grand total of one and a quarter gigabytes of ram it says here that he had windows 98 installed so i'd be very interested to know that if a windows even played played nicely with all that ram installed and b if this motherboard is going to play nicely with all those mixed brands of ram when it came to cleaning i just took the simple approach the first thing to do is take advantage of this beautiful bank holiday weather and hosing off their filthy old case in the garden the motherboard just needed brushing down but i noticed that there were actually two leaky capacitors on this board the board actually powers on okay but it's just only a matter of time before those caps blow and just shoot fire and sparks across my house so i needed to bite the bullet and fix them i've never soldered before so this is a definite first for me but i did it and i feel really proud of myself actually so you know that was a really cool opportunity the drives just needed brushing down with an old paintbrush and then i just wiped them down with some biodegradable scentless wet wipes same goes for the fan controller the pci cards it's all pretty much the same thing just just giving them a nice little clean the 2000s though is an era when screws were going out and these annoying little plastic clips were coming in so getting that stock socket 478 cooler off of that pentium was a nightmare and then it was covered with one of these like pre-applied aluminium cooling pads which i completely removed and threw in the bin i'm not worried about the the level of contact because this this heatsink fits so tightly it is a bit worrying so yeah the contact is really not a worry for me also the cooling compound was really hard to clean i thought this would just come off with a wet wipe but i needed to use rubbing alcohol obviously not a problem i got it off eventually got the whole thing cleaned got some new thermal compound boom boom boom easy peasy when it came to the gpu um this is probably the most interesting part of the build because these plastic tabs are really not designed to go back through the holes i i managed it with some needle nose pliers and a little bit of jiggery pokery we got it off but having the exposed die on top of this graphics card made me very nervous so i've got it cleaned and back together as soon as possible reassembling the pc i am going to leave out some of those pci cards i don't need a sata controller i don't need more usb ports so i'm just going to leave them off it just saves cables and it saves space in the case i'm also only going to put one optical drive back in i just need to have dvds that's really the only thing i need removing those drives did present me with a slight challenge in that i now would have had empty drive bay covers on the front of the case i found roughly what kind of case or what kind of family this case belonged to so i then managed to find a bit of a bargain on facebook marketplace someone just selling some old pc cases i thought they would be more compatible with nils case i thought i'd be able to use maybe the top and the side panels this was not the case but i could use the drive bay covers in the front at the very least to stop so much air and dust getting into the build that meant i did have to sand down re-prime and use some rattle can silver on the side and top panel of neil's case but actually came out pretty damn well and i'm pretty happy about it and when it came to the inside i decided i didn't want to use any of neil's original cables i wanted to do as many new cables as i could i bought new cables for the inside where possible and the old cables like the power supply i sleeved them and i decided that i wanted to have some kind of legacy from neil's original red interior and i think this looks really awesome actually i think some red leds could really set it off but for now i think this is great so here she is here's the red menace everyone now this is all built and put back together the next thing is to install windows and get playing some games for an operating system i'm going with windows me so first of all stop any hate windows me is a good operating system the reason i'm going for this is because neil had windows 98 already installed so that's kind of the era of the pc that he was going for and so i wanted something to fit that me is essentially just 98 upgraded a little bit it still has dot support but it's actually a little bit better with newer machines it's got slightly better ceiling for higher specs i didn't go with windows 2000 or xp because they're nt based and so they wouldn't have as much support for windows 9x games i'm playing this is a detail that would come back to haunt me a little bit anyway the os installed perfectly fine absolutely great so let's get on with some games firstly mostly just for the laughs i wanted to play star wars episode 1 racer now this is a directx 6 game so i fully expected this to run like a beast on this machine and well it absolutely does even at 1600 by 1200 i'm getting well in excess of 100 fps and actually at some points i'm actually getting over 200 fps basically this game is just a straight bang and i just wanted to play it so wicked next i chose evolver which is a directx 7 game from 2000 this is actually one of my favorite pc games from this era but it's also one of the first directx 7 games which use hardware transform and lighting as well as bump mapping so with the bump mapping patch applied i thought i'd give this a go at 1280 by 960 i am regularly getting in excess of 100 frames even with a bunch of enemies and particle effects on screen it's rarely dropping below 50. this machine is perfect for this era of games absolutely brilliant now i knew that neil's favorite unreal tournament and also quake 3 both being direct x7 games would run like absolute butter on this machine so i thought you know what let's push it a little harder let's go with unreal tournament 2003. this is a directx 8 game so pushing the machine a little bit harder i'm running this at 1024 by 768 with everything set to high there are some little tweaks here and there like a drop down texture filtering and so on but i am getting north of 100 fps most of the time you can see when things get sweaty it does drop down to the kind of 40s but i would say the average experience was uh 70 fps and that's exactly the kind of thing you're going to want for a fast paced game like unreal tournament so that that's a win in my book next up i tried medal of honor allied assault another directx 8 game from roughly the same time period i'm running this at 102.4 by 768 again and this time i've got everything on max i've only dropped the shadow quality purely for aesthetics because i don't really like the way shadows look in these quake games i'm getting about 90 fps most of the time in the interior locations when there's not a lot going on it is just hitting that 90 all the time so i think this engine might actually be capped at 90 when there's action on screen or if i'm in the outside locations it does drop to 40s but again this is absolutely fine this is perfectly playable now i wanted to start pushing the machine really to find out what its upper limit is so the next game i played was far cry this is running in directx 9 and i'm actually running this game at full 720p this is the only game that's got a wide screen resolution of the ones i played i had to set everything to medium but i did turn anti-aliasing on to give me a slightly better picture quality but i'm still getting upwards of 70 fps and it's rarely dropping below 30 even when there's a ton of stuff going on screen i'm really pushing this pc to its limit with this and i am surprised that it is holding up so well i think this is not just the radion that's doing a lot of leg work here but far cry seems to be a very well optimized game the next game that i wanted to play was doom 3. now this is partly due to the fact that the radeon 9700 pro and doom 3 kind of did quite a lot of marketing for one another at the time so it felt like this would be a really good card to pair with this game the game automatically recommends everything be set to low at 640 by 480 i decided to up that to 800 by 600 and i added two times anti-aliasing you can see that in empty areas i do hear 60 fps the doom 3 engine is capped at 60fps so it will never go over that um but when things get spicy this does drop into the teens i would say on average i was getting a solid 30 to 40 frames which is honestly amazing considering that doom 3 doesn't actually officially even support windows me so that was a result pushing things to ludicrous levels now i decided i wanted to play oblivion now this is a directx 9c game so is absolutely pushing this card to its limit a sensible person would have chosen to play morrowind here because that is far more suiting to the hardware and to the operating system but considering this pc actually meets the minimum specs for oblivion i thought at the very least it would be a laugh to try in my first test i ran the game at 720p with everything on low but with anti-aliasing turned on and actually i got an almost playable 20 to 30 fps this would routinely drop to single figures as soon as anything was happening on screen so this wasn't going to work but even dropping the game down to 640 by 480 with no anti-aliasing no effects whatsoever in quieter parts of the game i could actually see upwards of 70 frames but it would still drop to singles when in combat or really as soon as anything was happening on screen so the needle is swinging absolutely wildly on this game but honestly i'm just astounded that it even runs oblivion came out in 2006 it shouldn't even run on windows me but here we are of course of course i'm gonna preempt someone in the comments that's going to ask but does it run crisis and so here's your answer much like oblivion this pc does actually meet the minimum requirements of crisis so i could imagine the performance would be roughly similar the difference is crysis requires some dlls from the nt kernel so it actually needs to run under windows 2000 or xp this is a really interesting turning point for the history of pc gaming because i could have installed windows xp on this machine instead of me if you go to xp you'd lose compatibility for potentially some of your older win 9x games but if you went with windows me then you won't be able to support any games which ask for xp the only way around this is to dual boot but i mean i'm not going to do that personally because for me this machine was only ever going to be the best of win 9x because it's clearly suited at playing games from the late 90s to the very early 2000s as i said at the beginning of this video this is likely to be the last video of this type that i ever make which is kind of nuts because this is probably the most in-depth pc video i've ever done sourcing all the parts cleaning them soldering like doing all that crazy stuff um but it's just getting to the point now where i'm finding it really difficult to advocate this hobby for me this hobby was always something which was cheap and now that it's no longer cheap i just can't recommend it if you've watched this video and you thought hey that looks like fun i can tell you that it is i i really enjoy it if it is something that you're keen to get into then there are ways that you can lower that barrier for entry so my suggestion is text your mates text your parents put the word out maybe like on social media does anyone have any old computers kicking around someone will have something like this came up just because sunny had this kicking around in his house and he wanted to get rid of it so they are out there finally i just like to give a big shout out to sonny and to neil for setting this whole thing up it was very cool of them to donate this pc i've had a really good time building it i hope you've had a good time watching it if you like these kinds of videos then check out my previous uploads i do actually have quite a lot of old pc builds on here and hit subscribe because i do actually have some related old pc content coming out in the next couple of weeks so if you haven't done that already please go ahead and do that and i'll see you in the next video alright [Music]

Channel: Stoked

Views: 17,675

Keywords: old pc build, retro pc build, build a retro gaming pc, retro gaming pc, 2000s pc gaming, radeon 9700 pro, radeon 9700, ati 9700, ati 9700 pro, pentium 4 retro pc, how to build a retro pc, build a cheap retro pc, stoked matty, stoked pc games, old pc gaming, 90s pc gaming, unreal tournament pc, unreal tournament 2003 footage, how to build a retro gaming pc, get into retro pc gaming, buying old pc parts

Id: _119ecvIYrM

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 18 2022