- 15 years ago 2005 I had
just graduated high school, a little site called YouTube was born and AMD was riding high. Yes, my friends while some
of you young whippersnappers might not remember it, Ryzen is not the first time that AMD has stolen
Intel's performance crown and fed into them. Don't believe me? Well, all I'm gonna
need is my time machine, some flux capacitors, and
three taps of my sandals, and I'm gonna take you guys
with me on a little journey to what it was like, back then. Back then. Hello it's me young Linus, and today we're gonna be building
the gaming PC of my dreams at my favorite store, ncix.com using the magic power
of the way back machine. Poor young Linus. He doesn't know that magic isn't real yet. Just like no one's told
him about our sponsor for today's video, Seasonic Thanks Seasonic, you guys are awesome. And you've been building
great quality power supplies, not just today, but for many years, and we're gonna be using one
of yours from 15 years ago and seeing a fool it'll be a
little awkward if it doesn't, if it still works. (upbeat music) Let's start with how we
picked all these parts. Obviously ncix.com ain't around anymore. And even if they were their
website, horrible as it was, wouldn't still contain
products and pricing from 15 years ago. Actually fun story, it wasn't
even capable of doing that because none of that stuff was logged. So as a product manager when I adjusted pricing for something, I was actually interacting
directly with the database, overwriting any previous
data, which is safe anywho. We chose December 1 2005
prime holiday shopping season and use the Wayback Machine to scout the decade and a half old
version of the NCIX website to create our very own way back machine based on what was the
hot stuff of the day. So why don't we start
actually with the case. The SLK 2600 AMB, and
it's actually very similar to the Antec Land boy, which
happens to be exactly the case that I used for my very first gaming PCs. Oh, it is brand spanking new. Look that is so cool. How much did I pay for this? - [Man] You paid I think 80 bucks, which is pretty on par with what it actually costs. - That's like rated about what
I would expect it to cost. One little thing we're gonna have to do is ignore the Antec power supply
that came with this case, or go ahead and swap
that out for a Seasonic. This is a nice little upgrade. We're going to 430 watts, my friends. Hey, look, you mark it but
back then 430 watt power supply was like that was pretty good, all right? Now one of the things you young kids might be
enjoying is that for some reason why this is putting the power supply up in the top of the case, what, has he gone mad? That's because back in those days, case airflow was designed
to go from the bottom front, up across the CPU, I mean, remember, this design kind of predates
powerful graphics cards that output a ton of heat, and then out the rear
exhaust or in a lot of cases, you actually wouldn't even
bother to have any rear exhaust. So we'll just get sucked
in by the power supply and exhaust it there. Nowadays, in order to keep
the power supply running as cool as possible, we actually try to isolate
it have it draw fresh air in and exhaust it completely separately from the rest of the system. Oh, and check out our motherboard. This is the A8N32-SLI Deluxe. What made this one really special was that it was running an
Nvidia chipset that at the time, if I recall correctly,
was actually the first to have support for two
PCI Express 1.0 16 x slots running at full freaking speed. That was the bee's knees. Unfortunately, this Bee's
Knees got more like kneecapped. It was dead on arrival
so we had to settle for the A8N32-SLI. Looking at the pins in here, these do appear to both be wired for 16 and this premium moniker is one that a Seuss actually doesn't
even use every generation. I remember them telling
you the story of this. So this might have even
been a higher-end board than the A8N32. For pricing of this
board, I'm gonna say $280. Now motherboards have
gotten expensive, hey. Chips, on the other hand. Actually, AMD Ryzen
looks pretty reasonable compared to the CPU that
we're gonna be running for this monster. This is the Athlon 64 4400 Plus, and it's not the first
dual core processor, but what was so special
about the 4400 Plus was that it was the least expensive of the fully featured dual cores with I believe it was one
Meg of cache per core. Price of this puppy at launch, just shy of 800 Canadian rubles. That's right, my friends, that's not even an Extreme
Edition or anything, it's just a CPU. And I bought this thing right
at launch, I lined up for it. The installation method is basically the same as it is today. You lift up that little arm, you put that ZIF socket together. Just a little something like that, lower that arm and baw. You remember OCZ
- [Man] Yeah. - 'Cause I remember OCZ, this is still my favorite
heatspreader design for any memory ever. You wanna know why? Because this is thick. And when you shine these puppies up, oh, in a nutshell OCZ was selling memory that was kind of crap. And then at the expense of longevity, they were telling people, "Well go ahead, just crank
the voltage of these chips up "and they'll hit really great speeds. "And if they die, well, "whatever, we got a lifetime warranty." So that's great, because we'll
be around forever, right? What would a gig of memory cost back then? I'm gonna say 250 bucks. - [Man] 242.
- 242, yeah. Believe it or not, there was a time when heat
pipes and well water cooling were not within reach of
the average enthusiast. Meet the Zalman CNPS 7000 flower type CPU cooler. Yes, my friends, it
used the power of metal to conduct heat away from the CPU to this gigantic circle
shaped, thin arrangement. They actually ran all the fins like this, mash them together, see these big heavy
screws on the edges here holding the whole thing together, then machined it flat
and spread out the fins. So you're carrying heat
away from the CPU surface and then spreading heat
around the entire periphery where it's taken care of by this fan that incidentally gives
you a fair bit of RAM and VRM cooling at the same time. Do you think this thermal
grease is still good? - [Man] It'll be fine. - Ah, hum(beeps) Now because AMD was the
enthusiast platform of choice, check this out. Cooler compatibility was by default AMD and then you would actually
have to adapt the thing if you wanted to install
it on an Intel socket. So that means installing
on AMD was super simple. All you had to do was
take the built in hook, hook it over one side of the socket a little something like that. Then on the other side,
Zalman actually included this handy dandy little thumb
pressey thing I'ma jiggy here, but some coolers actually
expected you to use a screwdriver to push it down, which led to a lot of screwdrivers being driven into motherboard, PCBs. Oh, I love this. This motherboard is
actually from NCIX too. This label is still white. These were heat sensitive
labels so that NCIX could tell if you tried to use a
heat gun to remove it and put it onto something else. So that means that this
CPU lived a very cool life. If you guys like this kind
of enthusiast retro stuff, we got our hands on Ostendo monitor which as far as we can tell is the first consumer
ultrawide monitor from 2008. So make sure you're subscribed
so you don't miss that. Was pretty common for the
five and a quarter inch bays in the area behind them to basically just get all the
extra cables jammed into them. That was what passed for cable management. You can see there's
actually literally no room behind the motherboard tray. Poor Seasonic having to show off like 15 year old innovations
are what passed for them. This is pre PCI Express power. We may have made an error mistake, or as I call it an errorr. These graphics cards do have
six pin PCI Express connectors and I believe 6000 series was
the first one to have those. So this power supply must
just ever so slightly predate these graphics cards. We're not actually gonna be running SLI unfortunately, one of these is a 6800 GS, and the other is a 6800 GT. This card was the hotness back then. It was almost as fast as a 6800 Ultra especially if you overclocked it and this was the first
generation of Nvidia cards to support SLI. So two 6800 GTs compared to one 6800 Ultra in games that's scaled well with SLI would absolutely wipe the
floor with the 6800 Ultra from a price to performance standpoint. I took two PCI slot
covers out automatically, even though this is
only a single slot card, that's hilarious. It was pretty common to
have to use these adapters and graphics cards would
actually usually come with them. Pretty common place for
people to change over their core platform or
upgrade a graphics card and carry forward a
perfectly good power supply. Fan panel, audio. There it is, I couldn't see it
cause there's jumpers on it, I forgot. So depending on your motherboard, sometimes you would wanna hook up like AC 97 front panel audio and then sometimes you'd do HD audio. This was right around
the transition period. You know what I'm not
gonna bother hooking it up. Graphics card, I wanna say $380 - [Man] It was $238, 90 cents. - Wow, you can barely get
like an entry level GTX card for that these days up
here in canadia land. Check this out. So this is a fancy floppy cable. It's rounded for better cable management. You guys take your round
cables for granted kids, you know what else you take for granted. Cost of monitors. We decided to, you know,
do a glow up PC here. We went LCD and I'm guessing that this thing was worth like 450 bucks. - [Man] Yeah, you're off a bit. It's $324. - 324, that's $300 more than I would pay for it. As for plugging it in,
I knew I kept all these DVI to VGA adapters around for a reason. That's one thing I don't miss about single slot graphics cards. This just fire right up like that. Wow. This was back when Logitech
was at the top of their game for gaming peripherals. This is the first generation G15 MX518. Man this thing's a freaking legend. Is actually Terrance's keyboard
that he uses here at work. That's why it has all these
like stickers and crap on it. There's even stickers on all these keys because he actually wore them
off just Terrance things. If I recall correctly, this
guy was about 120 bucks. And I'm guessing this puppy
was around 45,55 bucks. Now that's a name I have
not heard in a long time. Windows XP welcome. Let's start with what would have been the first game I'd checked
out after an upgrade in 2005. Oh yeah, Far Cry, the first one. It really doesn't look
as good as I remember it. Oh, those godrays though, those
would have impressed 2005 me when you walked up to this like this bent rebar like hole here and you saw that those reflections on the water
and that gorgeous skybox, all this foliage, man that was a moment. Didn't used to be that these bars were sky I don't know what's up with that, but.. Look at that meat. Bow, take that meat, got that physics right there, oh, whoops you need to die now. Thanks. What the?
Am I out of ammo? I'm out of frickin ammo. I forgot how hard this game was. That's not to say that Far Cry
was the only demanding game from that era. Fear was one of my favorites. First encounter assault recon. We're setting our graphics
card to maximum sure. Let's see how we do here. Why am I in a dumpster? Did I fall through the dumpster? I think I'm like, clipped,
I'm clipped in the dumpster. What the? - [Colin] Dumpsters simulator 2005. - Oh, you killed it(beep). UT 2004 then. Double kill. Oh Terrance's A key is coming off in my ring finger is all sticky now. Whoops, whoops, whoops, whoops, oh no. Oops, actually a lot of
his keys are coming off. Oh yeah winner. This is what chicken dinner
looked like back then. So that's it young ladies and gentlemen, that is what passed for a
frickin sick AMD gaming rig, the last time they were on top. And that was what passed
for good graphics back then. So we've come a long way in both regards. A good job AMD, good job, game developers. And good job Seasonic for
sponsoring this video, whether it's 15 years ago or
today or 15 years from now you can count on Seasonic to
provide the power that you need for your gaming rig or Workstation or whatever else the
heck it is that you need. They've got a wide variety of products with up to 80 plus titanium
efficiency, modular interfaces. They've even got their
like Seasonic Connect thing where you've got like
the main power supply and then it goes off to this thing and you run short cables
to all your stuff. We did a video about it, it's super cool and you can check them out at the link in the video description. If you guys are looking
for another video to watch, that's kind of like this, you can actually check out
on even more retro build where I rebuilt my first gaming PC with almost the exact parts that I used including a soltec motherboard. Soltec, what's that? Soul of technology obviously.
My first custom PC rig had an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+.
It was a beast back in the day.
iirc 06-09 was the time when Intel and AMD was slapping each other back and forth.
I remember having a Phenom II X4 945. Ran 3.8 Ghz and with 1600Mhz RAM and a decent HT overclock was faster than a Core2Quad from the same time.
I bought a Pentium D 805 like a sucker. I didn't know any better.
Yes.
-Pepperidge Farm
Ofc I remember it, it was yesterday... and today
AMD likes to be on top ( Ν‘Β° ΝΚ Ν‘Β°)
swap the 4400+ for a 4200+, and keep the first mobo he had that was DOA, and he pretty much built the rig I had at the time. Although I had a different case.
RIP NCIX