Why Pay $1000 for a 25 year old PC! - NIXSYS Windows 98 PC

i just bought this brand new thousand dollar industrial strength pc so what the hell is this why is this a thousand dollars who would buy this oh wow maybe this is brand new maybe i would buy this look at all these new features multiple monitor support dvd playback usb in 2022 thank you philly and steve thank you wait what's this for again uh whatever thank you to our sponsor signalrgb they're giving away a minecraft themed pc with over 400 leds enclosed in a one-of-a-kind case enter for a chance to win at the link down below one of our writers was looking into making a high-powered windows 98 gaming rig for some reason i feel like i know why that reason is and got an ad for a company called nixis for a new pc running windows 98 apparently they're a small business in orange county california that used to primarily sell servers their side hustle was building legacy systems for companies that didn't have the time money or resources to retrain their employees or buy new versions of software but they found themselves selling old systems at such a rate and it was such a good market that they ditched it entirely and just started building rigs that throw back to a bygone era now full disclosure we didn't actually buy this pc we would have but we reached out to nexus and they were kind enough to send us a sample to test so long as we didn't let lidas pull our fred durst on it and break stuff now looking at the exterior this looks like the kind of pc that i would have sold in my very first it job back in like 2006. yeah it's written in the script there that it looks like it's from the mid-2000s and belongs in an office that's about correct this case design is very much mid 2000s we even have a floppy drive here as well as an m disc i'm not sure if this is a dvd rom drive or not but mdisks basically i think they're millennium discs they're supposed to archive data for a thousand years or something like that i don't know if that's actually true i don't think that anybody's ever tested a thousand year disk a lot of these legacy systems have stuff on floppy disks or just spinning media and this would actually be pretty good for transferring that out to something more modern on the back we've got oh man we got ps2 ports for keyboard and mouse fair enough serial that's actually pretty important parallel also pretty important vga then we've got a grand total of four usb 2.0 ports on the back with a i believe that's a 10 100 nick plus we've got uh some basic audio on the back here nothing really special but this serial port and parallel port are actually very interesting for most older use cases because a lot of old like human machine interfaces and scada interfaces stuff that's for like heavy industrial use will use cereal or parallel and the thing about cereal and parallel is they can actually go pretty far or at least cereal can i don't know about parallel but you can run cereal for like i think several kilometers and also around the front are another two usb ports these are also 2.0 and front panel audio now for reasons we'll get into later these are only running at usb 1.1 speeds but they are 2.0 capable now if you thought we were done talking about the exterior we're not check this out this is a genuine windows 98 second edition serial key i don't know where they got that it looks brand new like it's not scuffed or anything like that like you might expect from like a like a like a pole from an old system does microsoft still make these like do they still sell these to companies that need it or are there just like some warehouse full of like new old stock of this stuff i mean i wouldn't be surprised let's get the side panel off of here it's pretty thin metal like yeah like that's typical of mid 2000's grade pc cases ah there's that fan just spinning at maximum rpm forever because there's no control this motherboard reminds me a lot of an old gigabyte board it's got that kind of blue with the uh the copper-ish heatsink on the north bridge there oh yeah that's a north bridge right this doesn't have a chipset per se well i mean it does it's a chip set there are multiple chips whereas these days would only have a single chip for that ah let's see we got usb here and we got front panel audio here all the front panel stuff including a nice tiny little buzzer speaker little piezo electric thing single stick of ram that's ddr41 400 megahertz but i don't think it's running at that right now there's not a whole lot else going on here but there are some interesting things about this motherboard that are worth noting first off it's got an agp slot in it that's accelerated graphics port and basically what that is is a version of pci that is just completely dedicated to the graphics card they don't have anything in here right now but they went up to from at least two times as fast as pci to as much as eight times as fast as pci which is actually pretty good because pci i think was 133 megabytes per second these pci here are shared that's typical of the pci bus what that means is that all the 133 megabytes per second transfer rate that the pci bus is capable of will be split between all of the devices plugged into it this is pretty much analogous to pci express today but pci express is dedicated and connected directly to the cpu and chipset versus this shared bus that these have these old cards used below the pci slots are isa slots are industry standard architecture that's what compact called it back in the day because they didn't want to have to keep calling it pc compatible these are 8 and 16-bit bus so this would be the 8-bit that's the 16-bit extension the reason why these are super important for a machine that's targeting like legacy systems is a lot of interface cards for say communicating with old printers or you know hmis industrial equipment weight scales that kind of thing they use isa and that can't be adapted at least not easily to pci some other stuff of note in here these ribbon cables they're not going to what you might think they are yes one of them is going to the floppy drive but both the optical drive and the ssd yes that's an ssd are connected with these ide to sata converters basically they turn these serial ata drives into something that this old motherboard can comprehend i think that's basically it right the power supply this is an fsp sparkle power so these aren't super amazing but they're not no-name things that are going to break immediately the idea behind these is that they're old enough that they can handle the power demands of these older machines that we've kind of evolved past so 3.3 volt and 5 volt rails on modern systems are very underpowered compared to in previous times that's what we have here so we have a total of 500 watts of power available with 150 watts available on the 3.3 and 5 volt rails which is a lot more i think than most power supplies today will give you you might be asking yourself why not pci express well the thing about windows 98 is that windows 98 doesn't support pci express agp is the best it'll do kind of like water bottles from ltdstore.com they only supported agp on the first version but they upgraded to pci express and either way they can still support your thirst no matter what your socket type the compatibility with all of these older standards is really the main selling feature of these machines a business that relies on millions of dollars of automation equipment controlled by isa compatible cards aren't going to bat any eyes at occasionally dropping a thousand dollars on a warranty machine that will keep their entire operation up and running especially if the interface card hasn't been made since the reagan administration the skytrain the longest driverless train network in north america and our local metro system here in vancouver is in that exact situation a half million people a day in this city ride trains that rely on isa cards and backups stored on floppy disks it may be old but it's very reliable that's nexus's niche their clients seem to be from a wide range of industries there's textiles accounting healthcare commercial way stations in fact a way station is probably the original home of my personal windows 98 computer scale which i recently brought into the office to show off to the youth i have an old way station computer because well for an individual with a propensity to tinker building a new windows 98 pc doesn't make a lot of sense sure this motherboard here is brand new so it comes with a bit more certainty that it won't experience burst capacitors or cracking solder joints anytime soon but that comes at a cost even from the shadiest sellers on aliexpress they still command over a hundred dollars and that's without any real warranty on them or taking shipping into account either when there's still full computers floating around for that same price it's worth rolling the dice for those of us who know what we're doing when your business is on the line rolling the dice to save a bit of cash is an unaffordable luxury so 100 or even 500 motherboard that uses 20 year old technology can be a straight up good deal the same thing can be said for folks with accessibility needs who rely on legacy software for some quality of life improvements they may or may not have as much cash to throw around as business but if a computer makes life much easier and better to live having one becomes a high priority nix has pointed this out in our email exchanges as a big reason for individual customers purchasing machines for non-gaming purposes but this bad boy is not so mission critical to me so why don't we find something more frivolous to do with it oh god even the intro cinematic is bad [Music] unfortunately every agp graphics card we've tried on this hasn't booted which i mean i'm not sure if i'm super upset about it or not but it leaves us with just intel extreme graphics when i ran the sims 2 the intro movie was at like 2 frames per second so yeah obviously this is not a gaming machine but maybe we can run some benchmarks that'll be fun we got pc mark and we got 3dmark 2001 se let's see how 3dmark 2001 se works with our incredible intel xtreme 845 graphics turns out the capture device we were using didn't like 10 24 by 768 so i had to change that real quick benchmark um solid 15 fps that's cool when i was a kid i say kid but like you know in in school fiddling around with this stuff i was like i was like what game is this like i wanna i wanna play this game with mechs and monster trucks and missiles and stuff oh yeah there's a there's a there's a nice solid eight six seven six yeah thirteen oh spicy oh six four oh it's actually pretty solid oh 16 20. never mind it's jumping all over the place again if lightness were here he'd be all like trunk door bernadette the peasants which is exactly what just happened yeah see that's just friendly fire they're launching flaming arrows up at the dragon into the town like that's just gonna burn the town the dragon doesn't even have to do all the work oh man the matrix demo i used to think this was super cool come to think of it i think this is about how well this ran on my uh my pentium 4 1.5 with like a rage 64 or whatever rage 2 plus that's about how well it ran i remember it being pretty bad only in demo mode did it run half decent but i'd watch that demo mode you have successfully run the benchmark well that depends on your definition of successful because a lot of those tests were skipped average fps in car chase was 15.3 in low detail 8.9 in high detail yeah yeah no i can't imagine there being anything wrong with the wireless mouse this here receiver pretends that it's one of these so everything that this mouse does receives that those commands and then just translates it into more or less one of these so if i plug this in yeah there we go working fine when we first booted this thing up we had to use a ps2 keyboard and mouse on the back there for well compatibility reasons specifically because windows 98 doesn't ship with up-to-date usb keyboard drivers or just drivers in general the drivers for the usb stuff had to be installed manually before any of it would work now that the drivers are installed everything obviously works just fine but it is something we had to do the first time we booted it up usb flash drives are an interesting case so this one is a usb 3.0 as you can see here the thing with these is that you're limited to fat32 at best there are drivers you can get for ntfs and other file systems but by default the stock version of windows 98 is limited to fat32 which if you format this on any modern windows machine you're limited to 32 gigs that being said it can do up to two terabytes so i'm just going to throw this in here and we should see that we have removable hardware check that out it thinks that the usb flash drive is like a like a floppy drive kind of thing like a zip drive and that's because that was the storage paradigm for a long time which made all the sense in the world back then but now it's just not how we do things and as we can see we have a bunch of stuff on this here flash drive a bunch of cpu-z screenshots and yeah that's pretty much it for that i can eject it not that that seems to have done anything let's uh unplug or reject that there it'll stop the usb mass storage device please can now be safely removed that is a thing that you actually have to do with older versions of windows because it gets corrupt and fat32 unlike ntfs doesn't have journaling so if anything goes wrong in the unplugging process you are dealing with file system corruption well i've been set up to fail i think i don't know that windows 98 supports usb audio uh i don't remember if it does or not device manager okay it found it usb audio device so presumably it should work uh let's go to the control panel to make sure we select it first so usb audio device doesn't seem to have any playback options but the recording does usb audio device yeah it has recording and other okay so the other is where that is and i will test direct sound i guess [Music] so what i'm looking at right now is a blue screen i i think i should still be able to interact with the system slightly no it's it's dead wait oh yeah yeah it's still slightly working um but it's like it was not happy about that is this expecting a higher sample rate or something than windows 98 can handle i have to wonder why this this happened the way it did you killed it my god you killed it he's dead jim i mean i guess we'll see if it comes back i didn't expect this to kill it yeah well we rebooted into safe mode following that crash and i'm just looking at the adorable programs list here just because i mean it's a thing to do when you're in safe mode and uh it's got the unofficial universal usb 2.0 stack on here did we install that yeah from what i understand this was more or less completely stock windows 98 and that's kind of what they claimed they've been selling but they do include this usb 2.0 thing and that's interesting to me because we had to disable usb 2.0 because if we tried running windows with usb 2.0 we'd get one boot out of it and then after that it would basically just not work that being said all of the important stuff did pick up via usb we got the flash drive working we got sd cards working we got wireless peripherals working and wired peripherals so pretty much anything you can expect to need to deploy seems to work just fine usb audio aside it's about as good an experience as you could reasonably expect from windows 98 out of the box actually upgrading the machine is not all that easy compared to contemporary windows pcs however i blame the firmware if you're looking to get yourself a warranty reliable windows 98 pc or a pc with any older windows installation on it the nexus has made it pretty plug and play out of the box so long as you don't mind forking over just a bit more cash compared to a used system from the era and i mean i don't mind forking over segways to sponsors like micro center micro center is one of the best places to shop for desktops laptops computer components and all your technology needs new micro center customers can get 25 off all amd and intel cpus at any of micro center's 25 locations across the us if you're looking for a new pc check out micro center's custom pc builder help spec out the best pc for your budget be sure to check the box marked same day pro assembly to have micro senders expert technicians assemble your pc for you for an additional fee as well you can submit your build to the build showcase in the micro center community and receive a coupon for your next micro sender in-store purchase grab your coupon and everything mentioned in the video description below thanks for watching guys if you want to check out one of your own legacy pcs like this the link is down below and if you want to watch more videos on windows 98 you can take a look at this video where i got scale out and showed the youngins what for

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,038,139

Keywords: windows 98, nixsys, nicksys, nick sys, nix sys, windows 95, old os, scale, anthony, windows 98 pc new

Id: CTIpNtHWVtQ

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 27 2022