Windows XP Gaming PC Brought Back to Life

hello there today we have a kind of weird impromptu video because I bought a weird computer impromptu on Craigslist because well look at it somebody had to own this thing um and it turned out that someone was me so I picked this up because well for one it's crazy looking and two I could tell from the photos that it was a nearly perfect time capsule of a computer from 2004 which is just kind of really cool to see now this was listed as an Alienware for Fairly obvious reasons but it isn't and it never was uh this case was not used by Alienware ever as far as I can tell however it does turn out to have its own lineage that we will take a look at today I was all ready to dub this the failienware because of that but I respected a little bit more than that now but today we're going to be taking a look at this thing because I'm excited to see what it is there's some really interesting parts inside but this I believe is a vision man GS P4 3000 Series computer and we're gonna see if it will fire up today [Music] now of course what maybe buy this thing is this just utterly ridiculous case um this is why the seller thought this was an Alienware the obviously alien inspired design uh it has a door that pokes through there I have no idea why the punch outs exist here because there's no way you could punch out there which makes me wonder if maybe this is that's not even a different case it's just weird there's so much to explore here um but these eyes they should light up there's a cable right there to do that but that's not even the half of what we have going on here there's a little door right here has some USB ports uh there's some kind of display down there that we're gonna have to see what does when it turns on but that's just the front of this turning it onto the side here uh we can see this just gloriously awful window I love how hideous this thing is it is just great it has these locking tabs here for sliding it off they don't really seem to work anymore uh and then it opens up to reveal some really interesting stuff now I saw a photo of inside of this before I bought it so I knew what was going on here and there's kind of a lot for one we can see some what appears to be 2004 era stuff um this is what looks like a Pentium 4 era motherboard uh definitely uh what seems to be like a 6800 GeForce card right there I haven't actually confirmed that I don't know what that is but this is what really made me want this thing and oh man it oh that sucks let's let me let me get a tight shot of this so I can really show you what this is and it's really unfortunate that that's just broke because I'm gonna have to try and repair that and it's gonna be a huge nightmare this is what tipped me off that this case was special and that somebody really cared about this computer because that is a Counter-Strike logo cut out of acrylic that has an LED embedded in it so that it'll light up through the side panel when the computer's on but uh the LED's legs fell off the it's probably had been flexing around there forever and when I moved it around to bring it to the office they fell out so I'm gonna have to see if I can solder to the LED that's embedded in there um LED cases are made out of acrylic too and if they put that together right it's probably not removable so I'm gonna have to try and solder what little bit is left there which is just gonna be horrifying but uh we will definitely have to try and get that thing working again one of the other things that made me just absolutely have to buy this computer it's this power supply look at it I'm saying that a lot here but it's just bananas so we have what appears to be an extruded aluminum chassis anodized blue with the externally mounted fan the sleeved power cable coming out of this as well is kind of high-end too and it was not connected to the motherboard when I bought it I don't know how to read into that I'm wondering if maybe that was part of removing the hard drive unfortunately this won't boot right now and on that we're actually gonna have to pull this thing out before we even attempt that because I want to look inside of it because pretty sure this from 2004 and that is right smack dab in the middle of the worst part of the capacitor plague now I keep saying I think this thing is from 2004 and that's from the research I did to build my Windows XP uh 20th anniversary system which was built spec from 2004 and a lot of this all just seems very familiar to me um and especially this uh high quality cable management job here um how many different Splitters are there in here my gosh how many power hard drives did they have in this thing good grief um also this power supply has at Power connectors for some reason it's just so weird anyway this graphics card I want to see if I can pull this out I don't know how this case Works um this is an AGP graphics card by the looks of it um and I will it just slide out this is this thing is so weird there's no screw in it but it's kind of loose so let me just see there we go um yeah like I expected a gigabyte card gigabytes kind of thing was the blue PCB so gigabyte card gigabyte motherboard um is there any indication what this is there's a gigabyte part number there let me look up what this is real quick wow that whole section is torched from the uh power there uh and everything looks okay uh there's a speaker on this graphics card what probably beeps when it doesn't get power but that's still wild let me look at what it is as I thought per gigabyte.com this is a GeForce 6800 that was pretty much top spec for 2004 I mean pretty much it was top spec for 2004. uh so you could not do better than that when building a computer and it's passively cooled I don't think it's yeah it is not thermally conductive anywhere on the back there actually it has a rubber stopper and foam pads it's just an extra Radiator on the back which is honestly kind of brilliant because your GPU is always in the top slot so it's just kind of wasted space but uh so it's a single slot card-ish sort of but yeah that's awesome we need to see what processor that is though okay from here we can see a couple of things the power supply is how Max brand um I don't I don't know what that is hopefully it's not an ultra brand power supply because those are explodey but the CPU Cooler I'm a little disappointed that it's the Intel cooler not a salmon or something but that's a little thick there it seems to me so I'm wondering if maybe that could be a P4 extreme because that's kind of what the cooler is that came with those so I'm gonna pop this off because no matter what we're going to want to refresh the thermal paste on this thing so let's see what uh this looks like in there foreign though copper core okay I've got an alcohol wipe here I'm gonna wipe off the thermal paste and we will both see together for the first time what this thing is oh it's so dry it's flaking off oh my gosh um I can't quite make that ouch with the angle the lights at 2004 Pentium 4 SL 8u4 2.8 gigahertz though all right so looking it up that is a P4 511 it is not a uh extreme model so that was just a slightly better cooler I guess because I really think that the uh p4s had a much thinner one but we will be putting some newer uh thermal paste on there but again yeah all the capacitors look good there's some dirt built up around there but that all looks fine so yeah that's not bad uh what do we got for Ram we have some sharpied on um Ram we got two different sticks this one is 256 megabytes this one is 512. so a whole 768 megabytes of ram um that's pretty okay for a XP system like this I wasn't really planning on doing a like restoration video here but uh we're so close you know I might as well just pull this out and get it cleaned up because I'm seeing the dirt around there and stuff and I'm not super thrilled about that so we can just take care of that I know I'm gonna get questions about this so I'll mention this here I've been experimenting with a different dry cleaning method for stuff here at the office because I don't have running water but I have an Atrix ESD vacuum here um so this is conductive to ground from the tip uh this is a conductive rubber that goes into there and the whole thing is grounded so that uh it doesn't build up a charge and then I have a bunch of ESD brushes here so what I can do is I can vacuum up the dust as I loosen it so I don't need to like rinse a board or get it wet or anything like that which makes it easier to clean especially we don't have a sink so I'm going to be doing that here so yeah I just had to explain that before I turn it on because it is a vacuum it's loud all right that is looking dramatically better yeah I really like that solution uh I do think that's worth people looking into but I think next I want to get that power supply out so we can see what's going on with that because uh I guess it's not good things there we go I don't want to scratch it up lead man pal Max aluminum power supply okay who cares what it's made out of but support Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon processors it's AMD or meets ATX version 2.03 and ATX 12 volt version 1.1 specifications that is interesting um ultra low noise design so somebody cared about this thing um taking it apart is going to be interesting usually these are designed as like a shell that goes over top of a different one but because this is made out of like extruded aluminum uh we're gonna have to take off the back plates and it looks like it might be two separate pieces two half shells that go together but yeah I want to see what the Caps inside of this look like before we try applying power to it I really hope we can try and fire this thing up because it's just weird all right so hello oh yeah that's what I thought so we won't be powering this thing up that's for sure um yep it's done the capacitor plague thing yeah that's a ruptured vent on the capacitor this is a different kind of capacitor failure than leaking so this is not considered a leaking capacitor uh the electrolyte dries out and expands here that's what's going on so it's actually bursted the vent on top so this is different from leaking which I can see on the board I don't think there have been any leaks and that's just because they've dried leaking is where they usually get hot and they don't blow the pressure vent and they'll push the rubber plug on the bottom out and it'll leak electrolyte through there sometimes the seal is just bad on them as well but uh yeah leaks Come From The Bottom this is just that's usually cap plague when that happens all right back together it's gonna take me a while to get around to restoring this but I think it's worth doing it's kind of weird and cool okay now this case uh I don't think I mentioned this yet but what this is this is an atop Z alien um this came out after Alienware started and uh I don't think that it was really trying to be an Alienware clone because Alienware wasn't really pushing the whole alien theme that hard but it kind of was a clone anyway still but yeah there's a fan right there what looks to be like 120 millimeter fan for 2004 it's a little odd so that's kind of cool to see um there's another spot for an 80 millimeter fan right there that you just kind of pulled in there that's kind of cool no screws needed um there's an accessory kit right here which I I don't know what you do with uh these hard drive rails is that two oh that is super cool okay so these are hard drive rails that go in there and then optical drive rails and I guess no one ever used any of them because they're all still there by the looks of it so I lucked out on that uh that I got those the integrated Part Storage that's kind of a nice feature that definitely makes us feel like a lot more than just some kind of fly-by-night Clone I don't know what's going on with this over here that's that's all really confusing I'll have to try and figure that out so the card retention thing um but there are a couple of things here that I want to take a look at so I want to see if that led still works if I can get to those legs I'm just going to be really difficult to solder into there but I would like to get the Counter-Strike logo working again um but there's one thing I want to check first so this is a side panel there's a piece of cut clear acrylic in there and then actually try in there to cut out the alien eyes there's no acrylic there so it's actually vented um but when I took this outside that kind of changed color so what I've got is a black light and I want to see if that's UV reactive now that was definitely a thing at this time definitely for more high-end uh gear because it was kind of showy and pointless but I want to see if that glows so I'm going to turn off all my lights and I'm plugging in the black light I'm going to turn that on oh oh my gosh how awesome is that seriously wow dude I don't think this has any UV lights in it right now but dang yeah that rocks so that's the kind of thing I was going for with uh my build but the power supply cables were the only thing I could find that would do this that is so so cool though now to actually make a side panel like this work you obviously wouldn't Mount like a well you almost could mount a whole black light in there uh like that but the way that you did it were cold cathode light kits like this so This is actually a UV uh light kit this could go in this case but I think this is going to light up red uh based on what I've seen so unfortunately if I leave it as it is we probably won't see that light up which is a real shame and I already have this earmark to go into my 2000 anniversary build for the xconnect power supply cables so it's a little unfortunate because that is incredible um but yeah that is definitely a trait from this era almost exclusively all right back over to here though I want to see what the condition of this really cool uh Counter-Strike logo is so I'm going to take my multimeter and I'm going to set it to diode test mode and now put out enough power to just barely light up the LED if it's still working um just want to make sure that it's still good in there there we go and it is red like I thought uh so this whole case probably gonna light up red uh that will be a cool treat you'll see that through the window it's just a shame that they didn't do UV on this oh man what a lost opportunity so what I need to do is I can peel this back or off or something let me just trim it back oh that is good I can see in there this is something that would be needed I'm just going to peel the insulation off on this in there I can feel there's a resistor which there would need to be because you can't run 5 volts through the LED yeah we can see the resistor leg broke too that sucks uh so resistor on positive it's probably like 200 Ohm resistor or something there uh accounting's hard so I'm not going to bother with the Rings we just need to reattach although blankets just totally snapped off there but I'm going to go ahead and get some new wires and I'm going to go solder that uh so that we can utilize this okay so fixed and I did several things here a little differently than before uh the first one is I put these wires on backwards but uh the colors only so power is correct and this does fire up so the first thing I had to do there was get the wires attached to the LED which uh it was really tiny and difficult which is how I flipped the wire colors around but uh I was able to get those tacked on by loading the wires with solder and then just barely pressing them on uh so after that uh I got the other end of the red wire solder to what was left of the resistor which there wasn't much I could replace the resistor but uh yeah this was fine then I really wanted to make sure that those wires did not break free from the LED so I put some masking tape over the acrylic and then put a bunch of hot glue around the wires uh where the LED mounts and then leaned the whole thing forward so it would kind of average out and that helps provide some strain relief so these wires are going to break they're going to break right there and that'll be a lot easier to work with then I put some shrink tubing back over the resistor part and uh yeah that's it so here we are and I'm going to be putting the wire along the back here for even more strain relief because that whole thing is just kind of ugh um but yeah I'm going to remount that now I can take their Scotch tape off of here we can do a little better than that this time all right there we go close enough don't want to bring solvent into this because you can fog up the acrylic but I'm going to remount this with a twist tie because I don't want this uh zip tied in place so and there we are and I'm going to use that Loop in the back to hold up the power cable and that way it doesn't have to dangle across the whole front of the case and if I maybe position this just right yeah it might be obscured so hopefully that will look better and we can find a nice position there for this thing okay let's go over what all we need to do here um I think everything is clean enough in here I'm not seeing any like major dust bunnies so I don't think this thing was used on the ground so that's probably good enough as is not worry about that for now uh we will have to reconnect the many many matter of fact might as well put these here uh different lights and fans and nonsense uh up to the power supplies and uh they can maybe hide that behind it that would look a lot better we can massively improve on the cable management that this thing previously had so we're gonna try and do that um we have some more up here uh that appears to be for the eyeball light so that'll be really cool I've not seen this thing light up yet I'm waiting until we know that we're safe to turn it on because I want to have that first experience with you guys here if that fan is red that's going to be interesting because I've never seen a red fan before actually I'm kind of curious Linus and Alex over on LTT just did a video about how a modern fan they were looking at that's just ridiculous heads diode backflow protection these don't so these will light up when you spin them yay I'm gonna go ahead and mess around with the cables and such in here to figure out what all we have going on like the disk drive up there is not connected uh to anything but audio and then this one there's a cable but not connected to the IDE on the other one so yeah I just want to see what's going where in here okay I think uh I've got an idea of how this is going to go together here so I can go ahead and add a power supply now uh of course I'm not putting the other one back in so I'm gonna be putting in a modern one uh for now and that will pretty much guarantee that it doesn't have any issues all right next up is the motherboard and I'm gonna remount the CPU Cooler here but refresh the thermal paste of course as well not sure what was on there before but uh it dried out a lot so hopefully I'm making an improvement here these coolers are always so brutal to the motherboard as well because they don't Mount to anything on the back there is no back plane and that's just how these are they splay out on the board and just like rip it up it's amazing any of these survive at all but they were like this back in the day too it's just ugh okay so I need to go sideways into the PS2 ports all right just get that all nice and secure all right the time has come for me to figure out what this thing is how it works um it's clearly some kind of card retention mechanism um but oh whoa oh oh okay so there's ridges in there and they kind of like ratchet down and then hold the card in okay all right let's let's give that a shot so our passively cooled uh 6800 here going in down so okay so I gotta pinch this push it down and in the card wants to pull it back it doesn't want to line up ah okay interesting in theory I don't like it it is very hard to get in there okay this card does have a power connector on it but I'm gonna leave that disconnected because I suspect it's gonna beep if I don't and I kind of want to hear that because that is just weird matter of fact I'm even gonna take the PC speaker off because just to be sure I want to hear it beep uh but I can go ahead and put the rest of the front panel connectors and everything back on here okay I got the two Optical drives plugged in each to their own channel I guess uh I'm gonna go with a SATA hard drive for this for now um and I guess each one is just getting their own channel for maximum performance I go and plug in the 24 pin there and we need to run half of the CPU power connector over to here alrighty now to power all the things all right then when I bring that down to here might as well make it as fancy as I can I am going to take advantage of the accessory kit here I'm gonna grab one of these hard drive mounting rails let's see how do we do this okay so the plastic ones here are for hard drives these are for optical I guess weird okay so hard drives yeah yeah that makes sense ooh that's that's interesting okay so just ah that's simple I like that right there kind of in the middle I like it I I think that's a good move is that it are we ready to fire this thing up I think it's done oh wow I didn't realize we were barreling down on that yeah that's put together okay I am a little nervous about this because well it's capacitor plague era so we'll see what happens uh but I'm going to fire this thing up remember that's not plugged in oh that's going to need another Molex power cable when I plug it in well I expect that to beep and complain it doesn't have power but let's find out where's the power button oh inside okay all right well let's get it power remember there's no PC speaker in there now uh so I can actually put that back now that I know the GPU speaker works that is so weird now let's see what happens all happy beep I like that dude oh yeah we gotta connect a monitor to this and see if it's working first though we gotta see if those light eyes light up oh yeah barely but that's you know that's probably merciful soft powered down which tells me the chipset and stuff is working so I think it's alive let's get hooked up and try it out all right uh I'm gonna put this in place of my other XP build here I guess now the smaller computer is the heavier of the two and this one is absolutely massive all right we're ready to try this out yes drives checked hard drive good CMOS Eric I said the battery's dead I did notice it's actually the original battery um continue I don't know what's on that hard drive already so I might be cutting out here I'm gonna have to install Windows XP back onto the system uh Windows 10 on it apparently okay um we'll let this do what it's gonna do but it's gonna get XP back on it oh my gosh I forgot about the display it shows the temperature that explains why I saw a thermocouple in there with all the motherboard headers it can show a temperature on the case what do this thing is amazing I don't think it's gonna boot on a Pentium 4 so uh I am going to do the operating system reinstallation process here and I will join up back with you in a bit now while I'm at home installing XP and getting some games working and my cat explores how well I've plugged in the DVI cable I thought it might be interesting to take a look at something I've only mentioned here a little bit the vision man connection on this machine I didn't know this when I bought it but this machine turned out to be a systems integrator build and the company that made it was called Vision man the sticker on top of the computer boasts 11 years of experience which puts it around 2004 or 2005 based on what little there was archived of their website it's actually somewhat difficult to piece together information about the history of vision man because the Wayback captures of their website are very spotty but it seems to be based on what I've been able to find that Vision man started in the mid or late 90s as a workstation and server Building Company in the mid 2000s possibly 2004 they branched out into gaming computers as well now I can still find examples of computers almost exactly like this one around 2004 and 2005 which is where I got the GS P4 3000 Series name that I mentioned earlier there were computers configured in that line that had Pentium 4S and GeForce 6800s though I couldn't find an exact configuration like this with the red case and Intel chips it's difficult to guess what the price would have been because the value of the parts changed as they were released and replaced so I would guess this computer was somewhere between nine hundred and twelve hundred dollars when it was built now I find this system's integrator history fascinating and it makes me like this computer even more a lot of people myself included looked up to computers from the likes of Alienware and Falcon Northwest as inspirational goals of what computers could be so to have something from a company like this is just kind of a dream fulfilled even if it it's 18 years late and required a lot of work to get it going now in this research I found out some interesting things about the case as well it is an atop Z alien and this is not a case that Vision man put together to try and make it look like a fake Alienware cyberpower also used this case for some of their customer build computers it was just a generic case available off the shelf and what's funny is Alienware actually used cases like this as well custom cases for Alienware didn't really come around until their hot rod themed area 51. Alienware didn't really hype up the alien theme on their systems so something like this is a bit too on the nose for them still though it's a pretty cool and weird case and I'm glad that they used it and that it managed to survive this long because it is wild to see in person okay it is now all set up and usable which was an interesting experience to get it to do everything I wanted but it's all there and ready to go uh to the point where I even have the gigabyte GPU chipset drivers the real Attack audio everything is installed on here gigabyte actually hosts all the drivers for both the motherboard and the graphics card still so massive props to them because that is just fantastic um but I've had a couple of weird issues with this thing uh mostly related to the optical drives for some reason they seem really really slow and I don't know why this one is running in Pio mode and that one is running in udma too so that makes sense why that one's slow but I installed XP on that one and it still took like an hour and I don't know why but uh on the positive side I noticed this you hear that there's like no fan sound out of this thing at all my other computer is way way louder now part of that is because of the passively cooled GPU in there because it would normally have little tiny fans and those are always the loudest ones and that kind of really helps a lot here there's even vent holes right over that which would make it even louder so that's kind of cool on the other hand though I have concerns that that's actually adequate with the fans that are in here there's two chassis fans there's a one little one up there the 120 in the back and then I guess there's the big one in the power slide I was gonna say there's the small one on the power supply but actually I guess that powers flies right here not uh involved anymore I don't know there's no direct error path over that thing so I'm not sure how well that's doing but I don't know I do kind of wish that Vision man had put the thermal probe for this display anywhere rather than just ambient because you can look at your thermostat to figure out what ambient is but yeah that's I don't know I would like and may actually slide it under the heatsink for the graphics card at some point but anyway it's been fine overall no real showstopper problems it's so it all still works which means it's time to try the game for this particular computer to try out what the person who built or ordered this thing I should say I really wanted it for and uh this was a whole challenge here because this box copy requires Steam and steam does not work anymore so that's a whole thing when you install that it actually installs some compressed I think GCF files that have to be decompressed by steam after you log in so it's like a it's a whole thing so I have this um alternatively acquired copy uh of Counter-Strike that will actually work what this means with Steam not launching for this uh is that we are in the awkward time period now where we can have a physical copy of a game like this that is unusable because it requires online DRM so I have a less than Savory copy here that has been separated from the DRM that will actually still work so that is a better thing but let's go ahead and see how this runs [Music] I would say it's definitely uh running very well all right now that previous example there was at uh medium settings at 1280 by 10 24. this is high settings at 1280x10 24 not as optimal uh so there is a limit to how far you can push it uh but still games at this time were developing quite rapidly so it's not surprising that you can push it too far I mean this is really high resolution for these settings now a game I personally played a lot from this era was Need for Speed Carbon so I did install that on here and that ran not as great um so much so that I ended up installing it on the 20th anniversary PC as well so I could compare the performance I couldn't get the exact track to load on both of them for some reason but uh this felt about right here so these are at high settings at 1024 by 768 and the 20th anniversary computer does handle a little bit better now these systems have almost the exact same configurations they are p4s with 6800 GeForce cards in them the 20th anniversary computers is a GS 6800 and it's P4 is 3.4 gigahertz instead of 2.8 and Hyper threaded but that doesn't really matter uh so it's faster in that way but the performance difference between the vision man and the 20th anniversary is about as much as I would expect for the slightly better GPU revision and the more powerful processors so overall I do really feel like this thing is keeping up now these are slightly higher end games for this so let's try out what is this 2002's Warcraft 3. I gotta say while I'm swapping discs here Battlestar carlactica was not as good as I remembered it being way too much FMV drama and just really sloppy game physics this I think we can crank this game is running really well uh for full specs so this is a much better experience and this is two years older than this system so that kind of makes sense but it's just kind of a testament to how fast stuff was kind of advancing for games at this point I mean computers overall got more powerful more in the 80s and 90s but games really evolved very quickly here too well I think that wraps it up for the vision man here built in this awesome atop Z alien case this was a very spur of the moment pickup for me but I'm glad I was able to get it and bring it back up into usable condition I will still have to recap that power supply to bring it back to its full Glory but that's a project for a later day for now I'm just happy to see this up and running again so many people from this era myself included looked up to the computers made by Alienware or Falcon Northwest as being really awesome examples of what could be done so to have something kind of like that is really cool to me and I just want to leave it like it is rather than modify it anymore which is one of the reasons why I wanted to spend the time to repair that Counter-Strike logo I think that that is a really cool touch either that the original owner did or when they ordered it I'm not quite sure I don't think I'll ever know but still the whole thing really cool when I first bought this I thought there was no way I was gonna get it working aren't the capacitor plague would have taken out pretty much everything so the fact that I got to install XP and play games on it is just awesome so I'm really happy with how this thing turned out and I look forward to having it on tap for the future well if you guys enjoyed this video you may want to subscribe I know I'm definitely going to be doing more XP stuff in the future so you might want to stick around for that if you want to help support the channel I am on patreon but for now that's it and I will see you next time foreign

Channel: Tech Tangents

Views: 242,554

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Id: oaVDRY1R0kc

Length: 39min 57sec (2397 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022