- We're going back in time, ladies and gentlemen.
That's right, I just bought out the remaining inventory
of EXPC, a long dead PC store that hasn't even had a website
for the last eight years.
So all of this stuff in here
has been sitting around collecting dust in a warehouse
for nearly a decade, probably longer,
judging on the state of some of the packaging.
Do you wanna dig through it with me?
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(bright jingle)
There's four boxes? (energetic music)
- [Colin] Yeah, this whole skid is all stuff.
- Oh, so we actually bought the entire like remaining stock.
- [Colin] Uh-huh.
- This is a GPU water cooler,
but it's unlike anything you would find on the market today.
Oh, this is gonna be fun.
You knew some of the wildest stuff
had to be from Thermaltake, right?
Like what do these guys not make?
Oh my gosh.
Remember laptop expansion cards, ladies and gentlemen?
You could add a whopping four USB 2 ports to your laptop.
Nicole actually still has a laptop that takes card, guys.
Whoa, this one's got USB 2 and FireWire.
You wanna ingest some footage, Mark?
- [Mark] Oh yeah.
- At real time speed?
What is this pill?
This is a pill from Buffalo.
You know, the external hard drive guys?
Okay, I must know what the pill is.
$9.50, this is the medicine that your keyboard needs.
It's got a twist top.
Fetch me a laptop.
Ah, yes.
Now for a product demonstration.
Yeah, I don't think I'd pay $9.50 for this.
I gotta do this thing, Thermaltake.
For the price of just 14.99,
you could get the Cyclo cooling memo.
Cyclone cooling for memory.
Oh, man.
Let me show you guys how we cooled our memory, 2000s style.
These look like LED fans.
I bet you $100 that they're blue.
They're so weak.
The RGB memory under it makes these little pin LEDs
look super unimpressive.
Surprisingly quiet for having been sitting
for over a decade.
Move.
These guys, I never understood it, as an enthusiast,
I was like, why do they exist?
Why do you get to charge $12
for the world's most basic 80 millimeter fan,
even back then?
Did say 80, I meant 70.
And that's the answer, because Star Tech
has one of basically everything.
Hold on a second.
I recognize this packaging.
This was exactly the same scheme and packaging
that NCIX used for its house brand nGear products.
These were the shizz though, taking your floppy drive
'cause like, who needed one of those,
and turning it into a card reader
with that SD, MMC, CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick.
Man, do you guys remember when Sony
had so much proprietary bullcrap?
Me too 'cause it was yesterday.
And also 20 years ago.
WanTeng series USB port equipment plug and play.
What even is it?
A USB to parallel cable so you can plug in your old printer.
- [Colin] Oh, I legitimately might need that for my lathe.
- You need this? - [Colin] Yep.
- Take it.
Removable fram for three and a half inch
and two and a half inch HDD.
This is before my time.
Holy crap.
You would use a five and a quarter inch bay,
so that's your optical drive bay,
you'd plug this chungus bad boy into it, I mean,
that's why we had full towers that were this freaking big.
Boy, have we ever come a long way on these?
Got your USB-C two and a half inch drives,
got these little tiny mobile SSDs,
you're just off to the races.
But no, this, this is technology.
But at least you had security.
You know, you got the lock on the front.
Okay, now we're getting into the real good stuff.
Zalman has tried just about everything, I think.
And this is their 5.1 channel headphone amplifier.
Colin, how much you wanna bet that this still works?
- [Colin] 20 bucks.
- 20 bucks, okay, that's too much, too rich for my blood.
Hold on a second.
This thing is crazy.
What?
No, Colin, it is not, in fact, USB.
- [Colin] It's just RCA.
- Volume control interface between 5.1 channel headphones.
You can plug two users into it, so you've got your front,
rear, and center/subwoofer channels for both,
separate volume knobs.
Who would have bought this?
And then you've got whatever your sources,
front left, front right, (mumbles).
You know what, Colin? I was wrong.
This would totally work.
Not that you'd want to 'cause it's really, really stupid.
Thanks, Digital Surround.
Look at this flow meter.
You wanna know how fast your water's going?
What about this?
It stinks.
That's weird.
Bye.
TV capture, I remember TV tuner cards.
I really wish that this had been more of a thing.
It was because of resistance from the cable cutters,
you guys know that, right?
They wanted you to sit and watch the freaking ads.
(beep)
Ah, these were fun.
Okay.
So we've got both an ATI Silencer and an NV Silencer 4.
And as you guys can probably guess, these were for ATI
and Nvidia cards respectively
and these were fricking awesome, Arctic Cooling, man.
They were the schiz back in the day.
And this is not nearly old enough, Colin,
if this was your intention.
Most graphics cards back in the day were single slot
and they would have these wimpy little coolers, in fact,
in a lot of cases, they wouldn't even be configured
like this one where they're blowing air toward the back
of the case, they would just be sitting
on the card right here chilling just blowing air around
into your computer case, and what that obviously affected
was your CPU temps, your motherboard temps, everything else,
because even back then, your GPU was one
of the hottest running components in the system.
Arctic Cooling allowed you to put what is actually,
by modern standards, a pretty decent looking cooler
on your GPU after the fact that had multiple benefits.
Better performance, quieter.
And they had the added benefit of kicking all the heat out
of your system.
So check this out.
You got your copper cold plate.
You've got cooling for your memory chips.
Then you had your cooler.
This guy right here would go like this,
blowing air through these fins.
And then you can see it's actually kind of ducted here
in its shape.
So you'd have your stock PCI cover right here.
And then they would give you a second vented one
to install next to it, effectively turning your GPU
into a modern style dual slot card.
So it would expel all the heat from your case
through the back IO panel, and then this is the best part.
Check this out.
Okay, we've seen coolers for the backs of graphics cards.
In fact, a lot of coolers come with a backplate these days,
even this one comes with a backplate.
But this was back when they cared about freaking cooling
on the backplate.
Your card would be this thick.
Oh no.
I love this.
This is amazing.
I remember these.
Jake.
You wanna make the server go faster, boys?
- [Jake] Yeah?
- You gotta put one of these on your hard drive.
- [Jake] Oh, I know what that is.
- Actually, oh, can I have one of the new server ones?
Thanks, Jake.
I can't promise I won't put thermal paste on it.
It actually served multiple purposes,
these things were kind of cool
if you had like a 10,000 RPM WD Raptor drive
or something like that.
Basically, you pop off the top,
and then you can see the inside is both heatsinked
and yet insulated.
Why would that be, you might ask?
They served two purposes, one was anti-vibration.
So the only drives that needed a cooling enclosure like this
were ones that spun at higher RPMs, high performance drives.
And they tended to vibrate more.
So you've got this thick foam padding right here
that theoretically will make it vibrate less, I guess.
Oh my gosh, this thing feels so chungus in here.
It totally doesn't fit, and you know what,
maybe I have the drive in upside down.
Hold on, hold on.
Yeah, IDE interfaces were at the bottom.
Oh my God, it still works.
Tell me this doesn't feel like performance hard drive.
You can't.
- [Jake] It feels terrible.
- Shut up, it does not, I want a second opinion.
Colin, come touch my hard drive.
All right, let's toss it in the pot.
Just kidding, just kidding, just kidding, just kidding.
Should have seen the look on Jake's face, here you go.
Oh, I forgot about this one.
Oh my gosh, okay.
So this is Thermaltake doing what Thermaltake does best,
ripping off someone else's product.
So you can see it's basically
that Arctic Cooling cooler, right?
Except Thermaltake added their own bizarro land spin to it
and added water cooling to it.
So it actually does both,
it's like a hybrid air/water cooler,
and there were a handful of these back in the day.
I actually reviewed one back when I was ghost-writing
for Hardware Canucks.
You managed to bring me every 8800 card except the one
that this fits, this only goes on the GTX.
- [Colin] I tried.
- It's okay, it's okay.
These coolers were actually kind of neat
because they used air cooling for your memory and your VRMs
and all that good stuff.
And then they used water for the GPU itself,
do we have a screwdriver, can I have an iFixit kit handy?
The main benefit of this approach is that it allowed you
to focus all of your radiator power, right,
so all of your cooling capacity, on the GPU,
which was what really mattered for overclocking.
And it kept all of this heat from your DRAM and your VRMs
and all that good stuff out of your water,
so you could just dump that out of the system
with air cooling and then use all of your radiator capacity
to get the lowest possible temps on your GPU.
The only issue with that theory
is that you bought a Thermaltake water block.
So let's go ahead and open this up.
And we're gonna find what I'm expecting
to be a very rudimentary block design.
Holy (beep), is this just sealed?
We would have to cut it open.
What were these screws even?
Oh, they attached it to the heat sink.
How hard is it for us to cut open a copper thing like this,
just saw it in half?
- [Colin] The bandsaw is pretty dead right now.
- The bandsaw is dead?
Can we throw it in the mill
and just (imitates slicing noise)?
- [Colin] Sure?
- Awesome, thanks, Colin.
While Colin's working on getting us a look
at that Thermaltake block,
I wanna show you guys something really special,
this is not actually from EXPC, this is from-
♪ Brian the Electrician ♪
- He dug it up somewhere, I have no idea.
If CPU fan stops working, CPU may become too hot.
New CPU fan must be installed.
If CPU fan is not working, look. The red light is on.
But listen, the alarm is heard.
The green light is on when CPU Guard is on duty.
You guys ready for this?
Whoa, this thing is older than I thought.
I thought the PCB was black,
which would be an indicator of the age.
Not only is it green, it's this kind of green.
And as far as I can tell, this board was manually assembled.
It was quite common for Molex-powered peripherals
to have a Y splitter in the package.
And the idea was that a lot of power supplies
didn't have extra Molex connectors.
So if you wanted to plug in your CPU Guard,
oh, it's a little crusty,
you'd need another cable coming off of it
so that you could plug in your optical drive
or whatever else it was that was plugged into it originally.
The green light is on when CPU Guard is on duty.
The system just shut down.
All I did was power this board, am I gonna...
Oh my God, this is not turning on.
I don't know if we're gonna be taking another crack
at CPU Guard, I was so excited to hear it.
Look at the size of the speaker on it.
Like this thing was gonna freaking go.
Oh, you know what?
I think there's a manufacturing defect.
There's a ball of solder in between these pins here.
Hold on.
I bet if I pick that out, it'll work.
(beeping)
It works!
Okay, it's really annoying. One moment, please.
(whirring)
Okay, okay, I need a crappy fan to absolutely destroy,
wire strippers, and a sacrificial Molex.
Stay in there, this is such a cheap housing.
It just falls right out.
Okay, where's that damn Zalman fan then?
(tape fast-forward screeching)
Oh yeah.
Okay, you guys ready?
You get, oh!
It's sparking.
It was completely not grounded in any way,
even though there's a ground pin running right through it
to the power supply.
How is that even possible?
Okay, look, I'm not saying the CPU Guard is the best product
in the world, I'm just saying that,
when your CPU fan stops...
(beeping)
Red light, CPU fan is not working.
(laughs)
Oh, it works, I love it, sort of.
(laughs)
The last thing I wanted to look at,
the inside of this Thermaltake water block.
Yes, my friends, that is basically a heat sink style,
like north bridge heat sink style of fin construction.
This would be so restrictive 'cause your flow comes
in the side.
And then they don't even have like a channel at the back,
like an open channel at the back for it to flow through
and come out the other one.
It's not just cheap, it's stupid.
How could you possibly design something this bad?
Is there a flow-through like that I'm not seeing here?
There isn't.
There's no path for the water to make its way
to the other side.
This is just a solid wall of fin.
It would stop your water flow dead, basically.
Oh, you know what?
It's probably the domed top.
- [Colin] Yeah, there's definitely an air gap.
- [Linus] Yeah, but there were barely any places
for the water to come out into the thing.
- [Colin] And that's why it had bad reviews!
- Yeah.
Hey, reviews, the system works.
Hey, sponsors, the system works for that too.
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Thanks so much for following along
in this archeological exploration of tech.
If you guys wanna see more like this,
why not check out my attic exploration video
where I unearthed some long forgotten history
from the early days of Linus Media Group?
And there's some fun tech in there as well.