- 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.