Now you might look at this somewhat eclectic pile of hardware and go what a piece of junk
but for me
Everything on this table holds a very special place in my heart because what you're looking at is
after hours of scouring eBay, FreeGeek, Craigslist
basically to a piece
my first gaming rig
So if you were building a gaming machine on a budget back when I was in high school
AMD was a very compelling option the chips were cheaper the boards were cheaper
And this was actually the deciding factor for me thanks to a collaboration with NVIDIA
Which is probably a hard thing for our younger viewers to imagine given what bitter enemies they've become since AMD's acquisition of ATI back in
2006 they had much better onboard graphics than you could get on an Intel chipset
And so I decided on my website
And I'm going to show you the best weapon of choice the Soltech SL-75 MRN-L
The crappier onboard graphics version of the famous
FRN-L and FRN-2L whose budget overclocking prowess was second only to their amazing sense of style
That is until Soltech went out of business only a few short years later
Thanks to their use of shoddy electrolytic capacitors that pretty much all leaked just outside of the warranty period
I mean actually it's a miracle I found a working one of these
I could have substituted some other board with GeForce 4 MX graphics onboard
But to preserve the integrity of the build I
Way overpaid some jackass who runs an eBay store who thought this thing was worth over a hundred dollars
Because I tweeted I was looking for one so his listing got a bunch of hits. Ugh
Next up is my CPU the legendary Athlon XP 2500 plus
AMD marketed this processor quite cleverly
The branding was similar to Microsoft's then brand spanking new Windows XP and used the PR model number system to compare the lower
clocked but higher
IPC Athlon chips to Intel's gigahertz marketed Pentium 4 family
It ran a double pumped 1666 megahertz front side bus effectively 333 megahertz and featured
512 kilobytes of cache with a clock speed of 1.83 gigahertz
And was a well-known
excellent budget overclocker with an unlocked multiplier that allowed basically all of them to run at
3200 plus speeds or about 2.2 gigahertz
K7 was notably the last generation of AMD chips to use a front side bus before they changed
Everything industry-wide by moving the memory controller on board with the Athlon 64
Physically, it looked very different from modern CPUs
The die was completely
Exposed with only some rubber pads around it to prevent it from chipping or cracking during heatsink installation
You can see this one is quite chipped
So yeah, they didn't always work very well and the pin layout on the bottom is very retro looking socket a has
462 pins on the bottom
Laughable when you compare it to a modern APU that has over
900 pins in a much smaller area and a similar size modern Intel chip that uses LGA type contact pads
rather than pins to improve durability and pin density and squeezes over
2,000 in about the same area more pins are used for additional signaling to the motherboard and other system components for these more advanced
processors cooling and overclocking of my 68 watt beast was taken care of by a
Very unique product. This is the VanTec Aeroflow one of the only CPU coolers at least on the desktop to feature a
tip magnetic drive fan
TMD fans have the benefit of being able to use more of their area for cooling because the center hub contains
No motor only a bearing and the tips of the fan blades actually have magnets that are driven by coils in the frame of the fan
Cool, huh?
Less cool is the fact that they vibrate like crazy and they're loud and on top of that
Because of AMD's mounting system in those days
Putting this thing on sucks
So the CPU die isn't actually centered between these two fragile
plastic mounting clip things
So the heatsink needs a cutout on the one side for the the hinge for the retention ARM on the socket and only goes on
one way then you actually needed to like
Seriously, this was the intended way to install a heatsink in those days put a screwdriver into this notch on the other side
and sweat bullets while heaving down on it to pull the latch over the clips and then
Move it slightly to lock on to them. I mean there were so many
OMG, I put my screwdriver through my motherboard posts on the forums in those days
My RAM choice was dictated by what was cheap at NCIX at the time. So this Samsung 512 megabyte DDR
400 stick that I got from free geek actually still has the NCIX barcode
Sticker on it and is exactly what I used
In fact, it could be the exact stick that I had for all I know
I opted for a single stick even though this platform is dual channel capable to give myself more room to increase the capacity
of my rig in the future
Technically three sticks could be run in dual channel on this platform with one stick twice the capacity of the other two
But it was a kludgy solution and not guaranteed to work
The case in power supply is where I really have to take a moment to thank free geek the guys that we did this collab
With for hooking me up even Antec didn't have an original
Landboy buried in the catacombs and I could not find one of these
It took those guys like two weeks to find one and set it aside for me
Thanks guys, the original land boy before they sullied the name with this nonsense was
the bomb
It was made of aluminum
Very cool for the time it was affordable
It included not just a power supply, but and this was a huge deal, especially then a decent
350 watt power supply with blue LED lighting and
While it may not have featured literally any room for cable management or even front panel audio
It did have a removable three and a half inch drive cage for easy hard drive and floppy installation easy install sleds for the optical drive
And a side panel window to show off the aftermarket
80mm blue LED fan that I bought on an impulse like two weeks later at London drugs
Officially my first way overpriced computer modding component for drives
My original gaming rig reused the floppy drive and CD burner that I got as hand-me-downs from my uncle's Pentium machine
This is not an insignificant part of the reason that front case doors were so fashionable at the time
Black drives were not that common and they were even more
Expensive than their beige counterparts. Yes friends
The optical drive was as pricey as it was essential in those days
for the hard drive though
I couldn't carry forward an old one if I wanted better speed and
To have enough storage to install more than one CD based game at a time
So an 80 gig with an 8 Meg cache or a 120 gig with a 2 Meg cache
Cost about the same
I eventually settled for the 80 feeling confident that that was more than I'd need for a long time and
Feeling like the extra performance would be more worthwhile
Drives sure used to be more difficult to install by the way 80 pin versus 40 pin IDE cables
Master and slave jumpers you kids have it easy
For the rest of the machine. I'm using close approximations of the components that I had at the time my CRT was not a flat-core
Screen and yes young kids
We called it a flat screen because the piece of glass in the front was flat rather than curved
We knew it was still big and heavy and I actually had slightly different hand-me-down
Keyboard and mice before upgrading a year or so later to a wireless MX duo
But the one thing that is exactly the same here is the mouse pad being too cheap to buy a real mouse pad
I used a piece of paper to overcome the tracking issues on my computer desk and it worked great by the way
You just have to replace it everywhere
Once in a while, so we interrupt the scripted portion of this video to bring you
the moment of truth
Pressing the power button after of course turning on the power supply. Oh, you hear that tip magnetic drive fan
music
Come on display
It's alive
Athlon XP
1.1 gigahertz, that's okay. We can go and change that manually. You can see 32 megs of memory shared
Ah
Hard drive not being picked up. I'll diagnose that later. Maybe that I DE cable
Delete center set up and there we are
Let's get some Windows XP installed on this bitch, right?
so then with the system working, the only question remaining was will it run minecraft and the
answer is
surprisingly
No after overpaying for that stupid motherboard
It turns out that the system?
the system is not stable enough to do anything more
than install Windows and look at the desktop.
Not entirely unexpected, but disappointing to be sure.
So if you're not familiar with Massdrop,
the concept is pretty simple.
They've got this huge community of enthusiasts,
and I can't say like computer enthusiasts
or knife enthusiasts or audio enthusiasts,
because there's all these different enthusiasts.
And they basically go,
hey, there's this like really cool product that we'd like,
can you go to the manufacturer or an authorized reseller
and tell them, hey, you know, we're all willing to buy it
if you could just do a little something on the price.
Massdrop takes buyers and sellers and does volume deals,
so everyone gets a good deal.
The manufacturer sells a bunch
and the buyers get a lower price.
Pretty freaking cool.
And you can check it out at the link
in the video description.
But recently they have branched out a little bit
and they've started working with manufacturers
to do special editions of their products
just for Massdrop.
And special pricing is of course included as well.
So they worked with HiFiMan this time around
to bring back the HE300 with a special MD
or Massdrop flare.
So in their former life,
solely under HiFiMan,
these entry-level headphones were priced at
about 300 US dollars.
And the new one is very similar to the old HE300s,
but with an updated and more lightweight structure,
a more neutral sound signature,
and an all black appearance
compared to the silver and black of older generations.
The most important change, however,
that they have made is reducing the price
to a very actually legitimately low 99 US dollars.
So all you gotta do to check them out
is head over to the draw.pss
slash LTT dash HE dash 350.
Don't expect you to remember that.
Check it out at the link in the video description.
Thanks for watching.
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Now that you're done doing all that stuff,
you're probably wondering,
hmm, gee, what should I watch next?
Oh, maybe a review of like a super sick
17-inch gaming laptop.
You can check that one out there.
I guarantee you that it is both more powerful and smaller,
but it's worth it.
Smaller and more expensive.
And that's three things that it is both of than this.