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
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
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
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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