we're going back in time ladies and gentlemen
that's right i just bought out the remaining inventory of xpc 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 want to dig through it with me do you want me to tell you about our sponsor thanks to pulseway for
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there's four boxes yeah this whole skid is all stuff oh so
we actually bought the entire like remaining stock
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 thermal tape 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 desk whoa
this one's got usb 2 and firewire you want to ingest some footage mark
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 got to do this thing thermaltake for the price of just 14.99 you could
get the cyclo cooling memo oh
cyclone cooling for
oh man let me show you guys how we cooled our
memory 2000 style these look like led fans i
bet you a hundred dollars that they're blue they're so weak yeah the RGB memory
under it makes these uh little pinner leds look super unimpressive
surprisingly quiet for having been sitting for over a decade
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 i 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 color scheme and packaging that ncix used for its house
brand n gear products these were the shiz though taking your floppy drive
because like who needed one of those and turning it into a card reader get that
sd mmc compact flash
smart media memory stick man do you guys remember
when sony had so much proprietary bullcrap me too because it was yesterday
and also 20 years ago
when tank series usb port equipment plug-and-play
what even is it a usb to parallel cable so you can plug in your old printer oh i
legitimately might need that for my lathe you need this
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 usbc
two and a half inch drives got these little tiny mobile ssds you 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 want to bet that this still
works 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
volume control interface between 5.1
channel headphones you can plug two users into it so you
got your front rear and center slash subwoofer channels for both
separate volume knobs who would have bought this
and then you've got whatever your sources front left front right
you know what colin i was wrong this would totally work not that you'd
want to because it's really really stupid
thanks digital surround look at this flow meter
you want to 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 codes you guys know that right they wanted you to sit and watch the
freaking ads ah
these were fun okay so we've got both an ati silencer
and an nv silencer for it and as you guys can probably guess these were for
ati and NVIDIA cards respectively and these were freaking awesome arctic
cooling man they were the shiz back in
the day and this is not nearly old enough colin if this was your intention
most graphics card 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 is 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 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 back plate but this was back when they cared about
freaking cooling on the back plate your card would be this thick oh no
i love this this is amazing i remember these Jake
you want to make the server go faster boys
you got to put one of these on your hard drive 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 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 heat synced 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 tend 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 to 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
it feels terrible shut up it does not i want a second
opinion call in 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 slash 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 8 800 card except the one that this fits this only
goes on the gtx 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 do you have a knife fix it 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 gp was what
which is what really mattered for overclocking and it kept all of this
heat from your your dram and your vrm's
and all that good stuff out of your water so you can 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 is this just sealed we would have to cut it open
what were these screws even oh they attached it to the
heatsink how hard is it for us to cut open a
copper thing like this just saw it in half
the the bandsaw is pretty dead right now bandsaw is dead can we throw it in the
middle and just uh sure awesome thanks colin while
colin's working on getting us a look at that thermaltake block i want to show
you guys something really special this is not actually from xpc this is from
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 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
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
it works okay it's really annoying one moment
please
okay okay i need a 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 zellman fan then
oh yeah 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
red light CPU fan is not working
oh it works i love it it's sort of
the last thing i wanted to look at the inside of this thermaltake water
block yes my friends that is
basically a heatsink style like northbridge
heatsink um style of fin construction this would be
so restrictive because your flow comes in this side and
then they don't even have like a 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 is 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 yeah there's definitely an aircraft yeah but there were barely any
places for the water to come out into the thing and that's why it had bad
reviews yeah hey reviews the system works
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get 10 off today thanks so much for following along in
this archaeological exploration of tech if you guys want to 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