this CPU is ancient technology by today's standards one measley corpe
clocked at just 1.8 GHz but when I was in grade n this
Pentium 4 processor was crowned The Benchmark Destroyer by Maximum PC
Magazine it ran Quake 3 at a blistering
226 frames per second that is 18% faster
than the very best that AMD could muster at the time though it would have cost
you an extra $450 today dollar for the privilege now
at that point in my life my only source of income was the shiny Looney that my
parents would give me for each wheelbarrow of manure that I hauled to
the Garden so to say that this would have been Out Of Reach for me would be a
gross understatement and even if I could
afford the CPU there is no way that I
would have been able to obtain The Supporting Cast starting with this
premium ASUS p 4T motherboard with both
software and Hardware overclocking
controls one day I told myself one day
the price of all of this will come down and I will build a dream machine of my
very own well guess what folks it's ones
day and the pile around me might not look it but in September of 2001 this
was maximum PC's dream gaming machine
build dream being an excellent choice of words since the total cost was about
$5,700 that is almost three Vision Pros
in today's money it was a lot cheaper
today but eBay fees are still a trip and I could use some help paying for all
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now I showed you guys the CPU and motherboard but what about our eyew
watering 256 megabytes of 800 megat transfer per
second Rd RAM from Samsung that's right
it wasn't always DDR and rambus memory
was chosen for this build because of its smarter bandwidth utilization compared
to DDR in hindsight it was a not a great
standard it ran hot it was power hungry and generally performed worse per dollar
and went out of Style just around the time this build was spec but hey sucks
to BS I guess like modern DDR memory controllers you could run Rd RAM in dual
channel for increased bandwidth but it was just Dumber that is to say that if
you only had two sticks you had to install these dummy modules in the empty
ones in order for it to operate properly it was a pretty good system here's a
bizarre one at this stage in the game aftermarket CPU cooling was more of an
afterthought with Maximum PC opting for
the Box cooler from Intel which isn't to
say that PC cooling didn't matter it was just more about case selection this is
in my humble opinion one of the big highlights of this build The Cooler
Master ATC 20101 we had to reach out to
fellow YouTuber retro machines who made a video covering this case 10 years ago
in order to get our hands on one that is how rare these things have become thank
goodness he's still head is kicking around it supports up to 10 drives
including four internal hard drives it's got support for four fans two in the
front one in the back one in the top and it's even got two front USB ports which
guys was not a given back then okay of
course none of that is what's turned it into an absolutely Timeless piece of
gaming history that is the aesthetic
snake oil marketing about convective cooling aside as Maximum PC put it
nothing says Swank better than brushed aluminum and that is so brushing true
also can we take a moment to appreciate this build quality damn they don't build
them like that anymore speaking of ludicrous overbuild here's a cool
feature that we used to see on high-end cases removable motherboard trays and
the idea was that oh yeah you can you
know build the whole platform outside of the case and then slide the whole thing
in when you're good to go so convenient
now all I need to do is slide this into the case do most of the build and cable
tie everything into place effectively locking the motherboard in guess you can
see why these didn't last archaic odity is aside though it's
fascinating to see how little the ATX standard has actually changed aside from
maybe making some extra room for a power supply and adding some speed holes for
more cooling you could absolutely build modern system in this thing of course
that isn't the exercise today it's been a while since I've installed spinning
rust as a boot Drive in a gaming PC but today we've got not one but two
identical IBM deskstar 60g XP hard
drives at least that's what we ordered
then one of them showed up as um not one
of those which is kind of an issue since Maximum PC calls for a very fast stripe
raid zero boot config except that they
didn't know that desk Stars especially
the 75 GXP family would earn the nickname death stars for their
exceptionally High failure rates and would contribute to IBM divesting of its
entire hard drive business to Hitachi just one year after the publication of
this issue so from my point of view we should just appreciate the one in a
million shot that one of these showed up in working order run the system off that
and then our promised FastTrack 100 tx2 raid card can just be for
decoration now as Maximum PC put it rounded IDE cables provide no better
performance but they elicit ooze and Oz
whenever we show off the machine and they felt this was well worth their
Hefty price tag now this one's a little
bit more ooh and but hey at least we also have some
black wi Loom to cover it up speaking of cable management you guys should check
out our sick new cable management arches at LTT Store.com just keep the more
powerful magnets away from your hard drives now we just got to figure out how
to get the games onto the hard drive it sure isn't going to be with the network
port on our motherboard don't worry guys we are going to add a network card but
that isn't going to be how we install games for that we're going to need the
TDK Voss CD you show me better branding
and I will show you a liar that is hilarious it offers up 24x right speeds
10x rewrites 40x read speeds and they
claimed burst reads of up to 16.6
megabytes per second which hilariously
is just about the average worldwide broadband internet speed today so good
job TDK and it had even more going for it one of its killer features was its
proprietary burn prooof technology which
allowed you you to safely write or burn a disc while using your PC for other
applications without worrying about buffer underrun errors with other drives
doing so much as interacting with your computer at all depending on the overall
speed of your system would often lead to shiny but useless coasters back then by
the way it was also common to have a secondary optical drive to make the
creation of backup media easier you could burn straight from disc to dis or
so you could just leave your favorite game installed on the drive while you created an MP3 mix CD so that's why we
also threw in this tashiba SDM 1217 DVD
drive rounding out our Drive selections the most exciting thing I can say about
this Samsung floppy disc drive is that it's silver and sort of matches the
color of her case thankfully things get a little more
electric when we move on to power we've got the PC power and cooling silencer
420 which okay is not not quite the same as the 400 watt unit that the magazine
suggests but come on guys finding exact part number matches for E-Waste from 23
years ago is hard and this one is definitely nicer in any case this line
of seic manufactured units had a good reputation for both reliability and for
quiet operation I got to say it's kind of wild
to me that 420 Watts was enough to power
an entire topend gaming machine when we've got consumer CPUs that will draw
nearly that much today
alone
yeah I guess this is the part in the build where we give up on the cable
management and take a leaf out of Maximum PC's book yes split Loom wire
covers they were awful then and they're awful now on the subject of things with
very different power requirements today it's finally time for the pesta
resistance this ASUS NVIDIA v8200 Deluxe
a GeForce 3 card with an AGP 4X
interface 64 megabytes that's right 64
million bytes of video memory and a rated 200 MHz clock speed that by the
way this variant juices all the way to
270 mahz as if you guys weren't drooling
already it has four pixel shaders one
vertex Shader support for Direct X 8.1 and openg which brings us to all the
other fun cards we get to install I already talked about our IDE raid card
but we've got two more devices our
3om 100 megabit per second network card
and O this one's cool our Hercules game
theater XP which we're going to dive into a little bit more as we set up our
audio first we need to see if this thing even
works oh that's a good sign oh no it's
on it's on yeah give it a sec give it a sec it's got this beep is good that
means I wired up the speaker correctly let's go hey there we
go ooh manual frequency let's overclock
no let's not overclock yet let's just make sure we've got the right boot
device selected get this thing fired up we may
want to pull up the ID raid
card okay I know I know the Death Star
recommendation wasn't the only one that wouldn't age well Windows me the last do
space Windows is widely considered to be the worst version of Windows ever
released largely because it was a reliability nightmare but unfortunately
when this system was published in Maximum PC Windows XP had been released
to oems but was still about a month away
from retail so uh this is what we got oh I guess we can
start talking about peripherals though for our monitor we ended up looking over
a few pages to the dream content creation guide and found the Sony fw900
arguably the best consumer CRT ever made
this thing is so legendary we made a dedicated video about it and it is one
of the only three parts of the setup that are actually worth more today than
they were at launch it's around $3,000 for one in good condition but at
up to 1440 P at 60 HZ and up to 160 HZ
at lower resolutions with near perfect blacks and motion Clarity it's a pretty
incredible display even now can I make a
comment about this Mouse yeah I hate it
was this really their recommendation yeah it vibrates every time you hover
over an icon yeah that's awful neet the Logitech
I feel why would you point and click
when you can feel and click here I'm going to try and get my mic close to
this thing can you hear that oh yeah making
matters worse it is heavy as all get out which doesn't even appear to be all the
vibration motor it looks like it has a big metal plate in it I guess that was a
feature thankfully the keyboard Choice was a little less polarizing this is
from kronic lifetime series and it uses kronic designer rubber doome switches
supported with springs these um were not
favored by keyboard enthusiasts and honestly feels pretty cheap but maybe it
was good bang for the buck this is wild they claim it's
similar in performance to a toer real
force uh you know what it's not that bad
to type on it's mushy though it's not great it's not great what is going to be
great is our audio experience starting with the other half of the Hercules game
theer XP that I showed you guys before you see the card only has two ports on
it an oxen and a db44 connector what
goes at the other end of this thick 2 m
cable this awesome external module I'm
talking analog 5.1 for surround sound speakers every input Under the Sun
quarin Jack RCA midi coax and spiff it's
got built-in volume controls a game port for your joystick and did I even mention
it's got a four port integ ated USB hub
this module makes connecting everything much easier not just our
audio sound card or like everything card
of course that is what we're going to use it for first though I remember these
I had a set of these the clips promedia Ultra 5.1surround
tested and they were right long story short I made the mistake of selling mine
for a fraction of what I paid for it back in the day which makes the price we
paid to replace it so much more painful
that's right my friends this is one more item that regularly goes from about the
same today than it did back when it was new and that's even if you can find the
all important control pod and subwoofer
with bash oh are we crab raving right
away yes man I miss my prome ultra
51s oh yeah no no these things were
legitimately awesome also are my surrounds my primaries I think it might
be I think I might be a little confused by the MP3 encoding yeah but the sub
Works David did you check this out no the center channel has a cute little
stick so you can change the height oh on
what works best for your angle but can you have it point up uh
no hold on you got to stand in The Sweet Spot though you got to come stand in a
sweet spot with me hold on you're a little close you're a little close oh
yeah is the sub
working is it ever with bash
technology I would be so happy to have this set
up man dude when I was like 16 and I had
this I was in heaven what went
wrong Maximum PC acknowledges though that not everyone has a living situation
that's conducive to a giant bulky 5.1
setup so that is where these come in now
I never really needed headphones living in my mom's basement at the time
literally but if it's on the list we got to buy it them's the rules and the
Sennheiser HD 580s actually still hold
up very well today plasticy Construction
compared to newer sennheisers means they don't really feel as premium but it also
means they're super light and they have a nice neutral sound profile that makes
some feel that they are worthy of being called endgame headphones oh look at
this Andrew they're made in Ireland just like you now I've made one critical
error in our configuration for return to Castle Wolfenstein I set it to my
desktop resolution of 1600 by 1200 forgetting that yeah in those days it's
really more like 800 by6 00 if you want hey or maybe I could just run it at
1,600 by 1200 damn I guess that's what having a
top-of-the-line gaming PC did for you this like unironically works so this
game gets capped at 90 FPS oh oh oh um
which I'm surprised we can surprised we're getting anything close to that
dude neither I nor anyone I knew had
anything like this anything even close
to this if I saw this i'
like what that's a thing that's possible
in 2001 people were gaming like this no
man in 2001 like what was I playing Warcraft 2 oh wow ano
1602 what about a racing game though yeah I could get into that kind of busy
playing return to Castle Wolfenstein right now but like yeah sure I guess the
rest of us are busy making videos Lin
us all right let's talk about something else with force feedback this time it's
the Logitech wingman formula Force GP oh
man this feels pretty basic compared to
a modern high-end racing wheel compared to a modern low-end racing wheel yeah
that's true I feel like I'm in 2001 sitting in my dad's lap operating the
car okay hold on 2001 no I wouldn't have needed to sit in my dad's lap at that
you're like a 16-year-old no no no I was uh no in 2001
I was 13 she still a little old for the dad's lap yeah here we go driving the
Lotus Elise W that oh is this opposite
day it looks like you know what I can
deal with this I can do this I can do this I got this i got this brother this
beautiful like what 25 frames 30 frames a second that's it more than that I
guess you know what this is very playable but you're not wrong it's
probably in the uh opposite opposite day
oh I'm going to take a shortcut shortcut oh points zero points for my shortcut
why is it Opposite how dare you tell me I'm going backwards I will tell you when
I'm backwards oh come on copper you're in
the way buddy let me race brother is
that a missile is it firing things a yep you de I never played this game
back in the day look I didn't have a computer that could play this game back
in the day it looks not bad totally looks fine I would play this right now
but what about this is freaking awesome second peripherals
ooh made the Microsoft Sidewinder force
feedback 2 now with more force feedback
than ever before not to mention ooh
handle twist for immediate Rudder control a redesign trigger man this
thing's freaking heavy oh wow and it
even has an internal AC to DC power
supply this thing actually feels pretty good it's pretty nice I like it wow that
like feels pretty good destroy all enemy
fighters to win fire the guns oh no
way oh wait I have no throttle okay
that's going to be a problem come on get over here oh my God that is so cool oh
it's so visceral got him see you later Castrol
that'll learn you 70 mil gun look at this buddy see
you later oh oh where's his shoot where's
his shoot no no he's dead he's dead get over here who who wo can you shoot down
his parachute I don't think you can so I think you just
changed we got it
boys see you later buddy you're a freaking Pro hold on hold
on here's his parachute we could also play this game
with this controller uh I would suggest against it because that d-pad is
something special the worst thing I've ever seen it's off
axis that's terrible Sidewinder Gamepad
Pro more like Sidewinder Gamepad no it's
the sickest burn that was so good bottom line I might not agree with every single
choice that Maximum PC made here but thing is hindsight's 2020 and
realistically if you traded your kidney for one of these back in 2001 you'd be
feeling pretty darn good about it for a solid
6 months until something better came out
obviously at the pace technology moves it is rarely a good investment but I am
blown away by how many of these components do still hold up reasonably
well today and the fact that any of them are still worth more than they were back
when Maximum PC configured this thing I'm also blown away by this segue to our
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enjoyed this video how about checking out the one where we built my personal
rig from my teenage years it um wasn't
as good as this one but it was what I could afford