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 it to 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 back then
hey wow it's me young Linus and today
we're going to be building the gaming pc of my dreams at my favorite store
ncix.com using the magic power of the wayback
machine
poor young Linus he doesn't know that magic isn't real
yet just like no one's told them about our
sponsor for today's video see sonic
thanks see sonic you guys are awesome and you've been building great quality
power supplies not just today but for many years and we're going to be using
one of yours from 15 years ago and seeing uh oh it'll be a little awkward
if it doesn't if it still works
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 1st 2005
prime holiday shopping season and used 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 lan boy which happens to be
exactly the case that i used for my very
first gaming pc oh
it is brand spanking new
that is so cool how much did i pay for this uh you paid i think 80 bucks which
is pretty on par with what it actually that's like right about what i would
expect it to cost one little thing we're going to have to do is
ignore the uh antec power supply that came with this
case or go ahead and swap that out for a sea sonic this is a nice little upgrade
we're going to 430 watts my friends
hey look you mock 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 Linus
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 it would just get sucked in by the power supply
and exhausted 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 a8n 32 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 16x 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 a8n
sli looking at the pins in here these do appear to both be wired for 16 and this
premium moniker is one that ASUS actually doesn't even use every
generation i remember them telling me the story of this so this might have
even been a higher end board than the a8n32 for pricing of this board i'm
going to say 280 dollars motherboards have gotten expensive hey
chips on the other hand actually AMD ryzen looks pretty
reasonable compared to the CPU that we're going to be running for this
monster this is the athlon 64 400 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 cash per core price of this puppy at launch just shy of 800
canadian rubles that's right my friends it's not even an extreme edition or
anything it's just a CPU 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 bow
you remember ocz yeah because i remember ocz this
is still my favorite heat spreader design for any
memory ever you want to know why because this
is thick and when you shine these puppies up
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 yeah 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 going to say
250 bucks 242 242 yeah believe it or not
there was a time when he pipes and while 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
fin arrangement they actually ran all the fins like this
mashed 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 it'll be fine
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 pressy thingamajiggy 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 an astendo monitor which as far as we can
tell is the first consumer ultra wide monitor from 2008
so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that it was pretty common for
the five and a quarter inch bays and 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 porcy sonic having to show off like
15 year old innovations or what passed for them this
is pre-pci express power
we may have made an error mistake or as i call it an error
these graphics cards do have 6 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 going to 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 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 front panel audio
there it is i couldn't see it because there's jumpers on it i forgot so
depending on your motherboard sometimes you would want to hook up like ac97
front paddle audio and then sometimes you do hd audio this was right around
the transition period you know what i'm not going to bother hooking it up graphics card i want to say
380 it was 238.90
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
you're off a bit uh 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 it's actually taran'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 tearing 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've not heard in a long time
Windows xp welcome let's start with what would have been
the first game i'd check 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 god rays though those would
have impressed 2005 me when you walked up to this like bent
rebar like hole here and you saw that
those reflections on the water and that gorgeous skybox all this foliage
that was a moment didn't used to be that these bars were sky i don't know what's
up with that but uh look at that meat
bow take that meat got that physics right there oh uh
whoops you need to die now thanks
what the am i out of ammo i'm out of freaking 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 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 dumpster simulator 2005. oh
oh you killed it ut 2004 then
oh taren's a key is coming off and my ring finger is all sticky now
whoops whoops i know 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
freaking 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
hey good job AMD good job game developers and good job see sonic
for sponsoring this video whether it's 15 years ago or today or 15 years from
now you can count on c sonic 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 an 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 it's the soul of technology obviously