Rebuilding My VERY FIRST Gaming PC!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
2,083 words · ~10 min read
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Now you might look at this somewhat eclectic pile of hardware and go what a piece of junk
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but for me
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Everything on this table holds a very special place in my heart because what you're looking at is
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after hours of scouring eBay, FreeGeek, Craigslist
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basically to a piece
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my first gaming rig
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So if you were building a gaming machine on a budget back when I was in high school
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AMD was a very compelling option the chips were cheaper the boards were cheaper
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And this was actually the deciding factor for me thanks to a collaboration with NVIDIA
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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
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2006 they had much better onboard graphics than you could get on an Intel chipset
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And so I decided on my website
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And I'm going to show you the best weapon of choice the Soltech SL-75 MRN-L
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The crappier onboard graphics version of the famous
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FRN-L and FRN-2L whose budget overclocking prowess was second only to their amazing sense of style
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That is until Soltech went out of business only a few short years later
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Thanks to their use of shoddy electrolytic capacitors that pretty much all leaked just outside of the warranty period
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I mean actually it's a miracle I found a working one of these
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I could have substituted some other board with GeForce 4 MX graphics onboard
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But to preserve the integrity of the build I
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Way overpaid some jackass who runs an eBay store who thought this thing was worth over a hundred dollars
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Because I tweeted I was looking for one so his listing got a bunch of hits. Ugh
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Next up is my CPU the legendary Athlon XP 2500 plus
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AMD marketed this processor quite cleverly
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The branding was similar to Microsoft's then brand spanking new Windows XP and used the PR model number system to compare the lower
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clocked but higher
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IPC Athlon chips to Intel's gigahertz marketed Pentium 4 family
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It ran a double pumped 1666 megahertz front side bus effectively 333 megahertz and featured
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512 kilobytes of cache with a clock speed of 1.83 gigahertz
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And was a well-known
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excellent budget overclocker with an unlocked multiplier that allowed basically all of them to run at
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3200 plus speeds or about 2.2 gigahertz
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K7 was notably the last generation of AMD chips to use a front side bus before they changed
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Everything industry-wide by moving the memory controller on board with the Athlon 64
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Physically, it looked very different from modern CPUs
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The die was completely
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Exposed with only some rubber pads around it to prevent it from chipping or cracking during heatsink installation
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You can see this one is quite chipped
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So yeah, they didn't always work very well and the pin layout on the bottom is very retro looking socket a has
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462 pins on the bottom
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Laughable when you compare it to a modern APU that has over
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900 pins in a much smaller area and a similar size modern Intel chip that uses LGA type contact pads
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rather than pins to improve durability and pin density and squeezes over
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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
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processors cooling and overclocking of my 68 watt beast was taken care of by a
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Very unique product. This is the VanTec Aeroflow one of the only CPU coolers at least on the desktop to feature a
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tip magnetic drive fan
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TMD fans have the benefit of being able to use more of their area for cooling because the center hub contains
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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
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Cool, huh?
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Less cool is the fact that they vibrate like crazy and they're loud and on top of that
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Because of AMD's mounting system in those days
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Putting this thing on sucks
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So the CPU die isn't actually centered between these two fragile
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plastic mounting clip things
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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
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one way then you actually needed to like
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Seriously, this was the intended way to install a heatsink in those days put a screwdriver into this notch on the other side
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and sweat bullets while heaving down on it to pull the latch over the clips and then
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Move it slightly to lock on to them. I mean there were so many
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OMG, I put my screwdriver through my motherboard posts on the forums in those days
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My RAM choice was dictated by what was cheap at NCIX at the time. So this Samsung 512 megabyte DDR
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400 stick that I got from free geek actually still has the NCIX barcode
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Sticker on it and is exactly what I used
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In fact, it could be the exact stick that I had for all I know
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I opted for a single stick even though this platform is dual channel capable to give myself more room to increase the capacity
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of my rig in the future
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Technically three sticks could be run in dual channel on this platform with one stick twice the capacity of the other two
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But it was a kludgy solution and not guaranteed to work
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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
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With for hooking me up even Antec didn't have an original
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Landboy buried in the catacombs and I could not find one of these
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It took those guys like two weeks to find one and set it aside for me
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Thanks guys, the original land boy before they sullied the name with this nonsense was
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the bomb
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It was made of aluminum
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Very cool for the time it was affordable
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It included not just a power supply, but and this was a huge deal, especially then a decent
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350 watt power supply with blue LED lighting and
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While it may not have featured literally any room for cable management or even front panel audio
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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
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And a side panel window to show off the aftermarket
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80mm blue LED fan that I bought on an impulse like two weeks later at London drugs
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Officially my first way overpriced computer modding component for drives
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My original gaming rig reused the floppy drive and CD burner that I got as hand-me-downs from my uncle's Pentium machine
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This is not an insignificant part of the reason that front case doors were so fashionable at the time
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Black drives were not that common and they were even more
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Expensive than their beige counterparts. Yes friends
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The optical drive was as pricey as it was essential in those days
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for the hard drive though
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I couldn't carry forward an old one if I wanted better speed and
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To have enough storage to install more than one CD based game at a time
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So an 80 gig with an 8 Meg cache or a 120 gig with a 2 Meg cache
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Cost about the same
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I eventually settled for the 80 feeling confident that that was more than I'd need for a long time and
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Feeling like the extra performance would be more worthwhile
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Drives sure used to be more difficult to install by the way 80 pin versus 40 pin IDE cables
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Master and slave jumpers you kids have it easy
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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
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Screen and yes young kids
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We called it a flat screen because the piece of glass in the front was flat rather than curved
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We knew it was still big and heavy and I actually had slightly different hand-me-down
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Keyboard and mice before upgrading a year or so later to a wireless MX duo
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But the one thing that is exactly the same here is the mouse pad being too cheap to buy a real mouse pad
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I used a piece of paper to overcome the tracking issues on my computer desk and it worked great by the way
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You just have to replace it everywhere
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Once in a while, so we interrupt the scripted portion of this video to bring you
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the moment of truth
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Pressing the power button after of course turning on the power supply. Oh, you hear that tip magnetic drive fan
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music
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Come on display
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It's alive
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Athlon XP
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1.1 gigahertz, that's okay. We can go and change that manually. You can see 32 megs of memory shared
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Ah
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Hard drive not being picked up. I'll diagnose that later. Maybe that I DE cable
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Delete center set up and there we are
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Let's get some Windows XP installed on this bitch, right?
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so then with the system working, the only question remaining was will it run minecraft and the
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answer is
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surprisingly
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No after overpaying for that stupid motherboard
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It turns out that the system?
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the system is not stable enough to do anything more
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than install Windows and look at the desktop.
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Not entirely unexpected, but disappointing to be sure.
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So if you're not familiar with Massdrop,
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the concept is pretty simple.
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They've got this huge community of enthusiasts,
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and I can't say like computer enthusiasts
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or knife enthusiasts or audio enthusiasts,
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because there's all these different enthusiasts.
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And they basically go,
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hey, there's this like really cool product that we'd like,
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can you go to the manufacturer or an authorized reseller
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and tell them, hey, you know, we're all willing to buy it
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if you could just do a little something on the price.
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Massdrop takes buyers and sellers and does volume deals,
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so everyone gets a good deal.
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The manufacturer sells a bunch
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and the buyers get a lower price.
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Pretty freaking cool.
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And you can check it out at the link
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in the video description.
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But recently they have branched out a little bit
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and they've started working with manufacturers
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to do special editions of their products
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just for Massdrop.
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And special pricing is of course included as well.
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So they worked with HiFiMan this time around
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to bring back the HE300 with a special MD
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or Massdrop flare.
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So in their former life,
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solely under HiFiMan,
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these entry-level headphones were priced at
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about 300 US dollars.
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And the new one is very similar to the old HE300s,
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but with an updated and more lightweight structure,
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a more neutral sound signature,
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and an all black appearance
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compared to the silver and black of older generations.
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The most important change, however,
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that they have made is reducing the price
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to a very actually legitimately low 99 US dollars.
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So all you gotta do to check them out
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is head over to the draw.pss
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slash LTT dash HE dash 350.
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Don't expect you to remember that.
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Check it out at the link in the video description.
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Thanks for watching.
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Guys, if this video sucked,
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we know what to do,
12:10
but if it was an awesome trip down nostalgia lane,
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then get subscribed,
12:14
hit that like button,
12:15
or even consider supporting us directly
12:18
by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon,
12:20
buying a cool shirt like this one,
12:21
or with a direct monthly contribution.
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You can find the Amazon and the T-shirt links
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up there, by the way.
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Now that you're done doing all that stuff,
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you're probably wondering,
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hmm, gee, what should I watch next?
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Oh, maybe a review of like a super sick
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17-inch gaming laptop.
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You can check that one out there.
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I guarantee you that it is both more powerful and smaller,
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but it's worth it.
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Smaller and more expensive.
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And that's three things that it is both of than this.