**Restoring an Old Gaming System**

As I began working on this old gaming system, I was struck by its age and the amount of grime that had accumulated on the exterior and frame of the radiator. The fins were clogged with dust and debris, making it difficult to see what was going on inside. "Let's take a closer look at the fins," I said, grabbing some hot water from the sink. With care, I ran the hot water through the fins, watching as the grime and dirt began to dissolve away.

As the water flowed through the fins, I could see that they were in surprisingly good shape considering the system's age. The aio (all-in-one liquid cooling) unit was actually doing its job well, and I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that it wouldn't be too much work to restore it to its former glory. However, there was still some water trapped in the fins, which I would need to blow out with an electric blower before reassembling the system.

To ensure everything dried properly overnight, I decided to let the wet areas sit for a few hours. Most of the water had already evaporated, but it was essential to make sure that any remaining moisture didn't cause further damage or issues when we put the system back together. With the aio finished, my attention turned to cleaning the fans, as well as the storage drives – which included a single hard drive, an optical drive, and a graphics card.

First things first, I needed to disassemble the case to clean it thoroughly. Despite being an old Apiva case, I was pleased to find that the cable management wasn't too bad. The front radiator fan had been flipped upside down to expose its barbs, which made installation easier when we put the aio back together. Next, I began reassembling the system, starting with the wiring and making sure everything was securely connected before moving on to the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and graphics card.

As I worked, I powered up the system and tested each component individually to ensure they were functioning correctly. The pump and io (input/output) were working properly, and both fans were spinning smoothly. When I pressed the power button, the system booted up successfully, posting all necessary information to my monitor. With the system online, it was time to verify that the drives were detected and booting properly.

One minor tweak I made to the system was upgrading the memory from a single 8GB stick of DDR3 to two sticks of DDR3, which allowed for dual-channel configuration. This wasn't a major upgrade, but it did improve the system's performance. The power supply had been upgraded to a more modern CX 550 model from Corsair, which I had purchased myself and received overnight from Amazon. Having a reliable power supply was essential for ensuring the system would boot up and function correctly.

**Aesthetics**

One of my goals while restoring this old gaming system was to improve its aesthetic appeal. The black cables looked great, and I took some time to cable manage them within the case. While it wasn't a difficult task, I was pleased with how well everything fit together. A nice red glow emanated from the front radiator fan, which added a touch of warmth to the system.

**Upgrades and Future Plans**

Unfortunately, due to vendor delays, we couldn't upgrade as much of the system as I would have liked. However, having some upgraded components on hand did give me confidence that I could make further improvements in the future. If you guys enjoyed this cleaning video, please let me know by giving it a thumbs-up and leaving a comment. If you'd like to see more content from my channel, be sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell.

**Next Episode: The Dirtiest Build Yet**

My next project is already in the works – an extremely dusty build that I'm still struggling to describe just how bad it is. It's going to be a challenge, but with the right tools and expertise, we'll get it done. Stay tuned for Part 2 of our PCDT (PC Disassembly and Tune-Up) series, where we take on the dirtiest build yet and bring it back to life.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is another viewer's dirty gaming pc actually this has set in a garage for a while was owned by somebody else who wasn't the viewer but the viewer more or less inherited the system and it's in need of a deep cleaning as you can tell it's quite old as well but some of you have pointed out that you're fans of these kinds of cases and you're disappointed you don't see these cases on the market you know much at all anymore so i'm gonna make it a point in this video to not upgrade the case we'll upgrade something else in this system but i'm going to try my best to revive this case keep it alive for the sake of being old school because old school is is hip now i guess to get rid of that annoying activation watermark hop on over to vip std key and purchase a windows 10 pro oem key for fractions of the price of retail just use a secure payment method like paypal receive your key in seconds and activate your os here bye bye watermark and be sure to use our new offer code skgs for a sweet discount so what we have inside many of you wanted to know the specs of the system before we start cleaning things up this is actually talked about in a previous video if you haven't seen that you can check it out up here it's an athlon x4 860k so quite old believe it's an a68 hm motherboard a single eight gig stick of ddr3 1600 megahertz an r7 360 2gb graphics card and a measly 350 watt holy sh power supply so this is actually a pre-built from a company called cybertron pc not sure if they're still in business i haven't heard of them lately but they put a really cheap power supply in here this is pretty typical a lot of pre-built companies out there unfortunately this will be the one thing that we definitely upgrade might upgrade something else so it's gonna be pretty difficult on this old platform i don't have many uh parts to to swap out here i had talked to the viewer about completely replacing the platform of course he was okay with that uh but i'm still talking with some vendors trying to get them to send things i don't want to hold this pc for two weeks waiting for parts to arrive uh so we might have to skip out on that nonetheless he will have a clean system and that's definitely a step in the right direction speaking of which let's run through the cleaning gear i know i do this every episode but i'm going to make it really quick from now on just so new viewers kind of see roughly what we use to get these systems looking spotless again so we have gloves a few people made fun of me for wearing gloves but if you if you've ever worked around dirty systems it doesn't really make sense to not work well especially if you have kids at home i have a knock-off i fixed the tool kit pretty much has everything we need to take apart graphics cards coolers everything down to bare board bear cooler etc q-tips precision q-tips i like to mix these with the isopropyl alcohol get the small spaces especially on boards themselves these really help there and then i also have an electric duster ah that sound never gets old this thing has anti-static bristles on it so i can brush boards and things without worrying about damaging those components as long as i'm not like super aggressive with it of course am i missing anything i don't think so maybe some shop towels or paper towels something to clean large flat surfaces are we ready to clean i hope so so blind eyes in the darkness frail hands reaching out sort of causing the smoke as the doors behind me close no cure for the madness each turn tangled in the fear of losing sight of the slowly fading light where every passage ends you're all right so this was our first aio we've cleaned so far on the playlist it really wasn't so bad um you just use the shop towels and some isopropyl get up that you know any stains you have on the exterior and the frame of the radiator and then take some hot water and run that through the fins you see the fins on this one here i'll get it close get my face out of the shot so it focuses the fins look really good considering how old this system is this aio is actually in great shape so i'm really glad we were able to restore this there's still a bit of water trapped in the fins i've been blowing it out with the electric blower but i'm gonna of course let this sit overnight anything that i wet with water i allow to dry overnight just to be on the safe side most of the water is of course out of here but you want the rest of that to evaporate before we obviously put it back in the system again so aio is finished we've got to clean the fans then we have the storage drives uh actually it's just one storage drive the hard drive we have the optical drive and then the graphics card we'll fully disassemble that here in a second you're do you and all right we've got everything clean again we're going to start first with reassembling the case we'll get all the wiring set back up this is actually a pretty intricate case despite it being fairly old uh we're gonna get this together and then we'll reassemble the graphics card install the motherboard cpu ram all that good stuff we'll power it on and make sure that it posts you're must you're all right and now we're going to try to boot up the system i believe everything is wired correctly switch that power supply switch on power button is here uh i should probably plug in the power supply first okay i think we're ready flip that on power button is here all right sounds good the pump and the io is working it's concerned about that still good to go there both fans are working and we have a post all right folks pretty much all we need to see as long as it boots up as long as our drives are detected which i'll verify in a second uh that's really all i'm worried about i want to make sure the system is working when i give it back to the customer or the viewer yes it's kind of a customer it's not really a paying customer but still so with this system only a few things were changed first uh you probably noticed that i put two sticks of ddr3 in there instead of the original single eight gig stick so there's still eight gigs in here but i figured i'd switch them to dual channel i don't have many ddr3 kits anymore just laying around so it's not like i can upgrade them to 16 but the dual channel over a single channel thing for athons is not a huge deal i just figured populating both them slots would look a bit better than having a single stick of eight he'll probably end up upgrading his entire platform before he decides to upgrade 16 gigs of ddr3 imo the power supply was an obvious upgrade cx 550 and from corsair i actually bought this myself i had it overnighted from amazon it's really convenient living next to an amazon warehouse you can get things pretty much same day or next day delivery uh this was a much needed upgrade the black cables look really good we tried our best to cable manage in this case it actually wasn't too bad this is an old apiva case and um i mean considering what we're working with i'd say aesthetically it's not too shabby we've got a nice red glow here with this front radiator fan i flipped the aio upside down so the barbs were facing downward again not really a huge deal but i figured since we could and we had the space to do it we might as well and then we have the hard drive off to the front here which i'm assuming has the operating system on it uh so the system looks good i wish i could upgrade more i was working with vendors trying to get vendors to send things for an entirely new platform uh so a pretty big upgrade for the system but those parts aren't going to arrive in time and nonetheless i hope this viewer is at least satisfied with how clean this system is now and i think thanks to this new power supply he has a pretty decent upgrade path or upgrade uh potential going forward with that if you guys enjoyed this cleaning video be sure to let me know by giving this one a thumbs up i would appreciate that leave a comment let me know what you want to see next we have an awfully dirty build coming next it is extremely dusty i really don't have any words to describe how bad it is it is the worst by far and it's coming up in the next episode in the pcdc series thank you guys for the support in this one and i will catch you in the next one my name is greg thanks for cleaning with methis is another viewer's dirty gaming pc actually this has set in a garage for a while was owned by somebody else who wasn't the viewer but the viewer more or less inherited the system and it's in need of a deep cleaning as you can tell it's quite old as well but some of you have pointed out that you're fans of these kinds of cases and you're disappointed you don't see these cases on the market you know much at all anymore so i'm gonna make it a point in this video to not upgrade the case we'll upgrade something else in this system but i'm going to try my best to revive this case keep it alive for the sake of being old school because old school is is hip now i guess to get rid of that annoying activation watermark hop on over to vip std key and purchase a windows 10 pro oem key for fractions of the price of retail just use a secure payment method like paypal receive your key in seconds and activate your os here bye bye watermark and be sure to use our new offer code skgs for a sweet discount so what we have inside many of you wanted to know the specs of the system before we start cleaning things up this is actually talked about in a previous video if you haven't seen that you can check it out up here it's an athlon x4 860k so quite old believe it's an a68 hm motherboard a single eight gig stick of ddr3 1600 megahertz an r7 360 2gb graphics card and a measly 350 watt holy sh power supply so this is actually a pre-built from a company called cybertron pc not sure if they're still in business i haven't heard of them lately but they put a really cheap power supply in here this is pretty typical a lot of pre-built companies out there unfortunately this will be the one thing that we definitely upgrade might upgrade something else so it's gonna be pretty difficult on this old platform i don't have many uh parts to to swap out here i had talked to the viewer about completely replacing the platform of course he was okay with that uh but i'm still talking with some vendors trying to get them to send things i don't want to hold this pc for two weeks waiting for parts to arrive uh so we might have to skip out on that nonetheless he will have a clean system and that's definitely a step in the right direction speaking of which let's run through the cleaning gear i know i do this every episode but i'm going to make it really quick from now on just so new viewers kind of see roughly what we use to get these systems looking spotless again so we have gloves a few people made fun of me for wearing gloves but if you if you've ever worked around dirty systems it doesn't really make sense to not work well especially if you have kids at home i have a knock-off i fixed the tool kit pretty much has everything we need to take apart graphics cards coolers everything down to bare board bear cooler etc q-tips precision q-tips i like to mix these with the isopropyl alcohol get the small spaces especially on boards themselves these really help there and then i also have an electric duster ah that sound never gets old this thing has anti-static bristles on it so i can brush boards and things without worrying about damaging those components as long as i'm not like super aggressive with it of course am i missing anything i don't think so maybe some shop towels or paper towels something to clean large flat surfaces are we ready to clean i hope so so blind eyes in the darkness frail hands reaching out sort of causing the smoke as the doors behind me close no cure for the madness each turn tangled in the fear of losing sight of the slowly fading light where every passage ends you're all right so this was our first aio we've cleaned so far on the playlist it really wasn't so bad um you just use the shop towels and some isopropyl get up that you know any stains you have on the exterior and the frame of the radiator and then take some hot water and run that through the fins you see the fins on this one here i'll get it close get my face out of the shot so it focuses the fins look really good considering how old this system is this aio is actually in great shape so i'm really glad we were able to restore this there's still a bit of water trapped in the fins i've been blowing it out with the electric blower but i'm gonna of course let this sit overnight anything that i wet with water i allow to dry overnight just to be on the safe side most of the water is of course out of here but you want the rest of that to evaporate before we obviously put it back in the system again so aio is finished we've got to clean the fans then we have the storage drives uh actually it's just one storage drive the hard drive we have the optical drive and then the graphics card we'll fully disassemble that here in a second you're do you and all right we've got everything clean again we're going to start first with reassembling the case we'll get all the wiring set back up this is actually a pretty intricate case despite it being fairly old uh we're gonna get this together and then we'll reassemble the graphics card install the motherboard cpu ram all that good stuff we'll power it on and make sure that it posts you're must you're all right and now we're going to try to boot up the system i believe everything is wired correctly switch that power supply switch on power button is here uh i should probably plug in the power supply first okay i think we're ready flip that on power button is here all right sounds good the pump and the io is working it's concerned about that still good to go there both fans are working and we have a post all right folks pretty much all we need to see as long as it boots up as long as our drives are detected which i'll verify in a second uh that's really all i'm worried about i want to make sure the system is working when i give it back to the customer or the viewer yes it's kind of a customer it's not really a paying customer but still so with this system only a few things were changed first uh you probably noticed that i put two sticks of ddr3 in there instead of the original single eight gig stick so there's still eight gigs in here but i figured i'd switch them to dual channel i don't have many ddr3 kits anymore just laying around so it's not like i can upgrade them to 16 but the dual channel over a single channel thing for athons is not a huge deal i just figured populating both them slots would look a bit better than having a single stick of eight he'll probably end up upgrading his entire platform before he decides to upgrade 16 gigs of ddr3 imo the power supply was an obvious upgrade cx 550 and from corsair i actually bought this myself i had it overnighted from amazon it's really convenient living next to an amazon warehouse you can get things pretty much same day or next day delivery uh this was a much needed upgrade the black cables look really good we tried our best to cable manage in this case it actually wasn't too bad this is an old apiva case and um i mean considering what we're working with i'd say aesthetically it's not too shabby we've got a nice red glow here with this front radiator fan i flipped the aio upside down so the barbs were facing downward again not really a huge deal but i figured since we could and we had the space to do it we might as well and then we have the hard drive off to the front here which i'm assuming has the operating system on it uh so the system looks good i wish i could upgrade more i was working with vendors trying to get vendors to send things for an entirely new platform uh so a pretty big upgrade for the system but those parts aren't going to arrive in time and nonetheless i hope this viewer is at least satisfied with how clean this system is now and i think thanks to this new power supply he has a pretty decent upgrade path or upgrade uh potential going forward with that if you guys enjoyed this cleaning video be sure to let me know by giving this one a thumbs up i would appreciate that leave a comment let me know what you want to see next we have an awfully dirty build coming next it is extremely dusty i really don't have any words to describe how bad it is it is the worst by far and it's coming up in the next episode in the pcdc series thank you guys for the support in this one and i will catch you in the next one my name is greg thanks for cleaning with me\n"