**A Journey Back in Time: Building the Gaming PC of My Dreams (2005)**
15 years ago, in 2005, I had just graduated high school, and a little site called YouTube was born. Meanwhile, 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 into 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.
Hello, it's me, young Linus, and today we're gonna be building the gaming PC of my dreams at my favorite store, ncix.com, using the magic power of the way-back machine. Poor young Linus. He doesn't know that magic isn't real yet. Just like no one's told him about our sponsor for today's video, Seasonic. Thanks, Seasonic, you guys are awesome. And you've been building great quality power supplies—not just today, but for many years—and we're gonna be using one of yours from 15 years ago and seeing if it still works. (upbeat music)
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 1, 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 Landmaster, which happens to be exactly the case that I used for my very first gaming PCs. Oh, it is brand spanking new. Look at that—it's so cool. How much did I pay for this? You paid I think $80, which is pretty on par with what it actually costs. That's like rated about what I would expect it to cost. One little thing we're gonna have to do is ignore the Antec power supply that came with this case or go ahead and swap that out for a Seasonic.
This is a nice little upgrade. We're going to 430 watts, my friends. Hey, look, you mark 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 why this 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 we'll just get sucked in by the power supply and exhaust it 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 A8N32-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 x16 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 A8N32-SLI. Looking at the pins in here, these do appear to both be wired for 16, and this premium moniker is one that a Seuss actually doesn't even use every generation. I remember them telling you the story of this. So this might have even been a higher-end board than the A8N32.
For pricing of this board, I'm gonna say $280. Now motherboards have gotten expensive, hey. Chips, on the other hand. Actually, AMD Ryzen looks pretty reasonable compared to the CPU that we're gonna be running for this monster. This is the Athlon 64 4400 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 cache per core.
Price of this puppy at launch was just shy of $800 Canadian dollars. That's right, my friends, that's not even an Extreme Edition or anything—it's just a CPU. And 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 baw.
You remember OCZ—yeah. 'Cause I remember OCZ, this is still my favorite heatspreader design for any memory ever. You wanna know why? Because this is thick. And when you shine these puppies up, oh, in a nutshell OCZ was selling memory that was kind of crap. And then at the expense of longevity, they were telling people—
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en- 15 years ago 2005 I hadjust graduated high school,a little site called YouTube was bornand AMD was riding high.Yes, my friends while someof you young whippersnappersmight not remember it,Ryzen is not the first timethat AMD has stolenIntel's performance crownand fed into them.Don't believe me?Well, all I'm gonnaneed is my time machine,some flux capacitors, andthree taps of my sandals,and I'm gonna take you guyswith me on a little journeyto what it was like, back then.Back then.Hello it's me young Linus,and today we're gonna be buildingthe gaming PC of my dreamsat my favorite store, ncix.comusing the magic powerof the way back machine.Poor young Linus.He doesn't know that magic isn't real yet.Just like no one's toldhim about our sponsorfor today's video, SeasonicThanks Seasonic, you guys are awesome.And you've been buildinggreat quality power supplies,not just today, but for many years,and we're gonna be using oneof yours from 15 years agoand seeing a fool it'll be alittle awkward if it doesn't,if it still works.(upbeat music)Let's start with how wepicked all these parts.Obviously ncix.com ain't around anymore.And even if they were theirwebsite, horrible as it was,wouldn't still containproducts and pricingfrom 15 years ago.Actually fun story, it wasn'teven capable of doing thatbecause none of that stuff was logged.So as a product managerwhen I adjusted pricing for something,I was actually interactingdirectly with the database,overwriting any previousdata, which is safe anywho.We chose December 1 2005prime holiday shopping seasonand use the Wayback Machine to scoutthe decade and a half oldversion of the NCIX websiteto create our very own way back machinebased on what was thehot stuff of the day.So why don't we startactually with the case.The SLK 2600 AMB, andit's actually very similarto the Antec Land boy, whichhappens to be exactly the casethat I used for my very first gaming PCs.Oh, it is brand spanking new.Look that is so cool.How much did I pay for this?- You paid I think 80 bucks,which is pretty on parwith what it actually costs.- That's like rated about whatI would expect it to cost.One little thing we're gonna have to do isignore the Antec power supplythat came with this case,or go ahead and swapthat out for a Seasonic.This is a nice little upgrade.We're going to 430 watts, my friends.Hey, look, you mark it butback then 430 watt power supplywas like that was pretty good, all right?Now one of the thingsyou young kids might beenjoying is that for some reasonwhy this is putting the power supply upin the top of the case,what, has he gone mad?That's because back in those days,case airflow was designedto go from the bottom front,up across the CPU, I mean, remember,this design kind of predatespowerful graphics cardsthat output a ton of heat,and then out the rearexhaust or in a lot of cases,you actually wouldn't evenbother to have any rear exhaust.So we'll just get suckedin by the power supplyand exhaust it there.Nowadays, in order to keepthe power supply runningas cool as possible,we actually try to isolateit have it draw fresh air inand exhaust it completely separatelyfrom the rest of the system.Oh, and check out our motherboard.This is the A8N32-SLI Deluxe.What made this one really specialwas that it was running anNvidia chipset that at the time,if I recall correctly,was actually the firstto have support for twoPCI Express 1.0 16 x slotsrunning at full freaking speed.That was the bee's knees.Unfortunately, this Bee'sKnees got more like kneecapped.It was dead on arrivalso we had to settle forthe A8N32-SLI.Looking at the pins in here,these do appear to both be wired for 16and this premium moniker is one thata Seuss actually doesn'teven use every generation.I remember them tellingyou the story of this.So this might have evenbeen a higher-end boardthan the A8N32.For pricing of thisboard, I'm gonna say $280.Now motherboards havegotten expensive, hey.Chips, on the other hand.Actually, AMD Ryzenlooks pretty reasonablecompared to the CPU thatwe're gonna be runningfor this monster.This is the Athlon 64 4400 Plus,and it's not the firstdual core processor,but what was so specialabout the 4400 Pluswas that it was the least expensiveof the fully featured dual coreswith I believe it was oneMeg of cache per core.Price of this puppy at launch,just shy of 800 Canadian rubles.That's right, my friends,that's not even an ExtremeEdition or anything,it's just a CPU.And I bought this thing rightat launch, I lined up for it.The installation method isbasically 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 baw.You remember OCZ- Yeah.- 'Cause I remember OCZ,this is still my favoriteheatspreader designfor any memory ever.You wanna know why?Because thisis thick.And when you shine these puppies up,oh, in a nutshell OCZ was selling memorythat was kind of crap.And then at the expense of longevity,they were telling people,\"Well go ahead, just crankthe voltage of these chips up\"and they'll hit really great speeds.\"And if they die, well,\"whatever, we got a lifetime warranty.\"So that's great, because we'llbe around forever, right?What would a gig of memory cost back then?I'm gonna say 250 bucks.- 242.- 242, yeah.Believe it or not,there was a time when heatpipes and well water coolingwere not within reach ofthe average enthusiast.Meet the Zalman CNPS 7000flower type CPU cooler.Yes, my friends, itused the power of metalto conduct heat away from the CPUto this gigantic circleshaped, thin arrangement.They actually ran all the fins like this,mash them together,see these big heavyscrews on the edges hereholding the whole thing together,then machined it flatand spread out the fins.So you're carrying heataway from the CPU surfaceand then spreading heataround the entire peripherywhere it's taken care of by this fanthat incidentally givesyou a fair bit of RAMand VRM cooling at the same time.Do you think this thermalgrease is still good?- It'll be fine.- Ah, hum(beeps)Now because AMD was theenthusiast platform of choice,check this out.Cooler compatibility was by default AMDand then you would actuallyhave to adapt the thingif you wanted to installit on an Intel socket.So that means installingon AMD was super simple.All you had to do wastake the built in hook,hook it over one side of the socketa little something like that.Then on the other side,Zalman actually includedthis handy dandy little thumbpressey thing I'ma jiggy here,but some coolers actuallyexpected you to use a screwdriverto push it down,which led to a lot of screwdriversbeing driven into motherboard, PCBs.Oh, I love this.This motherboard isactually from NCIX too.This label is still white.These were heat sensitivelabels so that NCIX could tellif you tried to use aheat gun to remove itand put it onto something else.So that means that thisCPU lived a very cool life.If you guys like this kindof enthusiast retro stuff,we got our hands on Ostendo monitorwhich as far as we can tellis the first consumerultrawide monitor from 2008.So make sure you're subscribedso you don't miss that.Was pretty common for thefive and a quarter inch baysin the area behind themto basically just get all theextra cables jammed into them.That was what passed for cable management.You can see there'sactually literally no roombehind the motherboard tray.Poor Seasonic having to show off like15 year old innovationsare what passed for them.This is pre PCI Express power.We may have made an error mistake,or as I call it an errorr.These graphics cards do havesix pin PCI Express connectorsand I believe 6000 series wasthe first one to have those.So this power supply mustjust ever so slightly predatethese graphics cards.We're not actually gonna be running SLIunfortunately, 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 Ultraespecially if you overclocked itand this was the firstgeneration of Nvidia cardsto support SLI.So two 6800 GTs compared to one 6800 Ultrain games that's scaled well with SLIwould absolutely wipe thefloor with the 6800 Ultrafrom a price to performance standpoint.I took two PCI slotcovers out automatically,even though this isonly a single slot card,that's hilarious.It was pretty common tohave to use these adaptersand graphics cards wouldactually usually come with them.Pretty common place forpeople to change overtheir core platform orupgrade a graphics cardand carry forward aperfectly good power supply.Fan panel, audio.There it is, I couldn't see itcause there's jumpers on it,I forgot.So depending on your motherboard,sometimes you would wanna hook uplike AC 97 front panel audioand then sometimes you'd do HD audio.This was right aroundthe transition period.You know what I'm notgonna bother hooking it up.Graphics card, I wanna say $380- It was $238, 90 cents.- Wow, you can barely getlike an entry level GTX cardfor that these days uphere in canadia land.Check this out.So this is a fancy floppy cable.It's rounded for better cable management.You guys take your roundcables 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 guessingthat this thing was worth like 450 bucks.- Yeah, you're off a bit.It's $324.- 324,that's $300 more than I would pay for it.As for plugging it in,I knew I kept all theseDVI to VGA adapters around for a reason.That's one thing I don't missabout single slot graphics cards.This just fire right up like that.Wow.This was back when Logitechwas at the top of their gamefor gaming peripherals.This is the first generation G15 MX518.Man this thing's a freaking legend.Is actually Terrance's keyboardthat he uses here at work.That's why it has all theselike stickers and crap on it.There's even stickers on all these keysbecause he actually wore themoff just Terrance things.If I recall correctly, thisguy was about 120 bucks.And I'm guessing this puppywas around 45,55 bucks.Now that's a name I havenot heard in a long time.Windows XP welcome.Let's start with what would have beenthe first game I'd checkedout after an upgrade in 2005.Oh yeah, Far Cry, the first one.It really doesn't lookas good as I remember it.Oh, those godrays though, thosewould have impressed 2005 mewhen you walked up to this like this bentrebar like hole here and you saw thatthose reflections on the waterand that gorgeous skybox,all this foliage,man that was a moment.Didn't used to be that these bars were skyI don't know what's up with that, but..Look at that meat.Bow, take that meat,got that physics right there, oh,whoops you need to die now.Thanks.What the?Am I out of ammo?I'm out of frickin ammo.I forgot how hard this game was.That's not to say that Far Crywas the only demanding gamefrom that era.Fear was one of my favorites.First encounter assault recon.We're setting our graphicscard to maximum sure.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 the?- Dumpsters simulator 2005.- Oh, you killed it(beep).UT 2004 then.Double kill.Oh Terrance's A key is coming offin my ring finger is all sticky now.Whoops, whoops, whoops, whoops, oh no.Oops, actually a lot ofhis keys are coming off.Oh yeah winner.This is what chicken dinnerlooked like back then.So that's it young ladies and gentlemen,that is what passed for africkin sick AMD gaming rig,the last time they were on top.And that was what passedfor good graphics back then.So we've come a long way in both regards.A good job AMD, good job, game developers.And good job Seasonic forsponsoring this video,whether it's 15 years ago ortoday or 15 years from nowyou can count on Seasonic toprovide the power that you needfor your gaming rig or Workstationor whatever else theheck it is that you need.They've got a wide variety of productswith up to 80 plus titaniumefficiency, modular interfaces.They've even got theirlike Seasonic Connect thingwhere you've got likethe main power supplyand then it goes off to this thingand you run short cablesto all your stuff.We did a video about it, it's super cooland you can check them out at the linkin the video description.If you guys are lookingfor another video to watch,that's kind of like this,you can actually check outon even more retro buildwhere I rebuilt my first gaming PCwith almost the exact parts that I usedincluding a soltec motherboard.Soltec, what's that?Soul of technology obviously.\n"
