Putting Together My Own Retro Desktop PC

The three taller caps near the CPU heatsink might be Nichicon HM 3300uf 6.3v which were bad even if they looked okay. Just an FYI.

I had exactly this case and this mouse in my PIII and the First one in my P1 😮

ebonics is a fork of british english

Is the voice in this AI generated? The inflextion is really unnatural and unsettling

Great build. I've wanted to do my own version of this for awhile now, think I would have gone for one of the Northwood core P4's with the 800mhz FSB and a Radeon 9600XT or 9800 Pro for the GPU. The Ti 4200 was a pretty solid card too though, much better than the FX series cards that succeeded it.

I want a case like that for a modern pc.

Hell yeah dude this rig is killer 🎉❤😂

Lol I have a deathstar from just after the buyout happened it's somehow still alive and running in a pc today

It's worth noting that 3dmark 03 is absolutely brutal to DirectX8 class cards like the 4Ti, Radeon 8500/9000/9100/9200, and the Matrox Parhelia. That DirectX8 limitation is also why Crysis doesn't run, it requires DirectX9 and doesn't have a DX8 (or 7, or 6) render path like mid-era XP games often did. Another thing worth noting is that your Ti4200 is the same model as mine -- it's an OEM card and is clocked a little slower than the regular ones. That said, I would not recommend overclocking to reference until you repaste the core and probably add some vram heatsinks. A fan bracket pointed at the card and taking up a PCI slot wouldn't go amiss either.

That case you choose is the one i also built with. I had a P2 celeron 400mhz in mine with 128mb ram and a geforce mx200 was not awful worked of for the games and things i did.

That bulid reminds me of our family computer. Our machine also had Pentium 4 (don't remember exact model though) along with GeForce 5900XT and SB Audigy. When we got it in late 2003 it was fastest machine in whole neighbourhood, as most of my friends still had GeForce 2MX or similiar cards. I've upgraded graphics card in 2006 and used it until 2008 when i got money on my birthday and bulid myself better PC.

Colin, my Grandad had the exact same case and similar stuff with an amd motherboard and an athlon.

oh no! Not an MX4000! Some of those only had 32bit memory interface! I really love the MX460 with DVI which lets you hook up to HDMI via adapter... even a 420 or 440SE are better options than the 4000!

So satisfying to see! I worked in a computer store in the early 2000s and built many P4 systems. Exciting time with all the changes and developments. 20 years later I'm still into computers and testing new components on a regular basis.

Anyone wanting to sell one of these cases....let's talk

I had the same motherboard in my childhood computer. Wow.

Wow! What a blast from the past. I had that exact same case back in the day. In fact, I even had that same optical drive! I remember thinking the blue tray would match the case swoosh. LOL I wonder if that case is still around here somewhere or whether it got tossed... might be in the attic...

I also had a Ti 4200 back then, that thing was amazing!

Nice. I am busy building a Win98 rig with the ATI 9200SE 128MB AGP card.

The Pentium 4 was infamous for overheating. I would use the strongest thermal compound I could find to try to prevent that.

Damn, I had the exact same case with a similar motherboard and a 2.8Ghz Prescott Pentium 4

The Antec SL series power supplies were NOT good. Antec used shitty Fuhjyyu brand capacitors, which have a 100% failure rate. I've recapped dozens and dozens of these supplies over the years. You can expect that any SL series power supply, or any Antec supply for that matter from the 1999-2008 time frame to have bad capacitors. When they finally did move off of Fuhjyyu capacitors, they started using OST, Asia-X, Teapo, CapXon, JunFu and a number of other garbage Chinese/Taiwanese made capacitors that had equally horrible failure rates.

Exacerbating that problem, Antec was also obsessed with quiet running PSUs, which meant not running the fan, or running it so slow that it was effectively useless. This lead to Antec PSUs cooking themselves to death.

If you buy an Antec supply today, recap it immediately, do not use it until you have new caps in. I would also recommend fan modding the unit so that the fan always runs. Seriously, those things would get so hot that the PSU housing could burn you.

The Ti4200 is the closest equivalent to the Og Xbox that you can buy. Considering the Og Xbox was the most powerful home console from 2001-2005, The Ti4200 and similar performing gpus are probably good targets for an early 2000s gaming pc. I don’t think any game from before 2004s batch of demanding dx9 titles would give it any trouble at max settings 1280x1024

It's not truly retro if you use any modern day parts or technology

Very Nice.

Dear Free Geek,

My name is Isaac Wright.

I am here to file a complaint against you because you seem to have a passion for the "far superior" area of the Twin Cities. Why do you love the Twin Cities so much? Why can't you expand outside of here? You should think of the rest of the country. We here in Kingsport, TN, Bristol, VA, Bristol, TN, Knoxville, TN, Johnson City, TN, Abingdon, VA, Big Stone Gap, VA are discriminated by the lack of retro, used, or refurbished computers. The only computerts we can get are new ones at Walmart, Sam's Club, Office Depot, or Best Buy. Why is that? Even the rare times we get one at a thrift store, they one $50-$300 for them. That's more expensive than what you want for them. You are much cheaper. Also, even the ones I get in my area are all Windows 7-era, and you have all of them, all kinds of colors, mine are all black and silver. Even gray. I have even though of Adult Adoption, moving, running away from home because I can't add quite enough to my collection. Guess who got me into collecting? Ryan Gehret, Ben Kleinberg, VWestlife, Michael MJD, Psivewri all got me into collecting used electronics. Heck, even The Nostalgia Mall, The Flying Scotsman, and lmull3 did as well although The Flying Scotsman was known as Video Sans Frontier at the time. I like to do someting quite unique to mine though, and that is name them and make avatars for them using SP Studio. Why you gotta be so cool and love the Twin Cities and say "we're cool" and say bleep you to the rest of the U.S.? Even our computer recyclers down here just murder our computers and just send them to Computer Hell rather than what you do. You all actually refurbish them still working whereas we in Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee actually throw them out as garbage and send them to Computer Hell. Why is that? Why can't Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee start being like you all? Why don't you all start trashing like we do? Why do you all have to fix and refurbish everything in working condition and we don't down here?

Yours truly,

Isaac Wright

it signified the return of steve jobs and translucent color imacs copy cat styling. that is all.

Oh, I remember this case. It's the bean button case!

Hi, where can I get a 486 computer AT case back template to build one?
Thank you.

I built my own PC in one of those cases, I even cut out the plastic behind the swoosh and put a LED fan behind it for extra cool(ing).

Win98se has a max Mb default at 512 Mb their is a software fix if you want to go higher

Bonitas cachangas

Intel makes the worst motherboards since ever...

I also worked in a small computer shop at the turn of the century, and this is almost exactly the kind of PC we would build for the customer, or they would build for themselves, with parts from us. XP, despite its lousy WiFi support, was a very solid OS, which made most tasks a breeze. They didn't call XP the 'F1sher Price' OS for nothing! :D

Here in Brazil I built many computers with this case, it was for Pentium 3 or Athlon/Duron, that's why the rear panel didn't match, besides it came with a big speaker, from the Windows 98/Dos era. Pentium 4 is a little too modern for him, but until it fits like a glove, this computer of yours was wonderful. 👑

*

Aqui no Brasil eu montei muitos computadores com esse gabinete, ele era para Pentium 3 ou Athlon/Duron, por isso que o painel traseiro não combinou, além de ele vim com um speaker grande, da era dos Windows 98/Dos. Pentium 4 é um pouco moderno pra ele, todavia até que encaixou como uma luva, ficou maravilhoso esse seu computador. 👑

Omg i have this computer case too and I love it so much! Glad to see another person out there with the same one!

I Used to have that case as my workhorse up till 2008, I really liked it.

I'm just thinking... You cut away the metal covering the Noctua fan, limiting the airflow... But regardless of that, where is that fan getting air from precisely?

One reason Intel motherboards like these did not have any sort of "overclocking" was because of at least two points... 1. Intel made CPU's, and 2. Overclocking was not condoned at the time & that if you overclocked your Intel CPU, then that pretty much voided the warranty. People have been overclocking capable CPU's since the 8088's on at least consumer-grade boards. Today, Intel had since finally resorted to designing their newer CPU's (since multicores iirc) & newer motherboards to be able to automatically overclock when programmed to. You could say that Intel copied & stole that idea from overclocking enthusiasts over the years/decades & made it their own. If you (Intel) can't beat them (overclockers), join them. Btw, I used to work at an Intel motherboard factory for over a decade in & around this time of the Y2k era. So many different motherboard models were built on our lines, using SMT (Fuji, iirc) & THM placement machines & SMT ovens, then bigger thru-hole components placed by hand & finally through wave solder. Can't say if this motherboard model used above was one of them. I handled motherboard component inventory, as well as stocking barrel-sized levels of liquid chemicals required for these assemblies & also ordering pallets of solder (leadless).

Zip was hardly common. Never had one, click of death (Steve Gibson) alluded to on a podcast I heard.

I liked beige towers.

Darn it, I'm so old my first PCs are now retro : (

I remember the Radeon 9200 with 128mb and the 9250 with 256mb. Today I have an agp Nvidia 7800 waiting for a project like this. But I need a Pentium 4 extreme for this plan.

How many times did you cut your hand on the case

OMG same my case before 20 years 😭

RIP new case gg

Instead of going this route, that are the same route as I went with my Win98 and MS Dos machines (286 up to and including high powered socket 754). Then I have gone a different route with WinXP.

WinXP came out in 2001, and I found out that a Mac Mini Late 2009, are fully compatible with XP. Though a mobile tech, it sports a GF-9400 gfx.

And if you are into vintage OsX, then this is a treat. It runs 2006'ish XP games fluid in 1024x768x32 and it can also run OsX Snow Leopard. And it is small and silent enough.

Small, silent and compatible. What more can I ask for?

Pentium 4 retro PC?)

We had this case growing up. it was my favorite "family pc" from the 90's.

I still have the case, tho its pretty beat up now, I'm pretty sure we purchased it from MicroCenter in Saint Louis Park the summer of 1999, during the launch of the Athlon 1GHz cpu's.

I remember that pc's specs well, even though I was only 12 at the time.

I really wish I had seen free geek had a new (old stock). I've actually been searching for a few years to find a better condition case than our old one.
That is a super special find you have there, I really hope you take great care of it.