 I like lollipop. It was a thousand dollars. That baby looks so alarmed. We really didn't have as much to be excited about back then, did we? We just came across an absolute nostalgia gold mine. Remember Maximum PC? No? Okay, well, it was really cool and a computer geek staple back in the late nineties, early two thousands. And as it turns out, every issue from 1998 to 2008 happens to be available on Google Books for our enjoyment. So why don't you join me on a trip down memory lane? It's gonna be just you, me, Adam, and of course our sponsor. Storyblocks save time and money with Storyblocks. Get studio quality stock video clips for just a fraction of the cost. Check it out today at the link below or at the end of this video. This is one of the first times the audience is really gonna get to know you at all, right? Yeah, kind of. I've only really been in like a handful of videos at this point. I'm looking forward to the difference in reaction between me and Adam because in preparing for this video, I was like, Hey, how old are you? And he goes, 27. I'm like, Oh, cool. We're actually not that far apart. Oh, I'm 36 almost. We're 10 years apart. I built my first computer back in late 2003, early 2004, meaning that right smack dab in the middle of this archive was when I was like drooling over hardware that I could never possibly hope to afford. Meanwhile, Adam was like, I like lollipop. I was more of a Beyblades kid. I was really into Beyblades. You're really into Beyblades. Fantastic. Love it. So by the time you built your first computer, all of this was long gone. I built my first computer in 2013 after working a summer job. I have pictures of it actually. Our origin stories are nearly identical though. That's exactly what I did with my first summer job money. We're gonna start with the 2004 issue. Every September is when Maximum PC would drop their dream machine, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's just the mostest, the bestest and the most expensive-est hardware that you can find. We haven't even made it past the cover and it's already story time. One of my supervisors at NCIX, and this was actually a few years later, mind you, but they were my supervisor and they still had this edition of Maximum PC, handed it to me as an example to prove that my hating on displays on the front of computer cases was stupid because Maximum PC thought it was the bomb. It's pretty clear I was right. That trend did not take off. This case is made by Silverstone. And in my personal opinion, they actually kind of murdered it. This is the TJ06. All right, I wanna see it. This issue contains over 35 brutal reviews. Can you handle the truth? You had to have a hatch so that you could hide your drives, which defeats the whole purpose of having a display. That display, by the way, is touchscreen. So you could play Space Cadet Table with the, I don't know, I don't know. But it's showing an XP bliss background. That's because Windows XP was the operating system of choice back then. I would love to run Windows XP on the front of my computer. Ooh, look at that. Wow. You can tell I'm old school because I see that pile of hardware and my immediate reaction before I realized that it's all ancient literal e-waste at this point is like, whoa. All right, what are we looking at? Did I get the case right? TJ-03, I wasn't even close. It was $1,000. Oh yeah, Silverstone's premium cases back then were super expensive. The one Yvonne got me as a gift, the TJ-07, was like six, $700 case. And I had to put my own window in the side. No, I didn't. We ended up spending the extra on the window. How did they justify that kind of money? Why, like cases are dirt cheap now. Well, cases were dirt cheap back then too, but this was a premium case. And the competition for premium cases with decent features hadn't even begun to heat up yet. Okay, you wanna bring up the Zaser line? Zaser? Do it, I dare you. There you go, right there, that one. This is a similar era Zaser. What year is this article? This article is 2003. 2003. Am I good or what? One issue is that aluminum cases had not gone mainstream yet. I could count on probably one hand the number of aluminum cases that weren't made by Lee & Lee or Silverstone, both of whom were boutique and barely had a presence in North America at all. So a lot of the techniques that we take for granted to help bring down the cost of aluminum cases just didn't exist or weren't economical yet. Are those Logitech Z680s? Oh yeah. I had me a pair of those. You know what? I could probably dig up a picture of my Logitech Z680 setup. The Logitech Z680s were the every man's computer surround speakers, because believe it or not, PC surround speakers were a thing back then. At the top, you had the Creative GigaWorks 5.1 or 7.1 configs. You had the Clips for Media Ultra 5.1s. Those were so good. And then the next year down, Logitech came in, disrupted the market, was anywhere from a third to half the price and delivered a lot of bass. But there was a hiss. That's the reason I returned my Z680s, because I had them close enough to me that that constant hiss, even when they were completely turned all the way down, was very annoying. Back then, you're spending $1,000 on a case, $10 on a mouse pad. Please, if there's something that affects your performance, like a mouse pad does. This is their justification for their mouse pad. Whatever piece of foam and rubber happens to be lying around, but not us, we spend $10. You gotta remember, this was in the days of early crappy optical and laser sensors. You do not spend $10 on it and blow $1,000 on a case. Oh yeah, Intel Pentium 4560, overclocked. Oh yeah. This is 2004. Doesn't the Athlon 64 exist already? Yeah, it says the Athlon 64 FX53 is generally acknowledged to be faster in games, but they wanted the PCIe and DDR2. That's their justification. You know, this is something that the PC enthusiast community and media has never been able to figure out. All that gamers care is how many FPS they get. Does DDR2 get me more FPSes if it's paired with a CPU that's not as good? Don't buy it, right? Yeah. This should have absolutely been a socket 939 system if they're going for it the best. Fasten your seat belts. At 500 megahertz, this baby will blow you away. Where's my motherboard? That baby looks so alarmed. The MegaWorks 510D, that would be a predecessor to the GigaWorks around setup that I was talking about from like when I first got into this stuff. You have two voicemails, five emails, and while you were out, your joystick made a pass at me. Cause it's a virtual assistant. Corporate sexual harassment. That's funny one. Is that a Microsoft Wave? The classic. That was my keyboard for like three or four years. Computer furniture. Delivered direct to you. Can I just say good riddance to the keyboard tray? Bye bye. New to North America from Roland. USB, one cable, pure sound. I love it. I also like the, this acronym DTMP. DTMP, that never took off. July, 2002, surround gaming. That display setup would weigh like 200 pounds. Was that even remotely enjoyable because of the bezel size? Like nobody did this stuff back in the day. It's like an IMAX theater for your PC. Yeah, I think IMAX would have some things to say about that. We need to get this. Shut up. This is a foldable. I'm pretty sure it's a laptop and it looks like you could split the bottom in half, but I'm not sure. Lip pad Voyager. This is before, yeah, this is before my time. This is before Creative acquired Cambridge Soundworks. Creative just kind of devoured every audio company over the course of a few years. Creative was a monster. And desktop PC audio products, your sound cards and your MIDI interfaces and surround sound speaker setups, it was actually a sizable chunk of business. If you wanted sound that didn't completely suck, and I'm not talking, oh, I detect excellent dynamics in this track. I'm talking popping and like hissing. And I'm talking buzzing sounds when you move your mouse around. Zzz, zzz, zzz, zzz, zzz. Like you needed a sound card. The greatest 100 PC technologies of all time, Microsoft Solitaire. I mean, they had to come up with a hundred things. They set themselves a pretty big list. Skype is 96. Sounds like computers were awful. Yeah, pretty much. Having flash memory under that laser printer. Yeah, I don't know if I can get behind that. Yeah. Especially knowing what we know now. Was the future not always bright for flash memory? Flash memory wasn't actually slated as a replacement for the hard drive. December 2007. Mm, okay. I feel like they should have seen it coming. Nvidia SLI, how'd that work out? It's funny how some of their selections are really broad, actual industry changing things. ATA or DSL. And some of them are super specific. That Giphy Pyrus scan is number 60. Were they a sponsor by any chance? Can tell what was a hot topic back then though. Perpendicular hard drive recording, huge deal. Because all of a sudden, instead of laying out the zeros and ones this way, you were able to lay them out this way. And hard drive density was going through a period of rapid, rapid growth. You could make an argument for Napster being even higher than this, in my opinion. Because Napster was the wake up call that the music industry got that something needed to change. I don't think Spotify exists today, if not for the disruption of Napster. Napster just enabled people to share music in a way that never worked before. Exactly. Half-Life, okay. Doom be Half-Life. I mean, Half-Life wouldn't exist without Doom. Doom was like- That's fair. You could also make an argument that Quake was more influential just because the power and modularity of the engine. Again, Half-Life also wouldn't exist because of Quake, because it was originally built on Quake's engine. Windows XP, really? Number five? Position of Windows XP in this list was very much affected by the poor reception of EMI in 2000. Well, no, 2000 wasn't poorly received. 2000 was excellent. But you gotta understand that Windows 2000 was not a consumer product. Consumers were stuck with Windows 98, 98SE, ME, as you mentioned, and then it went straight to XP. Windows 2000 was good because it was based on the NT kernel. And that's what made Windows XP good. So again, I'm looking at this going, well, hold on a second. You can't, yes, Windows XP brought a better kernel to consumers, but it wasn't what introduced it to the world. And it wasn't what introduced this familiar way that we have of interacting with our computer, with the start menu and all this other stuff, the taskbar. Mosaic, the first web browser. Yeah, Mosaic should probably be above, now that we know how much more the internet has changed our lives than even they knew back then. This is number one, not way above graphics cards and a particular line of CPUs and even above USB. That's fair. I think USB is a fair pick for the time though. USB changed the game. That's definitely true. Honestly, I could sit and just go through this for many hours. Tunic Tower 120, that holds a special place in my heart. Shall we look at it? My first review, boys. How's stock cooler or your AMD stock cooler? Look at what we literally put on a pedestal in 2005. Put on an actual physical pedestal. Oh man, yeah. Athlon 64X2 4800 plus, I drooled over that one. There's no justification for spending the extra though. I got the 4400 plus, that way you get the full, I wanna say it was 512 kilobytes of cache per core. Eh, don't quote me on that. But you get the full cache on the chip and you can just overclock it a couple hundred megahertz and you're good to go. I got a 2405 FPW from Dell. Logitech G5 absolutely deserves its place here. Zelman Resurator One Plus. Do you even know what this thing is? No, is it a radiator? It's called a Resurator because it's a reservoir and a radiator and it literally sat outside your case. You know how so many old cases have those punch outs to run something into the inside? I remember having one of those. It's for water cooling. If you had one of these Resurators, it would passively dissipate the heat to the surrounding air and through the sheer volume of the water, it would be able to absorb momentary spikes like a short gaming session. They were actually super cool. And I believe that especially later models, you could get like an add-on fan that would blow down the whole thing and the performance was outstanding. Cooler Master Stacker CM830. This was actually a super dumb case because the whole point of the Stacker, it's right in the name, is you can stack it with hard drives. And the Stacker 830 was sexy looking and could fit like GPUs. And this was cool. You could put four 120 millimeter fans on the side to basically blow fresh air across the entire inside of the computer. Or I shouldn't say hard drives because it was five and a quarter inch bays in the early Stackers. So you could fill it with anything. Fan controllers, we would put those in the front. Reservoirs were typically five and a quarter inch bays. We didn't do two reservoirs internally yet. This is their blunders. The thermal tapes. An Apple mouse. Apple still makes garbage mice. They really do. Because I was the one that had a stupid little awful feeling track ball in it, right? This WiFi router promised a mile of range from an 802.11 beat. Well, that's just an obvious lie. They're so mad about this Arctic cooling cooler that came on the Sapphire Toxic Radeon X700 Pro. And you wanna know why they're mad? It's actually a super cool cooler. It was UV reactive. So it would like glow blue and orange. Toxic. It consumes three, count of three PCI slots. Where am I gonna put all my other cards? Now we have motherboards that don't even have hardly any slots in them because nobody puts any cards in their motherboards. That's great. Well, I've been drinking from the water bottle the whole time, baby. Ooh, yeah, it's the new colors. Oh, we have some really awesome new colors for water bottles on LTT store. And really dumb names for them that we came up with in literally like two minutes. What's your favorite name? I think Cream Scream is my favorite dumb name. Cream Scream. Because we can't call it, yeah, we can't infringe on anyone's trademarks, but it's orange and white. Oh, yeah. Look at that. Holy bananas. Quad core CPU. Man, look at that cable and tubing management. Is that Skull Trail? We did a whole video about Skull Trail, Intel's former dual socket enthusiast platform. It was pretty cool. Is that a chipset cooler? No, no. Okay. Skull Trail used fully buffered dims because it was based on Intel's server architecture. And fully buffered dims had these buffer chips on them that ran extremely hot. They needed active cooling. This was not an optional thing. So that's a Corsair Dominator Airflow RAM cooler sitting over top of the memory slots. And the memory slots on this motherboard are down beneath the CPU, which is- Correct, because the North Bridge, see this right here, contains the memory controller. This is before Intel integrated the memory controller. So these two core architecture based CPUs right here, but each of them are quad core and they are communicating to the North Bridge, which communicates to the memory. Cool, right? PCI Express was also still on the chipset. So that was going all the way down here to your dual, I can't tell what these are, but they're definitely ATI cards or AMD. I can't remember if the acquisitions happened yet. There are 700s. But we've got two of them in Crossfire and they're sandwich raiding together because who needs cooling? Corsair fully buffered dims. Love how Corsair put their sticker on these server dims. Good job, Corsair. Danger Dan made a water block for this board so that you could still install all of your cards because see otherwise, if you install the water block, you'd have tubes sticking out, right? So you could still install all your cards and then have the cooling come out like somewhere else. D-Tech Fusion V2 CPU blocks. Good old Danny D-Tech. The velociraptors, I remember seeing those. OCZ water-cooled memory modules. Yep, not one, but two barbs per side. To actually tube them up, I think they were quarter inch or one eighth inch. Can't remember. To actually tube them up was an absolute gong show. So dumb. For all that money, crisis runs at 26 FPS. That's why it's a freaking meme. It was just unplayable. It was incredible. What am I even looking at? This is the worst ad I've ever seen. Unlike this ad for our sponsor. Thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring today's video. Everyone needed a quick clip for a video but didn't have the capacity to make it yourself. Storyblocks helps you bring your stories to life without sacrifice due to time, budget or resources. There's over a million royalty free assets for you to choose from, including 4K HD footage, Adobe templates, music, images and a wide array of diverse and inclusive content. There are subscriptions for every budget so you can choose the plan that works for you. From their unlimited all access plan that gives you unlimited video and audio downloads to enterprise licensing so your entire company has access to the assets as you need them. We use Storyblocks here at Linus Tech Tips when we need stock footage fast. So check out Storyblocks today at storyblocks.com slash Linus Tech Tips. If you guys enjoyed this video, I'd say go check out the Skull Trail retrospective that we did. It's a super cool platform and it's worth digging a little deeper and then I did with my little mousing over where the data paths were. Thanks for watching, bye bye.