 15 years ago, 2005, I had just graduated high school, a little site called YouTube was born and 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 it to 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, back then, back then. Hey, wow, 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, oh, it'll be a little awkward if it doesn't, if it still works. 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 1st, 2005, prime holiday shopping season, and used the way back 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 SLK2600AMB, and it's actually very similar to the Antec Landboy, which happens to be exactly the case that I used for my very first gaming PC. It is brand spanking new! That is so cool. How much did I pay for this? You paid, I think, 80 bucks, which is pretty on par with what it actually costs. That's like right about what I would expect it to cause. One little thing we're gonna have to do is ignore the Antec power supply that came with this case. We'll 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 mock 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, Linus 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 it would just get sucked in by the power supply and exhausted 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 16X 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 A8N SLI. Looking at the pins in here, these do appear to both be wired for 16, and this premium moniker is one that Asus actually doesn't even use every generation. I remember them telling me the story of this. So this might've even been a higher end board than the A8N32. For pricing of this board, I'm gonna say $280. Wow, 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 cash per core. Price of this puppy at launch? Just shy of 800 Canadian rubles. That's right, my friends, it's not even an extreme edition or anything. It's just a CPU. 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 zip socket together, just a little something like that, lower that arm and bow. You remember OCZ? Because I remember OCZ. This is still my favorite heat spreader 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, well, go ahead, just crank the 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. We'll be 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 heat pipes and water cooling were not within reach of the average enthusiast. Meet the Zalman CNPS 7000 flower type CPU cooler. Yes, my friends, it used the power of metal to conduct heat away from the CPU to this gigantic circle shaped fin arrangement. They actually ran all the fins like this, mashed them together. See these big heavy screws on the edges here, holding the whole thing together? Then machined it flat and spread out the fins. So you're carrying heat away from the CPU surface and then spread it out and heat from the CPU surface and then spreading heat around the entire periphery where it's taken care of by this fan that incidentally gives you a fair bit of RAM and VRM cooling at the same time. Do you think this thermal grease is still good? It'll be fine. Ah, hmm. Now, because AMD was the enthusiast platform of choice, check this out. Cooler compatibility was by default AMD. And then you would actually have to adapt the thing if you wanted to install it on an Intel socket. So that means installing on AMD was super simple. All you had to do was take the built-in hook, hook it over one side of the socket, a little something like that. Then on the other side, Zalman actually included this handy dandy little thumb pressy thingamajiggy here, but some coolers actually expected you to use a screwdriver to push it down, which led to a lot of screwdrivers being driven into motherboard PCBs. Oh, I love this. This motherboard is actually from NCIX too. This label is still white. These were heat sensitive labels so that NCIX could tell if you tried to use a heat gun to remove it and put it onto something else. So that means that this CPU lived a very cool life. If you guys like this kind of enthusiast retro stuff, we got our hands on an Astendo monitor, which as far as we can tell is the first consumer ultra wide monitor from 2008. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that. Was pretty common for the five and a quarter inch bays in the area behind them to basically just get all the extra cables jammed into them. That was what passed for cable management. You can see there's actually literally no room behind the motherboard tray. Poor Seasonic having to show off like 15 year old innovations or what passed for them. This is pre-PCI express power. We may have made an error mistake, or as I call it an error. These graphics cards do have six pin PCI express connectors. And I believe 6,000 series was the first one to have those. So this power supply must just ever so slightly predate these graphics cards. We're not actually gonna be running SLI unfortunately. One of these is a 6,800 GS and the other is a 6,800 GT. This card was the hotness back then. It was almost as fast as a 6,800 ultra, especially if you overclocked it. And this was the first generation of Nvidia cards to support SLI. So two 6,800 GTs compared to one 6,800 ultra in games that scaled well with SLI would absolutely wipe the floor with the 6,800 ultra from a price to performance standpoint. I took two PCI slot covers out automatically, even though this is only a single slot card. That's hilarious. It was pretty common to have to use these adapters and graphics cards would actually usually come with them. Pretty common place for people to change over their core platform or upgrade a graphics card and carry forward a perfectly good power supply. Front panel audio. There it is. I couldn't see it cause there's jumpers on it. I forgot. So depending on your motherboard, sometimes you would wanna hook up like AC97 front panel audio and then sometimes you do HD audio. This was right around the transition period. You know what? I'm not gonna bother hooking it up. Graphics card, I wanna say $380. It was $238.90. Wow. You can barely get like an entry level GTX card for that these days up here in Canadian land. Check this out. So this is a fancy floppy cable. It's rounded for better cable management. You guys take your round cables 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 guessing this thing was worth like 450 bucks. 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 these DVI to VGA adapters around for a reason. That's one thing I don't miss about single slot graphics cards. This just fire right up like that. Wow. This was back when Logitech was at the top of their game for gaming peripherals. This is the first generation G15 MX518. Man, this thing's a freaking legend. It's actually Taron's keyboard that he uses here at work. That's why it has all these like stickers and crap on it. You know, there's even stickers on all these keys because he actually wore them off. Just Taron things. If I recall correctly, this guy was about 120 bucks. And I'm guessing this puppy was around 45, 55 bucks. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. Windows XP. Welcome. Let's start with what would have been the first game I'd check out after an upgrade in 2005. Oh yeah. Far Cry. The first one. It really doesn't look as good as I remember it. Oh, those god rays though. Those would have impressed 2005 me. When you walked up to this like bent rebar like hole here and you saw that those reflections on the water and that gorgeous skybox, all this foliage. That was a moment. Didn't used to be that these bars were sky. I 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. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. What the? Am I out of ammo? I'm out of fricking ammo. I forgot how hard this game was. That's not to say that Far Cry was the only demanding game from that era. Fear was one of my favorites. First encounter assault recon. We're setting our graphics card 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? Dumpster simulator 2005. Oh, oh, you killed it. UT 2004 then. Pew, pew, pew, double kill. Pew, pew, double kill. Oh, Taren's A key is coming off and my ring finger is all sticky now. Whoops, whoops, whoops. Whoops. No! Oops. Actually a lot of his keys are coming off. Oh yeah, winner. This is what chicken dinner looked like back then. So that's it, young ladies and gentlemen. That is what passed for a fricking sick AMD gaming rig the last time they were on top. And that was what passed for good graphics back then. So we've come a long way in both regards. Hey, good job AMD, good job game developers and good job Seasonic for sponsoring this video. Whether it's 15 years ago or today, or 15 years from now, you can count on Seasonic to provide the power that you need for your gaming rig or workstation or whatever else the heck it is that you need. They've got a wide variety of products with up to 80 plus titanium efficiency, modular interfaces. They've even got their like Seasonic Connect thing where you've got like the main power supply and then it goes off to this thing and you run short cables to all your stuff. We did a video about it, it's super cool. And you can check them out at the link in the video description. If you guys are looking for another video to watch, it's kind of like this. You can actually check out an even more retro build where I rebuilt my first gaming PC with almost the exact parts that I used, including a Soltech motherboard. Soltech, what's that? It's the soul of technology, obviously.