 Now you might look at this somewhat eclectic pile of hardware and go, what a piece of junk! But for me, everything on this table holds a very special place in my heart because what you're looking at is after hours of scouring eBay, FreeGeek, Craigslist basically to a piece, my first gaming rig. So if you were building a gaming machine on a budget, back when I was in high school, AMD was a very compelling option. The chips were cheaper, the boards were cheaper, and this was actually the deciding factor for me thanks to a collaboration with Nvidia, which is probably a hard thing for our younger viewers to imagine given what bitter enemies they've become since AMD's acquisition of ATI back in 2006. They had much better onboard graphics than you could get on an Intel chipset. And so I decided on my weapon of choice, the Soltech SL75MRNL, the crappier onboard graphics version of the famous FRNL and FRN2L whose budget overclocking prowess was second only to their amazing sense of style. That is until Soltech went out of business only a few short years later thanks to their use of shoddy electrolytic capacitors that pretty much all leaked just outside of the warranty period. I mean, actually, it's a miracle I found a working one of these. I could have substituted some other board with GeForce 4 MX graphics onboard, but to preserve the integrity of the build, I way overpaid some jackass who runs an eBay store who thought this thing was worth over $100 because I tweeted I was looking for one, so his listing got a bunch of hits. Ugh. Next up is my CPU, the legendary Athlon XP 2500 Plus. AMD marketed this processor quite cleverly. The branding was similar to Microsoft's then brand spanking new Windows XP and used the PR model number system to compare the lower clocked, but higher IPC Athlon chips to Intel's gigahertz marketed Pentium 4 family. It ran a double pumped 1666 megahertz front side bus, effectively 333 megahertz, and featured 512 kilobytes of cache with a clock speed of 1.83 gigahertz and was a well-known excellent budget overclocker with an unlocked multiplier that allowed basically all of them to run at 3200 plus speeds or about 2.2 gigahertz. K7 was notably the last generation of AMD chips to use a front side bus before they changed everything industry-wide by moving the memory controller onboard with the Athlon 64. Physically, it looked very different from modern CPUs. The die was completely exposed with only some rubber pads around it to prevent it from chipping or cracking during heatsink installation. You can see this one is quite chipped, so yeah, they didn't always work very well. And the pin layout on the bottom is very retro looking. Socket A has 462 pins on the bottom. Laughable when you compare it to a modern APU that has over 900 pins in a much smaller area and a similar size modern Intel chip that uses LGA type contact pads rather than pins to improve durability and pin density and squeezes over 2000 in about the same area. More pins are used for additional signaling to the motherboard and other system components for these more advanced processors. Cooling and overclocking of my 68 watt beast was taken care of by a very unique product. This is the VanTech AeroFlow, one of the only CPU coolers, at least on the desktop, to feature a tip magnetic drive fan. TMD fans have the benefit of being able to use more of their area for cooling because the center hub contains no motor, only a bearing, and the tips of the fan blades actually have magnets that are driven by coils in the frame of the fan. Cool, huh? Less cool is the fact that they vibrate like crazy and they're loud, and on top of that, because of AMD's mounting system in those days, putting this thing on sucks. So the CPU die isn't actually centered between these two fragile plastic mounting clip things, so the heatsink needs a cutout on the one side for the hinge for the retention arm on the socket and only goes on one way. Then you actually needed to, like, seriously, this was the intended way to install a heatsink in those days, put a screwdriver into this notch on the other side and sweat bullets while heaving down on it to pull the latch over the clips and then move it slightly to lock onto them. I mean, there were so many. OMG, I put my screwdriver through my motherboard post on the forums in those days. My RAM choice was dictated by what was cheap at NCIX at the time, so this Samsung 512 megabyte DDR400 stick that I got from FreeGeek actually still has the NCIX barcode sticker on it and is exactly what I used. In fact, it could be the exact stick that I had for all I know. I opted for a single stick even though this platform is dual channel capable to give myself more room to increase the capacity of my rig in the future. Technically, three sticks could be run in dual channel on this platform with one stick twice the capacity of the other two, but it was a kludgy solution and not guaranteed to work. The case in power supply is where I really have to take a moment to thank FreeGeek, the guys that we did this collab with, for hooking me up. Even Antec didn't have an original land boy buried in the catacombs, and I could not find one of these. It took those guys like two weeks to find one and set it aside for me. Thanks, guys. The original land boy, before they sullied the name with this nonsense, was the bomb. It was made of aluminum, very cool for the time. It was affordable. It included not just a power supply, but, and this was a huge deal, especially then, a decent 350 watt power supply with blue LED lighting and while it may not have featured literally any room for cable management or even front panel audio, it did have a removable three and a half inch drive cage for easy hard drive and floppy installation, easy install sleds for the optical drive and a side panel window to show off the aftermarket 80 millimeter blue LED fan that I bought on an impulse like two weeks later at London Drugs. Officially, my first way overpriced computer modding component. For drives, my original gaming rig reused the floppy drive and CD burner that I got as hand-me-downs from my uncle's Pentium machine. This is not an insignificant part of the reason that front case doors were so fashionable at the time. Black drives were not that common and they were even more expensive than their beige counterparts. Yes, friends, the optical drive was as pricey as it was essential in those days. For the hard drive though, I couldn't carry forward an old one if I wanted better speed and to have enough storage to install more than one CD-based game at a time. So an 80 gig with an 8 meg cache or a 120 gig with a 2 meg cache cost about the same. I eventually settled for the 80, feeling confident that that was more than I'd need for a long time and feeling like the extra performance would be more worthwhile. Drives sure used to be more difficult to install, by the way. 80 pin versus 40 pin IDE cables, master and slave jumpers. You kids have it easy. For the rest of the machine, I'm using close approximations of the components that I had at the time. My CRT was not a flat screen and yes, young kids, we called it a flat screen because the piece of glass in the front was flat rather than curved. We knew it was still big and heavy. And I actually had slightly different hand-me-down keyboard and mice before upgrading a year or so later to a wireless MX Duo. But the one thing that is exactly the same here is the mouse pad. Being too cheap to buy a real mouse pad, I used a piece of paper to overcome the tracking issues on my computer desk. And it worked great, by the way. You just have to replace it every once in a while. So we interrupt the scripted portion of this video to bring you the moment of truth. Pressing the power button after, of course, turning on the power supply. Oh, you hear that tip magnetic drive fan? Oh, music. Come on display. It's alive. Athlon XP 1.1 gigahertz. That's OK. We can go and change that manually. You can see 32 megs of memory shared. Hard drive not being picked up. I'll diagnose that later. Maybe that IDE cable. Delete to enter setup. And there we are. Let's get some Windows XP installed on this bitch, right? So then with the system working, the only question remaining was, will it run Minecraft? And the answer is, surprisingly, no. After overpaying for that stupid motherboard, it turns out that the system is not stable enough to do anything more than install Windows and look at the desktop. Not entirely unexpected, but disappointing to be sure. So if you're not familiar with Massdrop, the concept is pretty simple. They've got this huge community of enthusiasts, and I can't say like computer enthusiasts or knife enthusiasts or audio enthusiasts, because there's all these different enthusiasts. And they basically go, hey, there's this really cool product that we'd like. Can you go to the manufacturer or an authorized reseller and tell them, hey, we're all willing to buy it if you could just do a little something on the price? Massdrop takes buyers and sellers and does volume deals. So everyone gets a good deal. The manufacturer sells a bunch and the buyers get a lower price. Pretty freaking cool. You can check it out at the link in the video description. But recently, they have branched out a little bit, and they've started working with manufacturers to do special editions of their products just for Massdrop, and special pricing is, of course, included as well. So they worked with Hi-Fi Man this time around to bring back the HE300 with a special MD or Massdrop flare. So in their former life, solely under Hi-Fi Man, these entry-level headphones were priced at about $300 US dollars. And the new one is very similar to the old HE300s, but with an updated and more lightweight structure, a more neutral sound signature, and an all-black appearance compared to the silver and black of older generations. The most important change, however, that they have made is reducing the price to a very, actually legitimately low, $99 US dollars. So all you gotta do to check them out is head over to the draw.ps slash ltt dash he dash 350. Don't expect you to remember that. Check it out at the link in the video description. Thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was an awesome trip down nostalgia lane, then get subscribed, hit that like button, or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon, buying a cool shirt like this one, or with a direct monthly contribution. You can find the Amazon and the t-shirt links up there, by the way. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering, hmm, gee, what should I watch next? Oh, maybe a review of like a super sick 17-inch gaming laptop. You can check that one out there. I guarantee you that it is both more powerful and smaller and more expensive. And that's three things that it is both of than this.