Giant Retro Towers - Teardown and test! 

Friday's wouldn't be the same without you Mike.

It is recommended to drill through one of the leads to internal battery when modifying those dallas RTC chips. You don't want the old battery to become additional load for your external battery.

Wow - over an hour of Mike! yay!! Awesome video (as always).

Ah Goldstar, the "G" half of LG before they merged with Lucky

I love such skyscraper looking cases, so imposing yet so much potential for yummy external expansion slots! Everyone needs at least 5 floppy drives of various sizes and form factors in every case! So much expandability inside and out, front and back.

I love this channel and thanks for your dedication to retro computing!

You can use superglue and baking soda to build up the plastic tab on that door and file it into the shape you want. You basically apply glue, sprinkle on the powder and it turns into a hard rock like substance, and you can just build it up a layer at a time. The chemical reaction does produce some heat, and happens quickly, so let the part cool down so the plastic doesn't deform.

My theory is that the Toshiba SCSI drive from the first machine had a fatal head crash on one of its platters, but is a multi-platter/head drive that can still read from the other one(s). Would explain how it's still readable but has a ton of bad sectors marked like that. Would love to see an autopsy of that drive at some point!

Another fantastic, long video full of just enough detail and explanation.. I learn something every week. The pacing of your videos is perfect. Keep it up.

Yay another awesome video from the gorgeous techie! ❤️

Found your channel by accident. Immediately subscribed. Excellent content!!

Wymieniłem procesor i komputer działa , o dziwo . Nauczyleś mnie , Mike Dzięki . Mam 64 lata . Pozdrawiam i dziękuję . I replaced the processor and the computer works, surprisingly. You taught me, Mike Thanks. I am 64 years old. Best regards and thank you.😁🤭👍🤝

What a haul! So many amazing vintage computers. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you Mike for the Big Tower Retro Show , I was working at a PC Repair Shop in St. Louis called Word Pro during these years and this is some of the stuff we would see . Good to see Bigger cases like these as they are becoming more Rare :) QC

Using the Floppy interface for Tapedrives was actually very common on low-end systems. Expecially those Colorado drives.

Superb hour of Mike goodness - load of fun towers there and some surprises,!

So cool to have these systems! Nice resurrection

Ah, this is so beautiful to watch!

43:25 thanks for the fun run down and clean up, that was super fun! my fav so far from all your builds!

Seeing the RealPlayer icon in the system tray of that Windows 98 machine triggered my PTSD. RealPlayer was the bane of my existence in 1998, yuck.

Notched case is top notch. I salute you, sir.

Thank you for content.😊Such nostalgia i love it.

This is so GOOD, Mike! 👍

Zwnon was a heavy advertiser in Computer Shopper in the 90s. They let you build your machine the way you wanted, video card, ram etc. I had a giant case you have already shown in a video with a PentiumPro 200 and a Imagine II number 9 ( the kick azz video card of the day, later upgraded to Orchid 3dfx sli setup). It was a huge expense back then $2000 . They pretty much beat any other vendor and had a good rep as far as I can remember. Quake at horrible FPS but still beating everybody else machine 166 etc machines, the PPRO 200 when released was a beast, the kids would cry today with the FPS numbers... the bad old dark ages.

24:46 love how it says "some bad sectors" in the legend on the right. :D

Love the videos man, you're the only RU-vidr I can sit down and watch the entire video. It is so entertaining for a fellow computer nerd like me. Thanks for always giving me something to do on Fridays.

Over an hour, I like that. Nice video as always.

S1: heavily customized, a lot of pride in their professional work.

Just loving that HIQ case, Mike.. It's my fav so far that you've displayed.

Love your videos Mike! Recently got back into computers because of them, they're very helpful!

Yeah,my favourite type of cases, lucky you,Mike!!!

great video, Mike! i just luv it cause it's about an hr long, i could watch even 2 or 3 hrs long videos that you make.

Very interesting and entertaining video, thank you!

You just made me remember something I forgot all about with that CD rom caddy I had a gigantic external cdrom drive with one of those I had forgotten all about that.

These are awesome. They have much more character than today's computers.

I was so excited to sit down and watch a 1 hour MikeTech video! As a kid, coming across towers like this - with the mindset that bigger always meant better - I always thought that 'If I could ever get my hands on one of those... I could play any game in the world.' 😆 Thank you for the awesome video!

Ol' Mike, I saw this video as the first from your channel and I am totally in love. High quality images, full knowledge of the systems and very well picked retro computing beasts from the past. Lots of things to learn from yours. Instant subscriber and die hard fan... hahaha.

Yup, it's Friday, looks like a good one!!

Wow thanks Mike for a another great video and a long one to. Thanks for taking me back to the early days. Please keep up the great work. Kev

Seeing old software is the best

I worked at tri-star for most of the 90s, we sold a lot of those tape drives because they were cheap. They were pretty good though. We started zip tieing our cables a lot better than that around mid-90s.

46:50 wow I love that sound card, damnn!!

Love all of your videos, I've watched them all and look forward to you releasing a new video at the end of each week. ❤ I noticed those 866MHz Pentium 3's were only running at 520MHz, I'm guessing the settings must have been input manually and when the CMOS battery died it went back to defaults (I'm pretty sure that board is new enough to not need jumpers for setting bus speed and multiplier lol)

Proud citizen of Mikeropolis!

Thanks

ooh i was looking forward to the big bois

1:00:00 wow, that is just too cool! love that caddy!

Great video as always! Towers like that come up almost to my knees. I never really had much interaction with them. I have seen them at the Philadelphia School District building and in the offices on 8th and Snyder. Love the cd caddy as in the olden days lol. Your videos never cease to amaze me. I look forward to new videos every Friday.

Its awesome i just found your channel Great videos we love retro computers in all forms Binge watch time

That third system is beautiful. Would love to have in my collection.

Those sound blaster 16,s are great man. I upgraded my placard bell 396 with one. Loved it.

That last tape drive is probably a Colorado Jumbo 250, maybe 120, but yeah, floppy interfaces were really popular with the CMS tape drives. They also made portable ones that used the parallel port to transfer data. Not very speedy, but they got the job done. They take QIC-80 tapes that you can compress. I still have the 2 tapes I made from my 486/66 Win 3.11 machine back in 1995, and they're still readable. I bought a NOS Jumbo 350 off eBay and it came with that extended floppy cable so you could still have both 3.5 and 5.25 drives connected. Anyway, another awesome video, Mike.

Stopped by an estate sale last Friday. Looked around, saw some tech stuff. Picked up an EnPower TW3 EAA-89 laptop for $25USD. Never seen one before. Core Duo T2300, 1GB of RAM (512 onboard, 512 stick), 80GB HD, 945G video, 15.6" 1280x768 screen, and LOTS of ports: Four USB, firewire 400, PCMCIA and SD card, s-video, NIC and 56K, and something I've never seen in a laptop before: DVI output! Like an actual full sized DVI port. Too cool. It's in really good shape, all I needed to do was reseat the CMOS battery. Seems like a really good computer from 15 years ago. Is running XP home SP3. It also had all documents and email intact. So, PSA: When you sell a computer, wipe or destroy the HDs.

Those ATI cards with a Rage Theater chipset are precious and highly sought after. They are still considered in 2024 to be the best VHS/analog capture devices ever made for the digital conversion.

Awesome finds! Who would have thought that one had dual processors!

My Uncle (12 yrs. my Sr.; Grew up in the PC Boom) Had a Kick Ar$e IBM 386 Full Tower! That thing Was Huge; Probably where I got my OCD Love to "Fill ALL the Drive Bays!" LOL

Cool e-waste collection

Great vid! Yea, the Colorado drives of the time used a floppy interface. You could order a FC-20 card that would speed up access quite a bit. Yours truly did a video on that, comparing the speeds!

Nothing like som good ol' computer archaeology!

2nd case looks extremely similar to an old IBM case I use to have

That last system was a gem. The design and the pairing of parts was just perfect IMO. VBL Mach 2, OPL3, 486 DX2 and cache chip. RAM and his selection of drives. Dream system.

Well this video brought back memories. When I was a teenager in High School in the early 2000s I used to play around with old systems like these. Now, I never came across any old towers like those shown here but I saw the Baby AT systems and definitely had a few of those as well as some old Digital Electric Corp 486 slim desktop systems. My favourite systems to work with these days are either Lenovo or HP business desktop systems with the relatively tool-free designs. In fact, my HP Elite Desk tower has the legacy of Compaq Deskpro computers tool-less design implemented in it even down to the size of the power supply casing.

stunning

An hour long of video - really good vid!👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻☺️

Man I am jealous of that dual Pentium III system, bet that'll run late 90's games like Half Life flawlessly. That last system is a dream DOS gaming system too!

i have no idea why i love multi cpu builds so much, theyre just cool.

That little transformer can likely do more than you think. Remember the 12 volt rail is only rated at 10amps. The 250 Watts is all rails combined. The 12V rail was rated at 120Watts max, but it didn't do it. Probably bad caps. With the power supply open, the heatsinks will get hot as you didn't really get any air flow over them, but you are right in that saying that PSU is pretty well rubbish. I am just playing devils advocate really.

That Deer PSU is F- tier what it comes to quality. I'd throw that to recycle bin immediately.

I love watching repairs on older pcs I'm only used to working on modern pcs and find this very informative.Thank you for your content.😊It's very interesting to me to see this even though I owned vintage pcs when I was a teenager I never worked on them.First pc was a Compaq 286 with two 5 and a half floppy drives using MS-DOS 3.0 such nostalgia I also owned both a Compaq 386 and 486 both running windows 3.11 for workgroups .😅I sort of miss them. The old comoaq keyboard ms felt more tactility pleasing the roller ball mice werent so great though.Had an old cannon bjc 200 printer and loved the way it printed at the time even though not perfect and a couple of dot matrix printers b&w such nostalgia.

Zenon was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of Stoicisim. Which is very helpful during troubleshooting.

The PSU from system 3 looks like the guts are interchangeable with a later PSU if it turns out that it's unrepairable. Awesome goodness seen in this video, Mike!

I actually got the smell of cooked on wet dust and dead skin particles when you opened up the power supply on the HIQ machine. Oh that scent.. that old damp dusty stale nasty smell I miss and love so so much. Great!!

You’ll always love opening a random PC, you never know what’s in it and just makes it more fun 😂

I love how you tortured that first hard drive. Was hoping for the magic smoke and/or a fire lol. Some lovely systems all around, probably tall enough to support my desk.

When I first started in PCs I built an XT class clone with parts from Jdr m icrodevices. Long story short: NEVER AGAIN WILL I even entertain buying from them. It was 1987. The MCT parts were cheap VERY cheap. In the first year I went through 7 miotherboards and 8 power suplies 5 of which came D.O.A. I tell you this to use caution with that PSU as to the broken catch on the case door they were usualy Touch latches. I really enjoy these vids a the trip down memory lane. Joel

Oh man, I had a computer with a CUV4X-D in it. Blast from the past.

I believe I have some of the tapes that will fit into that drive. They are new and in the box that came out of an office that just never got around to using them when they threw out all of their computers that had those drives in them. Ha! I really enjoy your energy and enthusiasm, and really enjoyed your videos (and I love your watch, too!) Be well, friend!

Now, a quick word about old AT psus. They had most of the load on the 5V, not on the 12V. Loading the 12V line with car lights is not technically a good idea. Look for a motorbike or an old car 6V light, and use that on the 5V, not 12V. Since there's just a single transformer for all the important voltages on an AT psu, and they're not regulated separately, you have to think that loading one rail, but not the others, would make the loaded rail "low", and make the others read "high"; exactly as it happened with that PSU that got 9.42V on the 12V but the 5V skyrocketed to 5.82V! Only a few selected gamer PSUs have a separated mains to 12V circuit and then 12V to 5V and 3V (and servers, of course)

I have that board in one of my old workstations and I love it. The only difference with the DLS model is the Adaptec 7880 SCSI controller, which is the classic AHA-2940UW but onboard. I already had a faster card so I saved some money. At that time, there were already newer and faster U160 and later U320 SCSI adapters, so buying the expensinve version made no sense. It is a fantastic board and even supports dual 1.4 P3 Tualatin, albeit with small intermediate socket boards for the voltage regulation. No mods are required. Just CPU coollers with adjustable springs to take the slack for the extra 2mm height difference. It maxes out at 4GB of RAM and supports AGP pro 4X GPUs and newer 8X but at half the bus speed. Having such a machine back in 2000-1 was a pleasure to work with and it was expensive AF. That rig along with a rpofessional 22" CRT monitor cost me almost $10K in today's money adjusted for inflation. It would run circles around SGI and Apple systems of the day. I still use today for retro software with Linux and Windows XP/7 and it can even do all modern things. This thing has paid for itself multiple times.

I really like grey cases these ones look especially choice.

I don't know how I found you, but this brought back memories of teenage me working on computers in the late 90s. I don't know anything about modern computers, but I followed everything you said. And to be honest? I still prefer the form factor of those old towers. I can't even begin to explain why, but I'd still kill to have a modern build in one of them.

That 3rd system probably used a colorado memory systems QIC tape drive(i.e. jumbo 250). They used the floppy controller for the interface. Sound card is SB16 with scsi-2 interface, with waveblaster header and jumpers for internal/line-out output plus the usual jumpers for dma/high dma, and irq. Very nice.

I had a SCSI CD Drive with a Caddy that looked identical to that one in the Tri-CAD case. Mine was a CD Writer. I remember it taking ages to burn a full disk. Mine however was in an external case with a 50pin centronics plug on the external case. I used it on both my PC and my Amiga.

Brother, I just subscribed. The systems you check out are some of the greats I grew up with! SCSI Ultrawide, SCSI II... I love that era of PC. 5.25", 3.5" Diskette Drives and a CD ROM. Back when you can go GENERATIONS of upgrades and the "core" PC still kept up. Back in the day: Max out the RAM and Overclock, and youre good to go for another decade.. Keep Posting!

I really enjoy someone giving so much TLC to old systems

that dual CPU P3 would have been a dream machine for me back in the day. I had to wait for the Athlon MPs to finally get my dual CPU love on.

Full towers were always my favourites, they still are in a way.

I just found your channel and i love it. I grew up hacking these old dinosaurs together. Being born in 1980 i was learning as the tech started to boom (everything nearly doubled in speed every 6 months). I think i was 12 and installing the new windows 3.11 ugrade! Around the same time my external 2400 baud modem was replaced by a 14,4. Hacking was new and everything was vulnerable. I could go on and on. Thank you got sharing these

It is also better if you are a certified electronics repair tech from the 90s. They make drop-in replacements for those battery chips to this day. I have seen them on other channels dealing with retro PCs from the same era.

Ahhh good old Maxtor drives. At some point they began to add an animal to the PCB. In this case: a schnauzer dog. I've had an 850MB IDE drive with a shark on it. Later I found that Maxtor wasn't THAT reliable 😂. I absolutely love this videos. They bring back SO many memories. Keep up this amazing work!

Oh sweet sweet entertainment, but I'll have to wait with this one till the evening. Want to watch the whole thing properly.

1:00:10 those style of cd drives are so satisfying, i wonder how common they are to find in sata

Aww look at you putting on the perfect amount a thermal paste ;)

12:28 JDR Microdevices! Wow! That’s a blast from my past. I grew up in their hometown of San Jose, CA. I would go into their store on Bascom Ave every so often. Their products were generally top notch. Their people tended to be a bit rude, tho.

Nice find and review, btw, on the last tower computer, i believe that small ISA Card with DB25 pin connector, is not a parallel port card, but a SCSI card which usually used by scanner, usually older HP or UMAX scanner (the card comes with them when you purchase these scanners), the card uses NCR/Symbios 53C400 SCSI controller chip

Finally! I've been waiting 30 years for a good review. Where can I buy one 😄

This whole system reminds me of when I started seriously getting into computers back in the late 90's. I would imagine the Sound Card was probably the last thing to get upgraded on this thing. Sounds cards were so cheap and relatively decent by then that it was almost a no-brainer upgrade from any sort of ISA based sound card. They were usually garbage compared to a good PCI sound card like an SB Live, but still an upgrade over almost anything ISA based. A lot of people were still running AWE64's at the time.

It's the leaning towers of Pentia! :)

I never heard of VRAM Zip Chips, cool!

I built one of these massive towers once containing about 6 DVD burners and 4 hard drives for a company so they could clone and mail out marketing DVDs to customers, you can imagine how messy IDE cabling and jumpers was for all that! To be fair it ran on Windows Server 2003 for years and years without ever missing a beat!