Meet The Edge 

"This case is toolless" It better be! The Edge wouldn't want the TOOL vinyl fiasco to repeat itself! (For those unaware: in 2015 U2 accidentally shipped vinyl records containing TOOL's Opiate EP instead of their own Songs of Innocence album. Frankly, for the better)

The Pentium 4 is, in and of itself, a completely mind boggling part of computer history. This is a dead-end micro architecture that was dragged from SDRAM and RDRAM *through* to DDR3 on some of the 775 era chipsets. Not only that, but they (briefly) glued two of them onto a PCB to create the Pentium D. 10GHz anyone?

I remember this device. I was the IT director over a community health center for around 20 years. I was able to get a subscription to that service donated. It also came with the computer. We ran a VGA cable to the waiting room to play that. Also, having the educational materials of various dental procedures was helpful in a dental clinic that served a high indigent population that spoke Spanish - mostly farm workers. Many of the videos were in Spanish. If I remember correctly it ran Linux. There was a windows client app and also a server control windows app. Thanks for sharing!

"Dust should just come out." I'd love to see someone saying that while opening a CRT monitor. The stuff inside them isn't even dust anymore - it's superglue.

Consider trying a paint brush or another brush like it with the bristles cut shorter so they're nice and stiff but still gentle on plastic for that hard dust. We do that to brushes to get metal shavings out of wire bundles after aircraft sheet metal shavings and it works an absolute treat.

Wasn't expecting to see Patterson here, given that they make the ancient veterinary EMR software I use at work.

Ah, the "Transition" motherboards, I remember these. At the place I worked when I first started in I.T. circa 2001, they bought tons of whitebox PCs from a local supplier, and as a result I got to see motherboards a lot like the one showed in this video. However, by the time DDR got popular, the organization I was at finally made the plunge to buying from an OEM (Compaqs to start off with, which had pretty decent warranties at the time), and those were the first PCs with DDR that got deployed. Some of the older systems I supported with Pentium 1 and backwards also had dual-support for EDO and SD-RAM (EDO was predecessor to SD-RAM for most folks... they were smaller modules that you inserted into the slot at a 45 degree angle, then "stood them up" to lock them into place). Anybody that's messed around with like 1996ish PCs and backwards has probably has played around with EDO RAM... short of harvesting it from a dead computer, I'm not sure how you'd get your hands on it today. Anyways, with the EDO / SD-RAM mobos, you basically flipped a few jumpers on the board to specify which kind of memory the mobo should expect to "see".

Back in the days upgrading was super common. And technology moved so fast that you ended up with old ports on your new mainboard. For example nearly every function of an ISA card was also available in a PCI or fancy AGP card. But you often got 1-3 ISA slots on your brand new mainboard even with PCI and AGP. Just so jou could use your old Soundcard or SCSI Controller etc. I even have Mainboards wich have 2 Power Inputs (AT and ATX) so you could use your AT Powersupply with the hard power off, or you could upgrade to a nice soft power off ATX one... Good old times. EDIT : Industrial PC stuff often uses very old (+ reliable and cheap) parts. Sometimes you can find 386 based systems from around 2000. Wich is crazy to see... But Cheap, Low power use, and reliable. EDIT EDIT: Please do yourself a favour and do not look up old Industrial PC stuff... Everything is so obscure, awesome and rare that you instantly want it... But that stuff is freaking expensive... ;)

I have worked in IT for a few years and specifically in and around the Dental Industry for much of that. Patterson is a household name, specifically for their Eaglesoft suite, however I never knew of them making workstations.

The Power Macs are supposed to be held by both handles, not by a single one. Considering some of them weighed up to 50 lbs, you'd definitely want to use both handles.

This reminds me of a case I saw at Fry's back in the late 90s. It had a handle, probably for portability at LAN parties. I picked it up in the store, the empty case, no components... And the handle came right off. We dubbed it Faurtbility (Faux portability).

I really hope you make a video on the history of Rambus memory now. I remember that stuff, and you've made me intensely curious.

As a medical distributor I’m sure Patterson purchased unbranded PCs. But honestly it looks like an unbranded compaq.

I was recently trying to understand why I have no nostalgia for this era of XP/Pentium 4. This PC really helped me remember how awful that period was. I'm looking forward to the party tricks with those fancy cards though. 🥳

On the subject of "hard dust" some friends of mine and I griped about its cousin, which we named "datacenter grease" when fiddling with old and used rack servers. Datacenter grease is not grease but the incredibly fine dust that appears inside old servers after having been run for years nonstop in nearly sterile environments. The server never looks dusty, but once your sleeve, hand, or arm touches a spot or crevice where the grease had accumulated, it leaves a dark smudge that would not come off without a laundry machine or washing your hands with soapy water, and even then it took effort.

Never had a P4. AMD at the time was better value for money, so I was using an Athlon of some sort. Interesting to hear about the quirky stuff going on surrounding the P4 that I only vaguely remember hearing about at the time.

Not sure why anyone would want a Pentium 4. Seems like a bit of an edge case...

Damn, a crd vid and a technology connections vid in one day?

The P4's Netburst Architecture was More MHz above all else, even if it's doing less work per clock than a 486. They belong in the trash. All of them.

That computer looks identical to my 700mhz PC. It was branded as ‘Time Computer’ I think it was a UK only brand.

I’m guessing that “The Edge” might come from video delivery terminology. With delivery networks you have an “Origin” which delivers assets to the “Edge” which then sends it to a viewer/client. At Primary School (in the UK) we had a device that was literally called the “Content Cache” which had educational webpages/videos/animations and now I look back and see it was a literal “Cache” 😅

Good editing, video-wise. The little things that take a lot of time to make that dont have a long screen time really show heart and effort,; Really increases the production quality of your videos.

An old British OEM PC manufacturer called "Time Computers" used the exact same case for their Time Machine model. Leonard Nimoy did several TV commercial/advert for the Time Computers Time Machine ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-71meib_q0MY.html Venmill Industries is a CD/DVD/Blu-ray/etc disc buffer/resurfacer/repair machine manufacturer, that also used this case for their VMI 3500 Buffer. Also RAMBUS RDRAM has another weird quirk. You could not leave any of it's slots empty. RAMBUS's solution for this was to fill any empty slots with blank voltage pass-through sticks.

Fun video, love the channel. In regards to the Pentium 4 living through "three different eras" in socket interfaces, it's not that strange. Keep in mind Intel chose to use the Pentium 4 brand throughout the entire NetBurst lifespan. Its no different for the previous architecture, the P6, if Intel had just called it "Pentium Pro" throughout its lifespan as well instead of Pentium II and III. It saw packaging in the form of Socket 8, Slot 1 and Socket 370. In both the case of NetBurst and P6, the socket changes were a result of improvements to power consumption, cache packaging, and (of course) cost. Intel could certainly influence the industry any way it wanted back then :) Edit: I think you mentioned you're in the Seattle area? See you at RE-PC :)

“Because it was the 90’s so they just ploughed ahead!” 😂 So true! I kinda miss the insane designs in a way. Just don’t miss the janky reliability and user experience when you just need to get things done. We will never again see the insane hardware designs we got in the 90’s to early 2000’s.

These cases were used by a large now defunct PC oem in the uk in the late 90's / early 2000's called Time.

I think the motherboard in this was one of those deals where ASUS kept producing it for a long time, for industrial purposes. My work had a number of late 00s computers in rack cases using these boards. Like, built in 2008ish, but with a bunch of Celerons in them running Linux on DOMs, and loaded up with 4 port serial cards.

With the amount of time you spent talking about the history of Pentium 4 and how that era was a wild time for computing, I'm actually surprised that you didn't mention anything about AMD. I remember Athlon XPs and later Athlon 64s being quite popular and actually preferred by many PC enthusiasts at the time, and given that during that era AMD actually invented the x86-64 instruction set that is now the standard, I think it's safe to say it was the golden age of AMD CPUs. I actually ran an Athlon XP between 2001 and 2007 as my main (or, actually, only) computer and have rather fond memories of it. That being said, The Edge is a wonderfully wacky PC and I absolutely look forward to seeing it in future videos.

I really enjoy your content, especially the mouse video. That's what got me hooked. I hope you keep the "Helps to takt the screws out" or the "Two of them" as a running joke on your channel.

It's surreal to have a twenty something perform archeology on processors and computer technology you worked on ... as a twenty something. Your guesses are pretty accurate most of the time - very impressive!

fun fact: the Fractal Pop PC case has 2 hidden 5.25" bays at the front bottom. there's a magnetic cover over them and by default it's populated with a drawer. such a strange decision but pop off I guess. knowing fractal it's probably a great case, and probably one of the last "enthusiast" cases that actually still has 5.25 bays. it's actually surprising that it seems that there were able to fit it into a ton of different form factors. good on them for keeping this functionality in a cute way.

This case was sold in prebuilts under the MECER brand in South Africa

Patterson dental is still in business. We take care of several clients who use thier software. Great video!

Nice video, I love how you go into details of almost all of the components in depth. I wanted to correct one thing, at 14:01, you said "casting", it's actually"injection", as it is thermo plastic not a thermorset plastic.

That situation of boards with two different memory standards is quite interesting! I have a few boards that can do that as well. One of them is an ASUS A7A266 (AMD Socket 462), which supports both SDR and DDR like yours, and also, I have a couple of Socket 7 boards than support either 72 pin SIMMs or SDR! One of them is an FIC VA-502, and the other is a Jetway J-571B.

What are the six RJ45 ports at the top? Multiport ethernet card?

A LOT about that case is very similar to the SGi 320 workstation, especially the internal chassis shape, that plastic side with metal shielding on it and a plastic covering piece on the rear of the chassis.

My 2001 OEM Fujitsu Siemens PC came with an Athlon T-Bird at 1.3 GHz and 128 MB of SD-RAM. I later upgraded it to 256 MB of DDR-RAM, which this board supported just fine and resulted in a massive performance boost, like putting an SSD into a much newer computer, except that it actually doubled frame rates in games. Everything ran better. I then gradually upgraded the RAM to 1 GB, swapped out the T-Bird for an Athlon XP, upgraded the GPU twice (from 2MX to 9200 to 9600), swapped out the hard drive twice, the DVD drive four times (because they broke all the time), added an Ethernet, modem and sound card. In the end, after almost exactly seven years of use, the only parts that remained original were the power supply, case and board.

I can identify with this machine. strange looking; unremarkable; "I just wanted to introduce you because you'll be seeing him around"; a few interesting quirks.

I can confirm those were wild times. My friend had p4 with rambus. I could only afford celeron while keeping sdram. And there wasn't even double performance from p2 366 to celeron 1.8. That's how I switched to athlon 1.7 running at 1473 MHz that forced me to get ddr but also was faster than friend's p4 for much less money

I'm just commenting so I can say I subbed when you had 54k subscribers. You're going places, dude, this channel is phenomenal.

I still have nightmares about using P4 machines at work. At home, I ran an Athlon XP and Athlon 64 for a number of years.

For the era, half a gig of RAM was a lot. My Windows XP PC was stock with 128MB and was a dream to use when I bumped it to 256MB.

I actually remember Smile Channel, and I've been trying to find out more information about it for a really long time.

Honestly this has some looks and vibes as minidisc players from the time. This really unlocks some core memories, I feel like I’ve seen one before but I can’t quite put my finger on where. Amazing video none the less, keep up the great work!

11:50 - I had a "Pentium Extreme Edition 965" system - the best of the best of the P4/Netburst - a whopping 130 Watt power draw officially, I had it overclocked to 4 GHz, so probably drew closer to 150-160W. I also had a Radeon X1900 GPU, one of the top at the time. When I upgraded to a Core 2 Quad system, I relegated my former gaming rig to server duties - and replaced the CPU with a Core 2-core "Pentium Dual Core" at 2.0 GHz. The Core 2 architecture was so much more efficient than NetBurst that my ultra-low-end $80 Pentium Dual Core did things like transcode DVD rips *FASTER* than the 4 GHz hyperthreaded $1000 Pentium Extreme Edition. All while drawing 1/3 as much power. Combined with the removal of the GPU (not needed in its then-current duties, so I swapped it with some ultra-low-power thing I don't even remember,) and the system at full CPU load drew less power at the wall than with its prior CPU+GPU did at idle. And CPU+GPU were literally the only things changed.

I'm so glad today I can run most apps and games with an old I5 from 2013. In the early 2000s you had to upgrade your machine yearly. Now I can upgrade my build around 5 years and not even completely.

8:50 That is so rad! The Edge is my favorite member of U2. Sorry, Bono.

Hey CRD. Love the channel. The 486 actually came on at least 3 sockets too. Socket 1 for the early generation SX and 386-upgrade CPUs, 2 and 3 for the later DX chips with more pins. Technically there were also 486s made for the 386's PGA132 socket too, just not Intel's ones (at least not by branding... it's suspected that their RapidCAD CPUs were just 486s). The later history is a bit off to as far as when DDR1 was available. At the same time the initial socket 423 Willamette core P4s were released, AMD was putting out their 760 chipset for the Athlon CPUs, and that chipset supported DDR. They weren't the first though, IIRC there were VIA chipsets out months earlier that supported it too. DDR1 was commercially available throughout the P4's lifetime, there was nothing to wait on for those VIA chipsets. It was actually baffling to those watching the market at the time that Intel went with RDRAM in the first place because DDR1 was demoed back in like 1998 and had considerable latency advantages over RDRAM that made up for any throughput difference. And since the memory controller in CPUs of that era was in the northbridge of the chipset, there was nothing preventing any CPU from changing memory architectures per se. AMD went from SDR to DDR within the socket A line, using newer chipsets, before the P4 was even on store shelves.

I'm glad that I never canned my first gaming machine. It's a P4 2.4 built around an ASUS P4GE motherboard. I've been thinking on upgrading it with an uncommon P4 that ran at 3.2Ghz with the 533FSB.

The inside of the removable side panel looks exactly like the closing/locking mechanism of the SGI 320, one of the Intel based Silicon Graphics workstations. My 320 is even annoying to properly close in the exact same way. SGI cases also used similar fragile plastic assemblies for buttons and other moving parts, which would bind very badly with age. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out these share the same designers.

I have really strong recollections of this case being used for a brand in the UK (because a family member had one) - I believe it was Pentium 3/4 era, and was either a Packard Bell or a TIME PC.

Going through watching every single one of your videos! Thank you for the effort and great production!

This makes me want to do a deep dive on the small PC builders in San Diego during the 90's & 2000's. I brushed off those things bc they had no inherent value... Like a 90's Kia.

I really want this case for a sleeper build (decal included lol).

I clearly remember that or very similar case on our landfill destined pile, so it is very likely that in some point that (or similar) case was accessible in retail or small OEM here in Russia.

"I mean I guess at that point they could have said "Hmm... Maybe this isn't such a great idea." But it was the 90s so they just ploughed ahead." This rings so true for that era of design!

Looks like it trying to be on the apple iMac's of the 90s, great vid 👍

Interesting, recently picked up a server with triple channel SDR and a 478 socket. Also had some strange features like a CNR slot and an additional 6 pin aux power connector. Not quite sure what's going on with pretty much all of that, had never seen a P4 with 3 ram slots, let alone SDR. But after all this was made by AOpen, the manufacturers of the motherboard with integrated tube amp, so I'm not that surprised. (Only P4s I've worked with before are the 775 variety, in the dying stages of the Pentium 4 when they added hyperthreading.) I do have an MSI board for the Athlon XP with two DDR slots and two SDR slots, the KM2M Combo. Was disappointed to find out you can't dual wield memory types. Didn't know the same thing existed in Intel systems - suppose it was better for cheaper prebuilts since manufacturers could use the same board for many RAM configs.

I have a bunch of Canadian Tiger Direct catalogs from the mid 00s which are an awesome time capsule of the PC market then. The tech moved so fast then mobos would have multiple interfaces; SATA, IDE, and FDD interfaces as well as AGP, PCI and sometimes even PCIex slots all on the same board wasn't uncommon. VIA was still hanging on selling x86 chips then too. Along with NCIX (rip) they were the best place in Canada to get PC parts online at the time. I need to scan them one day. And SIS chipset gives me flashbacks lol.

Worked at Intel about the time the P4 came out....my first P4 board was only able to take RDRAM, and only got it built because some of the guys in the engineering department helped me get an engineering sample of a P4 chip, board, and the RDRAM that was going to work with it. Finding drivers was a lot of fun since technically, it wasn't supposed to exist and certainly not on the publicly available market. Was a pretty fast system for the time, though.

You made me miss my ol' Pentium 4 HT computer. Hyperthreading way back then was interesting. I used to use it to make music way back in 2006-2012 and I miss those days so much.

Oh God, that dental record software gave me flashbacks to when I worked tech support for a dental imaging company

Love the Compaq you showed, I just got a nostalgia flashback. I had the Compaq Presario 4505, it came out in 1997. I don't think I quite appreciated how cool the design was at the time. I wish I had one now. The case would be awesome as a sleeper.

This was sold under the Time brand name in the UK, we had one as our family PC for a while… it sucked and we ran it for a while with the side panel off to use a 12” desk fan for additional cooling otherwise it would cook itself.

You got a Pentium 4? Oh, that's why the global power shortage.

I have this same computer, but put upgraded internals in it so it's now got an i7 4790, 8GB RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a GTX 990 GPU. It's a decent little machine made from free and recycled parts.

upside down sure, but honestly having the heavy stuff at the bottom (PSU and drives) just makes more sense Not to mention, IO cards are now up high, and your power cable is at the bottom. Radical for if you keep your system under a desk. IO goes up power stays below

That case reminds me of going to a "computer show" in the late '90s and seeing table after table of random computer parts, cases, and accessories for sale.

After 5-10 years settled dust begins to chemically bond to the surface it has settled on, that's why you see it as "hard dust". I used to work in building conversation and that's why historic homes need to be either constantly cleaned by staff or constantly covered by dust sheets.

It is an In-Win case from 1999, I had one that I built into a PC around that time. Mine had a pink handle, but they must have had more colors to offer!

You just don't see stuff like these anymore. All the early early 2000's era pc's had dissapeared. But it's nice to see this one. This video made me want to bring out my 2005 compaq desktop my uncle gave to me and power it up. I don't know how to connect it to the web, but notepad and OpenOffice will keep me productive. Good times.

In the UK we used to have computers which looked like this. The company was called "Time Computers" exact design.

The Edge is from Barking in Essex, a suburb of London that everyone makes jokes about, a great association for this Packard Bell looking monster.

Fun to see a young guy interested in these old PCs. My 1st was TI 99 4a. Worked at best buy tech bench in the 90s. Seen tons of this old stuff.

All I really remember about the P4 is that it was way ahead of its time...as far as heat generation, and proper PC cooling that could actually handle it (at full power) was years away from being something anyone could just buy and install...so many custom cooling sets...including tons of (stupid) amateur attempts at sub-ambient that involved cannibalizing AC parts, forgetting to properly water-seal your MoBo, and shorting out your box from condensation. Even my old Dell 2300 with a max clock set at 2.66GHz would get pretty damn toasty, but it did last 8 years (as in, survived....not as in "still good enough").

P4X266? Funny, I don't remember SG-1 visiting that planet...

its called the edge. it is an edge case of a computer, to help solve edge case problems you are having. i love it.

WOW. Retro computing AND retro hairstyle! This is perfectly executed!

The handel has a similar novel charm ro the Gramecube's "lunchbox" design.

Man, I NEEED to find one of these cases... That will make an amazing retro/sleeper build..

edging to this right now

Haha I actually know the donator of this machine and I'm gonna go help them build an enclosure for their 3D printer right when this video drops. Lol small world.

The case is a second generation In-Win IW-T515P. I've owned 4 of them

I have a case similar to that! The Grey accents are more a blue and there isn't the USB front slot stuff. idk if im missing a part but the back plastic cover isn't there either.

Looks like we still haven't four what we're looking for... The next video :) This was amazing, Thank You!

i had a socket 423 1.3ghz p4 machine the first p4 ever to market and it was a compaq machine. the machine also used rd-ram which didnt last long in its life where it got over taken by ddr. somewhere i still have the socket 423 processor somewhere. i saved it since its very rare and the very first p4 ever made.

If you think a board with two types of RAM slots is crazy, you should see the Asrock 929Dual-Sata2 and 939SLI32-eSATA2. Not only did the Socket 939/DDR boards have both AGP and PCI-Express, they also had a special "Future CPU Port." The AM2CPU board, the only one designed for this port, had an AM2 socket and four DDR2 memory slots on board. Unfortunately, it's the same story, where you could only use the original 939 and DDR memory, or the AM2 socket and DDR2 memory.

the case reminds me at the early beige g3 desktop/tower or the performa lines

Packard Bell also made some "all plastic" computers, with just a spring steel emi shield inside, fwiw. And ever since the iMac we called those "easy theft handles"

For a good handle design on PC cases, just look at the Antec Lan Boy and maybe other Antecs. 2 Handles, on hinges, so they flip down an doesn't stick out when the computer is stationary. And still very stronk, I regularlly carry mine with only one of the handles

that looks like some late-90s "let's make computers that look like a bubble instead of a greebled box. corners are bad, what if you trip and hit your eye on your computer?" thinking. especially the power and reset buttons. they made a lot of really weird crap back then, just to make it difficult to use the case for any other purpose than the one it was specifically designed for, and to be tossed in the trash when it was no longer wanted or useful.

loved the Men's Warehouse-y "I guarantee it" at the end lolol

My dad had a PC like this in the mid 2000s. The brand was ‘Time Machine’

In my experience, Windows XP (SP3) will run flawlessly on either an AMD Phenom II X4 965 or (believe it or not) an AMD FX-8320. I know, because I did that for a few years. Either one blows the doors off a Pentium 4 in terms of performance - there's simply no comparison. I've also run Windows 2000 on an old Athlon 64 X2 2800+, it also worked flawlessly for years - and so did Windows XP. Linux too, but I doubt you're concerned with that :P Yes, those are all multi-core CPUs. Might be worth getting one of those chips for a second, faster testbench. The Phenom II chips are still usable with modern software; they were an amazing piece of engineering at the time, and so was the Athlon 64 X2 for that matter. My old Athlon 64 X2 2800+ was still being used by a friend of mine in his daily-driver PC up until at least 2017, LOL.

The G5/Mac Pro handles are really necessary though. 20kg is way easier to carry with them. ^_^

This guy needs to do commercial voice overs. He can make a phone book seem interesting.

I think my last comment might have gotten auto-modded out for linking to the weird Russian PC forum I found it on, but the case is an Inwin IW-T515P

I had the most rare i7 processor, the i7-920, on LGA 1366, just after this era. The aftermarket cooler for that guy was compatible to AM3 sockets, and then AM4. You will be mad at me if I tell you I still use that cooler, and it runs fine on Ryzen 1600 that spews less than half of the heat of the original i7-920. Coolermaster Hyper TX3 EVO. Check it out. The most bizarre cooler was available here, and I can run it to this day, within TDP of the Ryzen. 10+ years, running solid.

the board you actually want is the 4coreDual-VSTA from asrock, it has ddr1and ddr2 pciex4 agpx8 3xpci sata ide and floppy and supports p4's, p4ht procs, celeron d's, pentium D's, core2 duo's and even a q6600 core 2 quad literally every port you could ever want