Mystery 2000's Systems - Teardown and test! 

The ECS motherboard is also known for few other names... PCChips M925ALU V5.0 in retroweb looks similar and it has ECS version manual. In the manual it says that those big jumpers are for selecting between DDR and SDR memory slots. It has both sockets in the board.

the CD burner/dvd combo drives were common in the early 2000s as Straight dvd burners were still quite pricey. eventually prices came down, and these "Combo" drives faded away.

I really enjoyed this one, maybe because we get to see what a bad power supply can do to a system. It reminds me of how robust PC component design has always been. I wrote my first program in 1968 and have seen it and experienced it all, and I'm in the middle of assembling a super high end PC for a customer. It just amazes me that while there are now billions and billions of transistors and tech in this thing and, as always, it all starts up perfectly and just works. Incredible. Never-ending fun. (I tell my clients it's now impossible to buy components that aren't RGB now. 🙂). Thanks Mike. Love you man!

That power supply would have seen more than just a crapacitor let rip if someone witnessed its demise. Code Brown.

A few things on the first system. That top slot that looks like a backwards PCI-E x1 is actually an AMR (Audio/Modem riser) connector. Think of it like an expansion to your rear I/O, so anything plugged in still uses CPU resources, unlike most dedicated expansion cards. Mentioned in the comments anyway, yeah CD/RW and DVD ROM combo drives were common as DVD burners still cost a fair bit back then, and you required a different laser wavelength to read and write DVDs compared to CDs. You also required a much more powerful laser (More cost) to burn a disk rather than read. The 'Very High' settings on Crysis is for DX10 so only available if you had both a DX10 card, which the 9600GT is, and Windows Vista or later to run those settings. The AA (Anti aliasing settings) drained GPU power, best to turn it off or 2x max to have a nice FPS (Frames per second). I do enjoy the earlier to late 2000's as this was the time when I started getting into PC building, to me an AMD Athlon X2 era and Core 2 Duo system seems relatively recent to me. I have installed Windows XP so many times that I still remember the installation like it was yesterday.

Oh yeah, all copper Zalman flower on an Opteron 180! I had something extremely similar, they were chosen for their insane Overclockability

28:56 searching the bios string at the bottom of the screen returns a board: PCChips M925LR. Those big jumper clusters are for switching between SDR and DDR RAM.

Man an ABIT AN8 Ultra in the wild. It is an amazing motherboard from circa 2005. It has 4 SATA2, an Nvidia nForce 4 Ultra chipset, uGuru BIOS uitility, A LOT of fan control and PC stats. I own this board with a modest 64 3500+ for now. That board is a keeper I tell you. Quite valuable too. btw I knew instantly what 04 is. It is memory. I had issues with a 64 3200+ and its memory controller once :D

Oh wow that last PSU sure did some carnage… We missed on the only OS exploration because it killed the only hard drive in this video. I guess it’s pretty lucky that some parts like the CPU and floppy survived, at least it wasn’t a total loss I guess. It probably wasn’t a fun day for the previous owner when that thing blew up.

Pity the PSU took out the GA-5AX motherboard. It was one of the best Super socket 7 boards around at the time.

I miss Abit. I still have one of the last socket 775 boards they ever made. Great video! Thank you!!

Hey, when bending back those broken clips like on that floppy drive face plate, they're normally made of ABS plastic, so instead of super glue, use a little acetone. It will fuse the plastic together.

The 2000s were a great time to be building PC's. I can remember building my first ever pc based on an Asus A8V socket 939, Athlon*2, 4gb of ram, and some kind of Radeon GPU. Spent a small fortune on it, and it never let me down. Couldn't bring myself to get rid of it, so it's gathering dust 😀

The late Rudolph Loew's AHCICD.SYS handles most AHCI controllers in DOS pretty well, and Jack Ellis's XDVD2.SYS can handle pretty much any enhanced IDE interface over SATA in DOS.

That Abit board has a unique feature I wish caught on more - removable sound card. It was an elegant solution - concentrate the cheap Realtek controller on a small, out of the way PCB and if you want, remove it and add something of your choice. I hate the modern trend of soldering everything into place.

You have no idea how many of these videos have played in the background while I work, with me chuckling when I hear you dealing with old familiar problems. From one Mike to another, thank you sir. Side note: Peelander-Z was right.... "So many Mike"

The 2nd PC according to its bios string seems to be a PCChips M925LR V1.1/V1.3

yup got burned like that a bunch of times when testing PCB's at work, and i always appreciate the celsius conversions ;)

That first system was a damn decent gaming machine for its era, nice find. That makes me curious as to the specs of your personal PC.

S1 - I'm glad you answered the "Can it run Crysis" meme! S2 - That's one degraded thermal pad! Xtremely cheap power supply! S3 - L&C clearly stands for Light & Crap because it took an entire system with it! You could cook eggs on that South Bridge...

Funny thing with the older power supplies. They would fry before blowing the fuse inside of it. Not much of a problem with normal ATX power supplies. The ones with proprietary hookups, like Dell. Yeah! Cool to see you actually playing a game and being halfway good at it. Thanks for making my Saturday morning.

I’m really shocked you’ve never encountered a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive

The CD-RW/DVD-ROM drives were very common in the early 2000's. DVD-ROM drives were still quite pricey. The prices came down, so a lot of people went for the combi CD-RW/DVD-ROM drives rather than having multiple drives. For me I had a CD-ROM and a CD-RW/DVD-ROM rather than having a single drives for CD-RW and DVD-ROM.

I love seeing this older "gaming" computers, reminds me of my early pc building/repair days, graduated from that to travelling the country repairing and setting up cnc machines and industrial robots, feel like i owe my career to my computer hobby.

System two's mainboard is more commonly known under the PC Chips brand. especially in that early era of expensive Wilamette P4's many pc builders cut cost by installing these low end mainboards, often 30 to 40% cheaper then A-brand offerings from eg, ASUS.

Mike I really enjoy your videos ! I'm 67 so you know I've been around since punch cards. I had those back in college. But I've been around for all the tech up until now. Built three or four Heathkit computers. It's a long story but I just wanted to let you know I like your sense of humor a lot and these videos are so entertaining.

PC 2s motherboard appears to be a PC Chips M925LR I recognised that heatsink looking like a PC Chips, and a quick google for PC Chip Pentium 4 it came up with that weird array of jumpers.

I love watching you tear these old systems down. They instantly reminded me how glad IDE is not still a thing.

Heh, I remember those CD burner / DVD reader drives. IIRC they were cheaper to get at the time than the CD / DVD burner combos.

people that buy those cheap psus today should see this video to see what can happen

These y2k computers gives me joy everytime i see them.

“So, I don’t know why it’s complaining. I guess it just needed me to acknowledge it?” And just like that, you’re a professional RU-vidr 😂. Hehehe. Another fun video-thanks!

It’s really incredible how power supplies are treated much more seriously now than they were 15-20 years ago. It just makes sense to buy a good power power supply over a cheap one. Especially when the good ones aren’t even much more expensive than the crappy no name brands.

I have seen that board before. It's an ECS P4VMM2 V5.0 or V5.0A With that one you could make the choice between two types of ram, but you couldn't mix it. If I remember correctly, the jumperblocks were mean for the selection of the ram-type.

The vrm's and resistors on the mobo saved the CPU and Ram from an unfortunate Ac voltage injection. 12v components have no chance at 120 unfortunately. This was a very common failure back in the day PSU's weren't built to "Fail-Safe" they failed almost exclusively catastrophically.

Here in Brazil, a CD recorder with a DVD player was very common, only after a certain time did the DVD recorder become popular, specifically from the manufacturer LG. I built a lot of computers like this, then the client would buy the recorder and use the old drive just to read the DVD, so the recorder wouldn't "use up" too much. 👑

@ 33:57 "Why would they do it like that?" Belt and suspenders, Mike. Belt *AND* suspenders. 😉

The LG DVD-ROM/CD-RW was quite common, at least in Canada. When I worked in a small town store, we sold quite a few, every month. The ECS board ... whoo that brings back memories. I was very poor, in 2003, I upgraded a computer from a Slot 1 600mhz Pentium III ... to an ECS board with soldered 1Ghz Pentium 3. Probably a Tualatin, if I remember right.

I've seen a cheap capacitor launch the entire can rather than venting through the top before, during a session of makeshift capacitor fireworks via mains voltage. It was rather impressive how high it was launched... I've become wary of cheap power supplies from your videos, and just before watching this video I had discovered an "old" (circa 2013) PSU of mine had the capacitor plague, and another I was in the midst of scrapping had a literal fake transformer inside it that was nothing more than several steel plates on the inside. I can only imagine they did that to give it the illusion of being a heavier, beefier unit. The fan bearing was also very crunchy sounding. Don't use Sentey power supplies.

Nice machines, nice commentary and nice editing. Enjoyed that!

Always happy for new videos :) Keep up the good work!

Cheers Mike 👍🏻 Informative as ever. Look forward to the next upload.

Thank you for making these videos

I feel like I just watched my dad play a video game. He is just like Mike when it comes to gaming, mostly FPS games though.

Great video as usual.

i love that you use a different AOL trial disc every time you test a cd rom drive.

love these videos! Thank you

Always enjoy these, Mike. Thank you... brings back memories.

Always love your videos. Great set of systems. I love how the game played on the second system. I loved the shut down down sound. I was really pulling for the smiley face system. I liked the happy face and wanted it to resurrect!! As always your sense of humor is the best!

My first CPU was an AMD-K6/2 at 300Mhz and eventually I upgraded the entire system to an AMD Athlon K7... I still have a huge affinity to Slot 1/Slot A style CPU's and motherboards.

Thank you for this very entertaining video! ❤

love your channel! i've got dozens of beige boxes lying around.

Awesome retro PC Video as well👍👏👏👏

Hi Mike. Man o man, I wish I had the same resources as you... Great video, always enjoy them. Thanks.

0:30 yea those were everywhere. DVD burners were still very expensive for a short bit in late 90s, early 2000s. So they tacked on a CD burner to a DVD-ROM and there's more budget option. I had quite a few of them from upgrades for family/friend machines after DVD burners became super cheap. They were all pretty cheaply made too so none of them really lasted. Blu ray went through a similar phase too, had blu ray readers that could burn DVD/CDs.

"PC-CHIPS motherboards" (the red one) ... Low-cost hardware brand, quite popular around 2001 / 2002 ... 😉

Abit was the best back in the day, I have a few of my old Abit 939 motherboards still. I love them

“Don’t even bother”!! LOLOL

I have a vague recollection of a DOS optical driver that had SATA support, I'll see if I can find it again, it was quite useful back in the day

I work on server systems, these DVD/CD-RW drives are still pretty common on those even on systems manufactured in the mid 2010's. I enjoy your work, keep up the great work!

42:13 ahh, careful buddy ! 🔥

Beige surprise boxes never disappoint, I recently resurrected an Optiplex GX1. This power supply really turned down an entire system, impressive but scary at the same time.

@43:30 Those ALi super socket 7 boards were great. RIP.

Thank you for being so detailed in your videos. I actually own the HP Pavilion 8240 as well, and I was missing the original floppy drive. Since you said the part number in your video, I was able to go online and order one 🙂

Awesome video Mike as always 👍🏻 You should write an obituary for the gigabyte board 😂

32:20 the more basic the better Mike!

I have boards made by ecs elitegroup and abit, also a logisys psu, though it only has 1 fan but I happen to have a raidmax psu with three fans (model pm-s400w) and it is quite heavy too. I love these videos, getting old mystery systems from wherever and exploring their insides and seeing if they are salvageable. Oh and I love the whole "psu is light so it must be junk" thing, I have some psu's that I don't like to use that are very light, one being very light, and when being used the wires actually get quite warm and are quite thin too..JUNK.

@1:00 Abit AN8 Ultra Mobo! Had an Abit AN8 SLI with Optron 180 as well. great system. Still have it around.

1:45 Zalman 7000cu cooler, the original all-copper cooler. Those things were beasts back then, I had one of those cooling an Opteron 180 dual core in 2005. They switched to the AlCu model (alum/copper) shortly after due to their all coppers oxidizing so the original is harder to find these days.

@32:10 its PC Chips PC400 (PCChips-M925), the jumper along the side are for selecting between the DDR and SDR ram slots.

ECS was my favorite motherboard brand in the early 2000s - my brother and I built multiple gaming systems over the years using their products. You could get some boards on sale new for less than $50 shipped! Talk about a dream these days. Sure the boards were beyond simple, but they were absolute value leaders of the day IMHO. Great video sir sounds like you're recovered.

CD Burners + DVD read were called COMBO DRIVES. had a few of these in Notebooks. :D

About the jumpers, for a similar model I found: DDR1, DDR2: Short all J2A/B/C/D and J3A/B/C/D pins DIMM1, DIMM2: Open all J2A/B/C/D and J3A/B/C/D pins

fynally new video! i really like your videos and keep it up g! (:

ECS is one of the most major motherboard brands,... they more cheap boards were rebrand as PC chips, Matsonic..Amptron...

Oh, the DVD rom - CD burner thing :D It was in our home PC [P4 soc.478] in around 2003 / 2004, it was called a combo drive I think our was a Toshiba

Back in the day: AMD AM2 4200+ x2 (now it's a keychain), dual 9600GT's in SLI (originally a 7900GT, which died and eVGA replaced it with a 7950GT), 2GB of Corsair XMS2 800, and an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe. I put on some really bad Arctic Cooling 64 Freezer Pro, which fell of playing Bioshock... which was nice. Oh! And a Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro they were basically giving away at one point because somebody at Newegg ordered 30 cases instead of 3 and for some reason they only got the cards instead of them being bundled with the massive breakout box.

ECS is Elitegroup Computer Systems Also sold as PC Chips back in the day they made some low cost motherboards and a few high end ones also. However mostly known for making very cheap bare bones motherboards. As soon as I saw the chip set heat sink I knew it had to be either PC Chips or ECS they used a very distinctive kind of font on their chipset heatsinks the marking you are looking at on there says PC 400 meaning it can support DDR 400 RAM. Anyhow I built a few socket A computers using an ECS motherboard back in the day the ECS K7S5A to be exact strange thing about that motherboard is they were known to overheat on the chipset as they used double sided thermal tape to secure it on no clip or thermal epoxy so I fixed that by using you guessed it thermal epoxy no more overheating issue anyhow great video and seeing an ECS motherboard really brings back the memories.

Thanks!

CD-r/RW /DVD rom drives were very common early on. I had one in my first Athlon 64. I have a small stack of them still, even though I'm not likely to ever need them being they are PATA.

DVD Reader/ CD Burner a good buy at the time. Bang of 2 drives for one unit. Predates the DVD burners.

Interesting & good to watch one of your Vidz where you’re actually tinkering with Hardware that’s not as Retro as you normally show, Great Video all the same! 🙂🇬🇧

In the year 2020, it’s at least y2k compliant? Keep up the good work “guns”, loving your videos!

The first system very much reminds me of my first home build. I started with an Athlon XP 3200, and ended up with a Xeon. I ran it up until I was given a new computer in 2017 or so.

Second Mobo Looks like it might PCChips M925ALU V5.0 or similar on the retro web I assumed it was a PCChips motherboard based on it being red and said PC400 on chipset. But I think PCChips Amptron and ECS are all same manufacturer. I’ve had a few Pc chips and ECS in budget builds and they didn’t last long for me.

Those DVDRom cd burner drives came at a time before DVD burners existed. Short lived. Also the slot on the board where the sound card was connected in the first PC was an AMR slot (audio modem riser) another short lived technology. I suppose it was meant to make onboard audio interchangeable but it never really caught on. So many cheap PSUs in the 2000s. really not worth it considering what can happen. Lots of ways to save money in those days but a cheap PSU was definetly not the way to go.

Our second computer had a PCChips board, worked fine through a couple of PSU blowups but sadly it couldn't take a third one lol. The first PC I bought with my own money had a AM2+ ECS board which I actually still own. I loved that platform simply because of the number of CPUs it supported.

I love your videos! It was funny to see something so modern on your channel. Just as a suggestion-for a more professional look, suppress the resolution notifications on your capture device (e.g., 1080p @ 13:24).

My first laptop - an Acer laptop, had a CD writer/DVD rom drive. And that was back in either 2007 or 2008! I didn't mind that until 2010 when I wanted to start burning my own DVDs. I ended up getting an external DVD burner for my birthday that year. Sadly don't have it anymore cuz it stopped reading discs in 2018.

I went through a few combi drives back in the day, i thought they were fairly common !!!

the red board looks like pc chips who merged with ECS in 2005. also the jumpers on the board are to switch between the ddr and sd ram slots.

I believe the Zalman was called a Flower. The Opteron was priced the same as a normal cpu but had a lower thermal output and thus better for overclocking

4:40 Many bought opterons for gaming because they were essentially the same as the Athlon64 FX CPUs, just much cheaper. That build is spec-wise very near to what I had in 2005. (with an x850 Pro instead). This one is a nostalgic one for me :)

Have to remember that those Opterons were higher binned Athlon 64 X2's processors. They were highly sought for overclocking.

A long time ago, when I was in the computer repair business, we used to call that Elite Group MBs Elite Trup, from the Bulgarian world труп that stands for corpse/dead body.

I had that exact CDRW/DVD-Rom drive :D

Nice to see that the K6 wasn't an AFR model.

32:30 Looks like the case i had in my childhood, except the buttons were white and it was mini tower

Oh my boy got burned ☹️ also, I was so excited when I saw that Opteron system. I always wanted one but couldn’t afford one. The last system I have never seen a south bridge get that hot.

the AN8 Ultra was the motherboard I always wanted back then :D btw, cd-rw/dvd-rom combos were common back then, I have a samsung one laying around