When CPUs Were Like Nintendo Cartridges! 

We need more of these old school computer reviews

As someone who started building PCs in the mid to late 90s, it unlocked a whole flood of nostalgia. More episodes! Both this and the A500 one were great. Sleep was important cos it took so long to boot and load in lol

Lovely video. I had a Pentium 2 400Mhz back in 1998 which i later upgraded with the Geforce 256 SDR version. What a beast it was back then. In 2000 i bought the Athlon 800Mhz that had the same type of cartridge. Good times.

My last prebuilt desktop was one of these Micron PC's. I had been upgrading the components in all my PC's since my first 8088 in 1984. After upgrading the internals on my Micron I decided I would build all my future desktop PC's from components. It was the days of "Computer Fairs" where local mom & pop computer stores would band together and have monthly sales events at local school auditoriums or hotels.

I worked at Micron Computer from 1994 - 2008. We had a couple of name changes - First Micron Computer, then Micron Electronics and finally MPC. I do believe that that Crucial DIMM was added by the customer. Internally we called that motherboard the Atlanta board - as evidenced by the name on the version sticker on the BIOS chip. Also of note, that case could also be used as a desktop by changing the side panel and rotating the drive cage (what holds the CD drive). The configuration that you have was the most common as a mini-tower.

love when you show off the old hardware! its amazing to me how little so many people know about this era nowadays! That is a SL2HC pentium 2 which is the Klamath core, not Deschutes, so its TDP is actually 38W not 16 - the lower TDP 266 model came with the die shrink to 250nm

this makes me nostalgic. I don't really remember what kind of PCs I had cause I knew very little PC info as a kid but I remember opening them up and being amazed how it looked inside. I didn't touch anything though cause I was afraid I'd break it 😅

I had the same case from Dell. I used it for years in my electronics lab to run my oscilloscope card. I needed an ISA slot and I think that was the last motherboard I ever bought that had ISA... I upgraded the slot CPU to a P2 450 and maxed out the ram etc... lol what a beast she was.

The format of these videos is excellent. The perspective of the user who actually lived with the old machine and the fresh eyes of someone who's seeing it for the first time is a really interesting contrast. Iirc 3com built a brand new 6 million dollar factory in the Philippines that came online just after motherboards started coming with integrated Ethernet as standard. And then went bankrupt? I hope I'm remembering that right, I'm sure someone will correct me if I got it wrong :)

oh man, brings back memories. I worked on, supervised, and eventually worked Quality Control on the 2 assembly lines that made these units for Dell back in late 90s in New Braunfels Tx. They were just the empty cases made out of metal and plastic box that we assembled with no boards and a power supply. Dell called these units the Hunnicut and they had smaller cases called Hawkeye and a newer one (back then) called Klinger lol. Looking at the internals in the video I remember assembling and inspecting these cases by hand. Back then we installed LiteOn Power supplies.

I always enjoy these videos. This was right around the era that I got heavily into PCs, so these videos always bring back a lot of great nostalgic memories of those days.

I remember a friend that had a Celeron from like 1998 which was in a slot too. Passively air-cooled and overclocked! Played so much games on that thing.

Gordon in his element, love it

thanks for bringing me back in time to my youth gordon, you are a legend, and never forget your roots

I remember when I was shopping for a mail order PC in 1993 - 1994 I was looking at Gateway 2000, Dell, Micron and Midwest Micro all were about the same at the time. I ended up with a gateway 2000. You could build them to order and most of the time could get away without paying any sales tax.

Love the airflow in these old cases . Seen many of friend run them with the side cover off ...

I believe that circle design on the side panel is where the Dell logo went on their version. My dad had a Dell PII for his business with that same case design. Fun video and hoping for some more!

Nothing beats the old days when a blood sacrifice to the PC casedesigner gods were a must for any upgrade you wanted to make.

For sure the AGP was controlled from the northbridge. The southbridge controlled things like ATA and floppy. This is why Intel had so many different chipsets without needing many different north bridges as it split certain functions among two different chips that could be paired differently. Like the 440lx for example has a higher end Southbridge chip that offers more functions over 440lc (LC for low cost!) Very cool review guys. A classic for sure.

Nice. Sleep function was important, especially in business where you didn’t have time to wait 20min a for your pc to boot up. Also backups were often done in sleep mode iirc. Or maybe that was why they just left them running 24/7.

Awesome walk through history. Love the prison shank to silence the fan. Highly appreciate everything you guys do! Keep on truckin and Happy New Year.

Love this, the context of it all being the past and loads of stuff they know many viewers have never even seen before makes me feel kinda like a relic.

Thanks guys. These videos are my favorite.

the agp port interface directly with the north bridge which also contained the memory controller. the PCI controller was integrated into the south bridge but the north bridge could also contain some of the pci lanes.

funny to see how innocent your buddy is, yes there was a timewhen the boxes were closed , there was even a time before AGP , a time before DIMMs (SIP and DIL), Coax Network cables, to make everything a bit special also SCSI.

Old school watching this episode bring back some good memories. Did not buy a Micron PC but I remember building my very first system using that processor and components was not as powerful as today's Gen.

You guys just brought back SO many memories to me!

Thanks that was fun. At the time that PC was made I spent most of my time working on servers and networking so although I configured more 3Com cards than I can remember, I generally did not get into too many PC's other than to install or replace NICs and configure the networking and load network drivers. I appreciate the walk through.

I had that very same Pentium II although mine was the lowly 233 model.

Gordon, now you ruined Christmas for me and my family. I can't sleep tonight if I don't bring out the P2 and K6-2+ out to race them in 3D Mark 99, glQuake, Quake2, Quake3 and Unreal. Hope you're happy now! Anyway, merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Reading the title of the video makes me think my grandmother wrote it. Like, saying "Nintendo cartridges" without a specific system or saying generic game console cartridges, because ALL game consoles are "Nintendos"

The board in this particular example has onboard audio (the two Yamaha chips) that is suitable for Dos gaming without the fuss of what is typical of most setups. Toss in a Voodoo 3 and an SSD of some kind then one is doing pretty good without spending much for a retro rig.

I had a slot 1 Pentium3 500mhz which was upgraded to 700mhz under warranty(a nice free upgrade), and then i bought a Pentium3 coppermine 933mhz socket 370 but had a slocket converter(basically a slot 1 card with a socket 370 on it) so i could run it. There was AMD Athlons that used similar slot A design.

2002 I got a used MICRON Pentium 2, 333 MHz. 168 pin SDRAM (before DDR). That was the first PC I really worked on & got me into PCs. Took it all apart, cleaned all dust, added RAM, put it all back together, fresh new Windows 2000 install. It ran great- so clean, fast, no junk on it. I would web browse and go on AIM Messenger.....ran basic stuff plenty quick. Very good memories of that PC

My very first gaming PC was a Falcon Northwest with one of these in it. I think it had a Diamond GPU. It was amazing.

Oh man! Talk about a trip down memory lane! I remember reading so many comparison reviews between Micron, Dell, Gateway, Compaq and it all boiled down to Intel, Matrox (2D), 3dfx Voodoo, and SCSI 😂. All I need now to complete my nostalgia is the colored Sunday Best Buy newspaper ad and a few Computer Shopper catalogs.

It’s so nostalgic. I never had an Intel CPU PC until Pentium 4. But I had an IBM Aptiva PC with an AMD K6. It was a socket cpu not slot cpu. But it was new enough to not have ISA slots but old enough not to have AGP. It’s so funny how much more components and expansions we could put into PCs back then than now.

I still have a couple of thes Pentium IIs also got the ones with built in fans and MMX. Great video!

Awesome video, I love the retro stuff!

guys, you of all people should know, the AGPset was the northbridge, the PCIset was the south bridge, literally one "north" in the upper part of the motherboard, and one "south" side.

One of the main reasons why Intel went to SEC cartridges is so they could independently test that the CPU and cache chips were working correctly before assembling the processor. The previous Pentium Pro included cache on the processor die but the production yield was low because the processor could only be tested once fully assembled. So the Pentium Pro was very expensive to produce and the SEC cartridge was a cost-effective solution for the Pentium II. Personally I love these old cartridge processor designs. I learned how to build a computer with them and so I was able to side-step the nerve-racking task of applying thermal paste to the CPU. Just install it as a complete unit. I have a few Pentium III's and even some Pentium III Xeons (with whopping 2MB caches!) that I've collected.

I had one of the Dell variants of this case. It was my first new computer purchase in 2000, a Dell XPS 1Ghz P3 with Geforce 2 Ultra GPU and Rambus memory. The tower alone was a little over 3 grand. I was 25 at the time and making really good money in the Bay Area.

During the Pentium II era I was running AMD K6 processors on my Asus P/I-P55T2P4. God I loved that motherboard: I hung on to it as long as possible.

Showcase that Falcon Northwest on the bench for the next retro PC video. I remember that beast from the Maximum PC gaming issue Oct. 2002.

Man, i miss Gordon from the Maximum PC and PC Gamer days. Every month in the mail. I remember the issue years ago announcing his departure to PC World. Gordon is legit OG like Leo Leporte....he's been doing this long long before ALL these shill you tubers like Linus (especially Linus!), GN, JTC, HB, Paul etc. etc.

This reminds me a lot of my first PC I got when going to college, before that I had a Mac Performa which made learning Windows 98 easy. I gave the specs to a local PC shop and he made me a P2 400 with 128mb of ram and an 8MB AGP card, turned out to be the last discrete card Intel made until this year. The kids at school that paid Dell for the best got Slot 1 P3 550 so I was not far behind. I had a generic case called NEOSys with a 3-sided cowl cover you slid the top and both sides off all at once. What I did not know at the time was how fast tech was changing but when I graduated in 2003 a 2500mhz P4 was the new thing. IMO, with DDR5 and new process nodes, the times now in the 2020s resemble a lot of the early 2000s and not the stagnation of 2010s. To appreciate what Gordon is saying about cache, quality, etc check out the old Computer Chronicles PBS shows they are all on youtube. Between that and LGR I cannot imagine dealing with 486 or older rigs they were monstrous in their configuration headaches and costs. I am glad I got into PCs when I did because it was the birth of a new era and I was too young to realize it.

I remember my old P3-550 that was cartridge based...man those were the days!

3Com 905A/B/C for PCI slot 3Com 509 for ISA slot We used them with the Disk On Chip to make the PCs work diskless, booting from the network. Crucial is Micron, hence the M on the memory module.

I like making a comparison between dual-rank and dual-channel: former is required, latter is optional for performance. Dual rank is when SIMM(and SIPP) modules have appeared, which were initially 8-bit data lines. So a 286 and 386SX, with 16-bit data lines, had to use them in pairs of 2, whereas 386DX and 486 (32-bit data path) had to use pairs of 4. This was dual/quad rank. Required. Then 32-bit SIMMs have appeared, which a 486 could use just one. But then Pentium was released with 64-bit data path, so pairs of 2 had "returned". But 64-bit SDR DIMM was also released, enabling single-modules for Pentiums. Since SDR, all memories (SDR/DDR2-4) have 64-bit data lines (72-bits for ECC). DDR5 still has 64-bits, but uses 2 independent 32-bit channels (2x40 for ECC, from what I read on wikipedia now). But, of course, CPU speeds have skyrocketed and external sockets (RAM and CPU) were limiting the data flow to the CPU. So, I think around P4 time, they "invented" the optional dual-channel, where the user could balance performance vs cost. As in: optional pairing.

What an awesome machine. It's always such a throwback seeing ribbon cables. 😂

My retro gaming PC from 1998 is in that exact case but with the Dell front panel! I had no idea multi system integrators used that case. Very neat piece of info.

I have a micron millenia full tower! I swapped a 1GHz Pentium 3 into it, a voodoo 2 SLI setup as well. Love it.

Love these videos.

A blast from the past. Great show! Thanks!

This might be the first time I've seen someone mess around with one of these cases and actually knew what it was and the various features of it. I had a Micron Millennia MME (200MMX based) with a less stylized front in college. I miss that computer, especially the dual 12MB Voodoo2s I had in it when I see what those things are going for today.

The first build I did all myself was a Pentium 2. I remember getting this CPU and thinking "wow this is the future of CPUs!" 😅

Love it! Now I have to get back My NEC that looked exactly like that, man did we thinker with them....

I picked up one of these cases with the front bezel missing. I was wondering what on earth it was. glad to know the case is a pallo alto. Glad to have got the case for 10 bucks from the local salvage shop

Remember my dad bought me my very first PC in 1998, it was a PII 350, 440BX mobo, 64MB, intel i740 video card. It was around $1000 (1998 currency) including monitor and I/O devices. So much memories with that PC

Thanks for the Video. I have A Micron Client Pro looks just like yours. Great Old Machines

this was a good trip to some old memories

I remember the Pentium II well. I had just signed my first job contract after the apprenticeship. I had saved some money and once in my life I wanted proper high end! So I went and bought a PC with a 300 Mhz Klamath - for ludicrous money. (It was way more expensive than the 800$ 266 in the video) But it was the fastest thing on the planet. I took it home and was happy... for about 4 months, then Deschutes core Pentium II's came out, running rings around my Klamath, using half the energy and costing 20% of the price. That put me in the value-for-money-camp forever. I never bought anything bleeding edge again.

in 98 I ordered a computer from MPIPC, it was $2400. had a pII 400mhz, 440bx mobo, 8.4 bigfoot hard drive, ati all in wonder pro with 8m memory, 128m of sdram, creative labs awe 64 gold, a u.s. robotics 56k sportster modem, 1.44 floppy drive, 8x cdrom burner, eastern subwoofer + left and right speaker, 18 inch monitor that had a usb hub built in, win 98, office 97 professional. It was a beast.. the week after I got it the 450mhz pII came out.. I sold the computer 2 years ago, I miss it.

I have one of those, almost identical. It used to be my work computer back in 1997-98. P2-266, 64MB RAM, NT 4.0. After a few years they upgraded use to something else, either a late P3 or some early P4 (don't remember exactly) and the old box was going to be thrown out. I asked permission to take it and was approved. It's still in my basement to this day.

These are Slot 1 Pentium II. The Pentium III also came in Slot 1 package. Slot 2 CPUs from Intel are usually used in servers and high-end workstations (Pentium II Xeon and Pentium III Xeon). Now, Micron manufactures PC memory modules and SSD storage (Crucial).

This case is actually quite unusual even for it's time. Ive dealt with many many cases in the 90s and none had a fan cage like that. Edit: it's = its

Great trip down memory lane!

Excellent video, like!

I used to have a couple of PII 400mhz slot loaders, and a Celeron 333 slot loader too. Can't find them in my junk closet anymore, but I did find my P3 933 and Voodoo 2.

This was great history!

this video is awesome!

my first computer is in my basement. a gateway pentium 2 333 mhtz pc with no fans and a HDD with an incredible 4 gigs of storage. i remember upgrading it from win95 to win 98 and then again years later with more ram and a CPU swap from a 233 to the 333. big numbers back then.

You guys should get LGR on the show one of these days.

I had the Dell version. 3 thousand bucks including a boat anchor 19" crt monitor. How far we've come.

The first PC I built was in 1995. It had Windows 95, Intel Pentium 1 133 MHz CPU, 16 MB RAM, 1.2 GB Hard Drive, ATI (now AMD) 4 MB Video Card, Creative Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card, no name 2.0 speakers, 6 speed CD-ROM, no name case and a 180 watt power supply. I also had a 17" no name CRT monitor, HP 660C DeskJet and Microsoft mouse and keyboard. Price: around $4,000. Before this I had owned several 386 and 486 pre-builds, loaded with Windows 3.1 and 3.11.

I built a pc using the 300A Celeron. IIRC it lacked the cache, but it wasn't locked down to clock frequency. I ran a mild overclock on it, however a friend cranked his up to 500Mhz

I think we may need an archaeologist to take a look at that piece of hardware. That thing is absolutely ancient.

You cannot login cause it is trying to logon to the SPL network, in the drop down box under the password, tell it logon locally or on no network, that's why it can't logon, it's trying to login to a domain as the drop down is set to that.

There was a linux program called chntpw for this sort of situation. You'd boot whatever linux from a CD or something, and run chntpw from there. Or plug the windows hard drive into a computer running linux, if you had one. I got a little use out of it myself, but didn't need it that often. You might be able to find it and run it from a linux distro of that era, eg Slackware 4.0.

Silly that Micron provided the system with '95. The PII-266 that I owned came stock with '98 SE. Upgraded it to 112MB of RAM (64+32+16MB) as 98 SE stumbled with the original 32MB of RAM that came in my system.

I had a dual slot Pentium II board that I found a modded bios that allowed for Pentium IIIs. It had LOTS of scsi ports.

Dang, I miss the 90s. Awesome decade.

I remember those days. Was just slightly before my time, but I was dreaming in the catalogs back then. My first build was a Slot A Athlon. 750Mhz in either 99 or 2000. 20Gb hard drive and a whole ass 256MB ram. Wanna say I had a voodoo2 AGP card? Not sure on that. I do remember running two 17" CRT monitors, one on good card and one on crappy PCI card.

Lol the overclocking. I did that with my AMD Athlon. It had 750mhz or something and I set it to 800 or higher. That was my live's first over clock. :)

I can't remember how I got it, but there is a Linux bootable CD-ROM. It allows you to erase the password inside of an encrypted .SAM file. I've used this disc on every machine from Windows XP to Windows 10. A shot-in-the-dark guss is that this would work on any Micro$oft (not a typo) OS that's using the NT Kernel.

Rocking a Gateway TBR-400 with Windows 98. Works great and even games good. Got lots of upgrades for it to max out the memory, drives, and even put a better *New* video card in it. Got a SATA to IDE converter board and got SATA drives working on it. 128gb is the highest Win98 supports but a 240gb can be partitioned still. Also got an IDE to SD Card converter and that works great on there as well. Since I kept all my CD's from the Windows 98 days I'm even rock'n Office and a bunch of games on that PC. Best of all they didn't require 1000w+ power supplies to run like modern PC's do with their hoggish CPU and GPUs. These things ran cool enough you didn't tons of fans either.

18:15 "It doesn't matter which memory module you put in where" If memory serves me correctly (no pun intended), you populated the slot closest to the processor as that was the first lane that the processor was looking for a memory module, And then it would work its way "away" from the processor looking for the next available bank to store the data onto. This would also explain why the slot on the left (closest to the processor) had the 64mb module. *shrugs* I was only a teenager at the time when this type of tech was available, and I was learning on a Packard Bell before I built my first PC only a few short years later.

A very similar case was used for the Umax Pulsar / SuperMac S900 Macintosh clone in 1997.

I co signed a loan for my brother in law to buy one of these at Sears in the 1990s. I knew nothing about computers at the time. The tower alone was more than a thousand dollars and depending on what you were using it for, the software, retail boxed programs more than doubled the cost. I remember asking what possible benefit could justify this expense? In the 1990s you could buy one hell of a nice slightly used car for less money. Now, I'm on a hp z820 workstation that I bought on eBay for 200 and paid another 200 to upgrade the memory but it's rockin two 8 core processors and 256GB of memory. Less than 400 in this rig. Oh, I spent another 50 on the video card so 450$s.

I worked part time at CompUSA, systems like that bring back memories.

I've got a slightly newer pentium II 333 micron millennia with windows 98 and a very custom looking case, but it lacks an AGP slot sadly, but it does has a integrated Riva128 on the agp buss.

I bought one of MiconPC Athlon Based systems back in the day that had DDR1 ram.

really enjoying the content, but please fix/replace the camera shakiness and focus issues.

Time travel. I remember this well. Thanks guys.

The first computer I bought with my own money was a Cyrix 166+. Then all my builds were AMD up until the Pentium D. None of them had slots, they were all sockets. That computer looks like it is authenticating against a domain controller, so even if you did know the password, I don't think you would be able to log in after all this time with the domain controller offline.

I stopped building PCs back in the early 2000s and feel like I don’t know what’s going on now…reviews like this take me back to an era I understand

Who else remembers the socket to slot adapters? You could put a socketed Celeron in a P2 Slot 1 board.

when i used to go to LAN's in the 90's, i used to look in awe at the SLOT1 P2 cpus people had :) i thought they were so cool. but i has a celeron that was stupidly overclocked, so it held its own ;)

I can remember when this stuff was relatively new. Yep feeling a little older now. Thanks 😂

That cartride based cpu was definitely the best most interesting part😁👍