I Build A High-End Gaming PC From 2005 To Play My Favourite Old Game
back in the early 2000s little baby Dawid was a huge fan of God games particularly black and white a game in which you played a God who aided by your powerful pet creature had to lead your people to victory over the Philistines on the other side of that hill over there and to do this you had to decide whether you wanted to be a benevolent God or a Skeletor-esque deity that sacrifices babies every time you need to cast a fireball and then in 2005 mullu launched Black and White 2 which blew my mind the depth of gameplay combined with the hair physics was just too much for my little brain to handle but the thing is despite Black and White 2 being one of my favorite games of all time I haven't played it in well over a decade and the reason I can't just buy it and download it like you can many other old games is because lion head Studio the developer and EA the publisher are in a legal shiv battle about who gets to publish the game on modern platforms and at this point I'm done waiting for these two companies to get bored of their foreplay and decide who gets to take the load in the face so I've just gone on to eBay and bought the original game this is a hard copy of Black and White 2 and I've also gotten the expansion pack which I've never played before I'm very excited about that uh the problem is it's from 2005 and I'm pretty sure that these games won't work on a modern system so I've decided to build a high-end gaming system from 2005 to play one of my favorite games of all time but before we get into that today's video is sponsored by Micro Center the best place to get amazing deals on anything PC related Micro Center always has some awesome sales happening like their current holiday sales event where you can get savings on everything from gaming monitors to sim racing gear to even this very fancy looking creality CR scan oo and then you can use that scanner on your discounted Microsoft server his laptop and finally if you live in Santa claraa there's a brand new Microcenter coming so sign up for a free flash drive when the store opens links are all down below oh that's a very dirty box now they may have dug the box out of an active volcano but it's still very exciting that it comes in the original box which is kind of rare for a motherboard this old and the motherboard in question is the Asus A8 n32 SOI Deluxe a beast of the motherboard back from the days when you still got like a flap that opened and then you got to see like features and stuff now a fun fact about this motherboard my brother actually had one of these who's very excited about the motherboard because this was the first motherboard as far as I know that had dual 16x pcie slots which was a really big deal for him considering that he just had one graphics card and then never got a second one uh but that was the main selling point of the motherboard now considering that this motherboard comes with the box and a bunch of accessories it cost quite a lot of money I paid $200 for it which funnily enough is the same it cost new back when it came out but I mean obviously inflation was a thing $200 was a lot more back then but still oh wow the seller wasn't lying these are a lot of accessories these are cool wao it even comes with a game Port that you can use to connect like old joysticks and game controllers this is a little blower fan that you could attach to the power delivery heat sink on your motherboard I mean this is a cool touch let's take that out wao that motherboard is in pristine condition oh although there's a problem Oh there's actually a pretty big problem now the reason for my sudden Panic was an essential part of my cooler mounting plan was missing from the motherboard oh no that's kind of a disaster now aside from the fact that this is a remarkable specimen of a motherboard that there is a pretty big issue it doesn't have the stock mounting bracket with it which I was kind of counting on that stock mounting bracket because this is a socket 939 AMD socket which is a very old socket and very few coolers support it now I did buy a period specific cooler for this video uh but Canada Post is on strike and you know good for them they should should get paid more but it does mean that the thing that I ordered like 2 months ago I I it's just gone I don't know where it is uh so I was kind of hoping that I could use that bracket for cooler mounting because apparently there's a bit of a rumor going around that you can use a wraith cooler but you can only use The Wraith cooler if you have that mounting bracket and it's not on the motherboard I genuinely don't know what I'm going to do now but then I had a potentially brilliant idea can I 3D print one now considering my history with 3D printing it may not go very well but I guess we'll see soon enough next I want to have a look at the CPU which is in this packet which again cost a surprising amount of money it's been packaged like that that's interesting oh okay oh the CPU is just kind kind of loosely rubber banded to a bit of foam on the back and the CPU in question is the legendary AMD athlon64 fx55 this baby packs a single core running at 2 .6 GHz and it cost an eyew watering $850 when it was launched back in 2004 adjusted for inflation that's almost ,400 now in 2005 AMD did launch a higher end single core FX CPU the 57 which was a slightly more powerful AMD FX CPU available when Black and White 2 launched but good luck finding one of those it would be easier to find some genuine approval from your parents and generally ask Athlon FX pricing is wild the 55 I have here cost me $250 but it gets even more expensive as you climb up the ladder pricing is so crazy you can buy an fx60 box for $125 so I can't wait to see how this single core Beast runs black and white too and then finally from our initial haul we've got the graphics card now I did buy two of them but the other one it it's just gone I I that's that's another thing that that just didn't come uh so we're going to have to use one of these which was arguably the fastest graphics card at the time of Black and White 2 oh yeah check it out it is a 7800 GTX and a Dell variant nonetheless a Dell variant with a peculiar cooler on it because this is apparently a 256 Meg version of the 7800 GTX but as far as I can tell this is the cooler that came with the 512 Meg version so we'll see what happens when I fire it up because if it is a 512 Meg version it would be a massive score on my part because they're super rare and when they do show up for sale they're like 5 billion now what I find interesting about the 7800 GTX aside from its $600 price tag being ,000 in today's money but it was a high-end gaming graphics card with a TDP of 86 Watts which just pales and comparison to the behemoths of today so with that it's a good time to go and see if I can 3D print a mounting bracket for the the socket 939 on here so I'm going to go check thingiverse and just pray okay please please no way there's actually a couple the first option I tried refused to download for some reason so I was left with the recreation of this stock bracket so I downloaded the file threw it into Baboo labs's slicing software so that I could begin the Arcane process of 3D Conjuring and just like that I've 3D printed a mounting bracket for my CPU now I did show my 3D printing wizard friend the design and he was a real Downer about it going on about how the moment there's pressure on it it's just going to separate the layers and it's not actually going to work as mounting hardware but maybe it will maybe it will so I've got some screws these are radiator screws with random nuts that I found lying around M wow socket 939 looks so similar to am4 but that makes sense now I know that I'm supposed to like with a soldering and uh seat these threads but the reason that I'm not doing that is because of how the thread works on the radiator screw uh it's not threaded all the way down so we kind of need a little bit of of extra clearance it's rudimentarily on that's very skew I think the skewness is as a result of us not uh seating the threading properly so I know what the problem is but I I I have a reason for not doing it correctly and that reason definitely isn't entirely due to laziness that is actually kind of sturdily mounted it's looking good it's looking good it's looking very professional now again I did order a cooler that was supposed to be compatible with this uh but it it just didn't show up oh I really hope this works it's very annoying when my wizard friend is correct come on please don't break please don't break I think we're good for now until it snaps off when I put it in a case so one of the reasons why I think it's working why the the the print layers aren't just tearing off is because there's a screw pushing down on it from the top so there is actually counter pressure on the mounting bracket I think we're good okay now the power supply is another thing that I'm going to have to use a modern part of now a note on the ram that I'm using it was sent over by a viewer like 2 and a half years ago and I'm finally getting around to use it it's a 1 gig kit of Corsair XMS DDR running at 400 MHz now the interesting thing about DDR aside from it being the first Ram that could handle two commands per clock cycle it also brought the idea of dual Channel Ram to the market so DDR paved the way for pre-built manufacturers to screw you over with ram configurations neat so now comes probably the scariest part we have to see if this stuff works I really hope it does cuz this was a very expensive system for what it is okay we've got a light here that's a good start oh that's a good start oh yeah listen to the power and not only that but there are LEDs on this Ram which is Wild for the the time like back then LEDs on stuff didn't exist a few moments later that's not immediately a great sign so let me let me restart it if these parts don't work it's a complete disaster now my first attempt at troubleshooting involved using single sticks of ram in different slots on the motherboard and when that didn't work I desperately dug through several pins in my office to find another ddr1 which I found but that also didn't help okay that doesn't sound like posting the next thing I tried was swapping out the FX CPU for the Aon that came in the motherboard which also didn't work and then when resetting the seos in a blind panic also didn't work I remember that every time I struggle posting a system I get hundreds of enraged comments from people telling me to just use a motherboard speaker and after 40 minutes of looking for one the post code was not good news one long beep beep beep beep three short ones I can't find a beep table in the in in the the the manual for the motherboard um but there is like a a general beep table and apparently one long beep and three shorter ones generally means graphics card so I'm going to try a different graphics card I really hope it's not the graphics card because I don't don't have an option to replace it with oh no that's a disaster but then in these dark times I remembered that several months ago I bought a different graphics card from around this period for a different video and that option is an x1900 xdx a graphics card that's like the Next Generation from the 7800 GTX and one that came out a couple of months after Black and White 2 was launched so yeah I don't know that feels close close enough let's give this a try actually comes in the original box with this the Sci-Fi lady on it ooh oh yeah look at that now this graphics card was in absolute Beast back in the day we even have 512 Megs of video memory which puts the 7800 GTX to shame um let's hope it works cuz that would also make a big difference whoa it sounds like a jet turbine but it posts yes oh yeah look at that bios okay so now that we have a period correct system posted uh we need to drop it in a period correct case which I'm going to go get in a second and then we need to install some Windows XP and stuff on it but let's put it in its case so this bad boy is a thermal tsunami dream now back in these days thermal made some pretty high-end cases and you can clearly tell it's high-end by the door that opens on the front oh it's got so much resistance uh now as you can tell back in the day we didn't really prioritize front airflow that much uh but you know it does get better with the door open than whatever that bit is we've got the potential for a whole bunch of front ey on here although the person did have to add some USB 3 afterm Market Fancy on the side of the case we've got some purse specs with a fan in it fancy and to get the side panel off you have to undo a couple of screws and undo some latches which also have keys so you can lock the side panel as well now by modern standards the interior layout of the case is pretty butt cheeks I mean you got all the hard drive cages and stuff in the front blocking the little bit of air flow that can get through there now the power supply also lives on the top which isn't great because it has to pull in air from the system uh so that's why we don't do that anymore but for our sacrifice of front airflow we do get a lot of utility in terms of drives and stuff oh there's a spider I remember it was such a big deal when like hard drive caddies came out that you could do this like hot swappa you know there okay so now that we have most of our components in that cooler looks really funny upside down on this old system but anyway we need to start with the arduous process of cable managing in this case and then we can drop our Graphics G in here and when I finally got the system in the case when I fired it up it wouldn't post again for some reason but luckily it just took a little bit of digging around on the inside to fix the problem and then we were ready to install Windows XP which was its whole own problem now initially installing Windows XP and getting it running was much more straightforward than I was expecting but then the driver hell started I for the life of me could not get working drivers installed for the x1900 xdx I initially tried the Legacy drivers from amd's website which didn't work so I then tried the driver CD that came in the box which also didn't work I then ddu wiped all of my failed driver install attempts installed doet framework and then tried some drivers from Phil's computer lab's website which also didn't work okay so I have spent the last several hours trying to install drivers for this x1900 xdx and I just haven't been able to for some reason the system just doesn't want to play with it I've tried pretty much everything I know there's going to be a bunch of comments down below people being like Oh Dar it obviously just do this and it'll work uh but I've I've gone through so many resources but I can't figure it out and I'm running out of time luckily I did find this in a bin in my office which is an fx 4400 and it's basically the quadro version of the 7800 GTX and it's even a 512 Meg version ooh so I'm going to drop this in the system and see if I can install drivers for this one okay that's a good sign oh video art yay and the drivers installed first try with no problem which is very exciting and it meant we could finally play some Black and White too except there was one more problem oh look you can like screw with the particle effects in the lion head Studio logo this was very exciting to me back in the day it's like oh particle effects ATI look oh it would have been so perfect with the x1900 xdx I don't have audio though I'm going to have to go find audio drivers aren't I which again was a complete nightmare despite the fact that the driver install apparently worked window just couldn't find the onboard audio on the motherboard and with another couple hours of struggling a my patience was wearing real thin and B I remembered that I had a PCI sound card in some system I bought off Craigslist several years ago the drivers of which luckily installed first trying giving me a full usable Black and White 2 experience oh ah I hear black and white too it's very loud but it's happening there is some awesome music happening you are almost definitely not hearing it though which is I'm I'm sorry about that we've got suffering open here it's defaulted us to 800x 600 which feels very low I don't know I I think I'm going to hit up some some 720p do we think this card can handle that oh I remember how excited everybody was about Bloom always let's let's try that I remember this m this loading screen so well The Duality between good and evil oh yeah look at them Graphics I remember being mind blown by the hair on the devil's boobs so when this game came out back in 2005 the creatures AI was like Peak Peak AI wow it's not going well we're hitting 18 frames per second oh it it feels awful so what's interesting is we've got a 100% CPU load but 0% gpus I'm a assuming that that overlay isn't working wildly disappointed by the performance of this $800 CPU I went into the BIOS to see if I could change some settings and get a bit more performance out of it yeah but I I need to readjust my modern expectations of like how the game's going to run okay dropping the settings is helping we're getting about 30 frames per second now but I I think this is reasonable performance considering the hardware that we have uh which is wild I don't remember it running like this but soon I got used to the frame rate and honestly it didn't feel that bad oh what you have to tell them to bang as well oh yeah that's that's why I love this game so much the Breeders are doing whatever it is that such people do apparently oh yeah they're going to go do some bre reading but it it feels fine you know it's it's decent this is this is definitely a usable gaming experience in fact this is probably how I played it back in the day if even like this probably much worse cuz we're pretty much pegged at 100% CPU utilization so our fx55 is really struggling with this game um so it's good for gamers back in the day that not very long after this came out cor2 do was launched which was a huge step up in performance um but this is like an $800 CPU back in the day yeah so this was so what he's explaining now is that your the whole city shifts based on how good or evil you are in the game um which once you get super good there are just these flowers and vines that grow on everything and that also is one of the graphics things in this game that blew me away you could go and like play with your hand in the flowers and stuff and it was it just blew my mind when I was a kid and with that this whole experience just shows me how much our expectations has shifted as Gamers over the last two decades but after the initial shock of having to play at 720p 30 frames per second war off I was just having a good time playing one of my favorite old games and I'm definitely not going to immediately go and install this on a much faster system but anyway with that thank you so much for watching let me know if you were gaming back in this period And what kind of system you had down in the comments down below subscribe while you're on your way down there and until the next video bye-bye
2024-12-20 16:42
