- I just bought this brand new thousand dollar
Industrial Strength PC.
So what the hell is this?
Why is this a thousand dollars who would buy this?
Oh, wow.
Maybe this is brand new.
Maybe I would buy this.
Look at all these new features.
Multiple monitor support, DVD playback, USB.
In 2022.
Thank you, Billy and Steve. Thank you.
Wait, what's this for again?
Whatever. Thank you to our sponsor.
- SignalRGB.
They're giving away a Minecraft themed PC with
over 400 LEDs enclosed in a one of a kind case.
Enter for a chance to win at the link down below.
- One of our writers was looking
into making a high powered Windows 98 gaming rig
for some reason.
I feel like I know why that reason is.
And got an ad
for a company called NIXSYS for a new PC running Windows 98.
Apparently they're a small business
in Orange County California that used
to primarily sell servers.
Their side hustle was building legacy systems
for companies that didn't have the time
money or resources to retrain their employees
or buy new versions of software.
But they found themselves selling old systems
at such a rate
and it was such a good market that they ditched IT entirely.
And just started building rigs that throw back
to a bygone era.
Now full disclosure, we didn't actually buy this PC.
We would have, but we reached out to NIXSYS
and they were kind enough to send us a sample
to test so long as we
didn't let Linus pull a Fred Durst on it and break stuff.
Now, looking at the exterior.
This looks like the kind of PC that I would've sold
in my very first IT job back in like 2006.
Yeah. It's written in the script there
that it looks like it's
from the mid 2000s and belongs in an office.
And that's about correct.
This case design is very much mid 2000s.
We even have a floppy drive here as well as an M-DISC.
I'm not sure if this is a DVD rom drive or not
but M-DISCs basically, I think they're millennium discs.
They're supposed to archive data
for a thousand years or something like that.
I don't know if that's actually true.
I don't think
that anybody's ever tested a thousand year disc.
A lot of these legacy systems have stuff
on floppy discs or just spinning media.
And this would actually be pretty good for transferring
that out to something more modern.
On the back.
We've got, oh man.
We've got PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse.
Fair enough.
Serial. That's actually pretty important.
Parallel, also pretty important.
VGA.
Then we've got grand total of four USB 2.0
ports on the back.
With a, I believe that's a 10/100 Nic.
Plus we've got some basic audio on the back here.
Nothing really special.
But this serial port
and parallel port are actually very interesting
for most older use cases.
Because a lot of old human machine interfaces
and SCADA interfaces stuff that's for
like heavy industrial use will use serial or parallel.
And the thing about serial
and parallel is they can actually go pretty far
or at least serial can, I don't know about parallel.
But you can run serial for
I think several kilometers.
- [David] Whoa
- And also around the front.
Are another two USB ports.
These are also 2.0 and front panel audio.
Now for reasons we'll get into later, these are only running
at USB 1.1 speeds, but they are 2.0 capable.
Now, if you thought we were done talking about the exterior.
We're not. Check this out.
This is a genuine Windows 98, second edition serial key.
I don't know where they got that.
It looks brand new.
Like it's not scuffed or anything like that.
Like you might expect from a pull from an old system.
Does Microsoft still make these?
Like do they still sell these to companies that need it?
Or are there just some warehouse full of new old stock
of this stuff?
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised.
Let's get the side panel off of here.
It's pretty thin metal.
Yeah. That's typical of mid 2000s grade PC cases.
There's that fan just spinning
at maximum RPM forever because there's no control.
This motherboard reminds me a lot of an old gigabyte board.
It's got that kind of blue
with the copper ish heat sink on the north bridge there.
Oh yeah.
That's a north bridge, right?
This doesn't have a chip set per se.
Well, I mean it does.
It's a chip set.
There are multiple chips.
Whereas these days we only have a single chip for that.
Ah, let's see. We got USB here.
And we got front panel audio here.
All the front panel stuff.
Including a nice tiny little buzzer speaker.
Little Piezoelectric thing.
Single stick of RAM. That's DDR1, 400 megahertz.
But I don't think it's running at that right now.
There's not a whole lot else going on here.
But there are some interesting things
about this motherboard that are worth noting.
First off, it's got an AGP slot on that.
That's accelerated graphic's port.
And basically what that is, is a version
of PCI that is just completely dedicated
to the graphics card.
They don't have anything in here right now, but they went
up to, from at least two times as fast
as PCI to as much as eight times as fast as PCI.
Which is actually pretty good because PCI
I think was 133 megabytes per second.
These PCI here are shared that's typical of the PCI bus.
What that means is that all of the 133 megabytes
per second transfer rate that the PCI bus is capable
of will be split between all of the devices plugged into it.
This is pretty much analogous to PCI express today
but PCI express is dedicated and connected directly
to the CPU and chip set versus this shared bus
that these old cards used.
Below the PCI slots are ISA slots.
Or industry standard architecture.
That's what compact called it back
in the day because they didn't wanna have to
keep calling it PC compatible.
These are 8 and 16 Bit bus.
So this would be the 8 Bit.
That's the 16 Bit extension.
The reason why these are super important
for a machine that's targeting like legacy systems.
Is a lot of interface cards.
For say, communicating with old printers
or, you know, HMIs.
Industrial equipment, weight scales
that kind of thing. They use ISA.
And that can't be adapted at least not easily to PCI.
Some other stuff of note in here, these ribbon cables.
They're not going to what you might think they are.
Yes, one of them is going to the floppy drive,
but both the optical drive and the SSD.
Yes that's an SSD, are connected with these.
IDE to static converters.
Basically they turn these serial ATA drives
into something that this old motherboard can comprehend.
I think that's basically it. Right.
The power supply.
This is an FSP Sparkle Power.
So these aren't super amazing, but they're not
no name things that are gonna break immediately.
The idea behind these is that they're old enough
that they can handle the power demands
of these older machines that we've kind of evolved past.
So 3.3 volt and 5 volt Rails
on modern systems are very underpowered compared
to in previous times, that's what we have here.
So we have a total of 500 Watts of power available
with 150 Watts available on the 3.3 and 5 volt Rails.
Which is a lot more, I think
than most power supplies today will give you.
You might be asking yourself why not PCI express?
Well, the thing about Windows 98 is
that Windows 98 doesn't support PCI express.
AGP is the best it'll do.
Kind of like water bottles from lttstore.com.
They only supported AGP on the first version
but they upgraded to PCI express.
And either way they can still support your thirst no
matter what your socket type.
The compatibility with all
of these older standards is really the main selling
feature of these machines.
A business that relies on millions of dollars of automation
equipment controlled by ISA compatible cards.
Aren't gonna bat any eyes at occasionally
dropping a thousand dollars on a warrantied machine
that will keep their entire operation up and running.
Especially if the interface card hasn't been made
since the Reagan administration.
The sky train.
The longest driverless train network in North America
and our local Metro system here in Vancouver is
in that exact situation. A half million people a day
in this city ride trains that rely
on ISA cards and backups stored on floppy discs.
- It may be old. But it's very reliable.
- That's NIXSYS's niche.
Their clients seem to be from a wide range of industries.
There's textiles. Accounting.
Healthcare, commercial weigh stations.
In fact, a weigh station is probably the original home
of my personal Windows 98 computers scale.
Which I recently brought
into the office to show off to the youth.
I have an old weigh station computer because well
for an individual with a propensity to tinker.
Building a new Windows 98 PC doesn't make a lot of sense.
Sure. This motherboard here is brand new.
So it comes with a bit more certainty
that it won't experience burst capacitors
or cracking sodder joints anytime soon.
But that comes at a cost.
Even from the shadiest sellers on LA express.
They still command over a hundred dollars.
And that's without any real warranty on them.
Or taking shipping into account either.
When there's still full computers floating around
for that same price, it's worth rolling the dice.
For those of us who know what we're doing.
When your business is on the line, rolling the dice
to save a bit of cash is an unaffordable luxury.
So hundred dollar
or even $500 motherboard that uses 20 year
old technology can be a straight up good deal.
The same thing can be said
for folks with accessibility needs, who rely
on legacy software for some quality of life improvements.
They may or may not have as much cash to throw
around as a business.
But if a computer makes life much easier and better to live
having one becomes a high priority.
NIXSYS pointed this out
in our email exchanges as a big reason
for individual customers purchasing machines
for non gaming purposes.
But this bad boy is not so mission critical to me.
So why don't we find something more frivolous to do with it?
(man laughing)
Oh God.
Even the intro cinematic is bad.
(man sighing)
Unfortunately, every AGP graphics card we've tried
on this hasn't booted.
Which I mean I'm not sure if I'm super upset
about it or not,
but it leaves us with just Intel Extreme Graphics.
When I ran the Sims 2,
the intro movie was at like two frames per second.
So yeah, obviously this is not a gaming machine.
But maybe we can run some benchmarks.
That'll be fun.
We got PCMark.
We got 3DMArk 2001 SE let's see how 3DMark 2001 SE works
with our incredible Intel extreme 8/45 graphics.
Turns out the capture device we were using.
Didn't like 10/24 by 7/68.
So I had to change that real quick.
Benchmark.
Um, solid 15 FPS.
That's cool.
When I was a kid, I say kid, but like in school.
Fiddling around with this stuff.
I was like, what game is this?
I wanna play this game.
With Mex and monster trucks and missiles and stuff.
Oh yeah.
There's a nice solid.
8.
6.
7.
6.
Yeah. 13.
Oh.
Spicy.
Oh 6.
4.
Well, it's actually pretty solid.
Oh, 16, 20.
Nevermind. It's jumping all over the place again.
If Linus were here, he'd be all like.
"(indistinct) burned and ate the peasants".
Which is exactly what just happened.
Yeah. See, that's just friendly fire.
They're launching flaming arrows up at the dragon,
into the town.
That's just gonna burn the town.
The dragon doesn't even have to do all the work.
Oh man.
The Matrix demo.
I used to think this was super cool.
Come to think of it.
I think this is about how well this ran
on my Pentium 4 1.5.
With rage 64
or whatever rage 2 plus.
That's about how well it ran.
I remember it being pretty bad.
Only in demo mode did it run half decent.
But I'd watch that demo mode.
You have successfully run the benchmark.
Well, that depends on your definitions of successful
because a lot of those tests were skipped.
Average FPS in Car Chase was 15.3 in low detail.
8.9 in high detail.
Yeah.
No.
I can't imagine there being anything wrong
with the wireless mouse.
This here receiver, pretends that it's one of these.
So everything that this mouse does receives
those commands and then just translates it
into more or less one of these.
So if I plug this in, yeah, there we go.
Working fine.
When we first booted this thing up, we had to use a PS/2
keyboard and mouse on the back there.
For, well compatibility reasons.
Specifically because Windows 98 doesn't ship with
up to date USB keyboard drivers, or just drivers in general.
The drivers for the USB stuff had to be installed manually
before any of it would work.
Now that the drivers were installed
everything obviously works just fine,
but it is something we had
to do the first time we booted it up.
USB flash drives are an interesting case.
So this one is a USB 3.0, as you can see here.
The thing with these that you're limited to FAT32 at best.
There are drivers you can get
for NTFS and other file systems.
But by default, the stock version
of Windows 98 is limited to FAT32.
Which if you format this
on any modern Windows machine, you're limited to 32 gigs.
That being said it can do up to two terabytes.
So I'm just gonna throw this in here.
And we should see.
That we have removable hardware check that out.
It thinks that the USB flash drive is
like a floppy drive kind of thing, like a zip drive.
And that's because that was the storage paradigm
for a long time.
Which made all the sense in the world back then.
But now is just not how we do things.
And as we can see, we have a bunch of stuff
on this here Flash drive.
A bunch of CPU-Z screenshots.
And yeah, it's pretty much it for that.
I can eject it.
Not that that seems to have done anything.
Let's unplug or eject that there.
We'll stop the USB mass storage device.
Please.
Can now be safely removed.
That is a thing that you actually have to do
with older versions of Windows because it gets corrupt
and FAT32, unlike NTFS doesn't have journaling.
So if anything goes wrong in the unplugging process
you are dealing with file system corruption.
Well, I've been set up to fail I think.
I don't know that Windows 98 supports USB audio.
I don't remember if it does or not.
Device manager.
Okay. It found it USB audio device.
So presumably it should work.
Let's go to the control panel.
To make sure we select it first.
So USB audio device doesn't seem to have any
playback options, but the recording does.
USP audio device. Yeah. It has recording and other.
Okay. So the other is where that is.
And I will test direct sound, I guess.
Oh.
So what I'm looking at right now is a blue screen.
I think I should still be able to interact
with the system slightly.
No, it's. It's dead, wait.
Oh yeah, yeah.
It's still slightly working, but it's like.
It was not happy about that.
Is this expecting a higher sample rate
or something than Windows 98 can handle?
I have to wonder why this happened the way it did.
- [Cameraman] You killed it. My God, you killed it.
- He's dead, Jim.
I mean, I guess we'll see if it comes back.
I didn't expect this to kill it.
Huh? Well, we rebooted into safe mode following that crash.
And I'm just looking
at the adoro programs list here just because, I mean
it's a thing to do when you're in safe mode.
And they've got the unofficial universal USB 2.0 stack
on here. Did we install that?
From what I understand
this was more or less completely stock Windows 98
and that's kind of what they claimed they've been selling.
But they do include this USB 2.0 thing.
And that's interesting to me
because we had to disable USB 2.0
because if we tried running Windows with USB 2.0
we'd get one boot out of it.
And then after that it would basically just not work.
That being said, all
of the important stuff did pick up via USB.
We got the flash drive working, we got SD cards working.
We got wireless peripherals working and wired peripherals.
So pretty much anything you can expect to need to
deploy seems to work just fine.
USB audio aside.
It's about as good an experience
as you could reasonably expect
from Windows 98 out of the box.
Actually upgrading the machine is not all that easy compared
to contemporary Windows PCs however.
I blame the firmware.
If you're looking to get yourself a warrantied.
Reliable Windows 98 PC or a PC
with any older windows installation on it.
Then NIXSYS has made it pretty plug
and play outta the box.
So long as you don't mind forking
over just a bit more cash compared
to a used system from the era.
And I mean, I don't mind forking over segways
to sponsors like.
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Grab your coupon and everything mentioned
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Thanks for watching guys.
If you wanna check out one of your old legacy PCs like this
the link is down below, and if you wanna watch more videos
on Windows 98, you can take a look
at this video where I got the SCALE out
and showed the youngins what for.