Can you build a PC Equivalent to the Original XBOX?

In this video we build and bench a system with very similar specs to the Original Xbox, and find out if it can keep pace with the real deal in gaming performance.
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Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
0:30 - Refresher on the XBOX Specs
1:48 - Motherboard
2:15 - CPU
2:44 - GPU (and some background)
4:13 - RAM
4:42 - Case
4:54 - PSU (woes)
5:36 - Storage
5:50 - Putting it all together
6:42 - Sorting out the OS
7:08 - Games & Test Conditions
7:53 - Benchmarks
12:16 - Power Draw Figures
13:03 - Conclusion & Thanks

[@GreenHamGaming]

Brother, this was fantastic video. The way you explained how each part of the hardware will play a role in the numbers beforehand was fantastic. Very cool video and I love the idea of including power draw figures. I've never thought to do that and it's an important thing to consider with older hardware. Like let' s say you are building an old PC to put under a TV in the house and deciding between an old Pentium D machine over a Core 2 Duo, not many people consider the fact that a Pentium D 930 will consume say 95W under load over a C2D E6300 which will consume 65W at load all while beating it in performance. Both chips can end up in the same price range on the used market so it's important to consider power usage! Keep up the good work!

[@FSPersonalAcct]

Hello GHG!

[@SPNG]

Very much appreciated man! Delighted to hear you enjoyed the video. Means a lot, I'm a big fan of your content (loved your Xbox videos too!) and you've been a huge inspiration of mine for a long time now. Your example is bang on! Power draw is a very important metric to me, its nice to have a point of comparison efficiency wise as it can often show that performance isn't without its costs. Very helpful when comparing stock and overclocked setups as well. There's much more to come, have lots of video ideas I want to make and I plan to follow up this one at some point using a much more stripped down version of Windows, a proper motherboard, some faster RAM as well as some improvements to my testing methodology and game suite. Greatly appreciate the comment!

[@kerilz8794]

Please come back with more stuff man!

[@ethangilbertmedia]

Hey Green Ham Gaming! love your content, one of the first that got me into appreciating older technology.

[@dougr8646]

Ugh if you're not considering power draw you shouldn't be building a pc

[@Keullo-eFIN]

The Xbox CPU is actually a mobile Celeron 733, not a desktop one. That's why it's more close to a P3 than a "normal" Celeron :)

[@pixelpiet4211]

The Xbox CPU is neither Celeron nor Pentium 3. It is more of a hybrid of both CPUs. Intel and Microsoft built a CPU specifically for the Xbox. The CPU has 128 kb L2 cache from the Celeron and 133 MHz front side bus from the Pentium 3. So the CPU has to be set between the two desktop CPUs. It is similar with the GPU chip. You can see that in half life 2. In the Xbox version many details had to be removed. here in the video e.g. the high-rise buildings in the background are missing.

[@CarpetBanana]

Acshually ☝️🤓

[@ob5ida]

@@CarpetBanana When you're wrong you're wrong. 🤷

[@tigerbiggs3744]

Actually Microsoft had their CPUs custom built for the Xbox using the P3 architecture overclocked to 733mhz.

[@hanrinch]

There is no such thing as mobile celeron 733, celeron’s blck were mostly 66mhz back in the days and only increased to 100mhz with debut of tualatin.

[@SPNG]

I forgot to mention this in the video but I thought I'd clarify; I used the original release of Half-Life 2 for testing, not the latest Steam version. EDIT 6/20/2023: I noticed a lot of confusion in the comments as to what video output I was using for the Original Xbox's footage. To be clear, I used a Pound HD Link cable so it would work with my HDMI capture card, it looks a good bit better than composite but probably not better than some good component cables. When capturing the footage it's possible that I had some settings set incorrectly in my capture software, which could explain the "blockiness" in the image. The PC footage was captured from the Ti 4200's DVI output, which is why it looks so much better. Just wanted to clear that up.

[@Psythik]

What I dont understand is why you didn't use an optimized version of XP (like Black Edition) for a more fair comparison.

[@girlsdrinkfeck]

@@Psythik thats why he said he used more RAM etc to make up the heavier OS resources , i doubt itll make much difference ,but dosnt hurt trying

[@SPNG]

@Psythik I tried MicroXP (which is extremely light) but it made virtually no difference. I think the performance difference boils down to optimization of the games themselves. Instead of developers having to optimize for many lower and higher end hardware configurations with various feature sets, they can make the most of what the Xbox has due to the invariable configuration. For one, it seems like Half-Life 2's maps had to be simplified a bit (you can actually see it in the video, a good amount of objects are missing) for the Xbox version to help with performance, where this wouldn't have been necessary on PC since people could run it on much more capable hardware. Also some devs were able to use some really clever tricks to get around console limitations (Like in Morrowind for example, the console could actually restart during a loading screen because it would run out of memory). Those are just a few examples, and that's unfortunately the issue with a video like this, it's pretty much impossible to replicate all the special optimization tricks that were used on the Xbox ports. Even then, I think it was still interesting to look at what these parts could do and I was sort of able to compensate for those difference thanks to the slightly faster hardware.

[@rhobson]

I love builds like this, basically a hommage to something with historical significance, and not just another "let's throw a huge amount of money at this and see how good it is". I only feel like some Windows tweaks and optimizations could give a better apples-to-apples comparison, specially in the frame times. I remember having a very low-end pc (in fact with a GeForce MX440!) and optimizing the windows installation was what 1) made possible playing quite a few games, and 2) sometimes made me reinstall Windows (you can only go so far...) :D

[@SPNG]

Thanks, so glad you enjoyed the build 👍 And bang on, If I end up improving this system with some better hardware I'll try and play around with nLite or some ultra light XP builds to see how much performance it can free up, at the moment I think it's holding things back a lot with all the extra bloat.

[@TheDiner50]

@@SPNG XP being bloated. Sure... Unless nLite or that there really exist ways back in the XP days to improve performance? Like common. Windows 7 and Vista sure. But XP? The original XP install? Bloated? Hardly think it is fair to call that bloated. I can be very wrong but XP was the days before stuff ran in the background for NO REASON but MS being MS.

[@ScreenSage_YT]

​​@@TheDiner50It's bloated compared to the original Xbox's OS. Edit: Grammar

[@randy206]

The pc may have been a few frames behind in all of your tests but the visual quality was far superior.

[@jnelen22]

@TheVilified I bet you rub Vaseline on your glasses to get that "analog feel"

[@jounalehtio2317]

VGA/DVI output is a big deal against S-Video out of XBOX

[@FSPersonalAcct]

​@@jounalehtio2317between that and the Xbox typically having culled textures due to it's extremely low VRAM definitely gives a few brownie points to the PC.

[@k.m.1524]

That is because he use composit instead of component output...

[@VexAcer]

I'm assuming you're talking about the video output which yeah the Xbox is pretty blurry usually. It can look pretty sharp w/ HD cables & progressive scan though. If you're talking about graphics then def no. NFSMW was running w/ lower effects across the board compared to the Xbox ver.

[@builder396]

I think the 1% lows being harder on the PC is just down to the framerate being uncapped. On a lot of games capping the framerate can alleviate some stutters, especially when there is a CPU bottleneck....and on a single core CPU this holds way more true than on modern systems. Basically if the framerate is uncapped the CPU will be constantly peddling data for new frames to the GPU and when things need to load in the CPU has to slam the brakes on that loop, which is the stutter. If the framerate is capped below whats achievable there are little pockets of breathing room for the CPU where it can catch up on such things so they wont cause stutters later on. These days issues like that almost exclusively plague games that run primarily on a single thread, that bottlenecks that CPU thread, or if the CPU is a 4c/4t or even 2c/4t model on a game that actually utilizes more cores and has to shuffle several workloads in one CPU thread.

[@btarg1]

Linus Tech Tips a while back did a video booting the modified version of windows that the xbox uses on a dev kit, it would be neat to see the real xbox software running on hardware like this one day

[@legendsflashback]

Which windows, 2000?

[@genericjosh96]

@@legendsflashbackno a pirate version of the Xbox Alpha dev kit software. You can make a reproduction alpha dev kit with the software but it needs to be the exact right hardware for it to boot up

[@legendsflashback]

@@genericjosh96 ah ok thanks, I'll look into it

[@yellowknight11.1]

'xboxkrnl.exe' isn't Windows 2000

[@jacksonburch487]

I found my dads old Xbox and it amazes me how low the specs are but how well the games play. The games are so optimized it’s astonishing

[@SPNG]

That's awesome! And I agree, it's games are very impressive considering some of the limitations developers had to work around. On the homebrew side it had some very impressive stuff as well like Surreal64, it's a beast of a system. Thanks for watching man👍

[@03chrisv]

At the time the specs were high end and the games reflected that. It seems like you're young so from your perspective the Xbox is basically a potato so it might be hard for you to truly grasp how games ended up looking as good as they do, but if you were there back in 2001 to witness the launch of the Xbox you would have totally expected the quality of graphics from the specs it had compared to the other consoles.

[@patcho85]

@@03chrisv yep, me and my friends were absolutely blown away by Halo back in the day. Every console generation was such an improvement, was great days

[@aleksazunjic9672]

XBox, PS2 and partially Game Cube were first true 3D consoles, in a sense they had enough power to render 3D polygons that looked like real people, not collections of cylinders and spheres. They also had Z-buffer, so you could actually have some rudimentary textures on them, not just 2D wallpaper. All this was happening at the time when LCD TVs and monitors were still expensive, so most of these games were played on CRT stuff, thus low FPS and resolution was not such a big issue.

[@realspeedghxst]

@@aleksazunjic9672 and being played on a crt is better cus you know picture tube artifacts like blending effects and soft blurring like natural anti-aliasing, no sample and hold = clear image, and back then LCDs sucked with pixel response

[@crazedlunatic43]

The three major systems from the sixth generation each used different instructional sets from one another, like the GameCube using a PowerPC based instructions, the PS2 using MIPS based instructions, and the Xbox using good ole x86 based instructions. The system that would likely pose the biggest challenge to build would be the PS2, due to the complicated and proprietary nature of the EmotionEngine CPU, and Graphics Synthesizer GPU respectively. Other components within the PS2 are also a lot different than a standard PC’s components, which is why PS2 emulation is notoriously more difficult to achieve despite renewed interest within the PS2’s library. With GameCube, it may be possible to get away with using some off the shelf components since it’s architecture is very similar to that of a PowerPC 750 (The iMac G3) along with some form of custom ATi graphics. In a way, the GameCube is basically more of an iMac system of that time period and less about being a Windows system.

[@Tonba1]

Should be noted that the 733 coppermine in the xbox is modified a ton so its overall performance is actually alot closer to a 1ghz p3

[@LionWithTheLamb]

It is a 733Mhz Coppermine CPU, it has the 128K cache like a Celeron instead of the 256K cache of the Pentium III. The CPU uses a standard 133Mhz Front Side Bus common on Pentium III. It's actually LESS performance than a 733Mhz Pentium III due to the 128K less cache. Don't go believing everything you read or hear on the internet. I remember this in discussion boards way back when the XBOX was released.

[@LionWithTheLamb]

I forgot to mention that the reason the Intel processors had 128K instead of 256K cache isn't only that it was deemed that consoles didn't need the extra cache. Many of the XBOX consoles processors are failed Pentium III with 1/2 of the cache disabled repurposed to work in the Xbox. These processors otherwise would have been scrapped.

[@RetroRefreshments]

I had that exact PC tower for my very first PC build my dad and I did together when I was twelve. Boy that was a blast from the past!

[@thesteammachine1282]

Had the exact same PC case back in 2004-2005 . Used to be a 1.5gb of ddr 400mhz, a p4 3ghz and a ati 9600 xt 256mb. (cant believe i still remember XD) . Only one fan at the side of the pc and everything was cooking inside. In summer had to open the side panel but just slightly as the fan was attached to the motherboard and using what was opened, place a big fan next to the pc to blow inside HAHAHA ! This case brought out some good memories mate, thank you ! Half Life 2, Painkiller, Doom 3 and Far Cry original,Yeger and CS 1.6 all on that machine. Good times :) Interesting enough, I actually started with the OG xbox before having the pc and still have it and collect for it.(playing the same games I did on the pc but now collecting these versions on the xbox )

[@SPNG]

Nice, that would have been an awesome system for the time! My old family PC we had growing up was very similar (3GHz P4, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9200). And yeah haha, this case's airflow isn't the best, thankfully these components don't consume a lot of power so in the end it runs pretty cool. Glad you enjoyed the video man, I appreciate the comment! 🙏

[@joebloggs1691]

It blows my mind how they got HL2, DOOM 3 and Conker Live and Reloaded on these specs. Live and Reloaded looks like an early 360 game with really good textures and fur that looks good to this day.

[@davidcolmenares8788]

How any of the splinter cell games runs flawlessly on the og Xbox is the real deal.

[@pawnstarrickharrison7225]

Honestly a lot of the games that are on the Xbox are impressive. I mean the other sixth gen consoles were too but the Xbox was the most powerful out of them all and when the devs put in work for the extra detail etc it paid off.

[@DunklerZebralord]

Wow now that’s what I call a creative idea for a video. Very interesting project. Love it!

[@SPNG]

Appreciate the kind words 👍 Been wanting to do a video on this idea for a long time, so glad you enjoyed!

[@Ieatcrayons.]

Yes, literally my phone that’s how bad it is

[@Jack-pc9sp]

Awesome video, would love to see a sequel to the video using the suggested CPU upgrades and improved RAM speed

[@SPNG]

Definitely coming at some point, just need to get ahold of the hardware 👍

[@stephensalex]

Really enjoyed this! You've gained a subscriber dude.

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated man 🙏 Thanks for watching

[@drebolacat2469]

this is an idea that i’ve had for a few years now, nice to see that someone else thought the same

[@tthankyy7856]

Love your channel, it's underrated. Keep doing good work my man.

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated 🙏

[@DarrenReidAu]

Nice video, good old Socket 370 system is great to see in a build on KZbin! I built a few back in day, many thanks!

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated man 🙏Glad you enjoyed the build, it's my first time with S370 but was really fun to figure out!

[@amorathecat]

Loved the video! Very informative and entertaining. Thank you! Earned my sub.

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated 👍Welcome to the channel! 👋

[@quanli-qi4270]

Nice video really impressed with the quality keep it going 👍🏼

[@SPNG]

Thanks!!

[@_pixelatedsilver2a412]

great idea for a video! the xbox version of HL2 has a ton of map changes to remove props, decals, or add walls to block off sightlines so that certain areas can stay undrawn from certain viewpoints. You can see a lot of the missing stuff during the comparison of the two versions. I _think_ the BSPs from the xbox version may load on the PC version, but if not I'm sure someone out there has made a compatible version given how the source modding community is.

[@SPNG]

Thanks, I appreciate it! And yeah they definitely changed some of the maps for Half Life 2, playing through it a bit they seemed much more fragmented to stay within the console's limitations. At first I didn't notice some of those subtle prop differences in that segment of Water Hazard but looking side by side there's definitely quite a few changes, really shows the game wasn't just a straight port to the Xbox.

[@huskers1278]

You've earned a new subscriber. Absolutely amazing video!

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated man🙏So glad you enjoyed!

[@PurpleSanz]

You forgot Doom 3! That would have been the ultimate test! Even today, people are still wondering how the original XBOX was able to run that. Also, you could disable VSYNC from NVIDIA Control Panel (or enable Triple Buffering if you wanted to keep VSYNC on), set your Texture Filtering to Performance and Power Management Mode to Prefer Maximum Performance. You could also set your Power Settings to Always On, from Windows Control Panel, and disable all the Windows animations, shadows and theme to maximize your available RAM; you could even disable a lot of stupid services that you won't need at all, like printing or the firewall and stuff. Hell, I would even kill explorer.exe from Task Manager and run the games exe file from there instead. ;D Nice video, man!

[@SPNG]

Ah, you're right! That was another system killer for the Xbox, such an impressive port for the time. I have plans to throw a super slimmed down copy of XP or 2000 at this thing to hopefully free up some performance in a follow up video, I'll definitely use Doom 3 there👍 Thanks for watching, I appreciate the comment

[@user-jb5hu2wr3t]

GTA vice city and Unreal Chamopionship ran also great!

[@user-jb5hu2wr3t]

bruh even Burnout 3 and Burnout revenge played well

[@PardusRain]

This is interesting, looking at things the dips in places might actually be the more complete kernel also fun trivia going by xp's kernel version of 5.1 Vs 2000's of 5.0 seemed like it was very close setup wise.

[@weaselot2213]

Wow, I thought I was watching a video on a 100+ thousand subs channel. Great video, very interesting to watch. Thank you and good luck!!

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated🙏

[@michaelwhitacre8499]

Thank you for actually building this! I've pondered the same thing for years after modding my original Xbox and learning that its essentially a PC. Even when you look inside the case it's set up in a very similar fashion to a PC

[@fuchsiafire6932]

Loved the video, it would be interesting if you could do other console equivalents like the ps2 or the gamecube

[@yeahboi1999]

Vid deserves way more views :P great vid

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated 👍

[@AlberthAndrade]

Nice video, bro! Congrats! I can't wait to watch the next comparison: X360 PC vs X360.

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated👍Maybe at some point, I will say though the X360 is a whole lot harder to match spec for spec due to its PPC CPU and weird GPU

[@songsan807]

It's great how you able to get a close match of the XBox specs and get some great numbers. I remembered back in the late 90s were trying to get Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 computers to run Playstation games and it could not match the performance of a PS1 console when the cpu is only like 33Mhz.

[@NewportBox100s]

Great video! Subscribed. 🥶🥶🥶

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated man🙏Welcome to the channel!

[@ravajbains8672]

Awesome video dude you've earned a sub

[@SPNG]

Thanks for watching, and welcome to the channel 👋

[@finnbianga4189]

I love that you used the Windows XP installation music at 6:00

[@FSPersonalAcct]

I believe that's Gran Turismo music but it definitely sounds similar

[@Meansoduck]

man you know your shit. love smart tech tubers. great vid!

[@ARTala88]

Nice video to see. Thank you, it was entertaining

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated 👍

[@outtheredude]

As a general rule, for a PC that's equivalent to a particular console, I just go with double the CPU. Pretty much takes care of the background stuff of a general purpose OS, as well as the PC versions of games typically not being as tightly optimised as the console versions. So, something like an Athlon XP 2000+ (@ 1.67GHz) with a 128MB GeForce 4 Ti 4200 and 1GB of DDR memory using XP 32-bit made sense to me back in the day for something like XBox level stuff. A dedicated hardware accelerated sound card, such as an Audigy SB0090 also helps.

[@SPNG]

Would definitely help here, even with this 1GHz P3 we're very CPU bound. And funny you say that, the system I pulled this Ti 4200 out of had an Athlon XP 2000+ that I took along with it. Only reason I didn't use the board is because it was sitting outside for a long period of time and most of the caps had blown. Just thought that was a funny coincidence.

[@cedric7751]

Consoles handle state changes several order of magnitude faster than PCs so they are much less likely to be CPU bound when rendering many objects. I remember running 30k instanced drawcalls on a 2014 ps4 dev kit at 60fps when the most powerful PC CPU at the time was struggling with 5k. Since consoles use fixed hardware, the components can communicate directly using specific, optimized commands instead of being "translated" by generic APIs like on PC. In the test, the PC greatly benefited from a better cooling system allowing it to keep the throttling down to a minimum (and greatly increasing the power consumption). The Xbox did not have a fan blowing air directly on the heat sink, it was just a single fan circulating air in the entire case, tho it was located right next to the cpu heat sink. Using a cooling system that dissipates as little heat as the xbox, the PC would have fared much worse.

[@CarbonPhoenix96]

I cracked up at 9:20 when you called coruscant "croissant" 😂

[@FSPersonalAcct]

Me too

[@SPNG]

Fighting a war on 🥐

[@mattpierce5009]

Awesome video. Just wanted to add a data point - I impulsively bought that same Compaq motherboard a month ago on eBay, and right after paying for it I remembered that OEMs got stupid with PSU pinouts in that era. So I got ready to build an adapter, looked up the pinouts and noticed they were similar enough it should be safe to try a 20-pin ATX PSU, leaving the +4 pins empty. It works! The one caveat - the machine starts itself up as soon as you switch on from the back, but it's a small price to pay because you can just jam it in any ATX case and apparently use a regular 20 pin supply. TBH I don't know why Compaq felt they needed the extra voltage pins, to my eyes it's a pretty standard P3 board of the era and it works just fine without them, even with a later AGP card like a 2600 Pro and a pin-modded Tualatin. If I were less lazy I could swap the power sense pin to avoid the self-powering issue but hey, I'm satisfied with a working cheap P3 board. Thanks for the great video, love stuff like this, subbed

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated, glad you enjoyed! It was definitely a bit of an impulse buy for me as well, at the time I couldn't find much else that met my requirements for a decent price aside from a Dell board with a really weird PSU connector, so I settled on this thinking it was gonna work without a hitch😅 Interestingly enough I tried a 20-pin PSU as well but it didn't work! At that point I just went straight into looking for the original PSU, scouring the web to find any pictures of the inside of some of those Compaq DeskPros. Eventually I found out it used this PSU and I just picked one up, thankfully it wasn't too expensive. Glad it worked with a standard one for you though, its not a bad board considering how cheap you can get it. Thanks for the sub, and welcome to the channel! 👋

[@Dracconus]

I have to admit: I was EXTREMELY skeptical, and avoided clicking on this for a few days because I figured it was some janky video of someone building a PC from the same era, not knowing the differences in technology (especially around that timeframe.) Not only did you surprise me by trying ot do it right, you went above and beyond on listing specifications and information most people don't even UNDERSTAND and took the time to explain it too. Kudos, my man, you just earned a fuggin sub from someone that's been in the industry for over 20 years now. *Sidenote* God, I don't miss protruding capacitors right by the GPU slots.

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated man 🙏Glad you enjoyed! I definitely wanted to take my time to do this one right and be as detailed as possible without the video feeling like a drag, I'm glad I accomplished that to some degree 😀Thanks for the sub, and welcome to the channel! (PS: I don't miss those either lol!)

[@mindphaserxy]

During the original Xbox era I had a Pentium III 866Mhz, Geforce 4 MX440 64MB in a machine with 256MB of RAM and typical 7200RPM HDD and DVD-ROM. It kept up well enough. Titles like Max Payne and GTA3 ran pretty well at 800x600. I was always into stuff like Civilization III and Age of Empires 2 and it was a great PC for that.

[@dr.feelgood5048]

Killer specs for the day

[@coloradokoolaid]

i have those same fan protectors. good man.

[@eddyboicollins]

glad that the algorithm brought me here! yes, that's exactly what I want KZbin to recommend me! gg bro subbed btw

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated man 🙏 so glad you enjoyed. And welcome to the channel!👋

[@cybersamiches4028]

That's my old case back in 2003! So cool

[@zachg2229]

This was very interesting to watch, especially the half life 2 comparison. I've said before that i think the xbox port of half life 2 perfectly captures what it was like to run half life 2 on an average/older pc in 2004. My older brothers pc ran almost exactly the same as the xbox port but he couldn't beat it on the pc because of bad stuttering issues and crashes from time to time. His buddy lend him a copy of the xbox port almost a year later and when i watched him play it on there, it legit looked and played the same, just without the stuttering.

[@mutemiz]

This throwback tugs at my heartstrings

[@yaniayache5132]

Nice video man keep going, I wanted to ask you what's the song you used when Putting the pc together i think they've used it in gran turismo 6

[@SPNG]

Sorry to get back so late but it's Yusuke Yamamoto - Lunar Mare. Love the GT6 soundtrack!

[@LukesGamePage]

Brilliant video xxxx

[@shotgunl]

Excellent, fun video!

[@SPNG]

Thanks, glad you enjoyed man. Good to see you around here again 👍

[@shotgunl]

@@SPNG I've been watching them all though usually on secondary screen while working on stuff. I always mean to post, but that just hasn't been happening. I know that they are not 100% like-for-like (there are some gameplay and some geometry differences in the shared levels), but I'd be interested in how you feel Unreal Championship performs on the XBox versus Unreal Tournament 2003 on the XBox-equivalent PC. I had a lot of fun playing UC both alone, splitscreen with roomates/friends, and on XBox Live, but it certainly didn't run at as high of a framerate as UT2003 on the TBird 1.4 and Ti4400 (and athlon was a bit long in the tooth by then). I probably have UBench benchmark results somewhere of that setup in a backup, but I'm not sure exactly which discs those would be on. I do have a few screenshots that are in a backup of my documents that I do have available that I believe is from that given the creation date, and of the one's with stat fps shown: one's in DM-Antalus at 1280x960 and shows 53.5, DM-Asbestos at 1600x1200 with no AA (at least's that's how this and the other asbestos ones are labeled) at 59fps, Asbestos at 1600x1200 with 2xAA at 38fps, Asbestos at 1600x1200 with 4xAA at 22fps, Asbestos at 1600x1200 with quincunx at 32fps, Asbestos at 1600x1200 with 4x-9tap AA (I don't even remember what that AA was to be honest) at 21fps, and CTF-Citadel with other players at 1023x768 at 54fps. I had thought I had bought the 21" Acer P211 monitor in late 2003 around when the Ti4400 died, but I must have bought it earlier in the year because these are from march and I remember the 17" KDS I had only supported up to 1280x1024. I was having issues with the KDS, but I thought I replaced it later but guess not. The Antalus one is in a game, but I think the Asbestos ones are just offline solo with no bots. I'm just posting those numbers because I have them available and as a perspective of how I was experiencing UT2003 at the time versus Unreal Championship. I don't suppose you played UC or UT2003 when testing these? ha, I doubt since they are not *exactly* the same game (I know Asbestos has a lot of geometry changes, and a lot of less geometric detail...I know you can easily notice it in the room with the turbine and the super shield pickup that requires a dodge to reach in UC). But, I don't expect you to go test anything; I'm just curious if you had any experience with both games and had thoughts on the performance, since the Unreal and UT series are some of my favorites (so many hours of UT'99...even thought it was old by XBox Live's launch, I wish it had got a port to the Xbox, since both the DC and PS2 ports are not as performant as they could be). It may be capped at 30fps on XBox, but I'm not sure. It certainly drops with a lot going on or with bots. Still it was fun, and without it we might not have got Unreal Championship 2 on the Xbox, one of the most raw-fun arena shooters ever made (it's not as *good* of a game design as the original UT or 2004, IMO, but it's just fun, fun, fun).

[@bookshelffury]

Subbed for the Gran Turismo lounge music lol

[@SPNG]

Glad you enjoyed, there's a lot more where that came from 👍I'm a big fan of the lounge themes

[@coreytaylor7367]

Would love to see you try an optimized/lightweight windows XP and maybe custom drivers 👌 keep up with the videos. Subbed.

[@SPNG]

Appreciate the sub, welcome to the channel!👋I want to try stripping down a copy of XP/2000 with nLite or something to see if I can free up some performance.

[@coreytaylor7367]

@@SPNG if anything it should at least improve 1% lows. Curious about performance uplift overall though. Look forward to more. Got quite a few videos of yours to catch up on though lol.

[@MotownBatman]

New Sub! Dryden, MI I had a Dell Mini Tower that Came with the PIII 733Mhz, It makes out at 756 Ram: Win2k SP4 I was able to find the beloved PIII 1Ghz for it, No AGP so I had a PCI 128Meg GeForce (This was 2k5-ish) It was fun for Quake III Arena & Tiger Woods, but I used it mainly as a DVD/Xbox "Backup" Burner & Stuck to Modding the hell out of ever OG Xbox I could find. Mine had a 700Gig Hdd with Everything! Great Vid!

[@SPNG]

Thanks for your support, welcome to the channel 👋Sounds like it was a great system, ironic that it ended up being used for some Xbox related things! Cool that you were modding Xboxes as well, they're really fun to tinker around with. For now I just have a softmodded console with a bigger hard drive and am trying to build up some courage to install a modchip or something...😅

[@MotownBatman]

@@SPNG I was always Software Mods, Couldnt Afford the Mod-Chips, and then once I mastered SoftModding, I didn't really see the reason for the ModChip lol

[@StevenReviews]

Great Video!

[@SPNG]

Thanks! 🙌

[@JamesnLollify]

I've been waiting for this

[@BeefLettuceAndPotato]

Extremely well done video. Earned a sub from me for sure. Would love to see your take on socket FM2(+) apu's. They got me through college and man I'd love to see them fly again today lol. that 5800k could kill some runescape man, let me tell ya. haha

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated man 👋Welcome to the channel! If I can track down an FM2 based system I'll absolutely be reviewing one of those APUs, they're very intriguing!

[@DuneRunnerEnterprises]

Oh,got myself them some FM2+ of mining rig (the first wave of). It was a .., let's say not a very good idea.

[@gt8200-0]

I've got an AMD A6-9230 laptop CPU. Annoyingly it's in a desktop so I can't upgrade it.

[@GRIFAbyte101]

I'm actually still running an A8-6600K in my main system, and I'd say about 5 years ago is when software stopped running reliably on the poor thing. 😅

[@robertchamberlin2362]

Paint the pc case green and black like the xbox .Give it that whole xbox theme.Great Video!

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated 🙏Definitely plan to give the case a facelift, probably give the silver front panel a black finish and throw in some green LED fans👌

[@rare6499]

Brilliant video!

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated man 🙏

[@uk4890]

Great vid. You missed Unreal Tournament 2003/Championship

[@SPNG]

I appreciate it man, definitely looking to test one of the Unreal games in the follow up video.

[@simone.giordano]

A good follow up video would be an upgrade for this or another pc build console!

[@SPNG]

I have plans to throw a proper motherboard, some faster RAM, and an extremely slimmed down copy of 2000/XP at this thing to see how much it helps. I think the OS especially has the potential to free up some performance.

[@NinTech]

Good job mate!💪🏻 This PC is awesome: historically accurate and nice built👌🏻🤩 A very interesting comparison! Greetings from Italy😉😎

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated, glad you enjoyed 🙌

[@DuneRunnerEnterprises]

Oh,and a MOST important sign of the original XBox- an "X" on it!!!

[@serch_1x]

Finally someone did this video, thanks man.

[@SPNG]

Appreciate the comment, really glad you enjoyed 👍

[@lifelfe]

Where it gets interesting is using specific versions of the game, such as the Refined Mod for HALO or the Xbox graphics fixes in GTA 3 or build 2153 of HALF-LIFE 2, METAL GEAR SOLID 2 with the Vs fix. All in all it's to be expected and the PC is still served better by a slightly higher spec level for XP, but this is an excellent showcase to show those old lying around parts can indeed be put to use with care. Considering the highest potential possible GPU for Windows XP is the 780 Ti / 980 Ti / 1080 or 2080 potentially there is no reason to use anything but those except in extreme compatibility instances, however an 8800 GT would get the job done excellently with the added benefit of going to 1080p or potentially higher all the way to 4k with MULTI-GPU or XP64 with high end processors, RAM includ and a good solid Motherboard. Could even throw in an X-Fi EAX sound device if possible

[@blazeaster]

bro i opened this cause the case in the thumbnail was the exact same case i had on my first ever computer. i still have that machine to this day lol

[@WinXP_SP1]

Very neat video! It is unfortunate we can't get a true experience due to the RAM issue.

[@sammacin4082]

I have this PC case with a slightly different side panel. They look nice if you paint the inside matte black

[@DrNekobeard]

Such a neat little build

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated 👍

[@Retrodan680]

Great video!

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated 🙏

[@OsX86H3AvY]

Great video - keep it up please!

[@FSPersonalAcct]

SPNG never disappoints.

[@SPNG]

Much appreciated🙏There's more coming!

[@DeafOnAllFronts]

Gotta also note half life 2 in Xbox has a lot of removed textures and background elements have been removed as you can clearly see in the comparison video to save on memory

[@GraveUypo]

most games had "downgrades" to run on the slow cpu

[@stasprze1685]

I think you can actually get the Xbox OS installed if you use the developer version.

[@yeetusduck14]

5:54 gran turismo 6 music, nice

[@SPNG]

Love GT6's soundtrack!

[@yeetusduck14]

@@SPNG same, this and 5's are really relaxing

[@TrevorLentz]

It would be cool to see loading time differences between the two systems. I can't imagine morrowind loading slower on PC, even with the limitations of the adapter used with an SSD. Very cool video and presentation. 🙂

[@SPNG]

Something I might try in the follow up to this video! And thanks, glad you enjoyed 👍

[@KopperNeoman]

It's especially interesting to note that the Xbox actually reboots itself sometimes when loading in Morrowind. Now THAT'S a cache-clearing trick PCs can't do!

[@Ayixlia]

This was fun now do the Xbox 360 comparison to a gaming PC off the shelve parts!

[@TehObLiVioUs]

I swearrrrrrrr I had an old PC case like that yearssssssss ago omg with the big X and everything wow nostalgia

[@applepoop10]

Great video! Could you do the Xbox 360 next?

[@SPNG]

Thanks👍Possibly, but I need to do a lot more research on equivalent parts. Things get much harder when it comes to the 360 because of its Triple Core PowerPC CPU and its 240SP sort-of-but-not-really Terascale 1 GPU, both of which there very few/no analogues for when it comes to more standard PC parts.

[@FreeManFreeThought]

For power supply: my solution for a similar rig was getting a new corsair box that had the right power output, then splicing the appropriate connectors onto it. Janky? Sure, however I'd rather that then trust a power supply that old without basically recapping the whole thing. As for morrowind: personal experience is that on PC it ran much better with ati cards, my much more capable 2006 rig has the same slowdowns if I have an nvidia card in it, but with an ati card it's flawless. I have no idea why, just something that I have noticed.

[@_LeMKo]

Wow Amazing Case 0_0

[@dustmighte]

Every tech video should use Gran Turismo music. Good choice

[@SPNG]

I loved GT6 and GT5's soothing lounge music, makes for nice BGM!

[@TheGlitchyMario]

You can even make a dev kit using generic hardware! The parts are expensive tho

[@RicardoRamosRetrocomputacao]

Finally someone who designed a machine with the right features. I've always discussed this on the forums, the computer needs to have a little more memory and mhz for cpu due to the unoptimized OS. However, it is possible to optimize XP to get 20 or 30% more performance. One important thing that you haven't thought of doing is using the game files from the xbox version on the pc. Some games use the same textures and engine scripts between platforms, but xbox tends to be more optimized, like morrowind for example, it must be rendering less cells on xbox.

[@SPNG]

Thanks, when using a standard version of Windows you really have to compensate, imagine how slow these games would have run with a standard 733 P3 😆I never thought of that, I'll give that a try and see what kind of difference it makes in some games! Thanks for watching, I appreciate the comment!

[@JimProfit357]

I had the ambition of building console themed PCs, but due to the custom silicon used, I had to plan it a bit creatively, taking advantage of retro proprietary APIs and their exclusive games, to make some sort of alternate universe, souped-up versions of said consoles with relatively period-accurate x86 CPUs. -Saturn is obvious, the NV1 uses quadratic textures and exclusive support of a handful Sega games, unfortunately it's impossible to find at a decent price. -For a PS1-themed PC I would use an ATI Rage Pro Turbo (non-128). The 3DCIF API has that rough raw grainy look, has exclusive support for a few iconic PS1 games (WipEout, Tomb Raider) and I believe has enough oomph for later games such as FF7/8 and MGS. -A N64-themed PC would IMO use a Voodoo card, for the sole reason that both 3DFX cards and the N64 have Silicon Graphics DNA. I think the softer output of Voodoo 1&2 matches the look. -A Dreamcast-themed PC would use a Kyro card, with its tile-based rendering, too bad those dropped support for the PowerSLG API, which would have made such a build a bit more meaningful. As for PS2 I have no idea, and every major console after that uses some sort of AMD/NVidia chip...

[@SPNG]

Those are some good ideas for console equivalents! Funny enough I actually have a Rage Pro Turbo, before getting this system I couldn't test it out as I didn't have something AGP 2x capable but hey, maybe its time to give it a shot? I appreciate the comment! 👍

[@jackedup447]

PS2 probably dosen't have a equivalent considering its wacky architecture.

[@TheBonelord]

Excellent video

[@SPNG]

Thanks, glad you enjoyed!

[@lucasm20]

The Morrowind Xbox port was heavily optimized to get it working at all, to the point it apparently soft reboots the console while loading areas so it can clear the ram. I'd guess that helps a lot against the PC version.

[@dvlx8453]

wow very high quality content

[@10WA]

Funny I never knew my PC at the time was about the same as my Xbox. It had a Pentium III 900mhz, 512mb ram, Geforce4 Ti 4200 128mb. Ran games great at the time. Played tons of Sims, Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honors, and the first Call of Duty.

[@MsVlad54rus]

Another thing worth mentioning is hardware DSP processing support on Xbox. Some games, like Serious Sam 2 and NFS, use it to provide reverb effects in enclosed spaces, just like they do with EAX on PC.

[@jonathanellis6097]

Yeah I was thinking this as well. A creative sound blaster live, or Audigy, can be picked up quite cheep, and would be a massive upgrade compared to on board audio back then. It would probably have also made a difference to the performance as sound processing would have been handled in hardware by the card, where as I'm guessing the onboard is probably not fully accelerated.

[@christopherduke875]

I was running dual slot 1 board with 733MHz. Almost everyone I knew was already onto P4 if they were using Intel when xbox got released. I used to set all of windows processes to use one CPU and then run games on the other CPU.

[@blood....]

great video loved it

[@SPNG]

Thanks, so glad you enjoyed 👍

[@WilliamMcCarthyIII]

I have one of those PC cases! My dad bought like 15 years ago and never used it. I built a PC out of it for a friend.

[@AndysocialUK]

You can buy adapter cables for the PSU so you can use a standard ATX PSU, rather than the proprietary HP one where they swapped some pins around. I converted an old HP Z400 workstation into a gaming machine a few years back with one.

[@nickolaswilcox425]

the alpha dev kits are the best example for this, mostly off the shelf pc hardware and running a much more versatile operating system than the retail units

[@Biaanca5036]

geforce4(and FX. I had both) haaated Aniso Filtering in halo, if you turn that off in the driver manager you can get awesome framerates on HaloPC (at least at 640 /// 800) (and well.. I don't see why it needs to be ON if the premise is to 'mimic' the xbox 😄)

[@piti_rocks]

I was hoping for a GTA SA comparison. Nice video!

[@SPNG]

Thanks, glad you enjoyed! I plan to follow this video up at some point with some general improvements to the setup, San Andreas is a good one to add to the game list.

[@Mister_Shane]

I would have used an under-clocked Athlon and an nVidia nforce chipset based motherboard to get the Soundstorm audio. But I get why you went that way.

[@Ratich]

Regarding the PSU, it's primarily the fault of the platform and not the motherboard this voltage configuration can also be found at the Athlon XP platform from AMD. The modern voltage configuration was introduced with the Socket 478 platform and the Athlon 64.

[@zebubble2084]

The small unified memory pool wasn't all bad, and part of why it punches above similarly spec'd PCs. The RAM and bus everything was connected to it was extremely fast and efficient. A build that matches Xbox's performance needs to use parts that are quite a bit more powerful because the modular architecture and buses simply weren't as optimal back then. The OS and API were closer to 'metal' too, and devs didn't have a moving hardware target to consider. One also has to consider port quality, as many of these were poor back in the day. Many more factors to consider other than OS background processes, but maybe disabling services and checking CPU usage would have helped slightly in your testing, especially as XP is pretty bloated compared to 2K, especially SP3.

[@DanceBruce]

I had a pentium 4 1.6Ghz with a GeForce 3ti 500 and i remember getting good frames for years and years. Its always good to have this video to show people that console to PC is not 1:1 and its still not to this day.

[@Redlight__]

I love this idea, fantastic stuff. any ideas to do a xbox 360 equivalent PC?

[@SPNG]

No concrete ideas but I would likely use an HD 2900 GT for the GPU as it has the same amount of SPs as the Xenos. For the CPU I'm not entirely sure, I would need to do a bit more research to find an x86 part that's close to the 360's custom PowerPC CPU in performance.

[@MandoMTL]

Literally my first PC, except I had a Voodoo 4 4500 slapped in. Good times playing Doom and Quake.

[@SPNG]

Nice, that would have been an awesome system for the time 👍

[@madmax2010ok]

Just curious and may have missed this... How did you load games into your xbox PC? Are you using a stock DVD player? Were the games pre-ripped on a real XBOX? Just curious... would love to install a quality drive in my OG-XBOX!