Let's Build A 2005 Retro PC: Athlon X2 3800+ - Nvidia 6800 GT - Classic Hardware For A Classic Era!

We're building a range of classic PCs to revisit some of the great games of their respective eras - and now it's time to construct a 2005-era machine to tackle some of PC's genuine greats: Doom 3, Oblivion, Far Cry, Half-Life 2. Join Alex Battaglia as he puts together this PC time capsule - and we answer the question, can it run Crysis? (Spoilers: absolutely not).
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[@SpacedAug]

This has to be Alex at peak German

[@CaveyMoth]

"Veestuh."

[@hendrikfaber1882]

@12:20 Writing legacy as legacz, those silly German keyboard layouts. Its confirm, Alex is a real Germen

[@nateriver7848]

This guy looks like he's about to challenge me to a race in the LA river.

[@billyb7119]

When you girlfriend tells you not to worry about the guy she's building a 2005-era retro PC with.

[@2drealms196]

Its pretty cool when Alex comes over. He brings me his high end laptop and headphones and lets me play RTX Minecraft while he works with my gf. I even get to make them breakfast in the morning and listen to Alex regale us with amazing DF stories.

[@DM-dk7js]

Hahahahahaha I read that as the dude popped on screen in that tank top and it fit perfect

[@h2oaddict28]

@Hallison Michel He wishes, lol.

[@rare6499]

Loooool

[@spht9ng]

@@2drealms196 Alex fanfics oh god

[@snmdair]

I remember building my first PC in 1995 and dreaming of building a dual core socket PC, and then fast forwarding to 2004 and building my first hyper-threaded rig and being so happy going into task manager and seeing 2 logical processors.

[@duffelpuffelmcduff1181]

What's your next milestone you're dreaming of hitting that you'll eventually look back on and laugh at?

[@SomeAngryGuy1997]

And now quad-core systems are the bare minimum

[@samhodgkinson8901]

I'm sorry I didn't realise I'd clicked an 80s aerobics video

[@0FFICERPROBLEM]

From a kitchen in 1990s Eastern Europe

[@emdea]

YES! Hardware porn... EDIT: Tucked in tank top and jeans was a typical 2000's look in Europe (especially Germany) and i'm guessing this is intentional given the time these components were released; nicely done :)

[@le4-677]

sicko

[@amilyester]

Yeah... Oh and the computer is great too, I guess.

[@EposVox]

AW HELL YEAH ALEX COMING OUTTA THE 80S FOR THIS

[@LNCRFT]

12:20 When Alex tries to type something on his German keyboard and gets confused with y and z.

[@peber13]

Guys, we need to support DF on patreon so Alex can afford sleeves!

[@HoudiniFontmeister]

Why doesn't this have more likes?

[@debrucey]

0:03 holy crap, I wasn’t expecting to be confronted with those guns 💪 🥵

[@tidjane2001]

Lol

[@404social]

Thats the power of Nvidia. lol

[@GunsNGames1]

Shit, if those are "guns" then I have cannons? I really need to improve my self esteem lol, wtf I'm thinking of myself?

[@peterkevintaylor]

Just missing the Freddie mustache fella...

[@BoyProdigyBaby]

Maybe there is some additional "content" for those on patreon...

[@albertotrigosbueno5547]

yeah there is no content in this video, 20 minutes wasted for nothing

[@RalphGoesToSpace]

Onlyfans

[@amilyester]

@@albertotrigosbueno5547 r/woosh

[@georgethomas4889]

I was going to like this comment, but I saw that it was on 69 and left it.

[@mage0killer]

I'm a straight man and even I am enthralled.

[@Beastw1ck]

Dude I started this video thinking I was straight now I’m not so sure

[@sdFreerey]

"People thought I was gonna go for XP, but I still love vista, baby!"

[@rob_i208]

Installing XP is actually a bit of a pain in the ass on a computer of this generation. SATA drives did not exist when XP Service Pack 3 was created. This means you either need 1) a floppy drive, 2) two cd drives, 3) boot XP installation from a USB drive, or 4) slip stream SATA drivers into your XP installation (what you'd probably do if you go with option 3 anyway). Everything considered I'd go for Vista SP1 over XP SP3 too.

[@teaser6089]

@@rob_i208 I would chose XP over Vista, probably cause I never upgraded or some would say, downgraded to Vista from XP, I went straight to Windows 7 after XP

[@AshBashVids]

@@rob_i208 "SATA drives did not exist when XP Service Pack 3 was created." Yes they did. I have installed XP many times without hassle on SATA drives. Put it on IDE mode and it picks up just fine, drivers were for AHCI (pointless unless you had a fast HDD to utilise it). You could install the driver later and switch to AHCI if you wanted. SATA has been around since 2000 and by 2008, when service pack 3 came out for XP, SATA was already at its 3rd revision. Also was when XP based netbooks were popular, all SATA drives ;)

[@antivanti]

Vista was a huge upgrade from XP. It was basically the drivers and bloatware that were not tested properly by the OEM builders. Fact is that the biggest difference between Vista and Win 7 beyond a visual change to Taskbar is that the drivers had had time to mature.

[@TechRyze]

@@antivanti Not completely correct, as the launch version of Vista was terrible, and Service Pack 1 wasn't massively better. Service Pack 2 on the other hand, paired with 3GB+ of RAM was pretty much Windows 7 without the new interface features, and was released pretty much at the same time as the Windows 7 RTM release became available in 2009.

[@Oheao]

Kurt Russell's Big Trouble in Little China outfit? 2005 wasn't that long ago!

[@MartinKincl1993]

Here's a couple more suggestions for games I would love to see run on your retro PC: Age of Empires III (2005) Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2005) Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005) Heroes of Might and Magic V (2006) Assassin's Creed (2007) Mass Effect (2007) Far Cry 2 (2008)

[@Mizgala28]

After dusting off my old notebook from 2010 (with Windows 7 Home Premium) my Index score is 5.8 (because of ram). Tried Crysis 1 on it and on 1280x720 at medium settings I get between 26 to 33fps (that is a surprise) Thx for the video, such a nostalgia

[@dianealastair3363]

You sound so giddy! It was so fun to watch!

[@kristianbeqiraj3340]

Alex looking like he's gona steal your girlfriend

[@shto4782]

Amma hide my girl now

[@santichulito]

Lmao, he is straight out from back to the future

[@WayStedYou]

@@santichulito Straight outta big trouble in little china

[@GT45000]

*boyfriend

[@MT-qt9mw]

Yeah sure, like we have any...

[@adamprestidge4775]

I for one, would like to know more about alex's knife collection lol

[@MrStrangermoon]

maybe hes the relaxingend.

[@postanimus8989]

I have bad memories with Vista. I remember my mother bought laptop with Vista installed, and it wouldn't even run some of files i tried. I clicked a file, there was "ring" over a pointer for a while and nothing happened. I tried another couple of files and when they didn't worked as well, i just grabbed my XP SP3 disk and installed an older system, where everything worked flawlessly.

[@ChadKenova]

I remember building a pc to play crisis back in the day it was a e8500, 4gb’s ram, 8800gt. I still have that pc today for nostalgia. The only thing i changed was adding a q9550 4 more gb’s of ram and a ssd. Back in day a faster dual core was better than a slower quad core in gaming and man the e8500 overclocked good.

[@powerspec88]

My PC from mid 2004 till 2007 was a P4@3.0GHz with HT (northwood core), 2GB DDR Corsair XMS, BFG 6800GT OC. I still remember playing Doom 3 and HL2 and being blown away playing these games maxed out. I miss those days of gaming.

[@rtmclean484]

MY system was almost identical but I had to settle for the 6600GT but it was still mind-blowing stuff to me at the time and I found I could max out HL2, Doom3 and Farcry at 1024x768 on that little card. 1280x1024 was a bit too much for it without dropping some settings.

[@steelscooter]

The GPU would have come with a DVI to VGA adapter dongle. 👍

[@nathanddrews]

Correct. I has a very similar 6800 that also came with an analog breakout cable. That's not just s-video, it can output composite and component as well.

[@guspaz]

@@nathanddrews This one doesn't support the breakout cable for component/composite. It's just got a standard 4-pin s-video connector, the ones that supported the breakout cables have more pins on the mini din.

[@stingymcduck5450]

13:03 Alex: what's the first thing we do? Me: install an antivi.... Alex: Crysis! We install Crysis! BTW, I almost expected the Crysis installer to ask "are you sure you want to install this game on THIS PC?".

[@EcofoodKazakhstan]

6800gt got me almost till the end of the 7th gen. It could run some really demanding games, Crysis for example ran with a custom cfg almost at a locked 30 fps, with shadows on. I completed Batman games, Mass Effect games, and a lot of other games using UE3. It ran Burnout Paradise perfectly well. TES IV Oblivion was a blast. Keep in mind though that there is a developer note from Nvidia that claims that shader performance on 6800 series increases manyfold in lower resolutions, so expect sticking to 800x600 and 640x480 in some games to get good framerates. No problem for a CRT though) And yeah - deluxe psus and many other pc parts are terrible. Here in CIS (former USSR republics) it is a very common brand. As for this PC - it reminds me my first one - Athlon 3000+ (754), 512 megs of ram, Asus mobo, GF6800gt... good times. 2004-2005 period is one of the best in history of gaming, also including Total War, Splinter Cell 3, Psychonauts for PC besides mentioned mammoths like HL2, Doom 3, Far Cry, etc, and also best Burnout games, RE4, MGS3, Halo 2, GTA:SA and many more. Nowadays I have beast of a PC and all the consoles, but games are just not as fun as they used to be. Greetings from Kazakhstan, Alex and DF. Even here there are fans of your show.

[@GunsNGames1]

You also have a KGB?

[@НиколаГеоргиев-ш2б]

A guy once told me that Delux PSUs are the best of the cheap no-name brands. And they are actually usable, at least for a while. I had one in my P4 machine that lasted over 5 years (and probably could still run with some caps replaced had I not killed the fan). That was a major improvement from the no-name PSUs in my Slot 1 machine, which malfunctioned 6 six times for 3 years and finally damaged the motherboard. My uncle still has a 24/7 running home server with a 500W Delux on his Core2 Duo machine (more than 12 years of use).

[@gunayorbay]

That Serious Sam look :D

[@sega_kid4288]

I was thinking Big Trouble in Little China lol

[@michiganjack1337]

Sega _Kid same here lol

[@jbscotchman]

Jack Burton

[@suncommander7102]

I wonder how many of you thirsty for this PC or Alex

[@amilyester]

I'm going to need some water cooling down here....Wew lad.

[@Khrada]

Both is good.

[@colemin2]

@@Khrada TO SHIBALBA!!

[@iam16bits]

When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, looks you crooked in the eye and asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: "Have ya paid your dues, Jack?" "Yessir, the check is in the mail."

[@skeletino420]

I can't believe youtube hasn't suggested this video to me! im a big DF fan and a huge fan of retro pc building content, been watching df for a lil over a year now too.

[@hooblefloob]

Alex here making the BFG look like a squirt gun

[@V1nhL]

Kinda reminds me of James Dean 😂

[@amilyester]

@@Gamerzguy2468 I mean...

[@xBINARYGODx]

I played Crysis on a 9800 GX2 at 720p (hooked up to the same tv the 360 was connected to) and had the setting all on High and was at 60 at least 95% of the time (this was back in summer of 2008). The CPU was an QX9650 and I don't remember the ram, but I think it was 4 gigs DDR2 (2x2GB). That same pre-built has been upgraded, piece by piece over time and there is now nothing left of it, which this being 12 years later is not much of a surprise. However, beyond the 2070 Super and the SSD, everything else is more 2002/2003 (haven't need to upgrade anything else).

[@MKR3238]

I equally love the video and comment section

[@tSunrise_]

Came for the Retro PC. Stuck around for those guns.

[@0xF00F00]

"someone aus Thüringen"

[@waveplay3978]

What a perfectly understandable slip of the tongue

[@HondaAccordPerformance]

Had to upgrade every year during this time period because performance doubled every year. A 7800gtx in 2005 was double the performance of a 6800gt and an 8800gtx from 2006 was over double that of a 7800gtx. I remember trying to run Call of Juarez on max settings with a 7800gtx and getting frame rates in the upper teens.

[@zipzeolocke2]

Yup it was roughly 7 FPS I got when I was determined to play half-life using my Windows 95 IBM Aptiva PC. The game itself took up 90% of the hard drive I was using at the time. I uninstalled practically everything for that one game to play it at 7 FPS and I actually adapted to that play style and managed to get through most of the game taking into account how long it would take for Gordon to make a jump across the gap after pressing the jump button. I learned and adapted to that crappy experience. It wasn't until years later when I got the fancy Pentium 4 PC, getting to play Half-life for the first time on a computer that could handle it. How much faster it felt was astonishing! I was shocked at the experience

[@danieldudas9026]

2005? You goin' for that Depeche Mode - A Pain That I'm Used To (Official Video) - Dave Gahan look?

[@mindblockandroid]

It's more of a big trouble in little china kurt russell look

[@madson-web]

@@mindblockandroid it is totally this look haha

[@DiegoPCMR]

Oh my, watching these kind of videos is so pleasant. Just to see the top notch hardware of those golden times.

[@IMIDelorios]

TERRA is a brand of Wortmann AG, a computer manifacturer from Hüllhorst, NRW. Fun fact: I assembled computers at Wortmann in 2004 :) (The case is a little younger though)

[@adiffkindofswag1148]

I had two a very similar PC in 2005. Athlon 64 X2 3800+ & 6600GT then upgraded to a 7800GT for Doom 3 a few month later.

[@UberNeuman]

"You know what old Jack Burton says when the chips are down and everything is going down the tubes. He says 'Let's build a PC!'"

[@coreclassic]

Athlon X2 3800+ was rather an early-mid 2006 part, and it was often paired with 7800GT or X1900GT. If you want a 2004-2005 matching build, this would be A64 3000+ or P4 3.0GHz with the 6800GT. This is what most people were rolling at the time. Your build looks more like a transitional one where someone just upgraded their CPU.

[@photonboy999]

He explained the part dates, but I think he's just trying to get as close as possible within the limits of what is available still on the used market.

[@GameplayandTalk]

Batman Returns Sega CD music? Instant "+1". *Edit: And Tetris CD-i music? John Linneman on editing duties, confirmed.

[@chuploops9973]

fun fact: you can still get a windows experience score by going into command prompt and typing "winsat formal"

[@iamsabit1337]

Great specular highlight on Alex’s hair!

[@returningwhisper]

The 6800GT was a beast, loved that card.

[@NeThsDomain]

Don't forget F.E.A.R.! Really put my little X300 to work. And I LANned a ton of CS:Source, COD2, BF2 and C&C Generals at the time.

[@KissesLoveKawaii]

wifebeater and all. quality video

[@StatusQuo209]

Hell yeah! And it's tucked in lol

[@QuadTubeChannel]

I had a 'Manchester' 3800+ x2 then later a 'Toledo-512k' 4200+ x2, the latter of which seemed much better at over-clocking; for instance, I could take it from 2.2 GHz stock to 2.7 GHz under-volted, using a stock cooler. Paired it with an OEM Geforce 9600 GS (48 shaders/768 mb 192-bit DDR2 VRAM) and Crysis ran well under XP for the most part (1024 x 768 with medium detail). The only part of the game that suffered was the section in the dark cave with heavy smoke effects. Even older games ran no sweat.. crank the eye candy to max and let it rip. Tons of games from this era just waiting to be enjoyed.. am currently playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein again on an XP rig and still loving it.

[@nykraftlemagnifique]

Wouhoooo ! The tshirt / marcel of Jack Burton !!! What a style ! Love it ! Jack Burton is an amazing movie !

[@freshprinceza5998]

“But can it run crysis” - the best way to test a PC :D

[@212809]

2005 was by far the most pivotal era in PC history. Many important tech milestones was reached, such as the introduction of dualcore CPUs, the move from AGP to PCI-E, DDR2 ram & multi graphics card setup SLI, Crossfire etc. The games back then were really good also. Kids today have no idea what they have been missing.

[@2quick614]

I would say around 2006 as well with the introduction of the Core 2 Line and 8800 series from Nvidia which was a game changer at the time. But yes 2005 was a huge change in pace.

[@Browniewaffels]

It's really weird hearing your germanic accent come through like this haha. I think you suppress it a bit more when you do Voice Overs in other showcase videos. Neat video!

[@x3mbr]

Got some Autogefühl vibes going on

[@albertotrigosbueno5547]

wolfenstein

[@CaveyMoth]

In the words of Eisbrecher, 'This Is Deutsch.'

[@amilyester]

Is Alex German-American or German-German? His English is great and his German, well, I'm not one to judge cos I don't speak it.

[@michaelsteffensen6844]

@@amilyester A lot of Germans I've known have great English, better than a lot of native speakers even.

[@stealthninja4299]

I had a Pentium Celeron 2.7 GHz which had 512 RAM which I upgraded to 768 and a Radeon 9800XT in 2004/5. Had so much fun with it playing Far Cry, Half Life 2 and Doom 3. Good times. Great video as always Alex🎮🙂

[@CaioHornstein]

I used to have Athlon XP 1900+ and a Radeon 9800 Pro back then. Great time for PC gaming.

[@joeygreathouse3029]

This is the exact system my older brother upgraded to. He gave me his old AMD 64 2800+ he had OC'd and paired with 9800 XT

[@dreammfyre]

Holy shit, I had that exact GPU cooler! I haven’t seen it in like 10 years. I’m trying to remember what card I had it on... a GeForce 5 something... maybe? I do have some vague memory about buying a second hand 6800, too, in like 2007-2008, that I then BIOS flashed into a GT. EDIT: Of course that non-name PSU didn’t work lol. I think everyone learned that lesson around 2005ish, too. So it not working was very time period currect actually!

[@rawsnake]

Ah the nostalgia. I had almost identical setup though i had a Gainward 8800GT (512 MB) and that helped a lot in Crysis. Thanks for this, brings back memories, 🍻 from Sweden!

[@QuadTubeChannel]

I remember back in the day the nVidia 8800 GT holding its own for a very long time.. incredible bang per buck. I remember seeing games like Crysis, GTA IV, Prototype and Left 4 Dead 2 running on this card and thinking to myself, this things kicks ass. Same for the 9600 GT. Due to finances I had to settle for a 'budget' 9600 GS which was technically inferior in terms of gaming (48 stream processors/shaders) but even then, this was a HUGE upgrade to the onboard Geforce 6100. With a S939 A64 4200+ I could run Cyris at 1024 x 768 medium with little problem, and as many PC gamer's will attest there's a universe of older games that are still awesome and will run extremely well on these cards with lots of eye candy. For example Far Cry, Doom 3, Prey, Mafia II, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Half-Life 2. Good times :)

[@NikiDaDude]

This takes me back. I had a GeForce 6800 you could unlock the full 16 pipelines with a simple software mod in Riva Tuner and basically get a 6800GT with slower memory.

[@PixelShade]

awsome tanktop Alex! I want one! You're rocking the "big trouble in little china"-look :D

[@enjirube1]

Wearing the Jack Burton vest from BTILC and beaming live from the set of the Hostel (nice knives) O_O

[@montygill2835]

It's all in the reflexes 😁

[@mainsource8030]

the check is in the mayal

[@HBlatz87]

DDR4-hundred? ::sees "DDR 400":: Oh DAMN this is old lmao

[@alejandromartinezgandara2302]

I had the 3800 and the 6800GT. I still have a dual core 4400+ and a x800xt AIW in a Shuttle. It rocked!

[@Haksdo2]

I still have a similar pc for older Windows XP gaming, with an Athlon 64 4800+, 4GB of DDR400 and an ATI Radeon X1950XTX. Some of those games are still way more fun then many of the current games and they run great on the older hardware.

[@kainthetrollreaver9270]

I find when you can get the older XP games working on new Win 10 hardware they can run a hell of a lot worse

[@johnbagley8211]

My build from the era (late 2004) Case: Roswill black ATX w/ acrylic side panel window PSU: Rosewill 500W Mobo: DFI nVidia nForce 3 AMD Skt 754 ATX Motherboard CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3700+ 2.4GHz Skt 754 CPU Cooler: Zalman CNPS9500 Copper Heatsink/95mm Fan Video Card: ASUS nVidia GeForce 6800GT 256MB AGP 8x RAM: Kingston 1GB (2x512MB) DDR 400 HDD: 2 x Seagate 160GB 7,200RPM PATA Hard Drives in RAID 0 Optical Drive: DVD/CD+/-RW 48x (or something) Combo Drive OS: Windows XP Pro 64-bit Ed

[@ThePeppermintGeezer]

Just remember what ol’ Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big ol’ storm right square in the eye and he says, “Give me your best shot, pal. I can take it.

[@Krisseck]

Damn, in 2005, I was jealous of anyone owning a 6800! Great nostalgia trip

[@joesterling4299]

I had (and still have) a Dell Dimension 8100 with an Nvidia FX5900, a Northwood P4, and 768 MB of dual-channel RDRAM. I used it through 2016. AGP went out of favor soon after I got the PC, so that gen of Nvidia card was the best upgrade I could get with the Intel i850 motherboard. Memory, same thing. DDR took over, and RDRAM became scarce and too expensive to upgrade very much.

[@amilyester]

I had an el cheapo 6200 lol. Bottom of the rung.

[@Nanogrip]

I remember buying a brand new 8800gt to replace my 7900gt just to play Crysis, I've never seen that level of graphics and interactivity in my entire life. Then TweakGuides came out with a .cfg guide to help improve visual quality while having better performance at that time, I used to remember many of the commands by heart, but as time went on and graphics cards became much more powerful and efficient, I found less time and need for tweaking those files. I still play Crysis to this day! There are some pretty good user single player missions that are worth checking out.

[@raresmacovei8382]

Can't wait for the Remaster this summer.

[@Nanogrip]

@@raresmacovei8382 Yes! Same here! Finally a reason to upgrade to a new PC setup.

[@mahdiyussuf9804]

Reminds me of my first full build as a young lad. I still remember the parts: Athlon 64 3500+, nVidia 6600GT pcie, 1GB DDR ram, MSI k8n neo4 Mobo, Thermaltake Tsunami dream case. 😎 Edit: the dual DVI-I was standard then. DVI-I, not DVI-D, so you can output analog VGA as well with a simple adapter that always was included with the GPU box. edit2: I remember those s-video outputs! Good old days, when you plugged in your computer to CRT tv....

[@li_tsz_fung]

The stock AM2 cooler is so easy to install for beginners. I love that

[@mahdiyussuf9804]

@@li_tsz_fung Yes!

[@Jomenaa]

I still have some prebuilt upgraded with HD 3850 256mb, 4000+ (yes, the single core one) and 4gb of ram sitting at my parents gathering dust. That used to be my gaming pc back in the day :D

[@SuperMikeKaos]

That's my motherboard... and my CPU ;) I always wondered where I left it...

[@Derpington95]

My 2004-2005 PC was: Asus A7N8X motherboard with nforce chipset AMD Sempron 2400+ 512 MB DDR RAM some cheapo 128MB ATi Radeon 9000 AGP card with passive cooling 80GB 7200RPM Maxtor hdd and 2 ODD drives (one was a CD burner, the other was a dvd reader). Needless to say that Doom 3 didn't run well. On the other hand we were upgrading from a 486dx2 and could finally watch Shrek 2 on it. I was also introduced to this forgotten game series named Call of Duty.

[@قايدالبل]

I had a 6800 AGP(x8) in 2005 and it did come with a DVI-VGA adapter included in the box if I am not mistaken

[@mesicek7]

I had the normal version of the board - The Ga-K8NF9 Paired with the Athlon 64 3000+ and the 6600GT gddr3

[@vincentwarte4435]

Gediegenes Fassungsvermögen, mein Freund. Sehr gediegenes Fassungsvermögen.

[@maikelbazov3631]

I had the same setup with 6600 GT. doom and quake 4 were out at time. such great times

[@KneppaH]

My first self-build game pc (2005) was an Athlon 64 3500+ with 2GB DDR400 and an Ati radeon x850XT PE. Total costs more than 3000 euro... At that time it was a very capable high end machine, but within 3 years new games were becoming totally unplayable. Missing shader 3.0. and the singlecore CPU became a bottleneck fast. Nowadays a 5 year old high end pc is still more than capable of playing newer games at higher settings. Few years ago I upgraded that first build to an Athlon64 X2 4200+, 4GB DDR400 , SSD and a 8800GTX. just for the fun of it and the low upgrade costs. Now it is the perfect windows XP machine it should have been back then :)

[@Space_Reptile]

This is not a legit German gamer pc from that time if it does not have a MEDION Crt

[@ChiefSpartan1]

I built a PC close to this a few years ago. It's awesome for old XP games

[@mrratchet]

Glad your install of Vista went well. I recently installed Vista on an old rig like this a week ago and I had to reinstall it a few times due to corruption. Don't even get me started on activating it. I had to call Microsoft since the network activation is known to be faulty. When I got through to them, the first rep promptly told me to "go to a forum or something" and then hung up. The 2nd rep however, was very helpful and got it activated nice and quick. Now trying to get Steam going is another story!

[@heh2k]

I still have my old pc with the same 6800GT GPU. Originally with dual opteron 250s (later upgraded to 252s), running early amd64 debian and win xp. I played doom3 under linux, and half life 2 and F.E.A.R. under win xp.

[@bluedragon219123]

This is like I went back in time to the 1950s and we went forward in time to 2005. :)

[@djtomoy]

The hair, the shirt, the room- amazing

[@bloodypommelstudios7144]

Taking a break from Vampire: Bloodlines to watch this. Very interesting time in PC gaming.

[@MyRetroJourney]

Alex keeps the Pork Chop Express rolling! It's all in the reflexes!

[@montygill2835]

"What? Huh? What'll come out no more ? "

[@chrisrudi7162]

That's right, I've already bought a lot from Kleinanzeigen here in Germany 😜😄 Among other things, two mainboards from yours, which you showed in the video. Got it cheap as a set because the capacitors were defective. Fixed it and built myself a Socket 939 Retro PC with Athlon 4800+ and 3 GB of RAM. But I only use it with XP Professional and have installed a Radeon HD7850 with two gigabytes as the graphics card. Not entirely correct in terms of timing, but then more games will run on it. And mine also has an ARGB fan, USB 3 card, card reader with USB 3 socket, 1 TB SSD and an SB XFi PCI sound card.

[@Stinger2578]

My 2006 build wasn't too much different, but was based around an AMD Opteron 170 (which was a stock dual-core 2.0GHz chip) starting with 2GB DDR later upgrading to 4, an XFI Xtreme Music card, maybe 250 or 320GB SATA drive, basic DVD burner, a 7900GTX that had 512MB later replaced with an 8800 Ultra that had 768MB and I even started with the BFG Physx card which turned out to be a waste as I didn't really play much that needed it. Crysis was a game I was looking forward to along with Colin Mcrae Dirt, and "Unreal Tournament 2007", among running other similar older games to yours like Battlefield 2, Doom 3, Far Cry, and Half-Life 2 along with Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, FEAR, GTA Vice City (mainly for MultiTheftAuto), Halo, Need for Speed Most Wanted, SWAT 4, and Tribes: Vengeance. I'm sure there were quite a few other games at the time as I tend to have more things installed than I actually get around to playing. But, with all that said, the first thing I installed when I moved from XP to Vista was Halo 2 'Vista'. There was later a workaround found out by users to get the game to run under XP which is where my build spent most of its time till Windows 7 came out.

[@kainthetrollreaver9270]

My 1st IBM compatible PC was a Intel 486 DX4 100mhz. PC I was using in 2005 was a Intel P4 3.2Ghz HT, 4GB DDR2 533mhz RAM, 6800 GTO 256MB which I bought in 2004

[@blehbleheh]

There was just something about PC gaming during the 2004-2007 era that felt so right. 3D graphics as we know them today finally came into being- HD resolutions, bump mapping, detailed fluid simulations, physics and particle effects etc became more common place. For me that was a big deal beyond gaming: 3D modeling and animation became more viable for the consumer and hobbyist. Likewise, as you said, some of the greatest PC games came to the scene. At the same time, the landscape wasn't plagued with micro-transactions, half-completed releases and deliberately planned DLC cash grabs like it is today, while developers focused more on delivering amazing experiences instead of profits, and taking the time to make creative and original games instead of the cookie cutters we see, well, today.

[@Djinnilord]

My "Oblivion PC" was a 3700+, an X1900XT and 2GB RAM. Hardware was cool back then, with overclocking your way to the performance of a $800 CPU and unlocking pipes on your GPU for that extra push.

[@bpcgos]

My build at the time (circa end of 2004) was Pentium 4A 2.4Ghz, 512 MB of DDR RAM, 80GB maxtor PATA HDD, Ati Radeon 9550 256 MB (upgraded from GF4 MX400 only a month before after I realise it didnt support hardware Pixel Shader at all and failed me on playing Pandora Tomorrow), an ASUS Mainboard with VIA chipset maybe (also upgraded from cheap asrock mainboard a month before because,for some reason, it didnt support my Radeon 9550 AGP card although it have AGP slot). It was my first build that surprisingly work well for a first timer PC builder and last for 4 years until 2008 with added 1 GB of DDR RAM on second slot). Im also trying Vista RC version circa 2006-2007 because it was on a DVD from the PC magazine I bought, it delete my data partition (thankfully it could be restored after some nitty gritty of recovery software). Since then I never touch Vista ever again and stick with XP until 7 came out in 2009.

[@Cinyrk]

This Graphic Card has DVI-I ports which have analog pins, thus require only simple, cheap adapter to VGA. Probably was in the package with card at the time, as SteelScooter mentioned in other comment. Cheers!

[@rare6499]

Great video! I’m building a 2006 (ish ) XP/Vista (might do a dual boot) machine right now. X2 64 6000+, SLI 8800 GTS 640MB, 8GB DDR2 800 ( I know Xp won’t see the extra 4 gig!) all in my favourite case of all time, a coolermaster 201 😎

[@nomercy8989]

You should have tried F.E.A.R. as well.

[@user-16419]

Nice! Something similar to a PC from my previous live. :)

[@kidman2505]

I'm using that EXACT same board right now, with a 4400+ and a 6800GT as well!

[@L4NDON]

I was rocking an Athlon 1800+ and a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 at the times! Good memories

[@StagnantMizu]

man just made a whole list of all my old school gaming gear, currently 24 but have been throught quite some gear starting at like 6 with duck hunt and NES games and later doom 3 and sfx snowboarding etc on a classic PC from my dad to PS2 to xbox 360 to my first gaming laptop back in 2014 with 840M GPU and another laptop 1050TI GPU currently using a RX 5700XT in a selfmade PC for the past 3 years lol. never though I was a tech guy but I might be haha