loading
loading
YouTuber escapes the modern AI tech market by recreating his 1996 PC — nostalgia build relies on manual motherboard jumpers and a 2GB hard drive Zero account requirements. Zero pop-ups. Zero microtransactions. These days, it's exceedingly difficult not to be jaded and weary about the tech market. Memory, graphics cards, and now storage are becoming impossible to obtain; there's basically no new consumer hardware being released; and there's AI everywhere. Technology YouTuber TrashBench (TB), too, is tired and was harkening back to the halcyon days when everything was fresh and straightforward — so he went back in time with a retro build. More specifically, he recreated a facsimile of the first machine his parents bought him in 1996 when he was a wee lad, to play The Need for Speed: Special Edition — a PC-improved version of the first ever game in the series. According to the man, it was thanks to this machine that he fell in love with computers in general. TB kicked things off with an Intel Pentium MMX 200 MHz CPU sitting atop an Epox Pronix EP-P55-BT motherboard, boasting what was at the time a new, fresh, convenient ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket. This motherboard popped up during the RAM transition from SIMM to DIMM, which is why you'll see two slots of each on the top. 32 MB of RAM went right in, a generous amount for the year. Funnily enough, the CPU barely needed cooling, which is why a simple 40-mm fan suffices, although anyone who's lived through this era will tell you that those were guaranteed to start whining after just a few months of heavy usage. There is no case cooling, as it's just not needed. However, he did need to correctly set the motherboard's jumpers, as such luxuries like automatically detecting CPU speed and voltage were just becoming normal. Yes, this meant that you could burn out a CPU if you played the jumper game wrong. For graphics card duty, he enlisted an S3 Trio32 card, which was pretty, ahem, modest even in the era, and had no 3D rendering capabilities whatsoever. In this era, the now-ubiquitous 3D accelerator cards were just coming into fashion, and he eventually replaced the S3 with a Matrox Mystique 3D, another offering of dubious quality. Yet those were happy days, as any form of 3D acceleration was far better than none. Storage comes by way of a Western Digital Caviar 22100 hard drive with a whopping two gigabytes of storage and the uncanny ability to emulate the dulcet tones of a jackhammer. TB eventually swapped it later for a roomier 80 GB unit. Again, due to the idiosyncrasies and constant transitions of the era — hardware doubled in speed and capacity nearly every year — he had to set a jumper to clip it to the likely amounts of either 8.4 GB or 33.4 GB, as the addressing space of BIOSes and disk controllers of the time were limited. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. The build wraps up with an OG Sound Blaster 16 sound card and a CD-ROM drive. After test-driving the machine with Need for Speed, he moved on to Microsoft Flight Simulator 98, which necessitated a joystick. Naturally, he got the much-beloved Quickshot QS-123, a staple in many home PCs, and one that needed replacement in about six months, as its build quality matched its price. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals. - stuff and nonesense Around that time - Pentium MMX 233 @ 266, 16MB, Tyan motherboard, ATI XPert @play, Soundblater 16, 19”HP monitor from the local computer fair.. The machine felt incredibly fast.. until I got an Athlon a few years later. Reply
YouTuber escapes the modern AI tech market by recreating his 1996 PC — nostalgia build relies on manual motherboard jumpers and a 2GB hard drive Zero account requirements. Zero pop-ups. Zero microtransactions. These days, it's exceedingly difficult not to be jaded and weary about the tech market. Memory, graphics cards, and now storage are becoming impossible to obtain; there's basically no new consumer hardware being released; and there's AI everywhere. Technology YouTuber TrashBench (TB), too, is tired and was harkening back to the halcyon days when everything was fresh and straightforward — so he went back in time with a retro build. More specifically, he recreated a facsimile of the first machine his parents bought him in 1996 when he was a wee lad, to play The Need for Speed: Special Edition — a PC-improved version of the first ever game in the series. According to the man, it was thanks to this machine that he fell in love with computers in general. TB kicked things off with an Intel Pentium MMX 200 MHz CPU sitting atop an Epox Pronix EP-P55-BT motherboard, boasting what was at the time a new, fresh, convenient ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket. This motherboard popped up during the RAM transition from SIMM to DIMM, which is why you'll see two slots of each on the top. 32 MB of RAM went right in, a generous amount for the year. Funnily enough, the CPU barely needed cooling, which is why a simple 40-mm fan suffices, although anyone who's lived through this era will tell you that those were guaranteed to start whining after just a few months of heavy usage. There is no case cooling, as it's just not needed. However, he did need to correctly set the motherboard's jumpers, as such luxuries like automatically detecting CPU speed and voltage were just becoming normal. Yes, this meant that you could burn out a CPU if you played the jumper game wrong. For graphics card duty, he enlisted an S3 Trio32 card, which was pretty, ahem, modest even in the era, and had no 3D rendering capabilities whatsoever. In this era, the now-ubiquitous 3D accelerator cards were just coming into fashion, and he eventually replaced the S3 with a Matrox Mystique 3D, another offering of dubious quality. Yet those were happy days, as any form of 3D acceleration was far better than none. Storage comes by way of a Western Digital Caviar 22100 hard drive with a whopping two gigabytes of storage and the uncanny ability to emulate the dulcet tones of a jackhammer. TB eventually swapped it later for a roomier 80 GB unit. Again, due to the idiosyncrasies and constant transitions of the era — hardware doubled in speed and capacity nearly every year — he had to set a jumper to clip it to the likely amounts of either 8.4 GB or 33.4 GB, as the addressing space of BIOSes and disk controllers of the time were limited. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. The build wraps up with an OG Sound Blaster 16 sound card and a CD-ROM drive. After test-driving the machine with Need for Speed, he moved on to Microsoft Flight Simulator 98, which necessitated a joystick. Naturally, he got the much-beloved Quickshot QS-123, a staple in many home PCs, and one that needed replacement in about six months, as its build quality matched its price. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals. - stuff and nonesense Around that time - Pentium MMX 233 @ 266, 16MB, Tyan motherboard, ATI XPert @play, Soundblater 16, 19”HP monitor from the local computer fair.. The machine felt incredibly fast.. until I got an Athlon a few years later. Reply - rluker5 I work in a chemical factory with control systems, control room, remote control stations, etc. They currently run off of 3 different software packages: APACS/Wonderware, Allen Bradley Factorytalk, and DeltaV. The APACS is most user friendly and runs off almost no hardware. Snappy and responsive on Pentium 4s with 512mb ram and token hard drives. Can't get the charms for it anymore because they have been out of production for a while so it is being phased out by DeltaV. The last reactors still using it are in the process of being migrated off of it right now. Which will make about a dozen old working Pentium 4 systems, most with HT, of no use. The main guy running it has become a pack rat with components, for availability reasons, but may finally cut these old PCs loose. Not sure I would want one that much. Maybe if my daughter won't clean her room I could switch out her 13600k pc hooked up to a 4k tv for one hooked up to a 1280x1024 with built in motion blur? I couldn't afford the name brand Pentiums back in the day and had a slower Celeron so not that nostalgic for me. Over 10 years later I picked pc up as a hobby and got into the 1150 socket and already have a higher end for that socket (with 5775c, Rebar(A750) + NVME boot (Optane 118GB) running with a PCI HTO Claro soundcard) pc for my nostalgia build so a P4 build would be returning to the youth I never knew. Reply - FoxtrotMichael-1 I have a theory about why people might be especially nostalgic about this period of computing even though modern devices are, objectively, far superior. Never before in my lifetime have companies been more hostile to their customers with predatory practices, dark patterns, and hostile pricing practices and this is present in the tech industry even more than others. People don’t want Copilot, data collection, telemetry for advertising, and hyper-inflated and opportunistic pricing. This period in tech was completely different: companies were still invested in delighting the consumer. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to even participate in the modern economy because every transaction feels like I’m being taken advantage of. I’m probably just an old man shaking my fist at the sky but that’s the way I see it.Reply - quorm If you consider inflation, PCs are probably still cheaper today than they were then, aside from something like a 5090, of which there was no equivalent then.Reply - usertests rluker5 said:with 5775cNice. quorm said:If you consider inflation, PCs are probably still cheaper today than they were then, aside from something like a 5090, of which there was no equivalent then.And the stagnation in CPU performance means you can pick up some 2010s "e-waste" for peanuts and absolutely crush period-accurate retro builds like this one. Even the integrated graphics (like HD 530) is good. Reply - FoxtrotMichael-1 quorm said:If you consider inflation, PCs are probably still cheaper today than they were then, aside from something like a 5090, of which there was no equivalent then.The price isn’t the problem. I’ve even defended the RAM prices in previous threads (supply and demand after all). The practices are the problem. These companies view their consumers as a resource to be exploited. I wouldn’t expect anyone under the age of 35 to really get what I’m talking about. The entire atmosphere of being a consumer in the free market has changed. Reply - usertests FoxtrotMichael-1 said:The price isn’t the problem. I’ve even defended the RAM prices in previous threads (supply and demand after all). The practices are the problem. These companies view their consumers as a resource to be exploited. I wouldn’t expect anyone under the age of 35 to really get what I’m talking about. The entire atmosphere of being a consumer in the free market has changed.Linux usage has exploded from 2% to 3%, so we're headed in the right direction. Reply - FoxtrotMichael-1 usertests said:Linux usage has exploded from 2% to 3%, so we're headed in the right direction.😂😂 Reply - mccainm FoxtrotMichael-1 said:I have a theory about why people might be especially nostalgic about this period of computing even though modern devices are, objectively, far superior. Never before in my lifetime have companies been more hostile to their customers with predatory practices, dark patterns, and hostile pricing practices and this is present in the tech industry even more than others. People don’t want Copilot, data collection, telemetry for advertising, and hyper-inflated and opportunistic pricing. This period in tech was completely different: companies were still invested in delighting the consumer. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to even participate in the modern economy because every transaction feels like I’m being taken advantage of. I’m probably just an old man shaking my fist at the sky but that’s the way I see it.I agree with you...but this is both a company and consumer issue. Consumers are just as frustrating to a company as vice versa. Consumers want everything and they want it now. There is also no pleasing everyone. We shouldn't be on an annual cycle for TVs, phones, etc. It could be more like cars. They improve gradually over a generation...performance, longevity, etc. Less wasteful too. As for prices, there are a lot of contributors. Mining and data center effects on supply chains are well documented. Politics and regulations (both parties contribute) are another. Even lawsuits. When people cheer on when Nvidia, AMD, or Intel lose a lawsuit, those losses are recouped in future product costs. Lawyers win, the plaintiffs get something, but everyone else loses in the long run. It isn't just the tech industry either. There are legitimate cases to bring against companies and there are frivolous ones. I just want a high performing, reliable, PC at a reasonable price:) Reply - quorm FoxtrotMichael-1 said:The price isn’t the problem. I’ve even defended the RAM prices in previous threads (supply and demand after all). The practices are the problem. These companies view their consumers as a resource to be exploited. I wouldn’t expect anyone under the age of 35 to really get what I’m talking about. The entire atmosphere of being a consumer in the free market has changed.The number of under 35s posting on pc hardware forums (or any forum) is tiny. The reason the market feels different is because a niche hobby has gotten even smaller with fewer consumers and fewer manufacturers. But, consumers have always been a resource to be exploited, that's just business. Reply
document fetched 2026-10-25 02:55 · canonical https://tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/exhaustion-with-tech-market-prompts-youtuber-to-remake-their-first-pc-1996-build-fueled-by-nostalgia-and-ai-weariness