If you are interested in an unusual journey through time in PC history, a thread subscription to “The Big Retro Bench” is practically mandatory. PCGHX user modx is celebrating PCGH‘s 25th birthday in his own unique way, with a diary that documents his own PC history since 1996.
Three retro PCs are already (almost) finished
The basic idea of modx is to check the inventory of old PCs and bring them into shape. According to its own statement, graphics cards from the “late PCI era, the entire AGP era and the PCI Express era from the beginning to around 2012/13″ will be put into operation and tested. In October, he planned to build a total of five systems. Like back then, optics were not important to him. “Everything should just work and I want to do a bit of OC,” says modx. He “no longer wants to do” more extreme things like volt mods, which he had carried out on some of the cards back then, to the old silicon.
He originally planned to combine the Asus P5B with the Intel Pentium E5200 and Teamgroup DDR2-800, along with “a Wakü made from 1048 Eheim, a 120 and a 240 radiator, as well as an Alphacool Nexxxos”. Back then it managed over 4 GHz and 920 MHz on the RAM. Unfortunately, it turned out that the P5B box was empty. Modx writes: “I am 1,000% sure that I have never given this board away because it has been with me for a long time and has been through everything until the end of the 775 era.”
The large retro bench from modx
So he switched to the Biostar TForce 965PT. You should definitely read about the dramas with a temporarily broken power supply and different BIOS versions for yourself. Finding 20-year-old drivers was also a hair-raising task. He writes: “After temporarily photographing the hardware IDs and searching for the drivers with ChatGPT and Gemini, I realized that everything that has piled up here will probably take me several days to install.”
In the thread, PCGHX user modx then introduced the Retro System 2 with Pentium 4 3.0 GHz, which also had many hurdles to overcome. The PCGH user is currently still working on Retro System 3, and at the same time there is a first insight into the impressive graphics card collection.
What do you think of modx’s project? Use the comment function and let us know your opinion. You must be logged in to comment. If you don’t have an account yet, you could consider registering, which has many advantages. When commenting, please observe the applicable forum rules. For the latest news in the hardware world or our exclusive content, feel free to follow us on Whatsapp and X. You can find our video content (often seasoned with a pinch of humor) at Youtube, Instagram and Tiktok.