YouTuber TrashBench has rebuilt the computer he started out on in the mid-1990s — a 200 MHz Pentium MMX with 32 MB of RAM and Windows 95 — as a response to frustration with today’s hardware prices. He details it in a video published October 23 titled “PC Prices Got Stupid… So I Tried Gaming Like It Was 1996,” in which he assembles the machine piece by piece, hooks it up to a CRT monitor, and plays games from the era again.
TrashBench’s 1996 PC in 30 seconds
- TrashBench recreated his first PC: a 200 MHz Pentium MMX, an Epox EP-P55-BT motherboard, 32 MB of RAM, and a Sound Blaster 16.
- He used an S3 Trio32 and later a Matrox Mystique, with a 2 GB hard drive he eventually swapped for an 80 GB one.
- He tried The Need for Speed: Special Edition and Flight Simulator 98 with Windows 95 and a CRT monitor.
- The video comes out of frustration with today’s hardware prices and the omnipresence of AI.
The video has caught the attention of outlets like Tom’s Hardware, which ties it to a feeling spreading among enthusiasts: memory, graphics cards, and storage have become hard to find, there’s little new consumer hardware, and artificial intelligence is everywhere. TrashBench explains that this was the computer that got him interested in computers in the first place, and that he wanted to go back to a time when technology felt fresher and simpler.
A 1990s PC, Piece by Piece
The heart of the machine is an Intel Pentium MMX at 200 MHz on an Epox Pronix EP-P55-BT motherboard, with a ZIF socket and two SIMM slots plus two DIMM slots for memory. It has 32 MB of RAM, a Sound Blaster 16, a CD-ROM drive, and a Quickshot QS-123 joystick. Cooling is handled by a single 40mm fan on the processor, with no case fans at all — unthinkable for a gaming PC today. Tom’s Hardware notes those small fans used to start squeaking after a few months of heavy use.
On graphics, he started with an S3 Trio32, a very common 2D card at the time, and swapped it for a Matrox Mystique with 3D acceleration. The original drive was a 2 GB Western Digital Caviar 22100, which he eventually replaced with an 80 GB one. That’s where one of the era’s hardware quirks shows up: the BIOS on these boards couldn’t handle drives that large, and a jumper on the drive lets you cap its capacity at 8.4 GB or 33.4 GB so the system recognizes it. There was no automatic CPU configuration either: frequency and voltage were set with jumpers on the board, and a mistake could damage the chip.
As a curiosity, the video’s title says 1996, but the Pentium MMX and Flight Simulator 98 actually hit stores in 1997. That’s a common bit of license in these kinds of videos, which aim to recreate an era more than an exact year.
Playing Like It Was Back Then
With the machine assembled, TrashBench returns to two games that defined that generation of PCs: The Need for Speed: Special Edition, the expanded PC version of the series’ first entry, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 98. All of it with Windows 95, big PC game boxes, and a tube monitor — the kind of experience many players from his generation remember fondly, and that the video holds up against gaming today.
The Fatigue With Today’s Market
The video is nostalgia, but the context is real. Demand for memory in AI data centers has driven up DRAM prices and pushed that pressure onto consumer PCs. In recent weeks, AMD has raised the price of its Radeon cards by up to 15.4% because of rising memory costs, and manufacturers like YMTC have warned that the shortage could drag on until 2029. For anyone looking to build or upgrade a gaming PC, the result is less choice and higher prices.
Going back to a Pentium doesn’t fix any of that, and TrashBench isn’t pitching it as a solution either. What he’s showing is a different way to enjoy hardware — retrocomputing, where the appeal isn’t frame rates but building by hand, setting jumpers, and watching Windows 95 boot up again on a tube monitor.
Frequently Asked Questions
What components does TrashBench’s 1996 PC have?
A 200 MHz Pentium MMX, an Epox EP-P55-BT motherboard, 32 MB of RAM, a Sound Blaster 16, an S3 Trio32 later swapped for a Matrox Mystique, and a 2 GB drive later replaced with an 80 GB one.
What games does he play in the video?
The Need for Speed: Special Edition and Microsoft Flight Simulator 98, with Windows 95 and a CRT monitor.
Why did he make this project?
Out of frustration with today’s hardware prices and the omnipresence of AI, and because that computer was what got him interested in computing in the first place.
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