another post gave me this idea, some young kid lookin for a job for his first PC build, made me think back and i remember my first motherboard, not much else, but o what fun it was. here's a copy and paste cause i'm lazy
here's my first motherboard on my first build ever :D ..it was nearly top of the line at the time, o how things have changed, where are the SATA ports!? where's the cool heatsinks!? whats that big 'ol parallel port! i bet you don't even know what that is! whats that IDE lookin connection that could possibly be used for a floppy!? o man i feel old haha
Don't feel old. My first "build" was a Pentium 3 era Celeron (I want to say 500mhz, but I honestly can't remember. I also can't remember what brand motherboard I used for the life of me). I built it to have a semi decent computer in the dining room to replace the old Packard Bell Pentium 133 that was having issues. This was, I want to say 1999.
I had a Pentium 3 600mhz based Dell computer (complete with a 19" Trinitron CRT monitor... 1600x1200 goodness all in a sleek beige package weighing a scant 50 pounds) in my room, and my mom didn't want to spend a lot of money to replace the 133, so I built one on the cheap, reusing whatever parts I could like the modem (33.6k!) and cd-rom.
Good times. I even attached it to my computer with a crossover cable so my friends and I could play Red Alert or Star Craft locally.
Dell optiplex GPU upgrade. I remember for chismas one year getting a Radeon HD 6770 and new PSU to upgrade my Dell optiplex. I remember when I went to put it in, I couldn't, the board was really strange and had a rotated expansion (its hard to explain but the motherboard was accessed from the right side) and the only PCI-E slot was at the very top. I took a pair of pliers and made my own expansion slot, and then the card fit. I also had to remove the aesthetic shroud as well in order to fit but it fit and it worked well.
I even still have the card.
Edit: I also remember my hands being majorly fucked up from tearing metal apart
First one that fueled to desire to build was a Compact Presario Walmart special with Win XP 32 bit 40 gig hard drive 128mb of ram. A single core cpu dont remember what exactly. Man, did 256mb of ram make a world of difference. Which of course lead to 2 gigs of ram, two 40 gig hdd, sound blaster Audigy card, and my first gpu a fx5500 geforce. Stills runs use it for music.
For any of you guys feeling old, this will probably make you feel better. My first build was around 1996. I built it with my Dad when I was in 7th grade, as he was really interested in computers and using them a lot at his business. I can't remember all of the components but a partial list is (can't remember the motherboard):
Pentium 120mhz, which was quite high-end at the time
24MB of RAM (2 x 8MB and 2 x 4MB) the 4MB I got of an old computer
an 800MB hard drive and a 500MB hard drive I got off an old computer
Sound Blaster 32 Pro and CD-ROM (8x I think) (bundle with sound card, cd-rom and speakers)
28.8k modem
5 1/4 inch floppy and 3 1/2 inch floppy (from old computers)
A full size tower, I think it included the power supply.
Windows 95
Monitor was a 15" Viewsonic 4e (if that is a real model number)
I remember it being a pain to put together, trying to get all of the IRQ settings right, and I think we shorted the motherboard putting it together the first time and had to get another one. It was a really nice computer for a kid to have played a lot of Warcraft 2 and Diablo on it, and used AOL. Good times.
My first was in 94. It was a 486SX that I scavenged out of a dumpster. After finding several at some schools I pulled parts and built several more. I would normally turn 2 scavenged systems into one. A couple years later I upgraded them, then at 8 of them, to 486DX4 and loaded them with Windows 95 for the 13 3.5" floppy disks it came on. Those were good times.
My history with PC modding/building goes back to around 1999. Parents had a windows 98 machine with a celeron 333mhz, 32mb ram and SiS 8mb on-board graphics. That didn't last long before I slapped in a 3Dfx Voodoo 3 2000 PCI graphics card and added a 128mb stick of ram so I could play games like Roll Cage, Motocross Madness and Carmageddon.
Next was the pre-built rig I bought at Futureshop for college. It was rockin a Pentium 4 3.0Ghz with hyperthreading and 256mb ram. Unfortunately the on-board graphics weren't up to snuff so in went an ATi Radeon 7000, which a year or so later was replaced with a more powerful card, the specific model of which I can no longer remember. By the time this PC died, it had a Soyo Dragon 2 motherboard, close to 512mb ram and some other mid-range ATi graphics card I can't remember.
Since then, I haven't touched desktop PC's until September of last year when I built a brand new gaming rig.
i loved those Voodoo cards. I had a system with one that just seemed like a dream. I can't tell you how many hours I played Starcraft, Descent, Baldur's Gate, and Need for Speed.
Yeah, the Voodoo card completely transformed that PC into a serious gaming machine. The problem I started running into with it was not enough hard drive space. It had two HDD's with a combined capacity of only about 4.3GB. lol
well now if we're talking about our first computer hardware experiences, and not builds, haha, it have to be a gateway 2000. got it in 95? maybe 96? i suppose i was around 10. had so many hardware failures and i was the one to fix it all the time. modem would go up, sound card, put a new gpu in it, and a new harddrive. but there's no way i can remember what it all was.. but... i remember VOODOO... my friend had one. i'de buy games with allowance, and end up giving them to him because my computer couldn't run them.
meanwhile the tandy 2000 we got back in 89? was still workin like a champ!
First pc build with my own money - k6-2 400 (overclocked), 8mb voodoo2 (was $549 on its own i think), forgot how much ram and hdd. Had a few systems before that but yeah I didnt buy and build myself.
My brother and I put together our 386sx build back in the day. We were one of 2 families with a pc in the town I was in at the time.
I remember years ago, my dad went all out and and bought a Dell Dimension 2400 for a whopping $1200. Yup, it had it all. Intel Pentium 2.4Ghz, 512mb DDR SDRAM.
My interest for technology and building and tinkering really sparked when I changed the ram on it. To my parents, I looked like a genius! A nine year old changing a component in a computer? After that, I've had some generic laptops, just enough to run a little (Alot of) runescape.
Since then I've played around on Circuitcity.com creating partlists with it. I used to make some weird combinations like a GT 210 and an overpriced stupid case with LEDs Gauges and all that crap.
I got my first job last summer. Saved some money and built this: http://pcpartpicker.com/b/ETN