A discussion of old video cards in another thread got me nostalgic about my first home-built gaming rig.
My first was around 1999-2000ish. It was a celeron 400 (I think it was a socket 370, though I had to use an adaptor as the motherboard was slot 1) that I had overclocked somewhat, though I don't recall the numbers (first gen of soft overclocking), on what I think was an ABit board, with 64mb of RAM and a 32mb TNT2 GPU. I had a decent Sound Blaster as well, as this was back in the day when sound was not routinely an on board deal. Back then cases in anything other than beige were hard to get, so it had a god awful beige case and a 15" CRT monitor that couldn't handle the graphics settings that the GPU could deal with.
It was a piece of junk and I loved it. Played Quake 2 and Diablo 2 to death on it.
Before that I had a Cyrix 686 with a Voodoo (one of the original ones that you had to pair with a regular GPU), with 32mb of RAM - but I didn't build it.
around 2005-8ish, it was an AM2 prebuild that I put 4 gigs of DDR2 and a GT210 in. it played Halflife 2 and Portal well... I recently slapped another 2 gig stick in it and gave it to my sister.
Not exactly an old rig like what you guys had, but back in August when I was 15 I built my first PC. It was the desktop I ever had, the only thing I ever had before was a Toshiba laptop.
FX-6100 @ 4.4GHz w/ Hyper 212 Evo
Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0
MSI Twin Frozr III 2GB 7850 @ 1180MHz Core, 1400 MHz Mem
I don't remember the details of my first build. I just remember paying approximately £500 on a custom PC website, in the aim of being able to enjoy playing much of the early Total War series.
My first self-built PC had a Phenom 965, a 6950 video card - which was flashed and unlocked to a 6970. Though, I didn't make the most of it. Sadly, I was still purchasing games for console, at that particular time.
a 533mhz Pentium III, 384MB PC 133 ram 40GB we he'd, 10 GB quantum fireball, FX 5500 PCI 128 bit 256MB CD burner, USB 2.0 PCI, sound blaster sound cardcard played Ends, GBA, and N64 games
I used to play various games on an old Dell desktop computer. Not sure what its specs are. It's currently in the "clutter/junk" room. I think it was manufactured in the early 2000s. Not sure of the exact year, but it had Windows XP, so it had to be after 2001. I played Pacman, Dragonfable, some firefighting game, and an old bass fishing game.
But I officially joined PC gaming on February 25th, 2013 (I think this is the exact date; if not, it's extremely close). I remember just about everything about that day. I was giddy. I mean, afterall, I had prepared for this day for a long time. During the year prior to the date I mentioned above, I heavily researched various gaming PCs and was saddened by the performance I was getting for the price. While I was researching, I discovered Logan's YouTube channel (glad I did too) as well as websites such as Tom's Hardware. I also watched tons of How To Build a PC videos. This is when I became smitten with the idea of building my own gaming PC. Took nearly an entire year to research, earn money, and commit to the project. But in the end, I built a gaming PC for under $800 with the following specs...
I put together my first build in 2008. This is what it looked like:
CPU: AMD Athlon x64 5000+ Black Edition (dual core)
RAM: 4GB of dual channel OCZ memory at 800mhz with Nvidia SLI branding on it
MOBO: I originally had a cheap bioistar board, but it died on me after 6 months so I replaced it with a Foxconn A7DA-S
GPU: EVGA 9600GT (512MB)
HDD: 320GB Hitachi Deskstar
ODD: DVD burner
PSU: 800 watt PowerUP! which I later had to replace with an Ultra LSP650, because the fans burnt out
Case: Xion Solaris
Case fan: Cooler Master Sickleflow with green LEDs
It was a pretty simple build and wasn't anything over the top, but it was a pretty exceptional budget gaming build. The only reason I put it together in the first place was because I needed a computer for college, and I also wanted to play some games on it since I didn't have any console at the time. I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone.
My first "actual" guyuming reeg was powered with an EVGA X58 board with 4-way SLI capability. Specs back then was crap but improved a bit, until the board's VTT core choke detonated. Now you could have a look at my specs in my profile. True guymen powarrrr! :DDDD
Sorry about the CPU choice guys, but the current hype on technology and society or as I've taken this theory into account; every people paying shit heaps for an iPhone 5, just made me do it. I might be dun goofed here on my upgrade braggings. But the 470s kept most of today's games at a stable framerate.