Oh it was pretty boss (that's how we talked back then.)
It began life as a 486 DX (running at an amazing 66 mhz) and a 17" monitor. And it's 28.8 modem was smokin fast. Then I outfitted it with a massive 750 MB HDD, a RAM upgrade (I really forget how much... not much by today's standards,) an SB 16 sound card. Eventually I had the processor replaced and overclocked running at a whopping 110 to 124 mhz (to show up all of those P90 snobs.) Which is why it melted down... that showed them.
Still, there towards the end it was the a really awesome DOS system. Although all told I spent nearly $1,800 over it's 4 or 5 year life.
Well my dad built my first one. I was around 9-10 at the time. So I'm a little sketchy on the details. But what I remember it had:
an AMD Athalon Processor 2200+
an ATI Radeon 9550
a 1280*1024 CRT Moniter LG from memory... Eventually died after like 5 years.. was second hand too
an ASUS 17v600 mother board
a 30 GB PATA drive (shortly after replaced with an 80 GB)
and 256 MB RAM.
Ooo and Windows XP Professional.
Wow I remember that better than I thought.
Still I think it was around 2004 and it was my Christmas present.
PC? The first one I had was...a 486/66MHz, with 64 kilobytes (or was it megabytes? I forget) of RAM, 425MB hard disk space, and windows 3.11! And a 28.8 dial-up. I think it had an integrated GPU, and my closet was full of 3.5" 1.44MB floppy disks, currently only archaically known as "save icons".
Them gorillas tossing explodey bananas in Qbasic were a riot.
Boris Goodenough said:
Commadore 64 with tape station was my first gaming PC.
My first actual games PC was just under 4 years ago with a phenom II X4 and a hd4670 (which was a placeholder card for 5 months until the HD5870 arrived). I now have a gtx670 and an i5-2500K, whilst one of my family members now has most of the parts of my first PC, which is still going very strong indeed (and will perform close to the ps4 for the most part).
My first gaming rig was something barely saved from the scrap heap. My friend in San Jose saved an old tower from being thrown out back in 2010, patched it up, and sent it my way(my laptop fried itself at the time, piece of shit Compaq Presario) and after that I threw 8 gigs of RAM into it and gave it a 512mb Video card. It was actually a pretty solid performer for a then-three year old box, being able to run Splinter Cell Conviction and Deus Ex: Human Revolution at max settings. Today, I still use it, but right now it's boxed up because I've been moving shit in my room and I need the space clear. I'm thinking of replacing it soon with a superior custom-built rig when I get some more money in.
Well, I remember that it was an Hercules-standard monochrome PC, with both kinds of floppies and one of the first Brazilian modems. Probably around 1987. I played the old Ultimas, Wizardry, Hot Rod, Karateka, Conan and such.
Ooh, I had an ass-kicking Pentium 133MHz, 32MB RAM, 800MB HDD, Voodoo 2 12MB 3DFX; it was capable of running Quake 1/2, Fallout 1/2 and Baldur's Gate... good times
EDIT: Also before that, I had ZX Spectrum with 128K memory (I think). You had to connect it to your tv and it ran programmes of cassete audiotapes
Cant remember the CPU exactly, but I'm sure it was an intel 486 , had a whopping 32 MB(!) of RAM, a 200MB hard drive, two floppy disc drives (one for 5.1/4 and the other for 3.5 inch) and used Windows 3.11
Vegosiux said:
Them gorillas tossing explodey bananas in Qbasic were a riot.
I was rather late to the party when it came to gaming so the first computer I owned was pretty advanced, if cheap;
- AMD Athlon 3000+ CPU
- 2 GB RAM
- GeForce 7600GT
- 350-ish (I think) HDD
It ran CS:S and WoW flawlessly and that's all I really cared about back then.
I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this, but I still have never owned a dedicated gaming rig. The first computer I actually bought with my own money was limited to being a laptop (I needed to be able to bring it to my college classes), so I did a lot of research and got one that could handle a fair bit of gaming, but one that definitely wasn't a dedicated gaming laptop. It had a 2.4 ghz dual core AMD processor (I want to say an Athlon or a Phenom, but I'm not sure), 4 gigs of ram, and an onboard Radeon 4250, which surprisingly enough, had 128 megs of dedicated ram, instead of just the usual shared ram you get in onboard chipsets. My current laptop was an emergency replacement after dropping that one, accidentally cracking the screen. It's basically the same laptop in a smaller case, unfortunately minus the dedicated ram on the graphics card (it's a 4200 rather than a 4250.) However, the performance is about the same -- the only difference I really noticed is that, annoyingly enough, this one can't do hardware scaling that preserves the aspect ratio. So if I want to play anything widescreen that isn't 16:9, or anything 4:3 that's smaller than 1024X768, I'm stuck with either a postage stamp (in 1:1 mode) or a stretched out mess.
I plan on building a real gaming PC as my first major purchase after finishing college and getting my own apartment, with the next one being a projector to run it and the rest of my home theater[footnote]My other major hobby, which complements gaming just as well as it does movies and TV, if not better[/footnote] components through
First one I paid for is pretty much what I am using now. At the time it was a C2Q Q9400, 4GB DDR2, 1TB HDD, GTX260.
These days its got 8GB DDR2, 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, 2x2TB HDDs and a Creative Soundblaster. When I first got it I spent about NZ$2000. Cant say how much I have spent since then.
First machine I played games on was an Apple Macintosh Performa 5400 running Mac OS 7.5 and later Mac OS 8 which likely had a 120MHz CPU (PPC) and 16MB RAM. It later got another 128MB added. It cost about $3000.
Second was an even older Machine running Win 3.1. My best guess is it had a 486 but apart from that I cant remember. Was free.
Third was a Dell Dimension 3000, 2.8GHz Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, Intel GMA graphics, 80GB HDD. $1300.
My first?
I built it in 1994... it was a 386 DX2 40Mhz CPU in an even older AT server case. I had to do a lot of metalwork to make the motherboard fit. I honestly don't remember what RAM, HDDs, floppies, et cetera I had in it... but I do remember it had a lot of peripherals. It ran Falcon 3.0 pretty well, but I mostly played text-based MUDs on it running telnet and using a 14.4 modem. It was all free to me, just parts people were throwing away.
As for my price/performance purchasing preferences... I tend to look for the first big price drop from the top, go two more tiers down, and set that as my target... though I never stick to that as a hard and fast rule... I do a lot of research on hardware conflicts, noise, heat, et cetera. Last two systems wound up in the $1000-$1500 range that way.
I don't even want to talk about my First PC (piece of overpriced Dell shit) however here's my latest one:
The only thing extra I have that isn't in the photo is an ASUS Xonar DX sound card. Got a Razer Abyssus mouse, Razer Blackwidow keyboard and a 24" NEC LED monitor.
HDi said:
Really stuck on the GPU though. Can't decide between a GTX 660 Ti or an HD 7950.
If you want bang for buck then then you can't go wrong with the HD7950. However if things like PhysX and CUDA blow up your skirt then the GTX 660 Ti is a decent card.
I don't know whether such a thing as a "gaming PC" existed back in 1999-2000, consumer-level graphics cards were still something very new and the majority of games were designed to run off the CPU. It would be unfair of me not to mention the PC which introduced me to gaming in the first place.
It was an IBM Aptiva with these specs (I think, memory is a bit hazy): CPU - Intel Pentium II RAM - 128mb RAM, 667mhz I think?
> 800x600 17" IBM monitor
> Win98 OS
I played Command and Conquer, Thief 2, Earthworm Jim, Interstate '76 (NitroRiders), Earth 2150 and many others. Ah the golden days when gaming literally blew my young mind
Much, MUCH later once I was a bit more grown-up our family PC died and my dad decided we should build one instead of buying a pre-built (this was back in 2008-09), it would work out much cheaper. So we did! I had no idea what to buy really, but after a bit of digging around in forums I put something together with a bit of help from dad: CPU - Intel Core2Quad Q8200 / 2.33ghz Mobo - Gigabyte EP31-DS3L RAM - 4GB DDR2 1066mhz Corsair Dominator - Later added 2 more sticks of Kingston HyperX GPU - nVidia 8600GS - Later upgraded to AMD HD5770 as seen in below pic HDD - 320GB Seagate HDD - Later (much later) upgraded to OCZ Vertex II 90GB SSD PSU - 500w no-name PSU Case - I have no idea Monitor - ViewSonic 19" 1400x1050. Weird aspect ratio, I know.
This PC carried me through my awesome World of Warcraft days, when TBC and WotLK were in full throttle...golden days of MMO's, what can I say.
It's still alive and kicking today, now a family PC. The SSD has really breathed life back into that computer, making everything fast/snappy/responsive as if it was as good as new! Never looked back from SSD's since then.
And finally, my "proper" dedicated gaming rig assembled in 2011, going today with upgraddes - I didn't hold back on this one:
CPU - Intel i5 2500K / 4.5ghz Cooler - CoolerMaster Hyper212+, later upgraded to Corsair H100 Mobo - Asus P67 Sabertooth RAM - 8GB DDR3 1600mhz Mushkin Blackline GPU - Asus GTX580 DirectCUII - later sold and replaced with Asus GTX660 Ti DCII (@ 1189/3456mhz) SSD1 - Samsung 830 Series 128GB (upgraded from OCZ Vertex II 90GB) - OS/Program drive SSD2 - Intel 320 Series 160GB - got it on an awesome sale, serves as a game-only drive, games are huge these days! HDD - Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB - internal data drive HDD2 - Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB - external movies/music drive Sound - Asus Xonar Essence STX - powers Corsair SP2500 speakers and Sennheiser HD558 headphones PSU - Seasonic X-Series 760w Gold Case - CoolerMaster Storm Sniper Monitor - Samsung Syncmaster 22" - later upgraded to Asus VG236H 120hz 23"
The GTX580 ran into issues and I RMA'd it - sold the one I received from RMA for a sweet price. The reason I did was because it was a triple-slot graphics card and I realized it was a bad idea to buy a card that a lot of people would have trouble fitting into their computers. This thing was like a giant paving slab, not to mention it ran hot and pulled the power of a refrigerator.
These days I'm looking to buy graphics cards that have good resale potential. The 660 Ti seemed to beat a 580 in most games so I grabbed that, should be fairly easy to sell once GTX700 series comes out.
Looking forward to buying GTX780! Titan can fuck off, learn how to price shit nVidia
The first Gaming rig "I" had was more of a family computer, but I had some legitimate gaming hardware even tough i was some prebuilt machine from dell.
A Pentium 4 Processor running at 3GHz, 512MB of DDR2 RAM and a Radeon 9800PRO (no idea how much i cost since I didn't buy it).
I could easily play all the games I had as well as new stuff like chronicles of riddick and Half-Life 2.
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