18 replies to this topic

[Daragh]

What was your high end pc a few years ago (or even just a PC)
Your pride and joy that is now being outrun by cheap dell laptops. From the golden era of PC hardware. This should be a place to reminisce. Kick back and post what you can remember from your old build.

[Daragh]

Might as well start, there is the build that I have now, that is pretty dated (though I only got it off some guy)
Case: I have no idea, no fans, PSU bolted on and it was made by a blind walrus seriously the front USB headers are put on upside down!
CPU: Athlon 64 single core
GPU: nVidia GeForce gt240. This used to be a Galaxy 7600gt
RAM: 2gb of, DDR
Motherboard: Infinity Lanparty.
HDD: 160gb sata mechanical.
DVD Drive: Liteon 32x.
PSU: 450watt thing. About 6 molex connectors but no PCI-E

Then I used to have an Asus PRO50N
Athlonx2
Geforce 6000m
4gb Ram
120gb HDD
Thats all I remember from it, its now a shiny new Dell XPS 15 (originally going to be a desktop but I travel quite a bit)

Edited by Daragh, 15 April 2012 - 11:59 PM.

[FUZi0N]

First personal build during highschool around the end of 2005

Case: Cheap $35 case from xoxide
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 2.2GHz
Mobo: MSI skt 939 Mobo
RAM: Patriot 2x512MB kit
GPU: evga 7900gt
PSU: Tagan 480w
HD: Western Digital 80gb

[Knight_72]

I think this was the system I had in 2008/2009, I cant remember much further than this in my memory

CPU : Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 @3GHZ (was upgraded to Core 2 Quad Q8300 @ 3GHz)
Mobo : XFX G31 Gaming motherboard (was looking at an ASUS P5Q board but couldnt find so I jumped straight to AM3 X6 1055T )
Ram : 2x2Gb DDR2 800MHZ with awesome looking cooper heatsinks
PSU : AOpen 500 watt (was upgraded to CM Silent Pro M 850 watt)
Case : Stock Mecer with drilled holes for fans nearly everywhere (was upgraded to CM HAF932)
GPU : Was a 9800GT then upgraded to a GTX260 216sp and then to a HD5770 when the DX11 craze hit me with the release of Dirt 2

[Skidmarks]

My first pc I owned was a Spectrum ZS. Can't remember any specs but i used a portable 16" black & white tv for a sreen.
My 2nd pc was an Intel 286 & I think I can remember some of the specs.

Proc. Intel 33 Mhz
RAM. 2 mb 12 pin IC chips (SIMMS & DIMMS didn't exist)
HDD. 20 Mb MFM on seperate controller
Screen. 13" monochrome (green)
Screen card. Who knows or cares
KBD. Clickety clack IBM thing.

Those were the days.

[Andrewr05]

Despite it still being a damn fine rig to me, my current build is destroyed by a low end i3, a midrange current-gen GPU and even just 4GB of triple/quad channel memory.

It is ridiculous, I still. (in my mind) think of it as a pretty powerful machine too.

[Bosco]

Oldest rig I have is a Q9650 with 4GB of memory sporting a GTX 295.

[Andrewr05]

Oldest rig I have is a Q9650 with 4GB of memory sporting a GTX 295.

If you ever go to get rid of that I'd be really interested in that CPU and GPU.

I'll trade you my X3220 (Xeon variant of the Q6600) and my GTX285.









Even APUs/Mobile processors are really powerful compared to the average desktop system a few years ago.

[Locutus]

I got a 400 dollar toshiba laptop recently that can outperform most C2D desktops. >:3

EDIT: And yeah, it's an APU like Andrew said.

Edited by Locutus, 16 April 2012 - 11:30 AM.

[Puck]

It's not my oldest system, but my favorite from the past was my former third place in the world 9800 Pro in 3D2k5, using a heavily modded AIW 9800. It had a cut up socket A copper cpu cooler mounted with a custom backplate on the GPU, custom heatsinks on the VRAM, three 80mm fans, three VR volt mods(this was before software overvolting in GPUs), and two leads for voltage monitoring. Also had a hardmodded Vdroop/VDimm modded Epox mobo (to reduce full load voltage drop and allow higher RAM voltages), a naked Opteron 144, and actively cooled G.Skill RAM (back in DDR1 days RAM actually needed cooling for overclocking).

Neve got a full all-out bench in with max GPU/VDIMM/CPU overclocks, but my test runs were enough to rocket me to third overall after a few runs of tweaking .

How far we've come in the last 10 years!!! My first real homemade rig struggled with 3dMark 2001 .

**EDIT** Here is a picture the cooler with the two other fans removed to get a view of the tight clearance to the chipset fan. I remember having to use a webcam because my digicam was lost lol.

Edited by Puck, 16 April 2012 - 01:04 PM.

[dragonsdontfly]

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.3GHz (2.25GHz stock)
Foxconn E3500 Micro ATX mobo
4GB DDR2 1333 RAM
320GB WD Caviar Blue HDD
585W PSU (forget the brand, thinking it was Orion [generic brand])
XFX GTS 250 1GB Core Edition

Planted in an HP case I bought off a friend, with dual 80mm "sliding" fans over the video card: that could be moved from back (to cool GPU) to the front (to cool HDDs). Later was replanted into a Rosewill Challenger, then eventually rebuilt entirely and sold off piece by piece except the GTS 250 which I kept, and will be selling once my GTX 560 Ti gets here (been waiting over 7 days for newegg to open the box since they received it (Was RMA'd for shattered heatsink fans).. Getting a bit annoyed, 2-3 business days has turned into 5, and it still isn't opened..)

Only one thing about this build was better than my current one:

I had a Logitech G15 with blue backlit keyboard. I miss that thing I've got a couple generic Logitech's now- multimedia types, nothing special.

Edited by dragonsdontfly, 16 April 2012 - 04:17 PM.