My fav was maybe the 9850BE Agena with 2x 4850x2's in crossfire. M3A32 MVP wifi deluxe app solo
Had a s939 FX-55 with SLI GT 760's, it was pretty badass I thought. AsRock Dual sata II with AM2 riser (never got to use it )
Favorite cooling challenge is TEC cooling processors even over LN2 runs.
As far as the list goes, I can't even remember it all! Soo much hardware through time..... oh so much. Not as much as others, but definitely my fair share.
Third rig(80% complete)
I7 4960x ASUS Rampage 4 Black, 2x ASUS GTX Titan Black SLI, 64gb Kingston Hyper x beast DDR3 2133, OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480gb PCI-E ssd, 1tb Samsung 840 EVO ssd, Rosewill Hercules 1600w PSU
(i will need to add another Titan Black and 2 more 1tb ssd for this rig to be complete)
No, my original plan was to build a NVIDIA POWER HOUSE pc, but some how the guy at the powder coating shop apply a wrong color on my rig, so now, it not Nvidia green, but look more like apple green
Another thing is, my original plan was to run 4 GTX Titan Black SLI(that the reason i got the 1600w PSU), but then i change my mine, 3 Titan and a OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2, SATA 3 6g ssd is too slow for me
My family's first computer was a TI-99/A that I barely remember, other then playing Alpiner on it. Our first PC was a XT clone that I taught myself how to use DOS on. After that my parents bought a 286 in the early 90s from a guy in our church that I still think charged way too much for its old hardware and he did a shoddy half-assed job assembling it (resting a hard drive on ribbon cables instead of properly sliding it into AND screwing it into the cage is pretty horrible work Mr Bob ***** - assuming you ever read this, you should've taken more pride in your work instead of half-assing it dude). I used that thing for years in the great Windows 3.x heyday and it actually was a pretty good computer for what it was. Then they got me a 386 at a garage sale that was quite gimped compared to what I had, being a Packard Bell in a stupid pizzabox case with riser card and looked like cheap garbage but "hey it was a 32-bit CPU I could finally run a DOS prompt in a window!" It was that system that I purchased my first ever computer upgrade for - a Diamond 1 MB ISA video card. It was quite an upgrade, it really sped up the 2D animation in certain games like Raptor (one of my favorites!) and generally in Windows 3.x too. A few months later my parents got me a really cool system at a garage sale, a 486DX2-66 with not much else inside of it other then the case. It was pretty much gutted except for the socket 3 motherboard it resided on, along with a 2 MB Orchid Celsius VLB video card. It supported my old system's RAM so I moved that 4 MB of 30-pin RAM over and it didn't end up being enough so I saved up with my part time job after school and spent over $100 at the time on 16 MB of 30-pin RAM. Later on I made my first mail-order computer part purchase for that system, a PC Chips VIP 486 board that had both VLB and PCI in addition to ISA, and both 30-pin and 72-pin memory slots. It was like a jack of all trades, master of none. I thought it was awesome until the motherboard's onboard IO corrupted my drive and all of my save data that I lacked backups of. This was the mid-late 90s and I didn't yet know that particular motherboard was a problematic board. I ended up replacing that system with a good deal I got on a Leading Edge Aviva 2000 486 laptop (with socketed CPU!) that I used for a few months until the screen hinges completely cracked apart from use. The screen hinges were a weak part of that model of laptop, it was a pretty widespread issue when I read about it so I just ended up pulling the CPU, RAM and drive out it and then pitched it out. I wish I would've just ditched the screen and kept it as a headless DOS PC because, along with the 16 MB RAM and onboard sound that fully supported the Sound Blaster 16 it was a terrific piece of low-power hardware for DOS apps and games. I remember spending a summer day calling all of the computer junk shops in town until I found one that had a Cyrix 5x86, as that laptop was one of the few machines built that supported that Cyrix CPU. That was a great time, I really do miss that laptop.
But I regrettably sold that laptop in late 1998 when I bought my first new computer, a slick little Sony VAIO PCV-E201 that had very little in upgradability but it was super stable once I replaced the stock Windows 98 first edition with Win2K. I boosted it from the stock 32 MB RAM to 160 MB RAM as well as upgraded the Celeron 266 to a Celeron 466 on a Slotket and I used that thing without rebooting for months at a time, for years until I finally disposed of it, not because it didn't work but because the proprietary case was not in the best of shape from years of me using it as a footrest and I couldn't find anyone to take it, couldn't even give it away it was so obsolete. That was one of the most reliable computers I've ever owned.
With the exception of a 486 that I assembled from spare parts from hand-me-down computers in 2001, it was in 2003 that I basically built my first computer from scratch, the first time being with completely brand new parts. The first one I built had an Asus nForce-1 board with a 1.6 GHz T-bred A, I dropped it one day and the hard drive cage fell into the board and basically killed it (weird random ASCII multi-colored characters in the BIOS and post screen after that, and it wouldn't successfully boot). The second system I built was another Athlon XP, and another after that, each with slightly better boards. One had an Abit NF7-S that was a good board, but it was a "refurb" from Newegg, it should've been called an open-box (newegg didn't make the distinction back then), it died within one day after hooking it up and running it. I came home and noticed it wasn't running and noticed melted components around the RAM slot, so I sent it back. The first Athlon XP build I really didn't have problems with was the DFI LanParty NFII Ultra B. That system was awesome, really overclockable, slick looking, good BIOS, it was the first custom-built system in a long time that I was really jazzed about. Unfortunately I was never able to come across a good clocking XP chip, even my best one, a Mobile Barton 2600+ struggled with anything past 2.3 GHz on aftermarket air, pretty terrible for a stock 2GHz chip, especially one of those chips. I basically ended up really loathing the Athlon XP platform because despite everything I'd read and heard on the web from people saying those chips were great overclockers; between a Palomino, two T-bred As, and two Bartons (one being Mobile) I didn't have a single one that could do anything more then a slight overclock. I've never had such poor overclocking results as I had on Socket A, I'm still a little sour about that because its not like I didn't know how to overclock at the time. I was a member here, member of other OC forums, I did the research on how to overclock those chips, I studied the stickies, I had the proper equipment at least for air-cooled overclocking, I just didn't have any good clocking chips from that platform compared to what other posters were achieving with the same hardware and it was irritating.
My first really good success with overclocking was with the Athlon 64. I purchased an Opteron 144 around 2005-06 I think that I paired with a DFI Ultra-D and I had that thing running comfortably at 2.8 GHz on air, a full 1 GHz overclock. I was pretty happy about that. I replaced that chip when the X2 bandwagon was in full swing in the socket 939 camp, I got a chip that got me to about the same clock speed but of course overclocking it wasn't as easy as the Opty. The poor Fortron power supplies I was using may have had something to do with my issues on that setup as well. I ended up selling off all of the AMD stuff when the Core 2 Duo was released and I've been 100% Intel since. I'd like to build another AMD, I regret selling that Opteron a little bit mainly because it was fun to play around with.
So currently I have a system running an i7-4770K with 16 GB, 480 GB SSD, 680GTX, two 3TB drives striped, and it is truly badass. Naturally, it is my favorite computer I've ever had. However, some others that have a pleasant spot in my memories:
- DFI Ultra D with Opteron 144 (so many options to tinker with on that Ultra-D, had a love/hate relationship with the board but I question how much of that was due to my shoddy PSUs.)
- Biostar GF7050V with Celeron 460 ES (got it to run at 4 GHz on air, wish I still had the board! Plus, since it didn't support overvolting in the BIOS I had to do that via padmods, it worked and I got a 50 degree temp drop on the board's northbridge by screwing a cheap fan into the chipset heatsink, it was just a really fun board to work with!)
- Asus Maximus Formula SE with QX6700 (someday I'd like to put a more power efficient processor in it, but have never got around to it so I just underclocked it to 1.6 GHz instead and turned it into a HTPC in the meantime.)
- Gigabyte EP35-DS3R with QX6700 (its been sitting in my garage for years running 24/7, and years before that, it has killed a couple of cheaper PSUs in the seven or so years I've owned it but it still works flawlessly.)
- DFI Lanparty NFII Ultra B (I really liked that board, arguably the best board for socket A, lots of options and pretty darned stable.)
- Sony VAIO PCV-E201 (it was just a real stable system with Win2K, not really any configuration options or upgradability but that was the point, it was like an Apple in that regard, it just worked and I still found little minor ways to upgrade it and keep it relevant for years beyond what it should've been. I managed to run it with a Coppermine in the Slotket later on but could only boot Win9x with that particular chip in it.)
- Leading Edge AVIVA 2000 (great DOS system! By today's standards its 640x480 8-bit color DSTN screen makes the Wii U Gamepad's screen look like an Apple IPS retina display by comparison, but in the late 90s I thought it was pretty decent. I wish I had just torn off the screen and kept it as a headless sytem. I mean, the Cyrix chip, it was cool!)
Alternatively, there were some systems that I really came to loathe:
- PC Chips M919 VIP (garbage quality, I came to find out how truly bad this notoriously legendary board was sometime later when I researched it on the web. To think, I bought that board brand new through a catalog.)
- Foxconn 975X7AB (I really wanted to like that board but it was too quirky, the digital vrm wasn't as good as a traditional vrm, and some options in the BIOS were needlessly overcomplicated such as RAM ratios)
- Packard Bell 386sx (did anyone like Packard Bells? I sure didn't, especially a heavily used one from a garage sale that was rather ugly.)
- 2nd gen convection-coolediMac G3 (I'll just mention these as I did not particularly care for these systems, the earlier ones like the Bondi Blue and 5 flavors were okay but the later year runs in the convection cooled model really saw a drop in quality, particularly with the CRTs. The LG CRTs were terrific, but the cheap Chunghwa CRTs used in later model Indigo and Snow iMacs were crap and suffered from some terrible focusing issues in the screen, focusing issues that could not be corrected with the pots on the side of the CRT. And I've never seen such slipshod manufacturing and soldering on a professional product as I've seen on those iMac's PAV boards. Looked pretty shoddy, gobs of excess glue, so many wire jumps, really fine board design there guys, especially the AC socket connector, wiggle wiggle wiggle! Fortunately I never owned one myself, but I had to replace the CRTs on quite a few at work and I quickly grew to loathe those fanless G3 iMacs.)
My family's first computer was a TI-99/A that I barely remember, other then playing Alpiner on it. Our first PC was a XT clone that I taught myself how to use DOS on. After that my parents bought a 286 in the early 90s from a guy in our church that I still think charged way too much for its old hardware and he did a shoddy half-assed job assembling it (resting a hard drive on ribbon cables instead of properly sliding it into AND screwing it into the cage is pretty horrible work Mr Bob ***** - assuming you ever read this, you should've taken more pride in your work instead of half-assing it dude). I used that thing for years in the great Windows 3.x heyday and it actually was a pretty good computer for what it was. Then they got me a 386 at a garage sale that was quite gimped compared to what I had, being a Packard Bell in a stupid pizzabox case with riser card and looked like cheap garbage but "hey it was a 32-bit CPU I could finally run a DOS prompt in a window!" It was that system that I purchased my first ever computer upgrade for - a Diamond 1 MB ISA video card. It was quite an upgrade, it really sped up the 2D animation in certain games like Raptor (one of my favorites!) and generally in Windows 3.x too. A few months later my parents got me a really cool system at a garage sale, a 486DX2-66 with not much else inside of it other then the case. It was pretty much gutted except for the socket 3 motherboard it resided on, along with a 2 MB Orchid Celsius VLB video card. It supported my old system's RAM so I moved that 4 MB of 30-pin RAM over and it didn't end up being enough so I saved up with my part time job after school and spent over $100 at the time on 16 MB of 30-pin RAM. Later on I made my first mail-order computer part purchase for that system, a PC Chips VIP 486 board that had both VLB and PCI in addition to ISA, and both 30-pin and 72-pin memory slots. It was like a jack of all trades, master of none. I thought it was awesome until the motherboard's onboard IO corrupted my drive and all of my save data that I lacked backups of. This was the mid-late 90s and I didn't yet know that particular motherboard was a problematic board. I ended up replacing that system with a good deal I got on a Leading Edge Aviva 2000 486 laptop (with socketed CPU!) that I used for a few months until the screen hinges completely cracked apart from use. The screen hinges were a weak part of that model of laptop, it was a pretty widespread issue when I read about it so I just ended up pulling the CPU, RAM and drive out it and then pitched it out. I wish I would've just ditched the screen and kept it as a headless DOS PC because, along with the 16 MB RAM and onboard sound that fully supported the Sound Blaster 16 it was a terrific piece of low-power hardware for DOS apps and games. I remember spending a summer day calling all of the computer junk shops in town until I found one that had a Cyrix 5x86, as that laptop was one of the few machines built that supported that Cyrix CPU. That was a great time, I really do miss that laptop.
But I regrettably sold that laptop in late 1998 when I bought my first new computer, a slick little Sony VAIO PCV-E201 that had very little in upgradability but it was super stable once I replaced the stock Windows 98 first edition with Win2K. I boosted it from the stock 32 MB RAM to 160 MB RAM as well as upgraded the Celeron 266 to a Celeron 466 on a Slotket and I used that thing without rebooting for months at a time, for years until I finally disposed of it, not because it didn't work but because the proprietary case was not in the best of shape from years of me using it as a footrest and I couldn't find anyone to take it, couldn't even give it away it was so obsolete. That was one of the most reliable computers I've ever owned.
With the exception of a 486 that I assembled from spare parts from hand-me-down computers in 2001, it was in 2003 that I basically built my first computer from scratch, the first time being with completely brand new parts. The first one I built had an Asus nForce-1 board with a 1.6 GHz T-bred A, I dropped it one day and the hard drive cage fell into the board and basically killed it (weird random ASCII multi-colored characters in the BIOS and post screen after that, and it wouldn't successfully boot). The second system I built was another Athlon XP, and another after that, each with slightly better boards. One had an Abit NF7-S that was a good board, but it was a "refurb" from Newegg, it should've been called an open-box (newegg didn't make the distinction back then), it died within one day after hooking it up and running it. I came home and noticed it wasn't running and noticed melted components around the RAM slot, so I sent it back. The first Athlon XP build I really didn't have problems with was the DFI LanParty NFII Ultra B. That system was awesome, really overclockable, slick looking, good BIOS, it was the first custom-built system in a long time that I was really jazzed about. Unfortunately I was never able to come across a good clocking XP chip, even my best one, a Mobile Barton 2600+ struggled with anything past 2.3 GHz on aftermarket air, pretty terrible for a stock 2GHz chip, especially one of those chips. I basically ended up really loathing the Athlon XP platform because despite everything I'd read and heard on the web from people saying those chips were great overclockers; between a Palomino, two T-bred As, and two Bartons (one being Mobile) I didn't have a single one that could do anything more then a slight overclock. I've never had such poor overclocking results as I had on Socket A, I'm still a little sour about that because its not like I didn't know how to overclock at the time. I was a member here, member of other OC forums, I did the research on how to overclock those chips, I studied the stickies, I had the proper equipment at least for air-cooled overclocking, I just didn't have any good clocking chips from that platform compared to what other posters were achieving with the same hardware and it was irritating.
My first really good success with overclocking was with the Athlon 64. I purchased an Opteron 144 around 2005-06 I think that I paired with a DFI Ultra-D and I had that thing running comfortably at 2.8 GHz on air, a full 1 GHz overclock. I was pretty happy about that. I replaced that chip when the X2 bandwagon was in full swing in the socket 939 camp, I got a chip that got me to about the same clock speed but of course overclocking it wasn't as easy as the Opty. The poor Fortron power supplies I was using may have had something to do with my issues on that setup as well. I ended up selling off all of the AMD stuff when the Core 2 Duo was released and I've been 100% Intel since. I'd like to build another AMD, I regret selling that Opteron a little bit mainly because it was fun to play around with.
So currently I have a system running an i7-4770K with 16 GB, 480 GB SSD, 680GTX, two 3TB drives striped, and it is truly badass. Naturally, it is my favorite computer I've ever had. However, some others that have a pleasant spot in my memories:
- DFI Ultra D with Opteron 144 (so many options to tinker with on that Ultra-D, had a love/hate relationship with the board but I question how much of that was due to my shoddy PSUs.)
- Biostar GF7050V with Celeron 460 ES (got it to run at 4 GHz on air, wish I still had the board! Plus, since it didn't support overvolting in the BIOS I had to do that via padmods, it worked and I got a 50 degree temp drop on the board's northbridge by screwing a cheap fan into the chipset heatsink, it was just a really fun board to work with!)
- Asus Maximus Formula SE with QX6700 (someday I'd like to put a more power efficient processor in it, but have never got around to it so I just underclocked it to 1.6 GHz instead and turned it into a HTPC in the meantime.)
- Gigabyte EP35-DS3R with QX6700 (its been sitting in my garage for years running 24/7, and years before that, it has killed a couple of cheaper PSUs in the seven or so years I've owned it but it still works flawlessly.)
- DFI Lanparty NFII Ultra B (I really liked that board, arguably the best board for socket A, lots of options and pretty darned stable.)
- Sony VAIO PCV-E201 (it was just a real stable system with Win2K, not really any configuration options or upgradability but that was the point, it was like an Apple in that regard, it just worked and I still found little minor ways to upgrade it and keep it relevant for years beyond what it should've been. I managed to run it with a Coppermine in the Slotket later on but could only boot Win9x with that particular chip in it.)
- Leading Edge AVIVA 2000 (great DOS system! By today's standards its 640x480 8-bit color DSTN screen makes the Wii U Gamepad's screen look like an Apple IPS retina display by comparison, but in the late 90s I thought it was pretty decent. I wish I had just torn off the screen and kept it as a headless sytem. I mean, the Cyrix chip, it was cool!)
Alternatively, there were some systems that I really came to loathe:
- PC Chips M919 VIP (garbage quality, I came to find out how truly bad this notoriously legendary board was sometime later when I researched it on the web. To think, I bought that board brand new through a catalog.)
- Foxconn 975X7AB (I really wanted to like that board but it was too quirky, the digital vrm wasn't as good as a traditional vrm, and some options in the BIOS were needlessly overcomplicated such as RAM ratios)
- Packard Bell 386sx (did anyone like Packard Bells? I sure didn't, especially a heavily used one from a garage sale that was rather ugly.)
- 2nd gen convection-coolediMac G3 (I'll just mention these as I did not particularly care for these systems, the earlier ones like the Bondi Blue and 5 flavors were okay but the later year runs in the convection cooled model really saw a drop in quality, particularly with the CRTs. The LG CRTs were terrific, but the cheap Chunghwa CRTs used in later model Indigo and Snow iMacs were crap and suffered from some terrible focusing issues in the screen, focusing issues that could not be corrected with the pots on the side of the CRT. And I've never seen such slipshod manufacturing and soldering on a professional product as I've seen on those iMac's PAV boards. Looked pretty shoddy, gobs of excess glue, so many wire jumps, really fine board design there guys, especially the AC socket connector, wiggle wiggle wiggle! Fortunately I never owned one myself, but I had to replace the CRTs on quite a few at work and I quickly grew to loathe those fanless G3 iMacs.)
I too despised iMacs. All iMacs. I thought it was a terrible concept. They tried to sell it as a "simple" computer. It was no more or less complicated than any other computer of its time.
I too despised iMacs. All iMacs. I thought it was a terrible concept. They tried to sell it as a "simple" computer. It was no more or less complicated than any other computer of its time.
LOL I remember the Jeff Goldbloom Ads. "There's no step 3!!"... so funny.
Yes, there are license agreements and what not to deal with when you get an OEM PC. That's what happens when one company doesn't make "everything" from hardware to software an everything in between.
I could slap a PC, speakers, monitor, keybo and mouse together in 4 or 5 minutes without really rushing. I think they were exaggerating in your classic commercial there hehe.
In Highschool we had iMacs with iMovie for our video class. We used to edit digital videos on there. This was SD DV on those little cassettes. Used to take an hour to load an hour of footage on to the machine at 1:1. Terrible. Then when I wanted to add all my effects, cuts, transitions, credits, etc I had to wait from when I first got to school until lunch time. The performance just wasn't there for what they were trying to do with the machine. A modern iMac has the cojones to pull it off but a 1st gen upgraded to (early) OSX? Nerp..
On topic, I forgot to mention my Hunk of Dell carp.
P4 2.8 Ghz (With hyper-threading!)
512Mb DDR
80Gb WD Caviar -- This was huge for me back then
GeForce4 MX 440 AGP.
Hehe, Halo ran smooth on that rig. Not with high res of course
On topic, I forgot to mention my Hunk of Dell carp.
P4 2.8 Ghz (With hyper-threading!)
512Mb DDR
80Gb WD Caviar -- This was huge for me back then
GeForce4 MX 440 AGP.
Hehe, Halo ran smooth on that rig. Not with high res of course
I seem to remember you saying that was an Optiplex GX270. Absolutely horrible motherboard, CPU caps popping like popcorn (I have gone through many of those at work).
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