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Theocnoob

Theocnoob

Member
​
Joined
Dec 1, 2007
Location
Near Toronto Canada
I thought it would be cool to see a history of what users of OCF have used, computer wise, their whole lives. Some of us may be in our teens, some of us may be in our 70s. I'd like to see at what point people got into the computing scene, and what kind of hardware they've owned over the years.

Also, please list any modifications you performed, or had performed (by someone else) on your hardware.

Me:
(Commodore) Amiga 500 (added 512K RAM expansion)
(privately built) Pentium 75Mhz (no mods) (technically my grandfather's, but I used it more than he did)
(Solar Microsystems) Pentium II 300Mhz (Added a Voodoo Banshee vid card and Soundblaster)
(privately built) Athlon 1000Mhz (Added Geforce 2 GTS)
(Dell) Pentium 4 3.2Ghz (Added ATi AIW 9600)
(built myself) Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33Ghz (Added GeForce 8800GTS)
(built myself) i7 950 (added GeForce GTX 580)
(built myself) i7 2600K (no mods)

Honorable mention: 386DX (My uncle's computer where I learned how to use a PC)

Favorite system: Amiga 500. I have fond memories of this Hard drive-less dinosaur clunking along in my bedroom in my childhood.
 
Besides the vague, fuzzy memories of beige space heaters with turbo buttons from my childhood that my dad bought off of a guy from work:

An HP was the first boxed computer my family bought. I don't know any details on it other than it had a WD hard drive that failed after a few years. We went without a computer for a while after that.

Then there was the first computer that I could call my own, a Compaq could finally handle games that the old HP couldn't. Kinda. It had a single core 1.8GHz Celeron (I think). I was still young and computer-ignorant, and so I threw another stick of 256MB DDR in it in high school when I had a little extra money and it didn't really help with gaming. Needed a graphics card but I didn't know that back then. :-/ It's long gone but it was the comp that got me into computer gaming. It could easily qualify as my favorite.

Then when I graduated I got a Dell with a Sempy 145 and 2GB of DDR2 RAM and a DVD drive and I thought it was the most amazing thing in the world. I put in a 9500GT from Staples that was horridly overpriced but I didn't know it, and it lasted a long time as my gaming computer. I was still pretty computer illiterate back then, and I wanted to upgrade to a dual core (and I definitely didn't know about the Sempy being a locked Athlon II) so I bought the first thing I ever did from Newegg. An Athlon 64 x2 6000+ which XP never recognized and still ran it as a single core @ 2.8GHz, so I actually downgraded. :facepalm: That being said, the Sempy was probably my favorite CPU so far.

Then I got a good raise and decided it was time I actually built my own computer, which was the FX-4100 rig I started here with, and really what brought me here as I decided to try overclocking after a while. That's all more recent history that has been covered on the forums in the past few years and I'm working on reviving it so it will be back in my sig soon anyway.

And now I have an i5 rig I built around a review mobo I got recently, which will also be in my sig soon. :D
 
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I got my first computer around 86-87 and it was a TI-99 that I got second-hand. I was in my mid-20's at the time.

Next was a Packard Bell AT clone, running at 10MHz. DOS 6 goodness & a turbo button (which actually slowed the machine to XT 4.77MHz speed). It had 640kb RAM & cost $100+ to upgrade to 2MB.

I did a mobo, CPU, RAM upgrade to a 486 DX50, then DX2-66. It had Trident video if I remember correctly. This was the first PC I overclocked - by accident - I forgot to properly change jumpers when switching between the to CPUs. First PC with a CD ROM, which had its own ISA controller card and integrated sound.

I retired the AT desktop case & custom built a Pentium 200 pre-MMX with Stealth 3D video in a mid-tower - still pre ATX. I Power Leaped to an AMD 450 and added a PCI VooDoo 2. I think that may have been my favorite PC because of all the time I spent with Quake II and all of its mods. I had this box for years.

I'm not proud of what's next... lol It was a Dell Dimension 8100 (proprietary POS) s423 1.8GHz, RDRAM, and a Geforce2 GTS. I Power Leaped this one to a s478 2.6GHz 400fsb and upgraded to a Ti4400. Norton 2004 brought this machine to its knees, so it was upgrade time again. I ran a Win ME install for 4 years on this box!

I went a little nuts next. Started with an Abit AI7 and reused the 2.6GHz and Ti4400. Upgraded to a 3.2GHz northwood, then to a 3.4GHz prescott. The stress on the mosfets convinced me to get an IC7g. I picked up a Geforce 6800 Ultra & had enough parts to have two systems. Replaced the Ti4400 with an x850pro in the northwood system. Overclocking the Prescott made me decide to go watercooling, so I got the swiftech h20-220 apogee kit which I still use on my Q9650.

Next was the C2D E6600 @ 3.6GHz (wasn't that stock?), AW9D Max, & x1900xtx crossfire. Upgraded to an X6800 at 4.0GHz, Asus X38, 3870 crossfire was next. Upgraded the CPU to an E8600. Moved the E8600 to an Asus X48 and upgraded to HD4890 crossfire. Upgraded CPU to a Q9650, killed the HD4890s & bought an HD6950. That's still my gamer.
BTW, I've been flying sims ever since the TI-99 on every gamer up until the gamer in my sig. It was too funny hitting v-max in a F-15 on the TI-99 & ripping the wings off. lol

The Asus X38, E8600 and an HD3870 became my photo editing PC. For some reason that combo was nothing but trouble - driver crashes, bsod, win7 update failures, etc. Upgraded that to the 4670k, ASRock Extreme4 & the GTX650.

I also built a HTPC out of used stuff plus an mATX mobo & a cool case.

I've also had several notebooks for general surfing. A compaq with a T7500, 3GB DDR2, Intel 330 SSD & Vista is my daily driver. I also have a Dell d620 running openSUSE. An ipad2 is on my list of mobile devices too.

Edit: Other stuff I forgot about...
Toshiba P2 I got for free when I had the P4 3.4. I got a slocket & found a 1.4 tualatin celeron, software overclocked to 1.5. Added a ATI 9600 & used it for old Need for Speed games & F@H for a couple years.

I saved a couple Abit AA8XE mobo's headed to a dumpster. Paired one with a 2nd hand 3.73GHz P4EE. It had a Geforce 6200 in it, softmodded to a 6600. That was my first photo editing PC.

I had a mutant ACER with and lga775 Pentium D 820, with 2GB DDR1 & an agp GF5600 (fan died) then swapped to an ATI x700Pro. I installed Quake 4 on it & played it through. A friend & I actually got several of these Acers, installed XP & gave them away. A motherboard failed in one (another friend) and I swapped HDDs & gave him my box. It's his garage PC & he still uses it for internet radio & mp3 playback.

I was given an HP dc7600 full tower with a P4 3.4 (650) and switched that out with a Pentium D 945. Don't know what I'm gonna do with it, it's currently my basement PC. lol Thinking about swapping out the 300w PSU for a 550w I have lying around & putting an x1900XTX in it for some older gaming fun.
 
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First was an IBM machine that ran DOS.

Then a quantex (brand) machine with a p2 400mhz CPU in it.

After that I built my own machine with a amd thunderbird 1.4ghz and 512mb of ram.

From there Athlon xp 2500+ on an epox board.

Athlon s939 3700+ on a dfi lanparty that I later upgraded to an opteron 165 dual core.

Intel core2duo e8400 on a gigabyte board.

Then i7 920

I7 2500k-> 2600k within a couple months when I stared heavily benchmarking.

3700k

4770k

Will try to remember to go back and add more info when I get some time and don't have as many drinks in me!
 
Man, not sure I can remember all this.

Very first PC I don't even know what it was. I think it was some kind of 386 clone. I think I had it for about a week and my dad thought it was to much for me to do anything with so he took it back and got me a VCR lol, somewhere around 86 I think.

Got an IBM PS/2 486 SX-25 when I was around 16, my one and only ever pre-built machine. Win 3.1, but I lived in DOS. First upgrade was an original Soundblaster. It opened up an entire to new world. The first time I ran X-Wing with sound it blew my mind, its like I was deaf before and suddenly the world had sound. I played with that text to voice for hrs and wavs, man I was a fiend for wavs. Second upgrade was taking the 2MB ram to 4MB. Freaking IBM proprietary parity ram cost fortune. Next was an Intel Overdrive chip to push it up to a DX-50. Still had this when Win95 came out, man I hated that fugger. Dozen floppies and the install was hell. I took it off and went back to just DOS so many times, but eventually I was to hooked on Prodigy, Compuserve, and eventually had my own SLIP/PPP shell connection with trumpet winsock taking over my life. It originally came with a 2400 bps modem, I eventually upgraded to a Hayes 28.8 Z-Modem.

P90, frankensteined mostly from what I could scavenge from the PS/2 and parts I bought from a friend. First machine I built from case up. Also got 2x8MB sticks of ram from him which was beyond insane for the time. Had more ram than anyone I knew of. I think it was somewhere around here I got my first CD-ROM. That was a big jump in how things were done, the days of the floppy were history.

P166 for a very short time then a Pentium Pro 200. Was big into the BBS scene at this time and had tons of resources for parts.

Celeron 300A was next with the classic Abit BH6. My first real taste of serious OC'ing.

I jumped to a P2 450. Had gotten a Virge3D 4MB and boy did it suck. Was cheaper than this Creative Labs 3D Blaster I was seeing in the stores. Eventually the V2 came out and I got a Diamond V2 8MB. Going from software mode to glide in Q2 was a life changing experience. This eventually turned into 1 then 2x12MB V2's sli'd and later on a Banshee.

P3-800 was next. This was a nice jump in performance. I still miss the slot 1 cpus. I think I had the V3 3500 in this system. Great card, AGP and a TV Tuner. The software was kind of crappy for recording but I watched TV in a window ALL the time. Its pretty damn sad I don't have that ability today, usually most of my later tv\monitors have had picture in picture but these days manufacturers don't seem to do it much anymore.

Then there was this incredible thing called... the Thunderbird! 1ghz of butt kicking. I had known about AMD long before but they were always down there with Cryix and I never paid them much attention. This chip changed the game for AMD and I was happy to hop on.

I had it until the Athlon 1800XP+ which was ok but I was starting to get unhappy with AMD cpu performance.

From there I think I went to a P4 3ghz that I was able to get some absolutely incredible OCs out of.

Then all this talk about a notebook cpu revolutionizing how things were done. I had to see what the hype was so the C2D e4600 was first. It was nice, it was fast, OC'd, and was one of the first processors that I felt could actually handle whatever was thrown at it.

The Q6600 was next up. A nice step up but not a huge jump in overall performance as it was well ahead of its time and software had to catch up. It did do a solid job for a good amount of time, longer than I kept most cpus.

The i7-920D0, still going strong at 4ghz today.

The i5-2500K, decent upgrade but not really noticeably better than the 920. It eventually went to a friend.

The i5-4770K, the current main honcho for me.

I can't remember which all cards I had in which systems as I upgraded pretty often but I know I've went through the Radeon 8500, the original Geforce, Geforce 2, 9800 Pro, 2900 XT, Geforce 4, HD 3800, HD 5870, HD 6850, GTX 580, HD 7970, and GTX 780 ti.

All time favorite would probably have to be the PS/2, the only system I didn't build but I took it apart so many times and upgraded it so much I pretty much did. Was rock solid and just had to many first time memories.
 
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It would take me a year to make the list. lol

Favorite board is probably my K7D Master. Dunno why, I have better.
 
I've had so many over the years I'm not sure I could even name them all. Pentium 133@200, Celeron 400a@500, tbird 800@1000, tbird 1400@1500. A half dozen or so 1700+ until I got a juicb that would do 2.0. A Barton 2500+, then a couple of socket 754 Athlon 64s then a 3700+ single core followed by a 3800+ dual and an Opteron 165(that is still working and is still overclocked to 2.2 9 years later in my sister's pc). Then I went back to the dark side with an e6600 and q6600, which held me till my 2700k and now my 4670k.

My video cards I will probably get out of order. But ati 8800le flashed to 8800. Nvidia mx420, ati 9800 non pro flashed to pro, nvidia 6800gt, sli nvidia 7800gtx, nvidia 8800gts 640, sli nvidia 8800gt, ati 4850, ati 4870, ati 4890, crossfire amd 6950 unlocked, crossfire amd 7950, crossfire amd 290s.

My favorite would have to be the q6600 and 4890. That system lasted me longer without an upgrade than any other I've used.
 
I bought the q6600 right when the price dropped and they released the g0 stepping that was commonly hitting 3.6+. I could probably find the exact date I bought the 4890 since I bought it off the classies here but it was still a new card and the best amd had at the time. I used them both for I guess 3 or 4 years. There was a short window when I had a 6850 I forgot about but that was only for a month or two till I got the 6950.

Edit: checked the dates, looks like more like 2.5 years with the 4890. Seems like longer. The q6600 was about 4 years though. Got it around July of 07 I think and ran with it till end of 2011 when I got the 2700k.
 
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Supertrucker said:
I bought the q6600 right when the price dropped and they released the g0 stepping that was commonly hitting 3.6+. I could probably find the exact date I bought the 4890 since I bought it off the classies here but it was still a new card and the best amd had at the time. I used them both for I guess 3 or 4 years. There was a short window when I had a 6850 I forgot about but that was only for a month or two till I got the 6950.

Edit: checked the dates, looks like more like 2.5 years with the 4890. Seems like longer. The q6600 was about 4 years though. Got it around July of 07 I think and ran with it till end of 2011 when I got the 2700k.
Click to expand...

Nice. I find that part longevity has increased now that things aren't advancing at the breakneck pace that they used to.

For regular net appliance use, even a last gen Pentium 4 with a decent GPU will do pretty much everything. Not bad for an 11 year old part. My friend still uses my old P4 machine that I got in 2004 and I still use my Core 2 Duo machine from 2007 as an HTPC.
 
OH NOOO> Now I have to show just how young I am...... 25yo

Ive only had 5 computers.

HP something from CompUSA $500 -before i knew computers
HP Pavillion A1330- Laptop
Sally- i5-2500k, P8z77 v lx, Vapor-x r9 290 -MY BABY (first build ever)
Project Bertha- fx6300, MSI 970A-GD43, HD7850 1gb - Wifes baby (2nd build ever)
Dell inspiron 3000- Prebuilt some moddign, hd 6770 (moding for brother)
 
Well my family had a bunch of IBM PCs dating back to the old beige ZOMG TURBO BUTTON days and then up to a P3.

"My" first PC was an Emachines that had an AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 512mb RAM, 80GB HDD, and some S3 onboard graphics. First thing I did was upgrade it to 1GB of RAM, 9200 Pro, and put it in some random case that had like 8 80MM fans.

First custom PC was an AMD X2 4800+, ABIT Fatal1ty AN8, 2GB ram, X700, 500w Antec TruePower (I think), and 300GB HDD. Upgraded that over the years, last I used it it had an X2 4400+, Asus A8N-SLI (the 4800+ and Abit AN8 were lost due to a watercooling accident), a Super Flower PSU, and 2x8800GTs.

There was a side project, my SNES PC - a T5500, MSI 945GME1, 2GB ram, and a small HDD.

In college I tried the mATX route. Q9550, 4GB ram, DFI P45-T2RS, OCZ 600w ModXStream pro, 640GB WD Caviar Blue (later upgraded to a 1TB Samsung), and a HIS 4850 (later upgraded to a 5850) in a TT Lanbox (after a while I said screw it and tossed it in an Antec 300)

There's my LAN PC, Phenom II 955 BE, 8GB Corsair XMS3, 120GB Vertex + 320GB WD Blue, some cheapo MSI board (never intended to OC it) and an Apex case.

My current NAS - Sempron 140, 4GB ram, couple Toshiba drives in RAID 5, and a Biostar motherboard.

My Zotac AD04, the only prebuilt non-laptop computer I've used since the EMachines, and that's just because it was a $200 barebones that came with a free SSD and I had some extra RAM from when I upgraded my laptop. Couldn't build a PC that competed with it at that point.

And of course my desktop.

Don't get me started on laptops :D
 
It was an IBM 370 running HASP back in 1972. The computer was as big as a building and only had 360Kbytes of operating memory, but we partitioned it into 3 separate partitions(180, 90, 90) to run 3 programs at a time. Was the day of punch cards, COBOL(programming) and disk drives with platters as big as LP's.
 
Let's see here my first computer was some Packard Bell that my family used as our home computer no clue on the specs all I can remember is it had like 128mb of ram.

Next was a desktop I had bought from Walmart for like 500 that I used as a gaming computer. Emachines with 1gb ram can't remember the processor speed. Ended up installing a nvidia graphics card I also bought from Walmart and that's when I first got into computer gaming.

Up till now I have had various laptops from hp to macbook pros

And now my first build which is in my sig.
 
I love all of my rig that i ever build/assemble, they're like my son to me, i can't tell you witch one is my fav :)

First one:
I7 2600k, ASUS Maximus 4 z68, 2x EVTGA GTX 590 SLI, 16gb Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1866, OCZ Vertex 3 240gb ssd, 4tb WD caviar black HDD Corsair AX1200

picture.php


Second rig
I7 3770k, ASUS Maximus 5 Formula 3 EVGA GTX 680 SLI, 32gb Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR3 1866 2x Corsair Force GS 240gb ssd Raid 0 3tb Seagate HDD, Corsair AX1200i

picture.php


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)



 
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AMD Duron @ 750Mhz
256Mb DDR
128Mb Ati All-In-Wonder 9200 AGP
---
And the sig rig
I5-2300 @ 3.4Ghz
8Gb G.Skill Ripjaws @ 828Mhz Dual
2Gb MSI 7850 + Sapphire 2Gb 270x Dual-X

Prefer the Duron rig. First rig I owned. Lots of memories :)
 
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