PC gamers, whats your upgrade history?

[BriGuy]

I've only had three PCs, including my current one.

I went from a Packard Bell with a 150 Mhz Pentium I, to a Compaq with a 533 Mhz K6-2 to a HP with a Athlon 64 X2 4200+.

The PB never had a graphics card. I believe I had an MX400 in the Compaq, and then some version of Radeon, but I wasn't very educated on cards back then.

The graphic card history of my current computer is more interesting.

I got a 7900GS for it, but also had to replace the power supply from the stock that came in my HP because it wasn't strong enough. I then replaced it with a 9800GT, which I still use.

 

[Cutter John]

Jeezus how do you people rememeber all that? I've been building my own for about ten years and barely remember 2-3 of the CPU's I've owned.

Generally I'll upgrade a part every 18 months to two years. If its not expensive and offers a big jump in performance.

And yeah, I'll admit I've been an AMD slut the entire time. But thats mostly because when I do upgrade my CPU, I need to get something thats compatible with my current motherboard. Same with NVidia. Hey if it works, why change?

 

[Iasius]

CPUs
1993 AMD am486 DX40
1996 Intel Pentium 133
1998 Intel Pentium II 233
1999 Intel Celeron 433
2001 Intel Pentium 600E
2003 AMD Athlon XP 1800+
2008 Intel Core 2 Duo E6750

Video Cards
1993 Trident 1 MB
1996 S3 Virge
1997 3dfx Voodoo 1
1998 nVidia Riva TNT
2000 nVidia GeForce DDR
2002 nVidia GeForce 2 Pro
2004 nVidia GeForce FX 5200
2008 ATI X1950 Pro
2008 nVidia GeForce 9800 GT (didn't like the ATI drivers at all, so I sold it and went back to nVidia)
2008 a second nVidia GeForce 9800 GT (mostly for the support of a triple monitor setup and Vista wants you to use just one display driver)


Ok, I think that's roughly correct. If i had to remember what amount of RAM I had at various times though ... if I think I upgraded that most often along with HDDs, RAM went from 4 MB to 4 GB over the years, disk space was 200 MB in 1993, now it's 4660000 MB (4.2 TiB).

I didn't really play games as much anymore after ~2004, but in 2008 the age of that PC was showing and I wanted to try out a couple newer games so I bought lots of new PC components. I'll probably keep this one for quite a few years as well.



AMD vs Intel and ATI vs nVidia:
I don't really have a favorite brand so much as at times one company will make better products than the other. Most of the time that has meant Intel for me, but sometimes AMD.
As for ATI vs nVidia, I do prefer nVidia overall because they tend to have better driver support, especially under Linux.
The most annoying part of the ATI drivers I used when I had the X1950 Pro for a few months were the lack of options for aspect ratio. Playing old 4:3 games is no fun when you card automatically stretches them to 16:10. I also had an issue with the driver utility crashing often.
But this wouldn't prevent from from buying an ATI card if it's really good in the future, especially since I now have a nice display that supports aspect ratio scaling itself.

 

[Cutter John]

I just have to remember to be careful from now on when installing new Nvidia drivers. I ended up in quite a state yesterday when I used Add/Remove to get rid of the old video drivers and ended up killing my Nvidia network software along with it. Suddenly *poof* No net access.

Thankfully my system is dualbooted to the Win7 beta so I was able to download new software through it.

 

[Yoda]

2008 a second nVidia GeForce 9800 GT (mostly for the support of a triple monitor setup and Vista wants you to use just one display driver)

I rock the triple monitors in Vista as well. Though, mine likes to lose the ability to return to my normal resolution. I'll play a game at a fullscreen res, then Vista freaks out and changes some of my monitors randomly to 800x600, and I can't get my original display mode back, it craps out every time I try until I reboot. If I pick my 1920x1200 resolution for 16-bit color, at least that works, but it's the most annoying thing in Windows history for me, and that's saying a LOT. This shit ever happen to you, or am I just cursed and damned?

 

[Iasius]

This shit ever happen to you, or am I just cursed and damned?

No, that has never happened to me. It does sound extremely annoying.

 

[Bluejay]

Gee, I don't remember what was the setup of the PC I played Doom & SW Dark Forces on, only that it only managed to pass the minimum requirements. After that, I decided to go for a true gaming rig. I don't remember what it had either, I only recall that the graphic card was called Voodoo. First game on it was G-Police, that really flung me into gaming.


Since then, I've been changing rigs every 3 years. I dont have a rig that's more than 3 yrs old.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

I don't remember, I know I started with a Pentium 75MHz with a 1mb Cirrus Logic video card. and 8mb of RAM. Then I just upgraded bits here and there (8mb more ram, 4mb Voodoo card, etc.) until I did full new machines. And in them I have had everything from S3 Virge, to Matrox to GeForce FX and ATI Radeon, and Cyrix M2 CPU to Celeron 2 to AMD K6-2s and Athlons etc. Too many to remember.
My current machine isn't so much a gaming machine as I decided to go with console gaming but it's a Phenom X3 8650, with 4gb RAM and a Radeon 3200HD graphics card.

 

[TEH BABA]

I remember EGA and CGA still have ton of VGA games.

 

[little_chris]

CPUs:

AMD K6-2 400mhz
AMD K6-2 450mhz (got for free)
AMD Athlon 1ghz
AMD Athlon 1800+ (Throughbred B, did 2.2ghz easy up for std 1.5ghz)
AMD Athlon 2500+ (Barton did 2.2ghz so effectively a 3200+)
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Venice core, did 2.75ghz nice chip)
AMD Opteron 165 (Dual core chip, with easy overclock effectively an AMD Athlon FX60 for a thrid of the price)
Intel Core i7 920.

Vid cards:
ATI Rage Pro Turbo 8mb.
+ 3DFX Voodoo 2.
nVidia RivaTNT2 Ultra.
Geforce 2MX.
Geforce FX5500 (cries)
Geforce 6600GT AGP
Geforce 6600 GT PCI-E
Geforce 7800GT
+ Geforce 7800GT for SLI
Geforce 8800 GTS 640mb
Geforce GTX 260.

 

[Hermiod]

I don't remember, I know I started with a Pentium 75MHz with a 1mb Cirrus Logic video card. and 8mb of RAM. Then I just upgraded bits here and there (8mb more ram, 4mb Voodoo card, etc.) until I did full new machines. And in them I have had everything from S3 Virge, to Matrox to GeForce FX and ATI Radeon, and Cyrix M2 CPU to Celeron 2 to AMD K6-2s and Athlons etc. Too many to remember.
My current machine isn't so much a gaming machine as I decided to go with console gaming but it's a Phenom X3 8650, with 4gb RAM and a Radeon 3200HD graphics card.

Depending on your PSU (needs to be about 350w or more), a relatively inexpensive ATI Radeon 4650 would turn that in to a decent games machine.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

I don't remember, I know I started with a Pentium 75MHz with a 1mb Cirrus Logic video card. and 8mb of RAM. Then I just upgraded bits here and there (8mb more ram, 4mb Voodoo card, etc.) until I did full new machines. And in them I have had everything from S3 Virge, to Matrox to GeForce FX and ATI Radeon, and Cyrix M2 CPU to Celeron 2 to AMD K6-2s and Athlons etc. Too many to remember.
My current machine isn't so much a gaming machine as I decided to go with console gaming but it's a Phenom X3 8650, with 4gb RAM and a Radeon 3200HD graphics card.

Depending on your PSU (needs to be about 350w or more), a relatively inexpensive ATI Radeon 4650 would turn that in to a decent games machine.

Yeah, it's a 450W PSU, and that was the thought, it was cheap enough to build at the time and with a half decent graphics card it would be a decent gaming machine.

 

[Hermiod]

^4650 HD's are a great midrange card. Sapphire do an "Ultimate" one that adds HDMI output (the card normally has Dual-DVI) and uses a heatsink instead of a fan so it's completely silent.

I get very good framerates in Left 4 Dead at 1680x1050 with mine, so I'm happy.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

^4650 HD's are a great midrange card. Sapphire do an "Ultimate" one that adds HDMI output (the card normally has Dual-DVI) and uses a heatsink instead of a fan so it's completely silent.

I get very good framerates in Left 4 Dead at 1680x1050 with mine, so I'm happy.

Plus it's a AMD 780G chipset, so I believe it crossfires your onboard and discrete graphics card for better performance.

 

[Hermiod]

^Ah, I wouldn't know about that as it's the only graphics hardware in my PC. I don't have a SLI capable motherboard.

As a side note, I would not recommend going with the Sapphire Ultimate one if anyone wants to SLI them as the heatsink on each card would make it very difficult to seat them next to each other.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

^Ah, I wouldn't know about that as it's the only graphics hardware in my PC. I don't have a SLI capable motherboard.

As a side note, I would not recommend going with the Sapphire Ultimate one if anyone wants to SLI them as the heatsink on each card would make it very difficult to seat them next to each other.

The 3200HD card is onboard, I believe it's what came of the whole AMD Fusion thing, so there's a added bonus with 2 cards in power saving, performance, etc.