Looking back at my older rigs

I just had a thought hit me a while ago and was thinking how far both cpu and gpu processing has come. My first real computer I had was a Dell Inspiron tower about 12 years ago. It had a Pentium 3 (I think) @ 866 mhz and a TNT vid card. It was pretty good until I tryed to play Warcraft III on it. It was ok but really bogged down. Well I was in Walmart one day and what was before my eyes; and Visiontek 4200ti. I put that thing in and omg what a difference and I was hooked from that point. Below is my upgrades from roughly 10 years until now. Tell us your about your upgrade itch over the years.

2001.Pentium 3 866 MHZ and TNT PRO and Nvidia 420mx (sucked bad
2002.AMD Athlon XP 2400 and Nvidia 4200ti
2004.AMD Athlon XP 2400 and upgraded to ATI 9800 pro (BEAST)
2005. Upgraded to AMD Athlon XP 2500 (one of those that was made for a laptop and could overclock the crap out of) and kept ATI 9800 pro
2006.Next I upgraded to Athlon XP 3700+ and a Nvidia 7600gt
2007.From there I upgraded to a AMD Opteron 2.2 Dual core and kept the 7600gt.
2008. Upgrade to Pent 4 p2180 with Allendale core and a ATI Radeon HD 3850 (this sucker pushed some frame rate)
2009. Order my first laptop. A dell Vostro 1700 with a core 2 @ 2.0 and a 8600GT
2010. Upgrade to a ASUS G60 with a GTX 260 (monster)
2011. I down graded to a smaller Acer 4830TG with a i5 and a 540gt.

Looking back, I have spent a $hit load of money just to keep up with gaming but I had damn fun building those rigs and trying to push my futuremark score higher and higher. Awww....good times.

 

Man I still remember when I added a math co-processor to my old i386 motherboard to try and get Flight Simulator 3 or 4 to run decent long before any sort of 3D accelerator! The most I ever spent on any single upgrade was the Pentium II 300mhz the week they were released and I was so excited... that puppy cost a whopping $800 at the time ha... good times I agree

When the 3dfx Voodoo came around, that's when the whole ballgame changed! It was amazing for the time, and I still remember playing the demos that came with the card and being blown away.

Finally committed to laptops and tablets around 2005 and haven't built or used a desktop since....

My cellphone is way more powerful than most of the PC's I've built over the years combined.... that makes me chuckle

 

I got a pentium M 2ghz acer when they first launched, that was a beast in its day, it could overclock too up to around 2.3ghz. Beat P4 desktop CPUs and with the x600M clocked from 400mhz core to 600mhz it was not bad on that front either.

 

Compaq Armada E500: Pentium III 850MHz & ATI RAGE Mobility P 8MB
Dell Inspiron 5100: Pentium 4 2.8GHz & ATI Mobility 7500->ATI Mobility 9000
Dell Inspiron E1505: Intel Core Duo T5600 & ATI Mobility Radeon x1300->x1400
Asus G1S: Core 2 Duo T7300->T8300 & 8600M GT
Clevo M860TU->Clevo M860ETU: Core 2 Duo P9500->QX9300 & 9800M GTS->GTX 280M
MSI 16F2->MSI 16F3: i7 2920XM ES & GTX 580M->GTX 680M

The last one is in progress.

 

My first computer was a trs-80 model I. No way am I recounting my path to today. is there a post size limit?

 

LOL...sounds like you were in the same boat I was in. It was a passion with me upgrading my rig every chance I got. My wife hated me for that. She thought it was a waste of money, which I guess it was.

 

My first machine was Timex Computer 2048 with 3.5 MHz CPU and a whopping 48 kB or RAM. Later upgraded with AY sound card. It was ace! Oh, and it had chiclet keyboard, so popular nowadays.