Hardware Hardware we'd have killed for 10 years ago

Yeah, I remember overclocking my (katmai) PIII 500Mhz@712Mhz or something... never really booted to windows at that speed And it was more hot than my old 2900XT...

 

Compression fittings versus jubilee clipping, that's controversial . I still love jubilees and ptfe tape, absolutely no way they leak, compression fittings aren't always so good ;P.

 

Cases were not ugly (thermaltake Xaser 2 Cheesecake!!) and mice 10yrs ago were optical (MS and logitech offered them) - your going back too far in time.

If I recall, the Ti4800 and Radeon8500 were available in 2002... as was the Athlon XP2400+ and 2.8ghz P4 so I am trying to think of this as your hardware and peripheral anchor for that timeframe

Clocking a 1.8ghz 2500 AMD to 2.5ghz seems miniscual compared to pushing a 3.3ghz 2500k to 4.8ghz but they're both around 40% overclock.

Agree with comments that 120mm fans would of been great as would USB2 and Wifi

 

What about LGA-775? I hate PGAs with a passion, always somehow end up bending a pin (lost an Athlon 64 that way). Also, although it's not hardware, Steam! I love that all my friends and games are in one place instead of pissing about with xfire and msn, along with joining through steam instead of having to send server ips manually. There's the digital dist bit too,It's great not having to swap a disk each time you change games, plus the hunt for patches then any bug fixes and compatibility problems is gone, just click install, wait for the download and its all sorted, not to mention the absolute gutting feeling after you put x hours into a game and them have to start all over because you had a Windows crash and lost the saves (still haunt finished the first stalker cos that happened and wouldn't have finished human revolution without steam cloud). I'm gonna add high speed broadband too as digital distribution couldn't have happened otherwise. Not only steam, but spotify, YouTube, iTunes, origin and so on wouldn't be around either.

 

the mITX form factor!

 

PCIe is so much simpler than AGP and it's many variations.

I remember getting one of those in PC Gamer's Jan 2000 edition. For ages I wondered what it was, it was really useful when I finally found out.

 

Are you sure about that ... friend ? Today's most common (= cheap) monitors support 1920x1080 / 1920x1200 resolution you seem to dislike so much and 2560x1600 monitors are not uncommon whereas the most common monitors of 2002 (15" and 16" CRTs) worked up to 1600x1200 and the LCDs of that time were tiny, slow, badly ghosting, 800x600 or 1024x768.

In addition to that graphics cards of the day weren't capable of presenting anything usable at those resolutions (apart from 2D desktop work, of course) while today's cards have no problem driving multiple high-resolution displays, so that 1600x1200 resolution was pretty much unless, except for few professionals.

Do get your facts straight, friend.

 

Some maybe but I remember 10 years ago almost every budget and mid-range case was 'influenced' by sportscars. I still have nightmares about those horrendous BMW style cases that cluttered up retailers and computer markets. Ah computers markets.. 10 years ago they were awesome. Now they suck.

 

I'm sure I nearly bought an epia board in 2002...

 

What about the humble, highly portable, high storage capacity usb memory sticks that got rid of the need for floppies of all shapes and sizes.

 

I still have one somewhere...

 

I agree - my 21" CRT was fantasic, albeit straining my desk a little.

Good call x 2.

Back in the day, I'd find it therapeutic to use scissors to clean the rollers inside my mouse. Thankfully, I can satisfy my OCD by scrapping the crap off the slidey pads on the bottom of the mouse now.

 

I'd have killed to have my Razer Destructor mousemat, or similar And for ages i had an IBM standard issue keyboard that had me killed in CS countless times because the ctrl-key was too flimsy that I couldn't even press it down properly.

 

Oh gosh, I still have this on my desk. Have I really been trying to spin it like the totem from Inception for this long?!

 

hardware not so much.. I mean it's nice and stable and overclocks like crazy

but if anyone remembers unix sun terminals even back in the early 90's.. makes the lcd monitors of today look like the gimp =]

wouldn't mind taking the knowledge I now know about wireless security.. in 2002 was already ccna cert but didn't know much about anything.. oh yeah jennifer lopez booty was still ben afleck free back then too- who knows what could have happened if you could go back maybe you could go back and patent the beastrix too

 

How about if we look at this a different way

BluRay writers should have come along 10 years ago, as should have the latest Powerline Technology that we have now. Wireless may not have come along so far, or better still have had competition and therefore developed MORE. As for Blu-Ray - killed by the USB stick and fast internet..... in the home market.

 

My list would be endless but some items that have been missed from above, I would say:

Moving on to 300MB Wireless / GB LAN Networks in comparison to the old COAX and 10MB network cards the size of your GPU (the unknown of whether the network crash in the middle of game came from a game/windows fault or a loose COAX connection was a time consuming fault finding exercise, having to take apart the COAX connector and rewire to retry the network connection was a pain in the...),

BROADBAND (56k.............................................................................................loading)

CD/DVD’s, USB pens and HDDs, thank god games don’t come on 12 floppy disks anymore like the original Monkey Island, all that bzzz buz... light flashing no noise... bzz brrrr bzzzz, blank screen... I have now realise why I am nearly bald!!!!

 

Umm...what?

 

Dropbox, SDHC cards, well designed cases.

 

Hmm good point. Let me rephrase:
Powerful hardware in mITX form factor!