Other Your PC History / Memorable Systems

Sorry if this has been done before but whilst trying (rather badly) to sort out the low budget system for the Grandson it got me reflecting on some the stuff I had over the years. In rough time order it goes a bit like...

Spectrum +2: Parents bought it for "educational" software, ended up with tons of games and the whole family getting stuck in.

ICL OPD: Defo an odd one, actually got used for school work this time and of course messing about with the answering phone's voice synth.

Amstrad CPC 6128: Don't remember much about this one apart from the 3" discs, green screen and CP/M

Apple IIe: Another quirky system, didn't have many games but spent hours on lemonade stand.

IBM AT: Oh the fun that could be had with an 8mhz 286, 20mb HDD and CGA graphics The system that taught me DOS and the delights of messing with config.sys and autoexec.bat

RM Nimbus AX: Another 286 only this time clocked at 12mhz, with a 30mb HDD and EGA graphics. Memorable was the Taxan screen that could be switched between colour, amber, green and grey scale with a button on the front. Also wrote a program in BASIC to roll a dice a few zillion times and log the outcome as part of my maths homework, one of the few times school and I got along lol.

486 SX-25: Neighbour pops round and says he found it in a skip at work and knowing i was into computers asked if it was any use to me. Had 4mb of ram and a VL bus, massive upgrade over the 286 but had to try and fit all the old ISA I/O / video cards from my old systems - not helped by the fact it was a slim line desktop case with a riser card. Suffice to say my pocket money was spent on a larger case along with a VL multi I/O and video card.

Cyrix 5x86: Again don't remember much about this one, only that I was about 14 at the time and was rather chuffed to have 16mb of RAM, was also the time I first had internet access via a 14.4k modem and a friends MSN account.

AMD K6-2/300: Pretty sure this was on rather iffy PC Chips mobo with an S3 Virge PCI video card, at some point a 4Mb 3DFX Voodoo was added.

Duron 800: Having left school and earning a wage it all got spent on PC stuff lol. This was around the time over-clocking really seemed to take off and I got a bit carried away... The system was built on an abit KT-7A Raid motherboard, the CPU had the silver pen trick to unlock the multiplier and a huge cooler was fitted. Was housed in a full tower case which the local metal shop had cut wholes for about a dozen fans which i hooked up to a home made 5/12v fan controller. Even went as far as using Arctic Silver thermal epoxy to fit heat sinks to the RAM on the TNT 2 video card.

Athlon XP: Ran the Duron for years and then passed it on to the soon to be ex - this replaced it and about all that be said really lol.

Q6600: Saved up like mad for this one, had a few upgrades like RAM and video card over the years but still going - is currently the wife's system with a 3ghz overclock, 8gb ram and a Radeon 6850. Also the reason why the 7 year grandson is asking Father Christmas for a computer

i5 3750k: My current system and probably will be for a while. Built on a Gigabyte Z77 motherboard it has 8gb ram and a Radeon 280x, recently ran out of storage and had to deiced on a small SDD or large HDD - ended up with a 3TB hdd and a 64GB mSATA drive for use with the Intel Smart Response caching system, not the same as a "real" SDD setup but certainly quicker than a HDD alone.

Also have.....

HP DC7800 SFF: Runs MediaPortal and along with a low profile Radeon 6450 and twin sat tuner serves as the lounge room's media centre / telly box. Not the fastest thing on the planet but does the job.

Stone Mini ITX: Tiny little Core 2 Duo system based on an Intel motherboard, lives in the bedroom as a MediaPortal client.

Acer Aspire Switch 10 V: 10" Atom netbook with a surprisingly nice build quality and screen, used mainly for watching rubbish on YouTube when unable to sleep or posting random stuff like this thread to the internet.

Athlon 500: Need to track down a video card as the few AGP cards i still have wont fit, will eventually end up as a retro gaming system... one day...

*edit*

Tried to correct spelling / grammar mistakes - too many & too late, given up lol.

 

Scratching the grey cells now..

Apart from school/cousins PCs/Atari's..
DX2-66 - my parent's bought this Olvetti in '93 and we added a CDROM/sound card combo later. Preferred the games to the NES, got into DOS.
Cryrix PR200. Overclocked it to 233, had a 4MB Diamond Stealth II and 4MB Voodoo graphics card. 64MB ram. Spent all my paper round money on it.
Upgraded it to K6-2 400, 450, which was the worst mistake because they were shitty CPUs.
Duron 750 + GeForce 256
Athlon 1GHz
Athlon 1.4
<began reviewing Intel boards>
Pentium 4 2.0b Northwood
P4 2.4b
P4 2.4c
P4 2.8c
P4 3.2ee (best CPU ever)
P4 3.73ee
P4 2.8d (OMG whyyyy did I have to return the 3.73..)
E6300
E6700
Q6700
i7 860
i7 965
<finished reviewing Intel boards>
i7 3930k
i7 5960X

It's been a long Intel ride.

 

100MHz Pentium with the newfangled Windows 95... Came with a mind-bending 4MB of RAM and a whole 1GB HDD, think it'd got upgraded to 128MB and 20GB by the time it eventually got replaced. No GPU as GPUs weren't yet a thing. [first PC i used]

Not Mine but: Pentium II machine of unknown specs - My school got funding to buy it so me and a couple of my classmates could do CAD, robotics and some other related things with a partnered secondary school. Until the arrival of a dedicated IT teacher I was the only one in the school who knew how to use it.

Pentium II 300, K6-2 450. Latter was a replacement for the short-lived former, this was my first exposure to that unmistakable dead PSU smell.

Athlon XP 1700.

Turion something-or-other based HP Laptop. Back when OEMs were putting Vista on hardware that really couldn't handle it so it ran like a dog. Got me through college though.

Q6600, - my first self-build. Only had the Q6600 a year before it was replaced with:

i7 920 - the cause of, and solution to a fair chunk of my coursework woes at university. was originally in an Antec 1200, only over the course of rendering the animation for my final year work the heat buildup inside got such that the case warped. Eventually succumbed to BIOS senility before the SATA controller crapped out.

Current PC - Pentium G3258, hasty-last minute no-funds replacement for the above. Couldn't afford anything better at the time. Still can't.

 

Commodore Vic20 - can't remember loads about it but I remember a building bombing game called Blitz, loved it.

Spectrum +2 128k - got a 007 edition which had the light gun! Now I did have some amazing times with this, taught me patience for game loading.

Cyrix 233 - my mom managed to pull the money together for a PC, had a CD-R writer! I was the nuts for this! I even messed with overclocking ideas. I ended up killing the PC removing the BIOS chip.....oops

P4-HT from Tiny - I decided against a self build for this......ah well, this died for unknown reasons.

AMD Athlon something - my first self build and AMD, can't remember loads of it but it did well

Had loads since then as rarely got rid but some good memories on those above

 

My only two systems worth mentioning are:
P4 Northwood 1.8GHz running at 2.5, the case had a side panel which I cut out, stuck some acrylic on it with "Proxess" (my old username here) engraved on it using a Gravograph machine.
My current laptop which honestly hasn't let me down (except when I cooked my 980M).

I've had two other laptops but they're not worth mentioning.

 

Two more for the list I'd forgotten about...

Amstrad PPC640: Huge luggable thing with a tiny green LCD panel, was basicly an XT with no HDD in a box with a carry handle. Had a built in modem, always wanted to see if there any local BBS about but parents wouldnt let me lol.

Compaq Armada M700: Purchased sight unseen from a friend of a friend who more or less said "mate of mine is in a bind, wanna buy his laptop cheap? - its got a CD player in it". Paid about £250 quid for it, turned out to be a P3-600 with 384mb RAM and about 3 months old at best, got to be best PC bargain ever. Lasted for years until the screen got damaged in a house move, broke it for parts and probably made most of the £250 back lol.

 

Started fairly late, was very much into consoles only until my mid-teens, but it went a bit like this:

P4 560
FX-57
Core 2 Duo E6600
Core 2 Quad Q6600
Core 2 Extreme QX6800
Phenom II 555 (unlocked to quad)
Core 2 Duo E8600
Core i5 750
Core i5 2500K
Pentium G4400
Core i7 6700
Core i5 6600K

Talk about yo-yo'ing between upgrades and downgrades... Funny old hobby, this.

 

Far too many for me to remember!

I know I started off with a ZX80 (boy did I panic when I first started typing and the display went off every time I pressed a key)

ZX81 (with a later addition of a 16k ram pack (which would restart the machine losing everything you had worked on if it vibrated too much - like sneezing when typing) - does taping this to the machine with gaffa tape count as my first brach into modding?

16k Spectrum (which I killed somehow, soon after I upgraded the ram chips to make it a 32k version)

BBC Micro B - bought to help with my 'O' levels - My main memory of this machine is me shut away in my room for the 6 week summer holidays playing Elite

At Uni I moved onto full PC's - 286 / 386 / 486

Lost interest for a few years as I got a job. Got back into it when I saw the BF2 Demo (oh the days when you could download a fully working demo - also took me 2 days to download due to only being on 56k dial up modem. I loved it and due to my job going quite well, I decided to build a new PC to run it in all its glory once the game was released - an Athlon 64 something or other. I think it was based on an Asus A8N SLI-E. I built quite a few Athlon systems and on one occassion with an Opteron 144 - the last AMD chip I bought

I've bought at least one cpu from each intel generation since the launch of the Core 2 Duo's. Currently my main rig is running a 5960X, my 2nd system is running a 7700K

The amount of different setups I've built too:
The original Nvidia SLI (I built a couple of these during my BF2 playing history (built on the revised Asus A8N SLI-Deluxe - it was awful, so I eventually gave up on it)
The revised SLI & Crossfire (much improved, but have again given up on it due to many frustrations)
Multiple display systems (3 screen surround looked awesome but was a nightmare to get working with some games so I gave that up pretty quickly)
3D (made me want to vomit - lasted a whole 10 minutes).

The adventures I have had with watercooling too; many wet floors / colour stained carpets and damp electronics - flexible tubing, rigid tubing there have been some fun times. I loved and cursed my way through every build.

I don't know if it's me getting older or technology stalling, but none of the new releases make me think wow - I must build a new one. Sadly, I think the 2 machines I have now will be the last I build for a while.

 

Blimey, this could take a while !

I started on a ZX80.
ZX81
Spectrum 48k (my mother would not allow us to buy the 16 and ram pack)
Then I got into consoles, and it went Master System, NES, PC Engine (TG16) MD + SNES, NEO GEO, MD + MCD then 32X then 3DO.
Then a mate gave me an old Atari 400XL? something like that. It had Joust, that kept me busy for a long time
Atari ST (long after they had come out, cheapy from Argos)
Amiga (again, long after they had come out)
Samsung SX 25 286 PC. Mate gave it to me for nothing, this was when the PC obsession began.
I then had his DX 266 (66mhz) handmedown for peanuts.
Pentium 166
Then I started working at a computer shop. Oh the humanity ! week after week my wages disappeared on PC stuff. It all culminated with dual P2 266 in a QDI dual motherboard SCSI etc. Then I left the shop, and the last rig I bought before leaving the UK was an IBM Intellistation with dual P3 Xeon 450 2mb. It had a 32mb 3DLabs Oxygen, dual Voodoo 2 in SLi (that I picked up in a customer's old machine he wanted to upgrade etc) and a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz and eventually a Voodoo 5500 PCI. This was sold to a mate for 900 notes (peanuts for such a beastly machine) and I then moved to the USA.

Dual P2 450 Xeon 1mb in a MSG440 (the Marlinspike) with a Geforce 2 MX (rubbish). I had this for a couple of years, then a mate of mine bought me a SGI 550 motherboard with two 866mhz P3 Xeon 512k. I had it in a Chieftec Dragon in blue. However, it was sorely lacking on RAM and RIMMs were so expensive that eventually it worked out cheaper to build a new PC. I then built -

Athlon XP 2000+ OC to 2400+ speeds. Shuttle Nforce 2 board. Radeon 9200 AGP with 512mb ram (two 256 333 sticks). I then found a pricing error (I didn't realise it was one until I asked a mate if the price I paid was fair) and got a Geforce 5900 Ultra for $140. Was a BFG. Apparently they were more like $450 so I did well !

I then sold that machine so I could get my car on the road. I then modded a Mac G3 (blue and clear) into "RadioMactive" a fluorescent pink and yellow machine with PC guts. Celeron D, 256mb ram onboard GPU. Was pants, but it got me on the net. Only cost $230 total. Was one of them weird Asrock boards that worked with AGP and PCIE.

Then I came back to the UK.

Went to PC world and spunked £400 down the drain on a Phenom 9500 quad core with 4gb ram etc. It sounded good on paper, in reality it was the most unreliable POS I have ever had. Advent. The DVDRW died, then the HDD died then I had had enough and sold the remaining parts onto my cousin in an Alienware MJ12 case before buying the bogey. The bogey was my first proper Alienware. Predator 2.0 green with a C2D E4500 OC to around 3.2ghz and 4gb ram in a EVGA 680 SLi mobo. I had a 9800GT with an Arctic cooler on.

I then upgraded to a Phenom 2 950 on a NHD14 that OC to 3.8ghz and went through various GPUs. 9800GT, GTX 280 (died) Crossfire 5770s, GTX 470.

Then I upgraded to a Alienware Aurora 1366 case/mobo/PSU on Ebay. I added a I7 950, kept my Noctua and upgraded to a 6970 2GB Lightning. That died, so I sent it RMA and bought a 7970.

Then I swapped the 7970 for two brand new EVGA 480s. Then I upgraded to a 670 (I hated the 7970 it was balls hot and loud). Then I changed from the Aurora to the Area 51 ALX 2008. I added a second Palit Jetstream 670 and had 8gb ram, a Xeon similar to the I5 2500 (waste of money that was) and so on.

I then had a board issue, so I bought a 8320 with a Crosshair 5 is it? that was nice. OC to 4.9ghz.

Then I had a windfall, quite possibly the best piece of luck I have ever had in my life. I bought a £3500 dream machine that turned out to be a nightmare. 3970x, SLi Titan Black, 32gb RAM (dominator plats) and so on. The board died just inside of warranty and MSI did not have any X79 boards at all to replace it with. So I decided to strip it down, keep the good bits (like the Titans, The Asus RAIDR etc) and just buy a brand new 2014 Alienware Area 51 (the triad shape).I upgraded the TBs to a Fury X, then two Fury X then Titan XM (paid £440 a week before the 10x0 series came out) then about two or three months back bought a Titan XP. I have upgraded the 5820k to a Broadwell E Xeon that does 3.2ghz on up to 4 cores then 2.8 on all 14. And that's my main rig. All WC.

Then I still have my 2008 ALX. That is packing a Gigabyte X79 UD3 with a Xeon 2680 V2 (Ivy) 8c 16t @ 3.4ghz. It has 16gb Klevv 2333mhz ram and a Fury X. All under water, two loops.

Then I have my 2006 Area 51 ALX that became Dianoga. My Linux machine. Phenom 2 1055T, 8gb 800mhz DDR2, Geforce 950 etc. All water cooled again.

And now I have my oldskool rig. Athy XP 2400+ 512mb 400mhz ram, 64mb Wildcat etc for old skool gaming.

So yeah, four PCs. All fully water cooled.

 

2005 Mesh something or other.. X2 4400+.. only problem was it ran XP Pro x64 which wasn't supported properly for 4 sodding years..

I then had an Opty 146 on my first custom built system that clocked like stink under water and a bit of voltage on an Ultra-D.

Then my personal Fav was my Pentium e2180 on a DFI P35-Dark with some 8888 DDR2. That was a stupidly fast cheap system.

Long story short, I miss DFI

 

As do I, I loved my Lanparty UT NF4. In fact, a couple of suppliers that I used on my lanparty build have gone - the watercooling came from Danger Den and the GPU came from BFG

 

Building my first super high end system will always stick with me. Tri SLI 480s running a Dell 3007. The performance was miles ahead of anything I'd experienced at the time.

Ah well, time to leave that all behind!

 

Memorable moments...

- Installing a sound card, CD-ROM and another 4MB memory in the family PC. These additions opened up so many possibilities.
- PC I built when I went off to uni - P4 1.4, 512MB RD-RAM, GF3 Deluxe, U160 card + 18GB 10k drive + 2x40GB IDE drives. This thing was a beast.
- Some years later, v-modded P4P800 was an OC beast. P4 2.4C @ 3.7GHz, RAM to which I can't recall the chips, but ate voltage up for breakfast and overclocked to preposterous levels. 5800 bios hacked to 5950U and overclocked and volted to within an inch of its life as well.
- A PC I managed to put together that was chock-full of components that were like hens teeth to get hold of at the time - Opteron 165, SLI-DR Expert, OCZ 3700EB, TDX-SS. The DFI board was a beast, but so flaky. Eventually swapped it out for an Asus something or other.
- The last "real" PC I ever had. Q6600, 8800GTX, Redline XP4000, Areca ARC-1220 RAID card with more storage than I could shake a stick at, U320 15k system drive. Gamed on it less than I tinkered with it, and ultimately its excess (and thoughts around upgrading it) were what led me to pull the plug on PCs.

Main system CPU/GPU history IIRC:

The early years...
10MHz 286SX
33MHx 486DX
Pentium 90
Pentium II 300, Riva128, PowerVR 3Dx
Athlon 750, GF2 GTS

Got more enthused...
P4 1.4, GF3
XP 2200+ T-Bred
P4 2.4C, 5800, 5950U, 9800Pro, 9800XT (lots of CPU/GPU swapping this year)
P4 2.8C ES
P4 3.4E
Opteron 146, 6800GT
A64 4600+,
Opteron 165, 7800GT
Q6600, 8800GTX

Got less enthused...
C2D T7300, Radeon 9200m
Athlon X4 860K, some passive GPU
Xeon 1245v2, Quadro K4200m
i7-4500U, HD4400
i3-4020Y, HD4200
i7-6500U, HD520
i7-7700HQ, GTX1050

~fin~

 

Snap. TDX on the Opty, then I had a BFG 7800 GT.

 

This was exactly what my father did to our DX33. 4x1MB SIMMS for a HUNDRED QUID back in '94, plus another HUNDRED QUID on a Creative sound card + CD-ROM combo.

 

OK you guys asked for it.. So I found an app that let me retrieve all 6000+ images from Photof*cket, so here they are as best as I can keep them chronologically !

RadioMactive.













Then a rig I forgot, my MJ12. It had an Allendale? something like that. 1.7ghz C2D basically.





And back in the UK (I put it in a suitcase)



Then I got the bogey







9800GT upgrade



GTX 280



Dead 280



Black ALX







Black ALX and silver Pred 2.0 (that became silver ALX I still have today !)



My X58 rig (I7 950, Foxconn Bloodrage etc)



Sort the GPU cooler



Then I got this.



Wedgie.



The day my 6970 Lightning came, and my faithful old 470.



Then 7970



Then swap for two 480s





Then it all went back into this.



With a 670 Jetstream and a Sandy board/Xeon. Then this came up on Ebay.



It had these in.



Then the PSU went bang taking a good portion of the hardware with it, so I built this.





Side projects. The pockit rockit.



Which I gave to my aunt. Also my first 'hack



And what I have and run daily now. Old Skool.



The Triad



The 2008 that was fully rewired and converted to a stock PSU (RM 750)



And of course, Dianoga (RIP Waynio x)

 

It's just called Photobucket album downloader. Cost me £1.29 and has rescued thousands of photos. I tried using the Photobucket download button but it kept saying "oops an error occurred" and other crap. I managed to pull 0 pics. So today I downloaded the app and pulled out over a decade's worth of pics. Well worth the £1.29, especially as 90% of the pics were lost circa 2010 in a hard drive mistake (I formatted the wrong one. Oops !).

 

What sucked the most was that it wasn't a Windows format. I had a drive in my rig with 6 others than wasn't doing much so I wanted to pull it to repair my PVR with (Humax). I listed all of the disks, but I must have got distracted and labelled them wrong. So I pulled the drive, put it in the Humax and formatted it so there was absolutely no going back. That feeling isn't nice. The feeling when you lose a crapload of data and it's irreversible I have four PCs now all with the same photos on, and the NAS lol.