I remember my 286 used to struggle playing Wolfenstein 3D, had to run it in a tiny frikkin window to acheive playable fps.
Finished my first full build last weekend.....Nothing as satisfying and scary as when you go to hit that power button the first time. Specially since I initially stuffed up the thermal paste putting to much on, then had to claen it and almost dropped the CPU on the ground only to catch it in the palm of my hand heatsink up....thinking Id fked it all up I was worryed when goin to hit the power button. Then it ran.....Installed windows 7 in no more than 5 min. And at teh push of a button........got an overclock to 4.3Ghz.....soon Ill make an effort to get it to 4.5-4.8Ghz.....but very chuffed with the speed and its so damn quite and runs so cold.....4.3 Ghz gaming for 5 hours....temperture.....37 degrees. .....next will be the temp test when running Prime 95....
Oh there is, when you're on your 2nd or 3rd build and are too impatient waiting for a new PSU to arrive so you use a generic no name which goes 'bang'. It's quite scary waiting for the new PSU to arrive to see if you took your system out.
AVP2. Built a entire new rig duron 1ghz geforce 3 ti 200 etc but only 128mb ram. Back to the shop I went for more ram lol
First build? I'll include my Mum's PC as those were the days of Intel Overdrive processors. Added a 486 DX2/50 to get rid of an SX/25, 128Mb of RAM and a 2GB WD HDD as the 120Mb Maxtor wasn't cutting it - plus 32Mb or so on the GPU and the original mono Sound Blaster. Wow cutting edge First thing I did was finish Doom 2 properly since it crashed on the final level without a DX chip. So for my first proper build of a Pentium 75 the next year I caught up with Doom - the whole thing not shareware - and replayed Doom 2 in co-op over a null modem cable. In 16 years now is the first time I haven't had two games-capable desktops in the same place, taking a console break. Back to business as usual next year, probably, when we get the last word on AMD's new gear.
I went from a crappy 15" laptop to a gaming rig with 22" monitor, so I just sat there and looked at the beautiful creation
Played the original counterstrike ( you know, before steam existed ), Played the Science and Industry mod A LOT. Completed Half-Life (CD Version with Awesome soundtrack) that 6 weeks holiday when I was 13/14 was amazing.
Immediately after finishing the build, I pressed the power button to be greeted by absolutely nothing. After ripping half my hair out I looked at the back and flipped the PSU switch. It turned on and went to BIOS, I turned it off and went to bed. Windows was installed the next morning.
Installed Windows, downloaded Steam and bought CS:S...looking back, that game is far more boring than TF2 Sent from my Desire HD
Not to hijack the thread, but its interesting what people's first custom build was and when. Mine was an Athlon XP-M in an Abit NF7-S with an Nvidia 5600xt, 1gb of ddr400 all in a Sunbeam Transformer case..... Oh and an early tower-style heatpipe cooler with a 6000rpm tornado fan on it! Also, the first thing we (my brother's were building at the same time) did after finishing was have Christmas Dinner! Happy days.
mine was this build. After finishing i.e. happy with bios, overclocking and cables being tidy, i just ran tests to check the temps for a day and just monitoring. Then i installed various software and opening several movies up and randomly rar'ing and extracting lol. Seeing how quick things was (compared to my old 2.8 p4) gave me the chufties. A few months later i completed my second build.
Assuming I've got everything installed and tweaked and tidied and patched and absolutely finished, ready to go? I pull up the last game that I played on the old rig with the graphics wound all the way down and low FPS, and crank the crap out of it to look at the prettiness and justify the £700 I just spent!
First build was a 486 DX2-66. Spent the rest of the weekend completing Day of the Tentacle. Second build was a pentium 200, lost weeks playing the original Need for Speed. Third build was an AMD XP2600 overclocked to 3400, trying to find every benchmark to max it out.
The sad thing is I can remember the spec of every PC we've ever had since the late 80's early 90's right through till now. I'd be here all day typing those up, and I will if requested lol
