Blogs How old is your hardware?

Could you love with a graphics card that's past its fifth birthday?

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2012/05/22/how-old-is-your-has-your-hardware/

 

My oldest components are less than 6 months old (pretty much the whole rig), my newest is 3 weeks old (SSD). The longest I've had components for was my i7-920 CPU which went through 2x motherboards and countless other upgrades. I had it for 3 years. That's the longest I've ever had a single PC component I think... with the possible exception of my old X-Fi soundcard... I think I had that for 4 years... but I tend to think of soundcards in teh same way as keyboards, mice and monitors.... they tend to last longer.

I don't include keyboards and monitors in this, as they don't age very much, although my keyboard and monitor are around the same age, at around 2 years approx.

 

As I am reading this it reminds me of the newest rig that I am currently finishing off:

* 1.4GHZ Tualatin Pentium 3 SL6BY CPU (pin modded to work on my motherboard)
* Gigabyte GA-6VXE7+ (VIA APOLLO PRO AGP+iTE 8671)
* 256MB Samsung PC-133 SDRAM
* 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500
* Diamond Monster 3d Voodoo2 8MB Sad
* Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
* 120GIG Western Digital
* 650WATT PROCASE PSU, yup its overkill, but I believe in having big margins.
* Windows 98SE

http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=31774

Those keen enough to look at the specs should notice a trend, its a dedicated 3dfx glide rig, I had to hunt for parts as most just weren't available in South Africa,others I had to fix, like replacing caps on the V5500, it was a fun build and is neering completion, should be done next week some time.

While I could have easily ran DosBox and a glide wrapper, it just isnt the same as running games on actual hardware, glide wrappers dont do nearly as good a job as a real Voodoo 2-5 , things look smoother and more refined on the system.

And I dont have to worry about compatibility problems on any of my older favorite games, its simply install and play.

Youll be surprised what that little P3 can do, it works great with Firefox 8 and some newer apps once you install KernelEX,its nearing completion now and should be done in the next week or so.

 

My kids pc's are both running my old 8800gt's and they are coping with the likes of the games they play. Team fortress, Mass effect, Left 4 dead etc @1920x1080.

One of them will be the lucky recipient of my 560Ti when I upgrade which probably means I will have to source another similar 2nd hand card to stop any arguments.

 

my PC is only 18 months old, but I imagine I will keep that for atleast another 12 months.
My Laptop is from 2001 and rocks with 1ghz CPU and 1 gig ram, runs windows vista basic and is "always on", i have no plans to change that
I also had old PC kit going back 10 years in my attic before I moved recently, but took the opportunity to finally get rid of it when i did move house.

 

if my motherboard hadn't gone up in flames, chances are I'd still be rocking a Q6600!

 

I got most of my kit either from ebay or from friends who upgraded.
I ended up with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 overclocked to 3.5Ghz with 4gb DDR2 on an IP35 mobo, and an ATi HD5870. Still fast enough for all my needs, plays battlefield 3 at high settings. Only upgrade i can see is maybe an ssd soon but otherwise i'm very happy with previous generation hardware.

 

One year old for me, my 570 runs BF3 on my U2711 really well so I won't be upping the GPU until there is a more demanding game.

My keyboard changes on a monthly basis at the moment though!

 

I recently moved from my aging C2Q to a 3570k, and I love it. My upgrade cycle tends to be 3-4 years, apart from GPU's which are more like 2+3 years. Oldest part for me now? My tripple HDDs I think, they're 4 years old...

 

Traditionally my oldest part is generally my soundcard. For many years it was audigy 2 ZS when all those around me had XPies or Xonars. Then when I finally changed to an XPie Tit - all it did was crash my PC so I changed to Auzentech X-Meridian 2G. My GPU is GTX 680, mobo Z68, i5k, I guess my case is old. PSU a few years old. 1 old 1tb samsung hard disk, the rest is new.

 

µTorrent 29.41%
BitComet 2.44%

Utorrent would appear to have the torrent market sewn up. I myself have been a utorrent owner, but find they are now sneaking in a lot of excessive bloatware.

 

I haven't upgraded my PC since I built it in 2009

650W BeQuiet Modular PSU BN073
ANTEC TWELVE HUNDRED CASE
Asus P6T Deluxe X58 MoBo
TRIPLE 3GB 3x1 TR3X3G1333C9
Intel Core i7 920 2.66G *OEM*
Akasa AK-967 775 NERO COOLER
and my trusty 8800GT gfx card

 

I have an Audigy which would be in use, but I got so fed up with Creatives rubbish drivers a few years ago that I now just use onboard sound.

I do have a raptor 10K drive in there, cost me a big lump at the time, must be about 10 years old. Also just retired my old monitor, an LG lcd bought at the same time.

 

Started my rig in 2007 (I think...) and have since upgraded graphics but the core parts are still the same. Current spec is:

Intel Core Q6600 @ 3.5GHz
4GB OCZ Reaper 1066MHz
Asus P5E
EVGA GeForce GTX 570
Crucial C300 128GB SSD + 750GB Spinpoint F1

I'd love to upgrade to a new MB/CPU/RAM config but I can still play most modern games at full monitor resolution (1920x1200) at pretty much full detail settings and really should keep the cash for more boring things. I do get tempted though.

 

Complete with DIN plug?

I threw my last IBM board in the skip about a year or so ago.

Main rig - x58, DX10. My oldest regularly used bit of kit is one of the laptops - a single core Dell D610.

 

Points to sig. 'nuff sed.

 

The rig I have here is a few years old now but I never have any particular problems with it. The issue is that games just haven't been evolving as quickly in the past few years.

It's quite nice having an old computer as you're more familiar with it; I know exactly what goes wrong with it and how to fix it. My brother still uses the first PC I ever built (Athlon 4200+ so not that old) with a few upgrades.

 

Got a SSD recently but that's the first upgrade I've had for over a year since my last gfx upgrade (to a 6850). CPU (Q6600) was about 3 years ago. Not much requirement to upgrade at the moment but I keep an eye on the gfx card releases.

Got an Audigy card that I must have had at least 5 years and I've replaced it a couple of times but never been happy with the new cards so ended up going back to it.

Oldest peripherals I still use are the Altec Lansing speakers from my first PC purchase back in '98.