Blogs How old is your hardware?

I just love to mess with old hardare - and improve it if possible.
My oldest baby is a 386 25MHz which I keep to run the original Civ and Wing Commander 1; I have to enter the HD data everytime I switch it on since the battery is a non-replaceable one and long gone.
My favorite rig at the moment is based on a ASUS TX97-X which I recently improved with an AMD K6-III 400MHz from a K6-II 300MHz. MechWarrior 3 just rocks on it with the Diamond Monster 3d2 (3dfx Voodoo2)!!!

 

Well, my rig is over a year old now (2500K/P8P67-M Pro/560 Ti) but I plan to hang on to it for quite a while. I don't currently see any impending upgrade needed for it (though the CPU could do with a better cooler) simply because the 560 Ti handles pretty much everything I play at 1080p maxed out. It'll probably be upgraded the moment I buy a game that cannot be played at high settings.

 

Desktop:
Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.0GHz cooled by Akasa Nero S
3x2GB Corsair XMS3
Gigabyte GA-x58A-UD3R r2
Sapphire Radeon HD5850 Toxic
SB X-Fi Extreme Gamer
OCZ 120GB RevoDrive
2 x 1TB WD 1002FAEX
Corsair HX620W PSU
Windows 7 Pro 64bit

Laptop:
Sony Vaio 14" C Series
Core i5-2410M
Radeon 6670 (iirc) & 1600x900 display
320GB 5400 HDD

My next upgrades (when I can afford them) are to be:
Graphics card (thinking a GTX670)
Monitor (still using an old 17" Sony)
Speakers
SSD for laptop, new SSD for desktop.

Later, Board Chip and RAM for desktop.

When laptop is 2-3 years old, I'll consider its replacement (though last time it was 18 months)!

 

The hardware in D33P THOUGHT wasn't the most up to date, socket 1336 1st gen i7, and I really don't think that the newest hardware of today has moved the game along significantly enough to justify upgrading. I tend only to upgrade when a new Battlefield title is in the pipeline. My current system eats BF3 for breakfast.

 

8800GT Cheesecake

 

My hardware is coming up to a year old (i5, 8GB, 6790M). Not that it's upgradable. It's a Mac.

Prior to that I has a Q6600, 8GB, 275GTX which I'm pretty sure had it not been for buying a Mac would have been upgraded late last year to an i5 with GTX560. I tended up upgrade my system around every 18 months with maybe a component upgrade (gfx, more ram, etc) in between full upgrades.

The wife has an Asus i3 laptop but having low requirements she'll havwe that for quite some time.

 

My current spec is:

• Intel Core2duo E8400 3.0GHz
• Gigabyte Socket 775 Micro-ATX M/B
• Corsair 4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM
• 1TB HDD
• MSI GeForce GTX 460

I tend to do rolling upgrades as the money is available, with the last being the graphics card (but even that will be a while ago). Currently the plan is to replace the MB, CPU and RAM before to long as these are bottlenecking the GPUs performance a bit; and I'll probably go to 8GB DDR3 (I would go to 8GB RAM now but DDR2 is really expensive now )

Unfortunately my Dell 2407WFP died recently, so a lot of my budget has gone on replacing that instead of in to the PC like it should have done... still I am rocking an awesome Dell U2410 (yes, it really is awesome)!

I have been running Windows 7 since it's beta builds, and still running w7 on my PC; but my laptop (Dell Latitude E6400) is running windows 8.

 

I'm still rockin' a Q9550 (@ 3.83GHz) but my latest component/purchase was a 2GB HD6950 that I got with a crimbo bonus. Plus the fact that it could be flashed to a 6970.

 

E8200 (@3.75GHz) + 4850X2 2GB

I think they were a well balanced pair originally. But I think the old C2D is holding the 4850X2 back a little in modern titles now. Might upgrade to 2500k or Ivy.

 

I have my X58 i7-920 build from maybe 4 years ago, did upgrade ram and graphics last year from 4890 to 560Ti. Still does everything I want but imagine I will go for Ivy Bridge upgrade now it has arrived . Prior to this I had a Pentium III 550 with a Geforce 256 card while this rocked at the time (probably 1990 it had become little more than a fan heater at the end)

 

Oldest part for me is my GTX 460 hawk, which is about to go underwater so I expect a new lease of life, or a quick yet dignified death.

But other than that, I have an old 4200+ dualcore system with a 8400 gs and a 7600gt... super dooper. It's pretty slow though...

 

Bought it back in 2007
E8400 (6 months old, second hand, upgraded from E6750)
MSI platinium combo P35 motherboard
4GB of DDR-6400
WD Black 1TB
HD 5850 (3 months old, second hand)

Prior to my HD 5850 I had an 8800GT which managed BF3 fine on low settings. I only switched it out because I got it cheap and felt like some "new" hardware.

I really struggle to see why someone would upgrade a 2 year old system that's more than capable of running whatever you throw at it. to me the difference on running a game on medium instead of ultra high, is not always that huge a difference, and so, something I would throw a shitload of money after.

 

Oldest part in my machine is probably my DX closely tied with my 500GB hitachi. Everything else is reasonably new. And a pain in the ass.

 

Q6600 @ Stock
Palit GTS 250
Corsair CX 650
Asus P5NE-SLI PLUS E Motherboard
4 Gig of random corsair value ram
3 Sata HDDS (One 500G, two 250G)

Yeah I need to upgrade as I regularly hammer the **** out of it.

 

Exactly. I understand wanting to have the latest and greatest, but I think that there are a lot of people out there wasting their money. Of course, it's theirs to waste...

 

Until I upgraded quite recently, my rig was positively ancient. A Pentium4 at 3.2Ghz, 2Gb Ram, and a Geforce FX5600. Then that was upgraded to an ATI 4470 a couple of years ago.

Truth be told, I usually operate on a "need to upgrade" basis. The only reason I abandoned my Geforce was that Fallout 3 dropped to single digit frame rates in certain screens featuring lots of shaders. And even then it was a last resort and I chose a pretty budget replacement.

Most games do run fine on older hardware. If you aren't interested in playing games with better graphics, you rarely need to upgrade. Battlefield 3 on Low looks the same as Half-Life 2 on High, and if you're happy with Half-Life 2 on High why do you need to upgrade? It takes some seriously ancient hardware for a game to literally be either too unplayable or too ugly to enjoy.

I reckon my current rig will last me another five years or so, and then I might upgrade graphics card a little bit. Certainly I reckon it won't be until at least 2017 until there is a game released my rig physically won't play.

 

My main systems are in my sig but am also using a nice P4-HT and 2gb DDR1 as a storage computer for stuff I want long term, it serves it's purpose quite well

Age of hardware doesn't bother me much, I like gaming but am happy with medium setting (used to basic graphics as am still ocking R6 Vegas 2 with mate on the 360) plus the money you get for old parts s minimal, a working test unit is a better option.

Gladly though I think am due a mobo upgrade soon, which will mean CPU and RAM, oh well

 

I've literally just updated my ancient 7800GTX for a 550 GTX Ti. As for the rest of the system, I've pretty much just moved from an archaic C2D to a nice shiny Sandy Bridge i3 (which will jump to an i5 in 6 months or so)

At the moment my screen is a 19" widescreen with a resolution of 1440x900. I don't really need the highest performing card to run games at a decent framerate at that res and I'm not going to be getting a new screen anytime soon due to my living arrangements for the next few years.

The final point is money - what money I have remaining after bills, the taxman and fuel gets split between savings, gaming, airsofting and having a social life. Dropping £200+ on a processor just isn't going to happen.

Seeing as a lot of new games at the moment are console ports, I've not had any trouble running anything so far. In fact nothing seems to have taxed the latest version of my system at all - although it's early days still.

So there you go - most of my hardware is fairly new, but most of it has been out for over a year so is at least last gen. Before last weekend, it was around 5 - 7 years old.

Still...the transition to a 120gb + 80gb storage solution to a 2tb + 80gb was a lovely transition to make. No more sitting in the red constantly for HDD space.

 

Sports Interactive have brought all of the FM players onto Steam, that's what's done it

 

Yep I know several people who only have a steam account for FM.

The rig in my sig is going strong, upgraded a few bits last year. I need a new ssd but unfortunately no money for one at the moment. The only thing I can't run absolutely full spec seems to be BF3 at 1920x1200 but it looks awesome anyways and I'm not really bothered. There was a time when that would have been unacceptable but I reckon I've managed to kick the upgrade habit for now