Blogs How old is your hardware?

I recently did what FaSMaN is doing so I could play my old games without any compatibility issues. I found it a pain in the arse building it though, drivers being the biggest problem. Still can't get the Sound Blaster Live! sound card to work, having to use onboard at the moment. Spec here.

An even older build currently holds the lowest score on the bit-tech Geekbench table.

Current PC in my sig.

 

Socket 1156 is no longer on the market.

On May 2011 Computer magazines told the story of who great socket 1156 was and above all
how future proof it was,so I was happy because I had just build a PC with an Asus 1156 board.
On May 1012 my PSU died and I give a look over the Internet for a good PSU and a motherboard socket 1156,for a moment I feared that the mobo was dead too!
I could not find a motherboard socket 1156 of any brand on any of my favourite on line shop,
from Overclockers uk to Scan,Aria E-Buyer and many others.
with the coming of socket 1155 the old 1156 and my i5 760 = 20/30 slower than a 1155 i5 2500k sandy bridge cpu is confined to history.
Is a rig with an Asus P7P55D and i5 760 old hardware?
AMD take better care of they customer,
Intel has the arrogance of the winner!

 

I only recently updated from my e8400 c2d to and i5 2500k. P35 mobo to Z68. 4 Gig of DDR2 to 8 DDR3. I've had the SSD (Vertex 2) for about 16 months ...

My media server, on the other hand, is much older. Athlon 64, 1.8Ghz, and I don't even know what mobo it's got. 1.5GB DDR rocking WinXP, and about a terabyte of storage for movies and music. I really need to upgrade that one, though ... likely with the e8400 kit mentioned above ...

 

I only just upgraded from a Q6600 and gtx 280 recently because a replacement PSU was faulty & I replaced the whole system (over 6 months) trying to solve the problem. My new hardware is still out of date though ! AMD 5870 & AMD Phenom II X6 1100T.

For the record my old system would still play the latest games much better than any current console !

 

my secondary computer that is in daily use are running on a Tyan K8WE motherboard i bought back in 2005. had 2 opteron 242 i got cheap on it , 4x512mb no-name memory sticks and a Geforce 6800GT at that time. have upgraded it trough stuff i have found cheap on ebay. last year i bought a pair of Opteron 890, 2 Patriot Wildfire 120gb and a Raedon 6990. and 2years ago i bought 8x1gb with Corsair XMS 400mhz cl2.5 Reg ECC memory-sticks.
runs like a dream still and doubt the motherboard will die anytime soon...

 

+1

BF3 is like a slideshow sometimes but Im still holding on.

 

Isn't it obvious to everyone that almost all new games are console ports, and console games are written for an xbox 360, a seven-year-old piece of hardware?

There's no longer any point in having a powerful rig.

 

I bought my whole rig last year in hope it would last for at least 3 years. I'm still confident that will be the case. The only thing that pisses me off is how the SATA III controller of my board sucks balls and limits my SSD to about 40% of its max performance. That's very, very irritating

 

Chuck a third-party SATA board in it?

 

My rig is a good 4 years old now, saved hard over one summer at uni and built it all and since then I'v been chronically poor so havent got round to building a new one yet. Hopefully going to get round to that when the 8000/700 series GFX cards and next Intel CPU's are about.
At the mo this is what is grinding along (perfectly well... ish, apart from vista anyway...)

C2D E8400 @ 3.6 with a Thermaltake MaxOrb (it was 4.0 but I thought it deserved a rest...)
Asus P5K SE/EPU
4GB GSkill DDR2
500GB Seagate
GeForce 9600GT Sonic
Some awesome red lights and 'questionable' cable management solutions.

The GFX card is old but I'v been impressed with its ability to keep up, and recently I'v just decided if it doesn't look pretty enough on my main monitor I switch it over to my other monitor which is only 17" not 21". Problem solved

 

Not just you, I can't really see that much difference either.

Some settings in some games make a massive difference to the gaming experience, (distance settings in the Elder Scrolls games for example) but a lot of the so-called 'eye candy' in other games - I really struggle to see the difference in a lot of it. If I'm running running around like a demented lunatic chasing/running away from someone, I generally don't stop to admire whether the shadows on the grass under my feet are being realistically rendered or not...

 

if you know one that's cheap, reliable, very fast and small, I'd like to know

 

I'm currently using a 9800gt 512mb and an old athlon dual core which I think was recommended in the Buyers Guide when I built the PC a couple years ago. Definitely due for an upgrade (to be honest, it could have done with an upgrade the day I bought the parts ). I'm gonna wait for the mid range Kepler's to come out I think as the graphics card is the main priority at the minute then I'll probably go intel (whatever's cheap).

It is a little annoying having such outdated hardware but I don't have as much time to just relax and play games as I would like 'cause of uni so it's not too bad. Besides, I'm still working my way through Half Life so there's plenty of good old stuff out there that I can run until I get some money together

 

Most of my hardware is 6 years old - 2.1GHz of E6400 goodness, 2Gb RAM and a 7900GT. Keyboard, mouse, and monitor are all 10 years old and still going strong!

Last game I played was Mass Effect 3, but the machine's dropped below minimum requirements for most AAA releases now. Time for an upgrade?

 

I have two machines, a 'work' one and a 'personal' one.

The work one, which I am currently writing on, was originally built in early 2003 and is very similar to Shielder's & a few others:

AMD Athlon XP 2800+. (Single core, 32 bit.)
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo.
1.5 GB DDR400 RAM.

A few things have changed:
- on my third PSU
- third GPU, (from ATI 9600 Pro, to x1650, to current X1950)
- third HSF, (Stock, to Arctic Cooling Copper Silent 2, to current Zalman Copper Flower).
Lost track of the HHD's and case fans that I've swapped in and out over the years.

I'd upgrade it to a nettop, but it still does what I need it to so I don't see the point until it finally goes bang. Still runs a minimum 50+ hours a week, and for the first 6 years of its life probably did 100+ hours a week. Still almost silent too, (I change fans a lot).

For a giggle, I ran the CPC/bit-tech benchmarks on it:
Image: 394
Video: 313
Multi: 67
Overall: 258

Flash heavy websites slow it right down, (the National Lottery is the worst) but for most tasks I use it for you can't tell the difference between it and my other machine.

My 'personal' PC is based on an i7 950 with 12GB RAM. Old by many peoples standards here, but I doubt I'll bother replacing it for years, (upgrading GPU's, HDD's/SSD's & fans aside). It does everything I need it to really well. I have a multi-monitor setup, but I only use one for gaming on, and I don't need 100+ FPS to be happy...

Money isn't the issue, I could go and replace both tomorrow morning if I had to.

 

Er... my 320GB small Hard disk is a few years old as with my DVD ROM. Apart from that, Windows 7 is older than any other part of my machine.
I'm already starting to feel my X58 chip set Mo' Bo' and i7-930 CPU are nearing semi retirement as a Minecraft server or secondary 'surfing' PC.

I built a mate a rig out of my old i5 and GTX460 set up when I upgraded to this.
I don't 'need' a new GPU just yet but want faster turn times in Civ 4

Yes, I'm a pathological serial upgrader.
Bless all of you with the presence of mind enough to resist seizing all before you

 

In Jan 2009 I bought:
Q9650 @3.3ghz
8gb 1066mhz DDR2
GTX260
etc, etc.

Then Jan 2011 I upgraded the gc to a GTX580.

That's pretty much my upgrade cycle: graphics card every 2 years, whole system every 4.
Will be looking to completely upgrade again sometime next year. At the moment I have my sights on a 3770K, but we'll see where things are next year.

 

I Have the same setup except for a geforce gtx 580. Because my new motherboard is rma'ed. So with a graphicscard atleast two or three generations ahead and miles away in performance, I find it difficult to believe you can run battlefield 3 at high settings. Battlefield 2 ok fine.... Just because you can start it, doesn't mean you can "run it" implieing that it runs well. But You might just have a 19" monitor wich makes it plausible, or you might talk about dx9 rendering or something

Currently sitting on my old computer as said before, with the oldest parts being The Chieftec Dragon Miditower from like 2002, and two Seagate Barracuda 160GB sata disks from the same time, wich I used to run in raid 0

 

Everything's about 5 years old, except my SSD, and I love it! )

 

My sig is pretty old.. Although it can still play any new games that come out thanks to the graphics stagnation caused by consoles. I was thinking of an Ivy Bridge + GTX 6X0 upgrade but I have decided to wait for the next Xbox to make an appearance before I upgrade. That way I will be better suited to cope with any new graphical requirements that will only appear with the next console generation.