Great forum great people willing to help out if they can, I may not post a lot but I'm on every day to catch up on things oh and the mods are one of the best I've seen
Nearly 13 years for me and before that I was on the CPC forum before being told we were no longer wanted! I have not been on this forum or any other forum for a while now it’s crazy looking back at how much fun it all was. Trying to beat each other’s 3d mark scores trying to get the highest overclock! Fun times! I don’t really do much in the terms of PC builds but looking at this thread has bought back a bit of the excitement to start a new build
True. Considering how old my board is it has two usb 3.0 slots and two sata 6.0Gb/s ports. Two and three way sli, remember that?
Given how stingy board makers are with ports on some models [esp at the cheaper end] even that isn't too bad... Lack of M.2 and lack of PCI-E [and it being gen 2? or were we at gen 3 at that point?] would probably be a more pressing concern. I never ran SLI or Crossfire.
The closest I got was a 4870x2, never did sli or crossfire either. Pcie was gen 2 I guess back then? I'd have to check tbh. I've certainly gone off on a old fart forum tangent anyway.
The good old days when i had disposable income and a pc that was mine... and worked... Days gone and never to return. ...who's the miserable old git now?
x58 is definitely Gen 2, I ran a i7 2700k z68 up until 2020, that is 1 gen newer than x58 platform, the z68 platform is gen 2. I joined in 2007 when I first started building my own computer. It was something like quad-core Q6600, 8GB RAM, 8800GTX graphics card. I was a young uni student back then. Gamed pretty much any time not at lectures. Now I'm an old git with a family. I briefly drifted away from PC gaming whilst spending time with girlfriend and later wife 2012-2017. 2020 gave me loads of free time and now kid is big enough to give me consistent free time at night. So glad to have found Bit-tech and be part of this community. Thanks for reminding it's been so long...... Here's to another 20 years
Oh would you look at that, just passed 18 years meself, yikes! Really need to spam more and lurk less to get that old postCount++. I remember when I joined I had just gotten an awesome Sony Vaio 17" CRT and had dual DVB-T tuners watching and recording all kinds of carp. Can't remember the specs of that box for the life of me though! So pleased BT is still around, I aways keep a tab open to see what's going on. Such a great community here!
Disposable income... now there's a phrase that I have not heard in a long time. I vaguely recall that it had something to do with happiness...
Time is a funny thing. I dug out my first forum purchase recently to mount it on the wall - an HIS X1900XT. A young lad work neighbour saw it and looked like I'd unearthed an alien artifact, he was like "what's that?!" The ensuing conversation, in which I tried to outline where it fell in the list of graphics card generations relative to the cards he knows, made me feel like a fossil. But then, my dad has no TV and gets all his culture through an FM radio from the 80s, and would still consider any graphics card mind-boggling space magic, and his father, I recently learned, whose photo hangs on my wall, was born in 1902, before some of the characters in Downton Abbey, so it's all relative, isn't it? The big secret of life isn't that time passes fast, it's that humans just have quite short lives. Which for me makes the sheer pace of recent technological and industrial innovations all the more exhiliarating and terrifying. Like most of us, I have a sense that there'll always be a Bit-Tech forum. But realistically in my lifetime we'll probably reach a point where there's no longer such thing as a desktop computer, let alone a case mod.
God. Crossfire takes me back. I remember crossfiring two X1950Pro's on a white Sapphire board.. I think it was 939.
I was on a couple of other forums before coming here, and I was very active on XtremeSystems from around 2007 when I had time to play with hardware and plenty free cash to buy it. I remember the PC I had back in 2004 that my brother put together for me - it was socket 754 with an Athlon 3200+. I accidentally fried it by (foolishly) setting the PSU to 120v, and moved to a socket 939 system for a year or two before splurging on a Core 2 system in 2007. Happy days!
When I signed up here I would have still been on my dual P3 system... I have no idea what the other specs were - GPU, RAM, etc - but I know that having dual Pentium 3's overclocked from 800MHz to just shy of 1GHz felt cool as hell at the time! Let's ignore the monstrous heatsinks and the 60mm Delta 'screamer' fans strapped to them.... Pretty sure I was still hanging on to Windows 2000 at the time as well, when it came out I hated the look of Windows XP and I remember thinking it was incredibly bloated... I think I only had maybe one more major upgrade before I got a laptop on the Home Computer Initiative scheme somewhere around 2004/2005... I'd also picked up an original Xbox somewhere in 2003, so that was my gaming setup for a good couple of years. I held on to that laptop for years, it must have been somewhere around 2010 before I went back to desktop computing with a Core2Duo... Gawd knows how much kit I've got through since then, I totally lose track at that point!
2003 I joined. Bourne was still in dialup land until 2004. I think I had a GW-802 case back then which I modded with a window, painted metallic blue and added an LCD module run by LCDC I think? There was a big thread on here. I'm not sure what my rig was, it must have been a Pentium III Katmai core, which I think was o/c'ed. It was about 2012 my first marriage ended and I drifted away from bit-tech a couple of years after for quite a while, maybe popping in once or twice over the years. I had a house to re-do from some 'interesting' decor choices over the previous years. Then in 2015 I met a fabulous woman in Birmingham and we hit it off, getting engaged a year later and finally married in 2019 after waiting for my house to sell and moving over. We re-mortgaged her family home to build an annexe for us two so we can be there for her family. I went through quite a few graphics cards over the years. I started with a Voodoo3-2000. Then a Geforce card, then Geforce DDR. I skipped Geforce 2 but picked up a Geforce 3 (Ti500?). Then it was a switch to a Radeon 9700, then a 9800 Pro - that card was awesome, finally Homeworld ran as it should! I tried fitting a custom cooler and rued that decision as it caused it to fail very shortly after. I still had the 9700 I think and it was ok for a bit. It was back on the Nvidia side with I think the 6600. Then a 7700GT, then 7900 GTX. Then the 9800GTX+. Then a GTS260 Core 216. Then a GTX560Ti. Then, a GTX 660, and then another GTX660 for some sweet SLi - that was pretty nuts at the time and lasted me for years and years. I think the GTX1060 had been out for a bit and I upgraded my whole rig at that point from the wundermachine that was the 2500k in a Corsair Carbide Air 540 to a 9th gen i3 with GTX1060. I've still got the 1060 in a box somewhere as backup. I then went to an RTX2060 and then dropped in an RTX3060 last year. I could do with a wee bit more horses under the bonnet to get 4k@60 in Forza Horizon, it runs about 54 at the moment which in all honesty is good enough for my eyes. I could o/c it a bit and see. I recall when achieving 30fps meant something! The 2060 is in a Metalfish S3 with an i7-9700. The 3060 is paired with a 5600X under a Kraken X53 in a Meshlicious case. TLDR; many, many graphics cards were bought, with most if not all sold on bit-tech. The casemods over the years stepped up notches time after time - there was one I remember called Atomic which was (and still is frankly) amazing. There are many others too. Was it Trubador who fried an egg on an Athlon? I seem to recall that happened on here. And Relix, of course. That crazy Belgian. And cheesecake, naturally. Formaggio gateaux.
I managed to kill two HD 4870s in the same way, fitting a Vortex Neo aftermarket cooler that did an amazing job on gpu temps but didn't cool the vRAM or caps at all. Over a decade later, I'm still pretty angry about it. Aftermarket GPU coolers shouldn't be allowed.
