When was "peak PC" to you? The golden era of custom PC ownership

jaybee

jaybee

jaybee

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You've donned the rose-tinted specs... looking back on the history of custom PC ownership, when would you say we peaked? Or have we not yet?

Did the best PC games being out affect your view of things? Affordability vs performance?

Why was that time peak for you? Would love to see the thread full of pictures of older systems/setups and general nostalgia.
 
I have fond memories of buying an evga 680 and playing battlefield 3 and being amazed at the time, think it was with a 3770k which I’d overclocked to its physical limits with a megahalems cooler, good times
 
2000-2006 ish for me. Amazing era, incredible hardware advances and fantastic games. Peaked with the Intel Core 2 Duo/Quad which was a phenomenal step up over anything before it. AMD’s expensive FX series and Intels own Extreme P4 were completely destroyed by cheap Core 2 chips.

That said those FX’s hold a special place in my heart. I will try to get some pictures of my machines as I have an FX-60 build, as well as an FX-57 and a special dual FX-60 AGP machine. Also got an Athlon XP 3200 and an Athlon 6400 x2 AM2 on an original crosshair. Alongside some Pentium 4 builds.
 
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For me there were two peaks:
A little one - 1993~1995 territory - Pentium 1 (overclocked using jumpers on the board), demo CDs on magazine covers, 800x600 crammed into 14", and editing config.sys and autoexec.bat to clear up base memory for drivers so your games could fully use extended memory. To me it was an age where the tech was gathering momentum but we could still mess around with jumpers and run games in DOS. A nice balance.

The big one - 2009~2013 - Intel Nehalem (i7 960 in my case) to Devil's Canyon (4790K) and 9800GT ~ GTX780. Constant, notable performance improvements, awesome overclocking, 1080p LCD monitors became affordable and attainable and Windows 7 had enough of its bugs ironed out to be a great gaming platform. Windows 8 arrived in October 2012, Broadwell arrived 2014 and it's pretty much been downhill since. At least GPUs kept it up past that to a reasonbable degree.
 
2011/2ish Bf3 and GTX660ti and i7 920 ... steadyline to BF4 in 2013 then a steep nose dive after that.. Cant find anything decent on PC anymore... looking forward to Hell Let Loose Vietnam.. but i think pc gaming has had its day its mostly console releases just on the PC platform. BF2042 was such a let down. ive given up all hope
 
~2006 - When the top end graphics card X1900XTX cost $399, and I got 95% of that performance by spending $299 for the next model down (X1900XT)

I've not bought a top end graphics card since, and seems unlikely I will ever be able to


2012 was a close second with some great mid range cards being available for decent money (e.g. 7850 / 7870 etc)
 
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I loved the time around 2001 with windows 98, isdn, my scraped together hardware was terrible but it didn't really matter, I could play games like CS 1.5, dl music, chat, build websites without needing a PhD. People still interacted irl. This is probably peak for me.

I also liked the time around 2006, my first proper self build, ADSL, playing EVE with loads of ppl on voice via TS, and dl dvds.

Since then it's changed but not rly better. Hardware is better but costs more and the utility is still the same because games are more demanding. Services moving into subscriptions. Paywalls everywhere. Internet good enough to stream but everything's ad-riddled, windows is getting worse.
 
Armageus said:
~2006 - When the top end graphics card X1900XTX cost $399, and I got 95% of that performance by spending $299 for the next model down (X1900XT)

I've not bought a top end graphics card since, and seems unlikely I will ever be able to


2012 was a close second with some great mid range cards being available for decent money (e.g. 7850 / 7870 etc)
Click to expand...
7850 overclocked like a champ, I also recall with these AMD did some great game bundles making them even better value

Edit https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/t...at-ocuk-hd-7950-sub-100-7850-for-50.18644653/
 
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I'm lusting after a socket A build, ideally these parts plus a nice flat screen CRT.
  • DFI Lanparty NF2 Ultra B
  • Athlon 2500+ M
  • Gainward Ti4600 Golden Sample

images.jpg
 
I fondly remember green IDE cables, Corsair DDR Pro 3500 with LEDs, may have been a Sempron 3300 at that time, Hyper modular PSU'S, went from the pinkish red one to blue. And getting a just released HIS HD3850 AGP graphics card. And massive 250gb IDE hard drives.

I also remember my strange strategy move to PCI express and socket 775 Core 2 Duo With an Asrock motherboard that could take DDR1 and DDR2 as well as AGP or PCIe.

A dual core CPU, massive 4gb of DDR2 6400, and Sapphire Toxic 4870 PCI express GPU with a whopping 1gb of vram. Samsung F3"s, Scythe Kama Angle cooler, Seasoning Series X PSU.

Heady days that led to P45 chip sets, the quad core Q9550' and 8gb of DDR2 1066.
I think that systems last upgrade would have been the MSI Twin Frozr R7950 3gb GPU.

Those early 475/775 days were probably my favourite, Custom PC subscription too back then.
The early days of games on physical media that did not require a subscription or fomo micro transactions.
 
Obviously we can all dream but within a sort of sensible context peak PC in my opinion would be if there was a proper HEDT offering of current desktops, which didn't cost £LOL. I'm pretty happy with my 14700K setup but something like 12P core 24 thread + 12 E core setup with ~48 PCI-e lanes and quad channel RAM would be nice.

Before that while it missed a lot of people I think X79-V3 was peak PC - at its inception it had forward specced technologies, lots of cores and plenty of PCI-e bandwidth and with the 1650 (4930K) and 1680 CPUs with a good overclock had relevant performance for a long time and potential for bigger core count CPUs if you needed (at the expense of lack of overclocking - which the 16XX CPUs did support), and entry level was not too expensive albeit at release some of the nicer CPUs were pricey.

While Core 2 shook things up, like nothing has since really, and you can just about get away with Core 2 performance for a lot of general tasks today if push came to shove I think it was the re-introduction of HT/SMT when things became really interesting again.
 
Honestly probably now, It's always been now for me, I'm forever in awe of the progress made in computing and silicon manufacturing. I was blown away when we got our 286 decades ago when the internet screamed down the phone line and I'm blown away now with the raw computing power we use daily without even thinking about it.
 
Peak PC was 1080Ti for graphics cards in terms of price to performance. 4090 is the modern day equivalent in my opinion in terms of longevity.

CPU peak was sandybridge. Although the 5800X3D will likely be looked back on in the same light.

Now is one of the lowest lows I can remember. Extortiante pricing, and minimal jumps in performance from one generation of hardware to the next with a big focus on A.I.

Look at storage as an example, when SSD’s first launched they were transformative and made a massive difference. There’s next to nothing with NVMe though, gen 5 drives make zero difference for me in the real world.

PC gaming is a real low for me with minimal difference over console versions. It’s just higher frame rates with more stutters.

Textures seem to have taken a massive step back, cyberpunk ground textures are horrendous for example…
 
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For me it was firing up Doom 3 on SLI 6800GT ( i think ) with a dedicated X-Fi.

Before that it was getting Theme Park and Simcity 2000 working on my dads 486 pc after spemding hours on them on my amiga
 
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