All the computers I've ever owned

[mistersprinkles]

I thought it would be fun to have some people list all the systems they've had and what upgrades they've done. I'll start. I was born in 1983 and I got my first computer in 1990.

1990
Commodore Amiga 500 (prebuilt)
-Added a 1/2MB RAM expansion for a total of 1MB of RAM. This computer had no hard drive!

1998
Pentium II 300MHz (prebuilt)
-I upgraded the 2MB 2D graphics card to first an ATi Rage 3D 4MB card and then to a 16MB Voodoo Banshee which was really great. I also upgraded the low end sound card to a Soundblaster Live! This computer was built by a scammer who tried to slip me a 233Mhz PII overclocked to 300Mhz which was actually an older architecture that had a much larger production process. I had so many problems with this PC. I was told the parts were all new but they were actually all refurbished. A terrible experience.

2001
Athlon 1000MHz (prebuilt)
-I upgraded from 128MB to 256MB of RAM and I upgraded my sub-Radeon ATi card to a Geforce 2 GTS 32MB. This computer was also built by a scammer (a different one. Man I had bad judgement/luck). This guy charged me an extra $250 on top of the cost of the PC for a "warranty". I later found out he was trying to monopolize me when he terminated the warranty because I had installed a "Bogus NIC card" (his words). I had bought a NIC card from another source that was not him and he said that voided the warranty. What a jerk. He's still in business.

2004
Dell 3.2GHz Pentium 4 (prebuilt)
-I upgraded from 512MB of RAM to 1GB of RAM. This computer was great. Sadly it died on me and I had to swap out the motherboard which necessitated a new case as well since at the time Dell used non-standard motherboards and cases. This machine had a Radeon 9800 PRO. Rebuilding this machine into a new case with a new board was my first PC building experience.

2007
Core 2 Duo E6550 (self built)
-This was my first machine where I picked all the parts and built from scratch. I had initially intended this to just be a general use machine but the gaming bug bit me again and I upgraded the Geforce 8600 to a Geforce 8800GTS (g92). The motherboard on this one died on me, so I went from the first board (an ASUS P5K Premium P35) to a second board, an ASUS P5Q P45. This was the last machine I had with a 32 bit OS.

2010
i7 950 (self built)
I built this machine for gaming from the get-go. I upgraded from the initial Radeon 6870 to a Geforce GTX 580 1.5GB. This computer wasn't around long though.

2011
i7 2600K (self built)
Sandybridge launched shortly after I got my 950, and I was surprised by the improvements it offered, so I ditched my RAM, mobo, and CPU from my last build and rebuilt around the 2600K. I upgraded the GPU a few years later from the 580 to a 980 which I still have.

2014
Pentium G3258 (self built)
Not much to say about this one. I built it as an HTPC for the living room. When I was given a Core 2 based machine for free by somebody I built a computer for, I re-purposed it into an HTPC and took my G3258 machine, which had a Z97 board, and bought a 4790K to build a new main machine.

2016
i7 4790K (self built)
This machine used the motherboard and case and power supply from the G3258 build. I also carried my GTX980 over from the sandybridge system. This machine originally had the 8GB of RAM from my 2600K system at 1600MHz but I recently upgraded to 16GB of 2400MHz RAM.

 

[Hagar]

I was born in 1952 and bought my first PC in 1991.

In 1991 I had a 286 - 12.5MHz by Philips with a 40Mb HDD, 640k ram 384 extended ram and I upgraded it to 2Mb ram for £70 (£70 per Mb).

In 1993 I built my first PC a 486DX 33MHz with 100Mb HDD and 4Mb ram, Vesa local bus graphics, This machine morphed through several evolutions. (DX2-80, P60 through to a Pentium P100 with PCI motherboard more ram, bigger disks and Geforce 2 graphics card).

My next foray in the early 2000's was into AMD territory although I had built an earlier socket 7 K5 processor on a cheap motherboard (PCbits?), The Athlon 1700+ was a brilliant overclocker together with an Abit motherboard, I built several machines each with more outrageous (and noisy) cooling.

During this period, I built or upgraded many computers for friends, family and work colleagues. Mainly Intel but a few AMD as well.

My own PC tends to be a moving project with parts installed for testing, removed and sold or upgraded. Very rarely have I started with a blank canvas and built using all new parts.

Currently FX9590 but I have a yen for Zen (sorry).

 

[ov_sjo]

This is going to tax the old grey matter a bit.... Born 1978..


1986'ish - Commodore C64 Facelift. Had a silly 5.25" slimline external floppy drive from Evesham Micros which never really worked properly as it was a converted PC drive. Should have stuck with the proper Commodore 1541. Had a few gadgets from Datel Electronics, EPROM burners etc. Great times.

1989 - Commodore Amiga 500. Bought from Diamond Computers (otherwise known as LAN computers). They used to have all the £399 mega deals in the computer magazines. I think mine was the Bat-Man pack (movie deal at the time) and came with great games like Barbarian (will never forget the head-butt noise). Managed to persuade my father to buy me a GVP Impact II 52mb plug-in hard drive. Added two 1MB SIMMs to it too. Never had the funds for an accelerator though, but I did hack the motherboard quite a bit and change the crystal to speed it up.

Late 80's - Brother lent me an IBM XT clone (the type with the big red rocker switch on the side of the PSU). It had an NEC V20 accelerator chip in it. Just used it for word processing and some text adventures. Had an amber monochrome display (Hercules). Came with a HUGE Epson SQ-2000 (I think) printer with ink cartridges the size of house bricks. Nice quality, fast, but messy and cost a fortune to run.

1990'ish - Swapped the A500 for an A500+. Wasn't the best move really as a few games didn't work on the later chipset. Had a Datel Action Replay II and then III and got quite involved in a bit of disassembly

Early 90's - Went through a phase of owning as much Sinclair Spectrum stuff as I could. Rubber keys, ZX's, +2, +2a, +3, the lot. Had a lovely little 3.5" external HD from Datel which could rip most games at the press of a button.

1992 - Bought an A1200 from one of the big London computer shows. Still own it today. Wedged in a 270MB Connor 3.5" IDE HD. Still works, I hope, but with some bearing noise. Added a Blizzard 030 accelerator with 68882 FPU. 4MB SIMM in it too, I think.

1996 - After having a break from Commodore (I was a complete bigot, hated PC's), I got my first job in IT and felt compelled to have my own PC. It was a 486 DX2-66 of some sort with probably a 500mb 'ish HD. Used to play Doom II on it. Was not on the internet.



Memory is sketchy on the following around dates but will list them in chronological order


Cyrix 200+ based system. Most likely a Matrox Millenium 2MB and Orchid Righteous 3D 3DFX card.

AMD K6-233 based system. Quantum Fireball 1.3GB. Think I had a Voodoo 3500 video card in this one.

Dual P2 300mhz slot 1 based system. Four Quantum Bigfoot 8.4GB HD's. Ended up being a file server on NT4 I think.

AMD K7 1ghz (AXIA). Overclocked to 1.5ghz on air. Great little performer.

2003'ish - P4 3ghz Barton box. Originally a HTPC offer for Microsoft employees (of which I was one). Just used as a general PC. Cost me a fortune in BIK tax!!

<bit of a memory hole here, no idea what I had in this time frame!>

2011 - i7 2600k box. OCZ Revo X2 PCI-e SSD. Currently sporting GTX 950. 16GB.

 

[mistersprinkles]

Thats awesome man. Have you seen the Vampire 2 accelerator for the Amiga? It's got a
100 Mhz CPU, HDMI out, etc. Nice little board.

 

[d_brennen]

Can't even list them. First was a 386 Zenith though

 

[mistersprinkles]

Can't even list them. First was a 386 Zenith though

Awesome. I'm happy to see the response this thread has gotten. My grandpa had a 286 based Zenith laptop with a monochrome passive matrix display. It was so horrible. The only program he ran was word perfect 5.1. He actually used it well into the mid 1990s hehe. He was a university professor. At a time when everyone was bringing in their papers nicely printed on laser or inkjet, my grandfather was bringing in his notes which had been printed on his dot matrix printer which sounded like a chainsaw. Hilarious and awesome.

Getting back to my Amiga 500, I don't remember which bundle I got but it was a bundle. It came with some fun games my fav's of which were Ports of Call and Zany Golf. It also came with a joystick that looked like an Atari joystick. It was black. We bought the 1/2MB RAM expansion seperately and my mom's friend installed it. I also had a very large (for the time) Commodore monitor with built in speaker on the left hand side. That's about all I remember.

I had lots of fun making animations in Deluxe Paint III and playing games like Wrath of the Demon and Ducktales and Zoom and Wheel of Fortune... Great computer. Sadly I never exploited the full potential of it because I was a little kid. By the time I sold it (why did I sell it!!!) in 1996 it was extremely obsolete and I was more interested in playing Quake on my grandfather's Pentium machine.

 

[wildman]

1980 something - Vic 20 - Bought

1993 - HiScreen SX25 with 20mb HDD and 512k ram - Built

1998 - Dell P3 500 with a voodoo 3 16mb card, was the rig I took to i4 in Swindon !! - Bought

2001 - AMD Tbird 850@ 1ghz, quantum fireball 40gb HDD (died in first month), Hercules 3d prophet II MX 32mb, globalwin 802 case, pioneer 106 slot DVD, crucial 133 FSB ram, KT7A raid motherboard - Built

2002 - Same as 2001 but bougth an axia Y off members market - Built

2004 - Barton 3200, can't remember the mother board, think it was an nvidea nforce ultra 2 - Built

2006 - 4600 x2 AMD; 7950GT, 2gb ram ddr3200 , 250gb seagate HDD, Asus A8N SLI SE - Built

2011 - MSI P67, 2500K, 8gb DDR3, 7950, 750W XFX, 240gb SSD, fully - Built
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18257258&highlight=rome+day

2013 - Same as above but fully watercooled and with crossfired 7950's https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18503165&highlight=wildman+watercools


2016 - Skylake 6700K mini Itx in a corsair 240 with 16gb RAM, 970GTX OC, 1TB SSD - Built

 

[jaybee]

It's hard to define a change in computers owned, since many of us here will swap out components individually over time. A bit like Trigger with his broom.


Trigger: And that's what I've done. Maintained it for 20 years. This old brooms had 17 new heads and 14 new handles in its time.

Sid: How the hell can it be the same bloody broom then?

Trigger: Theres the picture. What more proof do you need?

 

[V F]

2004 - Barton 3200, can't remember the mother board, think it was an nvidea nforce ultra 2 - Built

A78NX-E Deluxe, NF7-S v2?

 

[JR23]

I was born in 1992 and didn't build my first PC until after i'd left for University, prior to that I either just used the P4 family PC or my Dell Studio XPS 16 so sadly I don't have a long list of pre-historic machines and everything i've had would be fairly relevant today. But still i've upgraded like a mad person and it's relatively interesting, I had to be the first to start doing this by month, hence it got a bit long!

Spoiler

August 2011
-My very first desktop all done myself with the help of my best friend who was far heavier into computers than me.
i7-2600k, ASUS Sabertooth P67B3, 2x Gainward GTX570 Phantom 3's, 2x 4GB Corsair Vengeance, Corsair Force 3 120GB, Corsair 600T

February 2012
-By this time i'd already started on the upgrades, adding the original H100, lots of scythe GT's, some terrible black extensions and 4x 4GB Corsair Vengeance LP.

April 2013
-I can't recall exactly when all of this happened but by this point i'd practically changed everything. The Sabertooth was damaged by a car journey and replaced with a Maximus V Formula, H100i added, Corsair Dominator Platinum, an AX860 instead of the original TX850, a Corsair 550D and lots and lots of cables and Corsair fans. I'm pretty sure I was preparing for GTA V.

May 2013
-One of my now aging GTX570's developed horrific coil whine and the fan bearings started to die on the other and so they were both returned for a newly released EVGA GTX780 Superclock 'Titan Cooler', and then I decided at least two graphics cards were always necessary and bough another.

September 2013
-With the release of Ivy Bridge-E I purchased a Rampage IV Formula and i7-4820k and hence finally replaced the 2600k from how the build originally started. As anyone would now guess this really did not make any difference to performance but I just loved the Rampage IV and it even gave me room to add an Essence STX.

February 2014
-By this point I had really got the hang of making very expensive and very slight upgrades just for aesthetics and replaced the Superclock GTX780's with two EVGA Classified GTX780's, because Classified. Also I added 2x Neutron GTX 240GB drives, this is when obsessing over how it looked really took over and I even milled a custom acrylic part to hold the SSD's.

May 2014
-αclass, for the first time I realized computers weren't actually important anymore and all that mattered was perpetual upgrades and projects so I bought all of the watercooling required along with a Corsair 750D and started an immense project that would last me until the following September.

August 2014
-JR2.0, with a now ridiculously complex 750D build in full progress I was concerned that it may not be finished in time to return to university to do actual work on it, also I became increasingly interested in LAN's hence built a secondary system in a Parvum S2.0.
i7-4690k, ASUS Maximus VII Gene, ASUS GTX760 Striker, 2x 4GB Corsair Vengeance Pro, Corsair Force LX 256GB, Corsair H105, Parvum S2.0

October 2014
-Chocolate Box, despite my initial lack of confidence both the 750D and S2.0 build went smoothly and on time! Actually very well and for a brief moment they were quite popular on the Internets, Parvum asked me if I would like to build in their upcoming ITX, this was the start of an awesome relationship and of course another project was born.
i5-4440, EVGA Z97 Stinger, Powercolor 290X Reference, 2x 4GB HyperX, HyperX 3k 120GB + 240GB, Noctua L12, Parvum X1.0

March 2015
-JR2.0 II, after being lured in by Gibbo's black Friday deals I added a GTX780Ti Matrix Platinum to my S2.0 along with a Neutron XT and some custom cooling details, just because stock AIO's didn't do it anymore.

August 2015
-αclass II, in preparation for insomnia I decided it would be a fantastic idea to move my entire system into the very first Parvum L1.0 which I had just designed to show off on the OcUK stand. Lots of radiators, fans and another GTX780 Classified were added to make sure it was elite tier enough.
i7-4820k, ASUS Rampage IV Formula, 3x EVGA GTX780 Classified's, 4x 4GB Corsair Dominator Platinum, Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB x2, Parvum L1.0

March 2016
-Parvum Lightning, originally came about when MSI teased the 980Ti Lightning, I wanted to do a show build but sadly samples wouldn't land until after the next insomnia but while raiding their cupboards MSI uncovered some 780Ti Lightnings. Being a Kepler addict this was magnificent and I forgot all about the new Pascal cards very quickly, the project snowballed using the ultimate of everything available. Oddly i've ended up using it as a LAN build, taking it wherever I go. It's so big taking it upstairs to my desk each time I got home would be too much effort so it stays out and about!
i7-5960X, MSI X99A XPOWER AC, 4x MSI GTX780Ti Lightning's, 8x 4GB HyperX Predator, HyperX Predator M.2 480GB, Bespoke Parvum.

April 2016
-Parvum Furia, this was a unique project that has absolutely no place in my upgrade strategy and as such, I rarely use it, it was more of an experiment, part of my final year University work to see just how small and powerful a liquid cooled PC could be.
i7-5820k, ASRock X99/E-ITX, XFX Fury X, 2x 8GB HyperX Savage, HyperX Predator M.2 240GB.

May 2016
-Chocolate Box II, while I have worked on lots and lots of other projects I hadn't kept and used all of them regularly, Chocolate Box being the main exception. With such great power for it's size either for work or play it's a build i've always treasured and so it was due several upgrades.
i7-6700k, EVGA Z170 Stinger, XFX 390X DD Black Edition, 2x 8GB Corsair Vengeance LPX, HyperX 3k 120GB + 240GB, Parvum X2.0

JR

 

[wildman]

A78NX-E Deluxe, NF7-S v2?

it was an Abit board , i remember the box being red and black and the slogan "welcome to the fast lane" or something along those lines. Remember building that when I moved over from playing SWG to WoW

 

[BluD]

Far too many to list but like your self i started on Amigas 500/1200 with Citizen Swift 9 pin and 24 pin dot matrix printers to match with their photographic realism , then switched to one of the prebuilt PCs in the mid 90s like everyone else, it had a p166 and then finally built my own PC in the late 90s.

I remember going through 4 cpu/mobo combos in a year once so trying to list all the pcs ive had between then and now would be near impossible as im sure it would be for many of the forum

 

[Neutrino101]

I would struggle to remember all of them and strangely with the earliest ones I tend to remember what I used them for more than the actual PC.

First was a 286 ~1992, a hand me down from my fathers work PC mainly used to play Duke Nukem (The platform version) and an old flight sim called Battle of Britain.

Next was a 486, ~1994, its sole purpose that I remember was playing Sim City 2000 and the early Tie Fighter

Then a Pentium Pro 200Mhz ~1996, this was the Command & Conquer and Duke Nukem 3D PC.

Looking at this it is depressingly clear that right from the start my PCs have been more about gaming than I had realised....

 

[V F]

it was an Abit board , i remember the box being red and black and the slogan "welcome to the fast lane" or something along those lines. Remember building that when I moved over from playing SWG to WoW

When you had it, did you replace the North Bridge cooler with the tall blue spiked heatsink?

 

[BluD]

I used one of these beasts on mine until i started watercooling the chipsets.



They were a great board, i had a habit of killing them though with my phase change cooler Damn condensation.

 

[WYNIR0]

Too many to list but roughly :

Born 1972

First computer Atari 800xl

Then got given an Apricot 486 by work sometime after 1993

Fujitsu P4 Prescot purchased through the computers at work scheme,

Self built Win XP machine, can't remember what the CPU was

Various laptops inherited from work

Since then several AMD Phenom based systems tinkered with regularly

Current Rig I5 4690k, r9 390 20GB. and various Laptops picked up when friends upgrade,

 

[StarShock]

oh lordy, this has got me thinking...

ok, '94ish we got a 386 of some sort second hand from a friend of my folks

'96 we got a Pentium 150mhz this eventually got an s3 savage 4 added to it, which was my first 3d accelerator

in '99 we got a AMD Athlon 600mhz carried the savage 4 over to this machine then upgraded to a Geforce 2 MX

2002 I moved away from home and got a Pentium 4 2ghz I think, my last prebuilt desktop came with a geforce 4 mx, which I soon changed out for a GeForce 4 ti 4200

2005 I got my first proper self build, also my first time buying from overclockers. Was an AMD Athlon x2 4600 with a GeForce 7800GTX, was my first time overclocking as well. got a number of small upgrades over time including a 2nd 7800gtx in sli and a small very sketchy watercooling loop.

2007 I got an intel Q6600 that overclocked like a dream, I think I had it running at like 3.2 ghz on air, something like that at least. its still sitting in the cupboard had 2 8800 GTs in sli

After a few years with that I took a step back from PC gaming, largely to do with finally quitting a somewhat excessive WoW addiction

I bought a 14" gaming laptop in 2012 with an i5 2450M and a GeForce 650m, which I gave to my brother last year.

2014 I build my current rig. a i7 4790 had a GeForce 780gtx which I have just upgraded to a 1070.

 

[mistersprinkles]

JR23, just like it says under your name, you are a true gangster. Those are absolutely five star world class builds. I applaud your skills.