Biggest 'WOW!' factor from a component you've upgraded?

[HangTime]

Just curious as to what upgrades you've made that have really made you sit back and think "WOW! That's incredible, what a difference it makes!".

I suspect for many games this may have been a graphics card upgrade, so if possible try and think of something different to keep it interesting. It could be a new sound setup, a new kb/mouse maybe, perhaps RAID0 raptors....

For me I'd say probably when I went from a 14" to 19" CRT about 8yrs ago. Not only did I gain a lot of desktop real estate, but it also made gaming a whole lot easier and more enjoyable.

Come to think of it getting an ISDN connection back in 1999 was pretty incredible too, going from ~100ms to ~20ms ping was a big help - not to mention the dialup time going from half a minute to half a second!

So, what upgrades have you been dead chuffed about?

 

[HangTime]

You mean 450MHz - most struggled to get to 500MHz, let alone 800MHz.

Yeah my 300A topped out at 472.5, could have maybe done more with a chipset allowing more discrete control over FSB (this was in the days when FSB couldn't be tweaked 1mhz at a time).

800mhz would have meant a 178mhz FSB which I find hard to believe. I know there are cases of people with extreme cooling and overvolting breaking 600mhz but I'd can't believe anything over 150fsb (quite rare from mobos of the time anyway) would be running cooler than at 66fsb considering the extra voltage required.