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

[Guardsmon]

As a general setup moving from my old FX55 with 9800pro to my Q6600 with 8800GTX was a little shock to the system

 

[Grimley]

The bootup time when I added SCSI to my P166MMX rig about 8 years ago.

 

[feriso]

Two things for me:-

~2001 when I went from having always used naff onboard gfx to a 6800nu which fully unlocked and ran near GT speeds

~last year when moving to a 24" Dell

The only two jaw drop moments for me.

 

[Uhtred]

It's between

Dialup to cable
256mb of ram to 512
tnt2 with 32mb of RAM to ATI 8500 64mb.

Since then the difference has been noticable but never as great as the above

 

[Electronic Dave]

9600XT >>> X1900XT

Athlon XP 3200 >>> Core 2 Duo E4500 excellent at encoding when OC'd

NEC LCD1760NX (17" 4:3 TFT) >>> Samsung LE26R73BDX (a nice widescreen LCD TV although I miss a higher res of course)

Funny thing is my own assembled office machine (an Athlon XP 2000) boots up way faster than my gaming rig with a Raptor drive and S9393 Athlon 64 4000...must be the different amount of files on both or OS setup (16GB vs 68GB)

Massive change soon...proper 24" TFT, Q9550 or Q6600 with a HD4870 X2

 

[jrodga2k5]

My x1800xt......loved that upgrade

 

[TheBlackShuck15]

going from a advent prebuilt pc with a amd athlon xp 1.6 256mb with a nvidia geforce 2
to my current setup custom built c2d 4 GB ram Nvidia geforce 8800gts
BIG difference!!!

 

[sharpygsxr]

I made the step froma P4 2.8 prescott with a 9600XT and 17in monitor to a E6600 and GTX and 22inch widescreen and its the only time ive spend money on the best hardware at the time and never regretted a penny

 

[MotherMayI]

Dialup to ADSL, without a doubt.

Monitor's always seem like a good 'bang for your buck' upgrade as well. Makes using a system a great deal more enjoyable if it has a top notch display :up: