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

[gt_junkie]

- His Radeon 9800pro 128mb (silent and allowed me to play HL2 and Far Cry for the first time)
- Athlon X2 (no more stutters or lags whilst doing loads of stuff)
- 7950GX2 (ate up Doom 3 and Stalker which my x850 had had trouble with)

Most recent was the 9800GX2 (awesome card plays everything i've thrown at it @ 1920x1200... including the first half of Crysis )

gt

 

[willhub]

Ah yes that reminds me, I used to have a cheap 5.1 set from Aldi too (Nordik by any chance?) and now I went to 2.1 Roth Audioblobs 2. The bass is absolutely amazing on this thing.

Nah these where tevion/medion that I had, some tiny sub and weird paper thin speakers .

 

[MikeTAD]

Many...very many... years ago when I upgraded from a 14" CRT to a 21" CRT (the 21" cost £880 at the time!!!).

 

[Bonjour]

CD-ROM.

 

[Crowze]

Biggest single upgrade for me was Matrox Millenium 2MB to Geforce 2 GTS 64MB, back in 2000 or thereabouts. Went from running UT at minimum detail at 320x240 in software mode to D3D max detail 1280x960 - to say I was impressed would be quite an understatement .

 

[Zefan]

That's a toughy. Either upgrading from a 17" CRT (temporary monitor after my 17" TFT died ) to a Dell 2407 or from a GeForce 3 Ti 200 to 6800GT.

 

[lopkinfop]

getting a voodoo card and playing quake 2, from the standard GFX cards in the dell i had was amazing

 

[Wayne~]

I went from Win 98SE to XP and then I was wowed!

 

[Bakedgoods]

I've never really understood the whole decent sound card thing. Well... I can get why it would be good for games with surround sound.

I just plug my PC into my amp and proper speakers and I always have done

 

[Dingleberry88]

Blurry 19" CRT to 24" Dell TFT.

So much clearer, more vibrant and of course bigger.

 

[tem07]

When I went from Pentium 4 to an E6600 - wow, I could multi-task!
Also when I went from a 19" to 22" then to 24" - just incredible.

 

[pastymuncher]

I have two. The first was going from my awful MX440 on a Socket A XP2000+ rig with 256mb of ram to a A64 3400+ socket 754 rig with 1Gb of ram and a 6800GT.

The second was from my awful clocking A64 4000+ (2.8Ghz max) rig to my first C2D rig which was a E4300 that clocked to a huge (at the time anyway) 3.4Ghz in a Gigabyte 965P DS3P. Have'nt had such a "bang for buck" upgrade since.

 

[dan653]

about 3-4 years ago, a combination of my zalman cnps9000cu and a seasonic s12 from an intel stock cooler (fixed fan speed) and a qtec psu (it came with the case, honest)

 

[Plasmoid]

15" 1024x768 fire damaged compaq CRT
to 22" 1680x1050 LCD w/ 2ns latency yum yum

 

[Space Monkey]

not a component but the biggest wow factor i can remember was going from a Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2 to an Commodore Amiga 500! Playing batman just blew me away

 

[Exentia]

going from 17" TFT to dell 24 incher was pretty WOW inducing oh and gogin from onboard sound to a card, just thought theres no way it can be THAT much different, oh how wrong was I.

 

[lopkinfop]

i will soon be going from a 17" to a 24" monitor, i'm hoping thats going to be good

 

[lopkinfop]

also going from a 486 66mhz to a pentium 100mhz was very good

 

[Teaf]

Either:

Graphics card... I used to play Quake 2 in software mode at about 25 FPS, never seen a graphics card before (this is when I bought my first PC) and I decided to buy one. Installed it myself, turned Quake 2 on and it was very much a "Wow!" factor

Other one would be going from onboard sound to a dedicated sound card. I have a quite expensive/large sound system at home and was told that onboard was good enough for my setup. But when I did switch to a dedicated sound card the difference was incredible.

 

[Lee]

I thought my XP2400+ machine (ATI 9800pro) upgraded from 512MB ram to 1256MB was good.

I then went to a Q6600 and a 8800GTX with 4 GB, now that was WOW !