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

For me it has to be the time i replaced my cheap Intel Celeron 2.4ghz:( to a prescot 3.46ghz and 2gigs of ddr ram from 256mb:eek: then upgraded to Vista for another surprize :cool:
 
Orchard Righeous 3DFX GPU -> 2 * Creative Voodoo 2's Sli'd was a huge gain.

also going from an 233MMX -> Pentium 3 550 ( I think ) was also huge.
 
MikeHunt79 said:
My first decent soundcard with ASIO drivers.

Using audio programs such as Rebirth gave me 7ms latency instead of 70+ms!
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Going from no sound on my 486 SX25 and adding a Sound Blaster 2.

I can't imagine playing without sound today, as it's integral to the whole game experience. Whether it's screams in Diablo or the sound of your engine, sound is just as important to me as visuals.

On that note, RIP Aureal. May Creative crash and burn for what they did to you. Oh wait, they pretty much have :p

In 2nd place, buying a system which could play Quake. That game blew me away.
 
Adding 3Dfx Voodoo 2 along Matrox Millenium.
Or maybe Seagate Barracuda ATA IV, it was so silent that I opened case to see that I had really connected power cable to it.
 
Going from a generic 17inch monitor to a Samsung 22inch widescreen.

I was blown back in my chair!

Also going from a 10 year old Tiny speaker system to a £60 Creative 5.1 speaker set wowed me. Mostly because the old one didn't work... :o
 
Glad to see lots of people mentioning large monitors. Before I bought my HP 22-inch as an upgrade from a 17in Dell, I was a bit skeptical about spending £250 on something which didn't make my PC any faster. Now I regard it as the best thing I've ever bought for my PC. Makes every aspect of using the computer so much more pleasurable. If you've got money burning a hole in your pocket, I'd recommend a monitor upgrade over a new graphics card any day.

Having said that, I've been pretty amazed by some graphics upgrades. MX400 to Geforce4 Ti4200 was a huge step, and going from the Ti4200 to the 9700Pro was hugely impressive. I regard those two as some of the best graphics cards ever made. After that I went to a 9800Pro and a 6600GT but there was nowhere near the wow factor. Hard drives are important too - my WD 640GB has made a surprising difference over my 7200.10. Then there's RAM - since struggling with 512MB on my first self-build I've always stayed ahead of the curve RAM-wise, because it's so important.

dmpoole said:
The least impressive was going from a P4 3.6 to my E6600 Quad.
I honestly can't see any difference after nearly a year.
In fact my P4 was faster at a lot of things.
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I think we might have been through this before, but I still think that if your Q6600 feels slower than a P4 then there's something wrong. I had an Opteron 146 at 2.9, which most would consider faster than a 3.6 P4. Going to a C2D E6300 blew me away, even at stock. The quad is simply amazing; not much faster than the dual in most cases, but the number of tasks you can do simultaneously whilst retaining smoothness is impressive.
 
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Well when i last upgraded i had to build a complete new rig as my PC was an off the shelf heap. Went from:

1.7 celeron
256mb ram
onboard 32mb gfx :(
unknown mobo with no options in bios for anything other than date and time etc

To:

msi neo plat 2 mobo
3200+ Winchester
6800GT
1gb ram

Lets just say i was gob smacked when i installed farcry. Best i could play on the other rig was SOF2 with everything set to med and low at ridiculously low res lol.
 
well biggest WOW factor would have to be loading up windows 3.1 for the first time, using the mouse instead of haveing to type in all the commands via dos.

first voodoo 1 add in board connected to a tseng labs 2mb card sudenly quake came alive.

first seperate sound board, no more beep beep beep from the internal speaker, made games like jazzy jakrabbit actually bearable.
 
AMD Duron 1100 Morgan core with 256MB RAM + Windows ME to Athlon 64 3200+ Clawhammer, MSI Neo Platinum, 1GB Ballistix and Windows XP. The Duron system was also running a really weak nVidia card that wouldn't play anything (MX400), then the 3200+ system was running a HIS 9800 Pro. Huge leap!

When my 19" Mitsubishi CRT broke down and I had to borrow the crappiest 15" LCD for months, then plugged in my 24" widescreen BenQ. Aaahhhh...

3.00GHz AMD X2 4800+ to 4.00GHz Intel E8600 running my usual benches. Super Pi 1M from 31 seconds to 11 seconds. Rather pleasant.

And so on, and so forth...

mick4545 said:
Beige case to Coolermaster Stacker case.
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Ah yes. For me it was beige case to Wave Master.

Lysander said:
Upgrading from my Dell 22" to a Hyundai 24". Sounds weird, I know.
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Not really weird, you now have 30% more screen space.
 
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Nearly all of mine upgrades had the wow factor :D but ones that really stood out were:

From 8600GTS - to 9800GX2

More than double the power on upgrading, from playing Crysis on medium I went to maxing almost everything (1280 by 1024, makes it easy :P )

From a E2200 2.2Ghz dual core to a Q6600 quad overclocked to 2.8Ghz, that made a real difference, especially on Crysis.

My final wow was when I got my screen a year ago or so, not very big or expensive but I went from a 15" LCD on which the power cable had a habit of falling out to a 22" LCD which dwarfed the old screen and was a lot nicer to work with.
 
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