Last piece of Tech that made you go "WOW!!"?

[Admiral Huddy]

At the time of upgrade, then I have 2:

Nvidia 6800GT - Just ripped through all my games like chain saw.

Sand-force SSD - Although i have an older gen, the impact was immediate. Boot times, games and generally performance where significantly and notably quicker.

As I said before, it's not that often that an upgrade come along that's visible and instantly makes a difference without having to run media benchmarks. These were certainly two.

In terms of wow factor longer term.. Both the Q6600 and the 8800GTx where amazing pieces of hardware. Although this is more likely to do with the slower production of cutting edge software, my 5 year old CPU is still going strong.. Certainly the best value for money ever.

 

[bartledvd]

playing halflife using my shiney new voodoo3 after bein stuck with a onboard + voodoo 1 combo thing never new a game could look so nice openGL was stunning.

 

[Clav]

3DFX. Also my first 2.1 speakers, some generic no-name crud but they sounded awesome compared to the weedy 2.0 speakers I had only ever seen up until then.

 

[Egon]

move from 386 to Pentium
Introduction of CD Drives
3dfx card
First mmorpg (Everquest for me)
A fair few other games but too long a list, EQ deserved special mention
Big Gap
iPhone
SSD

I've probably missed stuff out.

 

[Wazz-1]

My Shure SE530s a real wow moment, like hearing my music for the fist time! Probably my best buy ever.

 

[danjama]

Well I've just gone from an Athlon 64 3200+ to a 1090t. Quite a difference

I find BluRay to be consistently dissappointing.

 

[Razargh]

My X-Fi Titanium Sound Card, totally changed my immersion in the game & now i have eyefinity + a pair of AKG K272 HD cans.

 

[northenstar]

1986 - Cheetah SpecDrum (Drum Machine) for the good old ZX Spectrum (changed bleeps into real drum noises !)

2007 - My first custom build PC with an 8800GTX Graphics Card (Rebaked several times, and still working !)

2012 - my OCUK Supersaurus 8)

 

[Raventu]

My Gameboy Colour. Gone are those amazing days of pokemon...

..just picked up a DSLite for £30 in a certain purple high-street store that is about to go into administration. Pokemon here I come! XD

 

[NeverWinter]

Honestly, my old 9800pro and 3G iPhone.

 

[DiCe!]

Upgrade to SSD and upgrade from normal headphones to my Senny 595's

 

[Marine-RX179]

For me it's probably my 2500K...but it was more of a "yeeeeeaaa! That what I'm talking about!" than "WOW"
Before when I play on mmos that only uses 2 or 3 cores, my gpu usage can drop to as low a 50-60% usage and fps can drop to low 20s during busy area or intensive fight on my old Q6600 at 3.6GHz...but now with my 2500K at 4.5GHz, my gpu usage will remain at constant 70%+ and fps at constant 55-60fps with the 60fps using MSI Afterburner even in raids. Quite happy with the performance.

 

[[Damien]]

SSD definitely. Honourable mentions for 8800GTX, 2500K and 9800 Pro too.

 

[[WU-TANG]GZA]

I totally forgot something! Like Marine it was more of a 'now that's what I'm talking about' rather than 'WOW'

I live in Canary Wharf, London. Principal financial district of Europe and loads of people have been living here for like 12 years now and more more. I'm on the dreaded Poplar exchange....

For years I suffered with 1-1.5mb internet and peak hours would slow to 56k speeds :O from like 2002-2011

Until last year BT saved the day and Infinity became available for the same price that I was paying Vivaciti for LLU (only company that had LLU available on exchange) and now I get:

 

[Wilkotron]

I've had some amazing 'wow' moments with a fair few bits of tech, but more specifically DJ gear.

Most notably: Allen & Heath Xone:92 - Going from a Vestax PCV-275 the difference was jaw-dropping. I've never purchased a piece of kit I've been as proud to own as that! The missus then made me sell it to fund our house move, which was one the most gut-wrenching moments of my life!

Mackie HR624 Mk1's - Clarity and sound reproduction is mind-blowing. I'm not ashamed to admit, they bought a tear to my eye when I heard how good some of my music productions sounded on them.

Hazro HZ27WC - Jaw-dropping clarity and resolution. Going from a cheapish 22" TN Panel to this was simply astounding!

 

[SupermotoMX]

hmm, my 520 intel SSD, upgrading from 4gb - 16gb of ram, obtaining a 1ghz overclock on my CPU without insane volts

oh and upgrading from onboard sound to asus D2 7.1 :O

 

[BarBrawllin]

My Gameboy Colour. Gone are those amazing days of pokemon...

..just picked up a DSLite for £30 in a certain purple high-street store that is about to go into administration. Pokemon here I come! XD

WTF!?!?! its about to go into administration? do you know when this will be happening because i just got a P8Z68-V from them,yes im ashamed to admit it but i had a substantial discount because of a voucher and didnt want to be without a PC whilst waiting for my RMA replacement from OCUK so i took another members advice and just bought another one(means i wouldnt need to reinstal windows because its the same model)
It was to replace the one i bought from here as i beleived it to be faulty and found out after a day that the new one didnt make a difference to the problems im having and now im waiting the 5-7 days for them to refund the cash back to the card i used to buy it,i just took it back today

You got me freaked out now if the worst came to the worst and they did go into administration before i got the refund would it mean im screwed!?!?!

 

[nuttyprot]

The very first gaming mouse I bought. Razor copperhead. I still have it boxed (pads under the buttons went). Sadly tho after the copperhead razor products seem to have dropped dramatically.

 

[Uhtred]

I had that one, without the window, but I threw it away last year. I probably should have sold it tbh but it had taken some knocks in its time.

In terms of value for money it has to be my northwood 1.6 which ran at 2.4 and the abit bd7 motherboard. The latter is still running 24/7 10 years later.

In terms of performance jump then going from some rubbish tnt2 card to an ati 8500le was a massive improvement but i think that says more about the crappy card i had before.

First phone to really tick all the boxes is my current SG2.

 

[Wolfe777]

I'm going with some old school ones.


Switching from a Spectrum 48k + to a Commodore 64 - the fact that it played incredible (at least compared to Spectrum) music during LOADING on some games blew my mind. Ahh the SiD chip, so amazing. Then realising that you could even play basic games whilst loading on some games. Astonishing.

The Dragon's Lair laser disc arcade machine - not much of a game but seeing that in action for the first time it just obliterated anything else in terms of graphics (if not gameplay) at that time.

Damn there's so many more, will be brief, Mario 64, Zelda OOT on N64, Shenmue and Soul Calibur on DC, switching from intel integrated gfx to a 9800 pro, etc, etc.

But the most recent and likely not too common a choice - La Noire - the first game in over 5 years to truly astound me in terms of graphics - the motion capture facial animation is truly a thing of beauty and in my opinion all realistic story based games will use this technique or a similar one in years to come, I truly believe it hasn't received its due plaudits (if just for the graphics alone) and it will judged as a far more important game than it is now in future years as a result.


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