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

I have a few ill list them to make it easier
1) my first cd rom writer in 97' (8x write 4x re-write 16x read lol) i was like omg dad look i can copy music i downloaded from napster on to a cd and listen to it in the car!!! Lol cost about £300 aswell.

2) when i went from a 2d card to a voodoo 2 12mb in my 233mmx, again and omg i can play quake and a game called "pod" which at the time people said was the most powerful game ever!?

3) first liquid cooled pc was cool, maybe not a wow moment but cool.

4) when i got my first 56.6k modem and could play command and conquer, star siege tribes and warzone all online with my mates and download free music online, that was an amazing moment!!!

5) some others of note but not quite wow are ipad, iphone 3gs (had the first iphone but was un-impressed), First proper paintball marker (smart parts eos cost £250) moved on to an SLR now which cost £2000, lol
 
Latest thing... My Vita. Truly amazing for a portable device. Before that it'd be the iPad and the iPhone. Not sure what else yet.
 
Core i7 920 at 4Ghz. Coming from a Athlon 64 3000+ with tiny over clock it was a hell of a jump. The old system used to take ages to load games and basically refused to alt+tab out of them. With the i7 everything was oh so fast.

Apart from that it would have to be broadband, ADSL in my case. I still remember the day I first got it, 5 days after my exchange finally got upgraded. 50KB download speed was the thing of gods to me back then after creaking along at 3.5KB for so long. Even though I now download at 40 times that original speed, and others even more than that, that jump was special to me as I'd waited a good couple of years longer than most.
 
The i5 2500K seems a good price/performance piece. And they overclock so readily.

Granted getting a new CPU rarely makes me go WOW, but it's overclocking ability is certainly impressive :)
 
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:cool:
 
HangTime said:
My last couple of supposedly 'never go back' purchases, a SSD drive and a mechanical keyboard, have left me somewhat nonplussed. Nice, to be sure, but far from the overwhelming experience I'd prepared myself for based on the reactions of others. They carried a big price premium (compared to conventional drives/keyboards) and the improvement certainly didn't feel like it outweighed the cost associated with it.

So anyway, that got me to thinking. What was the last tech purchase I've made where I've gone "WOW, that is totally awesome, way better than I was expecting, money well spent!". So I thought...

...and I thought...

...and I thought some more.

I'm actually struggling to come up with something. Not strictly computer hardware, but probably my phone (HTC Desire HD) that I got around 15 months ago. Did pretty much everything I wanted from it, loads of great usability tweaks like automatic text wrapping, making it easy to search for stuff, unexpected extras that I've ended up using a lot like the Flashlight app.

If I restrict it to PC hardware, it gets even more tricky. I'm looking around my desk, looking at what I've got plugged in, what's in the case, what boxes I have scattered around. What have I got:

-Logtech G5 mouse: Seems no better than the MX518 it replaced
-Zowie Celeritas keyboard: Doesn't seem earth-shattering compared to my old G15
-Shure SRH840 headphones: Very nice but cost over £100 and not a massive step up from my Sennheiser HD555
-Viewsonic VX2268WM monitor: Obviously a lot better than 75hz TFT alongside it, but aside from the practicality (size/weight) no better than a big CRT
-OCZ Agility 3 SSD: Windows is a bit slicker but boot times nothing to write home about and transfer speeds don't seem noticeably better than my better mechanical drives. Only running in SATA2 mode but was expecting more.

To be honest, I think the most recent bit of kit that impressed me was probably my motherboard, an MSI P55 GD65. Only cost £64 about 2.5 years ago which seems like a pretty good deal to me, good for overclocking, good features for the time, although the lack of USB3 and SATA3 is showing a little now.

So how about you?
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My Shure SRH840's. Probably gonna upgrade to the 940's soon too.
 
iPhone
Radeon 9700 Pro
Q6600
Monitor Audio RS6 speakers

stulid said:
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Never lucky enough to own one, but still the best-looking case ever, IMO. Knocks the socks off all the brightly-coloured, angular 'gaming case' nonsense that's in at the moment.
 
So many people think their new SSD is what's made the PC feel fast all of a sudden. When in actual fact it's just because it's had a fresh install of Windows. If they did a fresh install on a decent mechanical drive, it would feel almost as snappy!

A fresh install on a decent Sata drive feels very snappy as is. Everything loads in less than a second and windows open almost immediately. What more do you really want or need!!

SSD's are great for viewing thousands of photos in albums etc and keeping noise/power consumption down. People just brainwash themselves into thinking it's amazing to justify the large price tag.

Where they are great though, is laptops! Improves battery life, ables you to tilt the laptop and move it around with wrecking the mechanical disk and also it is a big improvement over a cheapo 5400rpm drive.

My "wow, this is better than I was expecting" purchase was an iPod touch... absolutely loved it, until I dropped it down the toilet :(
 
Buchanan0204 said:
So many people think their new SSD is what's made the PC feel fast all of a sudden. When in actual fact it's just because it's had a fresh install of Windows. If they did a fresh install on a decent mechanical drive, it would feel almost as snappy!

A fresh install on a decent Sata drive feels very snappy as is. Everything loads in less than a second and windows open almost immediately. What more do you really want or need!!

SSD's are great for viewing thousands of photos in albums etc and keeping noise/power consumption down. People just brainwash themselves into thinking it's amazing to justify the large price tag.

Where they are great though, is laptops! Improves battery life, ables you to tilt the laptop and move it around with wrecking the mechanical disk and also it is a big improvement over a cheapo 5400rpm drive.

My "wow, this is better than I was expecting" purchase was an iPod touch... absolutely loved it, until I dropped it down the toilet :(
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Maybe it was old and slow but I've done many fresh installs on SATA HDDs and none have been as fast at loading/booting on my SSD. So I disagree there. Your sig though, I do agree with.
 
GTX 580 compared to a 5850 :)

5850 compared to 8 year old pc.

Iphone 4 compared to Samsung Tocco.

Full HD monitor compared to 1024*768.

Watercooling. SILENCE!
 
Going from ISA GFX card to a VESA local bus card I had a flight sim installed can not remember the one at the time but when I install the VESA local bus card I do believe I wet my pants.

That was one but there has been many for me.
 
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