What computer upgrade has made you go WOW?

My parents didn't buy upgrades when I was a nipper, so it was a new computer every 3 years or so. The difference was always mind blowing.

From a P60 with 8MB of RAM and 1GB HD (I remember deleting parts of the OS to fit on Quake, which needed an enormous 60MB, and frequently running the system with less than 3MB of free space) to P266 with 64MB and a 6.4GB HD. Damn.

Going from a PIII 500 with 256MB of memory with a Voodoo III to a AMD 2.4GHz with 1GB of RAM with the Radeon 9700. Again, fantastic improvement in every way.

Broadband was also a big one. I had a second phone line and NTL World running all the time, but 512k ADSL made a huge difference. I was the first install in Co Armagh according to the engineer.
 
Going from my AMD 3200 and Nvidia 7600 to my i7 920 and 4870x2 rig! That was one helluva step!

Going from dial up that would disco after 2 hours, to broadband was massive for me too.
 
Either the jump to broadband or when I bought my first graphics card, before then it was the parents buying the low end cards because they didnt have a clue or want to spend anymore on it so I was left with the radeon x300s and nvidia fx5200, after this I bought a 6600gt as my first 'proper' card and was in awe as soon as I realised there was a setting above 'ultra low'.
 
Going from an athlon xp 2.5 single core to the dual 4400 was a big jump, particularly and not surprisingly for online play.

Jumping from a 22" to my present 26" monitor was one of the most satisfying (if not thee most ) upgrades ever. I've had it well over a year and I still on occasion am surprised at the difference.

In terms of graphics I've had nice number of peformance boost gains, perhaps the most impressive jump was when I plonked in a 3dfx Voodoo 5500 agp card back in around 2001. Cost me £200. The card before it was (I think) an nvidia Geforce 2 Tornado 32mb. I think it was the combination of better AA and reliability that was the most welcome benefit. For the next two years most games were comfortably maxed and much smoother.
 
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Going from an Athlon XP 2500 (Barton Core ;) ) with 256MB RAM and 40GB HDD to Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo 4GB RAM 2x320GB HDD in RAID0 ... Oh the Shame :(
 
Phil99 said:
256MB -> 512MB RAM (not having to wait 20min for the PC to recover after exiting a game :p)
GF2 MX200 -> GF4 Ti4800SE
15" CRT -> 17" TFT

Have upgraded many things since then, but none of them have really had that much of a night/day difference.
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GF2 MX200 -> to the Ti4600 for me back in the day :).
 
Going from a Cyrix 166+ to a P3 450. I could finally play Half Life!

Going from 56k to 2Mb ADSL.

Upgrading from a 17" CRT to dual 24" LCD. That was a good day.
 
For me, it has to be my SSD.

I went from two Seagate 250gigs in raid 0 to an OCZ vertex 250gig and everything loads so much faster now. My bootup time went from 2:30 to around 35 secs :). I love it and I'll never go back to a normal HDD.
 
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