What has been your best computer hardware / software purchase?

[Cromulent]

Just out of interest I was wondering what your best computer hardware or software purchase has been over the last five years?

For me, my best hardware purchase was my 4k monitor. Everything looks amazing at 4k resolution. It has changed the way I use my computer.

For software, I'd say I get the most use out of Microsoft Office 365 or VMWare Workstation Pro 15.

What about you?

 

[Distracted]

B grade aorus 1080 ti.

£385 and it has (touch wood) been working flawlessly. I bought it from ocuk while new cards were well over twice the price. I consider myself very lucky and it is without a doubt my best purchase.

Besides that, and some may balk at this, I think the 9900k is my second best purely for the amount of happiness it has brought me.

At the other end of the spectrum i would say the Asus Maximus XI Formula is now my most dissapointing purchase. The build quality is lacking and some parts feel cheap which is just unacceptible on a board of this price. Also, the LEDs on the board are so dim at full brightness that when paired with any other LED components they are practically worthless. Had i waited and read a few user reviews i would have known this but I bought on the day of release and am now trying to find 'fixes'. This is made even more dissapointing by the fact that my build is designed to show off the components so i bought the formula largely for its looks. The adverts showing bright LED lighting are a lie.

 

[Quartz]

Switching from a mouse to a trackball: no more twinges in the fingers and hands. I haven't used a mouse more than briefly in over a decade. Going 4k comes second. Working with text (like writing this post) is so much nicer on a 4K monitor.

Software? Probably Google Chrome.

 

[stokecity_m]

My i7 920 nearly 9+ years ago.

Still going strong (well strong enough )

 

[almoststew1990]

Mine has been my 8GB of DDR3 2133MHz. I got it with my i7 860 in 2009/2010 and was the fastest I could get at the time. Still going strong and still adequate for gaming with a 4770k and 1070ti at 1080p.

As that isn't 5 years I'd say my 750GB Samsun 850 Evo SSD (back when 750GB on an SSD was large!) Totally take it for granted now!

 

[Randomface74]

i7 920 build, plus a later SSD upgrade for it - I used it as a main PC, then a media PC, now it's handed down to my mum.

 

[Robzere31]

Can't really pick out one single item as pretty much all of my current kit has been faultless.

If I had to choose one item though I'd single out my X34a 34" ultrawide monitor.
After selling my previous monitor, a 27" 1440p Asus, the X34a only cost me £300 which IMO was money well spent.

 

[agw_01]

Probably the 2nd hand FX8350 I picked up for £45. It had a broken pin so was sold as untested but it worked and ran at 4.4GHz for a couple of years.

Upgraded to Ryzen this year so sold the FX and it's motherboard on eBay for £120.

 

[Quartz]

Since I didn't actually pay for Chrome, I'll have to give an actual purchase, and so I'll choose OS/2 v2. Yup, I was one of those people. It was a fantastic OS with a fatal flaw - its parent. Still, it prompted Microsoft to develop not only Windows 3.x but also Windows NT. I only dropped OS/2 when I got my hands on an early beta of Windows 2000.

 

[MartinPrince]

My dual Xeon E5 2697 v2 picked up for £350. 24 cores 48 threads great bang for buck and eats through my video work in no time.

 

[FatRakoon]

For me, the biggest moment in my computing life, or certainly one of the biggest moments, was years ago, ( more than 20 years cos it was in my old flat ) on my humble Atari MegaST.
I bought a 40MB HD from a guy ( Way back when ads were placed in monthly Mags and it took easily 2 months to get something sold off due to there not being a WWW like there is today )

Anyway, at the time I had a Quantum 540 and this guy was selling this 40GB and so I jumped at it and when it came, I set about seeing what the guy had deleted and I was almost completely and fully able to recover a whole load of files off it... That was back when I knew what I was doing and recovering files from a SCSI drive was easy, but laborious.

Anyway, on the Atari, the user interface OS was called GEM ( Graphic Environment Manager ) and it was basic as best, but it did have very basic Multitasking capabilities in their ACCessory Apps, btu there was a couple of after market programs out there that allowed full multitasking and one of them was MAG!X later renamed MAGIC and this had Mag!X V2.1 on it, also in order to use the Multitasking OS, it had to have a Multitasking capable UI and again, there are a few, and this had EASE. Anyone who knows about Linux, will know that this is just like the various versions of Linux and the various versions of the Desktop, and you can look at EASE, THING, TERADESK, Jinnee etc kind of like Gnome , KDE, Mate, XFDE and so on...

Anyway after several days of hard work and perseverance, I had managed to get my humble rubbish Atari ST from a basic computer, to a fully multitasking machine.

Even to this day, I now use Magic v6.2 and the Jinnee Desktop on my TT030 and MiNT and Jinnee on my Falcon060.

Mint is very much a unix extention for the Atari computers and it allows Ataris to also run X Apps and also gives them Unix Filesystems.

Waffle. mode = off

This must be one of the biggest moments in my computer life.

-------------

Second biggest jump, was when I bought my first 3D Card... The Orchid Righteous 3D and it allowed me to play UT Classic with my Cyrix 333 against my mate who had a Maxi Gamer 3D on his P200MMX

Oh those were the days!

 

[FatRakoon]

OS/2 v2. Yup, I was one of those people.

ME too! - Warp 4 - Still got the disks somewhere? I would love to play with it again, but it wont go on a new PC and Im stuffed if I am willing to wait 4 months for it to install on an older PC

I only dropped OS/2 when I got my hands on an early beta of Windows 2000.

HAHA! - Me too again!

I didnt want to ditch O2W4 quite just yet, but with NT4 being so good, and then adding the IE4 extensions to it, made the NT4 a seriously good Operating system, but with USB and DirectX being a requirement for games etc, Windows 2000 was a natural choice, but back then, cash was tight, as I was in my flat and was flat broke.I got my parents to help buy me a copy, but I will be honest enough to say that my first ever copy was hookie. As was XP I will admit. Come to think of it, everything I have and everything I use only started as a hookie copy. Everything I use is fully legal now, but if I did not have hookie, then I would not have bought anywhere near half the stuff I have now.

 

[MartinPrince]

...( Way back when ads were placed in monthly Mags and it took easily 2 months to get something sold off due to there not being a WWW like there is today )...

Yes I remember that well, spending my lunch times reading through ads in MircoMart looking for a 68060 card for my Amiga 1200

 

[Doug2507]

In the past 5 years....probably wheels/pedals and rift. Never had so much fun as I have racing around in karts on vr.

 

[MrFunex]

Recently, either my Oculus (which has totally transformed gaming) or an old laptop, an Acer Aspire which has given 7+ years of faithful service. Upgraded with a SSD and it’s perfectly capable even now - certainly value for money!

Going back, probably a 3Dfx graphics card. Going from 320x240 software rendering to 640x480 at what must have been 20-30fps was nothing short of life-changing!

 

[Grandmaster Fap!]

Going back, probably a 3Dfx graphics card. Going from 320x240 software rendering to 640x480 at what must have been 20-30fps was nothing short of life-changing!

Orchid Righteous, absolutely mind boggling what that did for PC gaming.

Also my first SSD, i actually thought my other HDs were broken after this thing booted up in 10 seconds!

 

[MissChief]

When I bought my i5 2500k in 2011. It overclocked to 4.2GHz with a multiplier change alone and is still sitting in my sons machine with another 4GB Ram and an SSD and still chugging along. He doesn’t really play much in the way of modern games, Dishonored 1 & 2 probably the most recent but it still gives amazing service even though I’ve upgraded the graphics card three times. Great CPU!

 

[FatRakoon]

Orchid Righteous, absolutely mind boggling what that did for PC gaming.

Understatement of the year. LOL

Also my first SSD, i actually thought my other HDs were broken after this thing booted up in 10 seconds!

And I only recently went M2 - Makes SSD feel sluggish!

 

[StarShock]

Microsoft intelimouse explorer 3.0 blue alienware edition. Have been using it for about 15 years now. And it has yet to let me down in the slightest.

 

[JRS]

Biggest bargain - I snagged a B grade Geforce FX 5950 Ultra for waaaaaaaay less than I had any right to back in 2003.
Best overclocking purchase - I had an Athlon XP 2600+ that I ran for 9 months water cooled at 2.6GHz with a faintly crazy amount of voltage.
Best single upgrade - Samsung 830 SSD, was the first solid state drive that I bought and made for a huge leap forward in performance.