What has been your best computer hardware / software purchase?

[MrFunex]

Another post from me - I’ll nominate my first optical mouse. It was a Logitech one, and was a ‘first gen’ model as I remember - it still needed a mouse mat - not one of the new ones that work on glass or other polished surfaces. What a difference! I’ve never cleaned my balls since...

 

[Distracted]

Bought a second had in perfect condition Corsair One. (7700k + 1080) I just love how it looks - very tron-esq. Not sure it would have been my favorite had it been full price...

Nice looking pc. I was thinking about getting one because i wanted something compact, but I never found a used one at a price that seemed fair.

 

[nox_uk]

Nice looking pc. I was thinking about getting one because i wanted something compact, but I never found a used one at a price that seemed fair.

It's a shame you can't buy just the case but owning one I can see exactly why - it simply would not work. I was pretty lucky with mine but it did mean driving half way across the country to collect it.

 

[SinaiSound]

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5

Purchased almost 10 years ago and still going strong today with the following..........

Xeon X5650 - Approx £40 for a 6 core CPU

12GB DDR3 - Cost £48 back in 2011

1000w Corsair PSU - Approx £146 back in 2008

Not that surprising I've not upgraded....

 

[BongoHunter]

Threadripper 1950x for me - let me get rid of 2 old rackmount servers and get the same amount of compute and memory into a single box thats also my main desktop PC. Freed up loads of space in my office, uses less power, and is much quieter!

 

[steve45]

Two purchases come to mind.

Firstly, without a doubt the i5 2500k! had my moneys worth and more over the years, bought it summer 2011, been in multiple builds over that time and performed flawlessly at 4.4Ghz on stock volts, and although not the fastest, its still arguably relevant to this day. Had my Z68 motherboard not started to fail (all but 2 usb ports are shot) I wouldnt have even bothered upgrading, however sad as it is, the time has come to retire it.

Secondly, SSD not any one in particular, just in general, such a huge performance boost over traditional HDD.

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

SSD drives are probably the biggest revalation for me since the advent of quad core.

+1. Going from mechanical to SSD. I think that an SSD should be mandatory on all OS drives. At work, I'm sick of seeing the HDD activity LED constantly lit while it takes 10 minutes for the desktop to load up. I'm paid £10 an hour, so every 6 minutes of that LED being lit is £1 ****** up the wall. And yes we're paperless office. Bloody NHS equipment lol

For software, probably Windows 8.1. I was eligible for the free Windows 10 upgrade back in 2015 but I never bothered as I heard too many Big Brother stories about that OS. Been using 8.1 since 2013 which is the longest I've used a Windows version.

As a couple of people mentioned OS/2, if we were to extend this survey further than the past 5 years, then I would say that the jump from Windows 9x to Windows 2000 was a big one for me, although I still liked Win 9x. The jump to Windows XP was underwhelming in comparison.

 

[Distracted]

I take it all back. Best purchase bar none, robotic vacuum cleaner.
It has a computer in it and connects to the internet so it counts, right? It's like I'm cleaning the floors, but I'm not! I'm watching a little motorised slave do it for me while I play games!!!!!1!!ONE!!!!

 

[Grimley]

As others have said here, SSD. 1st one I bought was an Intel SSD about 8-9 years ago, it prolonged the life out of my old core2 duo machine for a couple of years longer at the time. Currently using Samsung 850 Evos which I've owned for a couple of years now. If it wasnt for them I'd still be upgrading PC's every other year & I'm still on Haswell/Broadwell, I don't see the point of trying to upgrade these days (Though I'm tempted by 3rd gen Ryzen as I've not gone back to AMD for almost 5 years now)

 

[Quartz]

Switching from a mouse to a trackball

I'm going to give a shout-out to my Nofan CR-95 CPU cooler. I love the sound of silence.

 

[Finners]

I5 2500k at launch, great value for money uses it for ages at 4.8ghz.

Still got it, clocked it up to 5.2 benchmark stable with normal cooling.

Since moved on but kept the CPU and will one day clocked it till it's death when I can get some exotic cooling

 

[Squid Vicious]

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5

Purchased almost 10 years ago and still going strong today with the following..........

Xeon X5650 - Approx £40 for a 6 core CPU

Likewise, bought a UD3R in 2010 and added an X5650 in 2014 - best hardware investment I ever made as no other platform has had the same longevity (also says a lot about the progress Intel made over much of this decade )

No longer my primary system but will soon be repurposed into a freenas or unraid box.

Also SSD, no other bit of kit has had greater impact on general performance than this - agreed that it should be mandatory in any build

 

[FloppyPoppy]

Really hard to choose with SSD in there so im going to go out and offer two best components.

SSD.

Ati 5670. Story : When i was around 14/15 years old i was rocking a really old ( beige case old ) system that i unfortunately don't remember the specs of, unfortunately at the time our neighborhood had quite a high amount of crime and our home was broken into and everything taken bar the puppy ( thank god hes still with us ) But everything else of any potential value was loaded into our car and taken including the beige machine. After a insurance battle my parents had some loose money and decided one of the items to replace was my pc even though i had told them to get their stuff back first like cameras ect. Needless to say they got one anyway and it was a huge upgrade. a HP something with a quad core and a GT210. I ended up getting a paper round for 8 weeks to save up 75ish £ and bought myself a 5670 to slap in and suddenly for the first time i could play games with okay settings at more than 30fps.

It's the one item that started the whole PC thing off for me and despite now having the luxury to be able to get high end hardware like 1080ti's i doubt they will ever compare to the 5670!

 

[DrBombcrater]

Chewing it over, I can think of three purchases that really stand out.

My First SSD. Yeah, a bit of a cliche. But I got my first one way back when they were either searingly expensive or complete garbage. I managed to get an 80GB Intel X18M for about a third the usual cost of an 80GB drive because its a 1.8" drive with a mini SATA connector. To connect it to a PC required an adapter and a mod to run 3.3v to the SATA power plug. But I did the work, got it going, and never booted my main PC from a hard drive again.

Second is my X5660. Cost about £30 I think, and went right to 4.5GHz with no bother. Superb.

Final one is probably the best money I've ever spent on anything. I hunted Ebay and paid £35 for a non-working Samsung 305t+ monitor. It's a 30" 2560x1600 wide-gamut VA panel, cost over £1000 when it was new. This one had stripes on the screen, which I know is a sure sign of a faulty T-Con board. Sure enough, ten minutes using hot air to reflow the main scalar chip on the T-Con board and the monitor started working perfectly. Still works to this day.

 

[Terminal_Boy]

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!

Am still running my 2500k. Best CPU bang for your buck ever in my opinion.

 

[233]

2600k

spent its entire life running 24/7 at 4.8ghz and still has enough poke to be perfectly useable today for gaming

 

[gEd]

ATI 9800 Pro
i5 2500K (now running HTPC)
First SSD
G27 wheel
Samsung cf791 monitor

 

[scotty63]

Microsoft sidewinder FFB 2 Joystick, Still works as good as the day i got it in 2003, Got a 2nd hand Sidewinder FFB wheel about 10 years ago, Only replaced it with a G25 because the latch mechanism was to chunky to lock onto my new desk with a keyboard draw. Microsoft made quality gaming controllers, Wish they still did.

 

[arc@css]

In more recent times either a 980Ti or G-Sync monitor. Brilliant purchases.

 

[theforce]

-Sennheiser HD 650
-Intel i5 3570k