Good thread.
Started way back when with a Sinclair zx 80( yes an 80 not 81).
Moved to a spectrum then on an Atari ST (non of that Amiga rubbish, my god the ST vs Amiga wars were just as bad as the NVIDIA vs ATI/AMD are now.) Just goes to show that some of us never really grew up.
Moved on to a 286 which was just so fast at the time, but so quickly the 386 and then 456 came and went. I did have a 486 dx4 100 I seem to recall it was better than the cyrix 486 that replaced it.
First chip that I actually had to pay for myself was a Pentium 200 MMX, still got the chip somewhere I believe
.
The celery 266 overclocked to 400 with its sloket design was in there somewhere and there was Pentium 4 but I cannot remember which model, I do know it wouldn't do the magical 1 GHz that was all the rage at the time.
Unfortunately there are a few gaps in my memory from then on because I have been ill, but I know I had a i7 920 on socket 1366, the board I still use now in my own rig, but now with a xenon 5650 at 4.4 GHZ. This was my fist step into water cooling as well, my GTX 970 will be the next upgrade, possibly when Ampere arrives.
hopefully we will see something at GTC in march next year.
sorry for the long post, but it was nice to remember the early days.