What was your first PC spec?

DEL 707 said:
I remember my 1st 3Dfx card, pretty sure it was an Orchid or something and the difference it made was amazing, I couldn't believe how good Dark Forces 2 looked. Made me go through all my old demo CD's to try out all the games I couldn't play before.
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An Orchid Righteous! You’ve just reminded me!

50MHz and 4Mb of pass-through cabled goodness! If memory serves, it didn’t need a heat sink, let alone a cooling fan, but could be ‘overclocked’ to 58Mhz. I never did though, one slip, and I’d be back to the Stone Age!
 
I had an AMD K6-2 450 I think, I got a RIVA TNT 32bit GPU but it didn't support Open GL for quake (but combat flight sim looked better) so I changed for a Voodoo 3 2000. Think it was a 6.4Gb drive and I had 64gb RAM so it could run Quake 3 quite well.

I remember getting a 17" Iiyama monitor and it was a huge step up from the 14.
 
Mine was an Aptiva 486 DX66. I can't remember the size of the hard drive or the memory. I had a 15" Sony monitor with it. My friend bought a 17" instead but I decided to buy a better quality but smaller monitor for the same money. I seem to recall it had a very basic 1mb graphics card but I can't remember the make. Either on that machine or on a later one I upgraded the graphics to one of the very early 3D cards which was a Diamond Edge 3D. But I returned it becase it actually ran games slower than a 2D card :) My first proper 3D card was a Videologic Power VR which was a competitor to the 3DFX at the time. The Power VR ran at a higher resolution than the 3DFX (1024x768 instead of 800x600) and came with fantastc racing game called Ultim@Race.

This was back in the days when you needed both a 2D card and 3D card and the 3D card couldn't run on its own. It was also before Direct 3D was introduced. So you had to buy games which were written to support the GPU. Over time the Power VR started losing market share to the more dominant 3DFX so I swapped to one of those instead... and then two of them in SLI. The 3DFX did have much better colour representation than the Power VR but I still have happy memories of using it on Quake 2.
 
486 DX2/66, 4MB RAM, 545MB hard Disk and with a 14" CRT monitor. From an old shop on George Street in Edinburgh, long since closed down called ESCOM. Came with IBM PC DOS instead of MS DOS. I can even remember how much. £1142.56. You'd get a beastly machine for that these days! I had to wait 5 days for them to build it and on the day I ordered it I bought a copy of X-Wing. I must have read that manual a dozen times before I could play it.
 
digitalx said:
Pentium 2 on Windows 95 and was a Packard Bell that's all I remember. I had a wheel and pedals set for "Network Q RAC Rally" as well, loved that to bits! That's all I remember though I was too young.
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Fantastic memories of this also! Thanks for reminding me! That was played on our first "family" pc bought from Toys R' Us back in 1996 when I first started high school.

If I recall it was a Fujitsu Siemens Pentium 120mhz with 32mb memory and a 4.3gb hard disk! I also remember the soundcard and 33.6k modem were together on a pci card.

Ahhh....memories.
 
Technically a C64, but first proper IBM PC:

486 DX2 50MHz
4MB RAM
270MB HDD
2x CD-ROM
1MB Cirrus Logic
SoundBlaster! 16

AST Advantage! was the brand, played the crap out of the minigames in Encarta'97 and an absolute TON of DOOM :D
 
My first pc was an olivetti from radio rentals.

P133
4Mb RAM
CDROM and soundcard
800Mb Hard Drive
14" CRT

Then the first one I built myself was a but newer

P200 MMX on a crappy pc chips mobo
8Mb RAM
CD ROM
Voodoo 2 PCI GFX
Tape backup drive
1GB HDD
SoundBlaster AWE 32
14" CRT
 
MissChief said:
486 DX2/66, 4MB RAM, 545MB hard Disk and with a 14" CRT monitor. From an old shop on George Street in Edinburgh, long since closed down called ESCOM. Came with IBM PC DOS instead of MS DOS. I can even remember how much. £1142.56. You'd get a beastly machine for that these days! I had to wait 5 days for them to build it and on the day I ordered it I bought a copy of X-Wing. I must have read that manual a dozen times before I could play it.
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We had an ESCOM round here they were expensive. They sold amigas as well I think.
 
My first PC was a Fujitsu Indiana PC from Toys R Us. My parents bought it for me for my 18th. Specs were:

486 DX2 66 Mhz (which later I fitted a Pentium 83 Mhz overdrive processor)
4 Mb Ram (later upgraded to 8 Mb)
420Mb hdd
4 x CD Rom
Soundblaster 16 Soundcard
1 Mb video card
MS DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.1
Also fitted a 24k Dial-up modem later on

Played a lot of Wolfenstein and Doom on this PC.
 
My first PC was a second hand Tandon 286 with a VGA monitor i bought from the IT department when i was at uni for £100. i bought it to type up my assignments on Wordperfect instead of using the PCs at uni. It had a massive 10MB hard drive lol, I even had to install my own 3.5" floppy drive I bought from Maplin as it came with a 5.25" drive, oh happy days! The only game I ever played on it was the original Simcity :-)
 
Strictly speaking an Amiga A600 but first "proper" PC was a hire from Radio Rentals (!) in 1995.
486 SX50
4Mb RAM (I later paid them £150 to fit another 4Mb).
Can't remember GPU or HD size.
It ran most of the games of the time fairly well though choked a bit on Wing Commander 3. However the initial 4Mb of RAM required endless faffing about making boot discs (later discovered how to set this up from the HD) particularly for titles which required extended (or was it expanded) memory and the CD-ROM drivers loaded, like Tornado. I felt like Gary Sinise's Ken Mattingly in Apollo 13, trying to configure the re-entry sequence, at times.
Think I ran it for about a year before sending it back and buying my first Pentium.
 
386DX 16Mhz

Can't remember the RAM but it only had a floppy drive and a 14" Monitor. I invested in a Soundblaster sound card first... Indiana Jones, Monkey Island 2. I loved my mates Amiga but my PC blew it away! Very happy days indeed.
 
First PC I remember was that Amstrad that had a fan in the screen to "cool" the cpu (despite being in the box underneath)

No really fond memories of that so my first PC was a really simple HP 386 with a meg of ram and a 14" via monitor, dad "borrowed" it from work in 93 so I could learn DOS before writing was important (and play Raptor call of the shadows and Hocus Pocus when shareware was a brilliant thing). PC's back then were way cooler, we had a few odd Pentium and pentium pro boxes from his work round the house followed by a range of later 90's unix work stations we'd put windows on so I could game when they weren't "testing". Shame they all got sent back to the USA when his company ditched it's UK wing.

My first build in 05 was:
Athlon 3000+ (replaced with the opteron up 148 that just pulled 3ghz)
Terrible Foxconn board (replaced with an Asus SLI board that overclocked)
512mg ram
Originally it was a 6600gt, nice and cheap card but replaced ATI X800 gto2 (the OCUK special you could flash the bios for to make it an xt with 16 pipe lines) -
80gig hdd :(

Looking the gto2 was the coolest addon my mate bought one of as well (I flashed it for him), even if we discovered how bad the Linux ATI drivers were, spent too much time switching cards just to run civ4 in gentoo linux...

Half of this is not retro enough so the best memories are going to my neighbours house and playing Amiga 500 games on that instead! He had all the best PC games when we were kids
 
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