Your favorite generation (or system?)
- Thread starter Ice Rich
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Soldato
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AMD 'Thunderbird' CPUs were fast for their time. I remember when I used to run United Device distributed computing service, it would compare my Thunderbird 1400 MHz against its Pentium 4 1500 MHz benchmark, and UD reckons that my Thunderbird was 50% faster than that P4.
Great thread. Nice to think back.
Blimey some youngsters on here - 'my first system was a P4'hee hee
My history starts with Spectrum 48, Commodore 64, Acorn A3000 (awesome machine), but first family PC was also '93. Back then £1000 seemed to be almost a minimum spend for a PC (shudder to think what that equates to nowadays with inflation - just feel sorry for my parents!). Pentium was just out, but for that money we got a 486 DX2-66, 2MB Ram (nearly hit the G key, but no it really was MB), SVGA baby!, whopping 340MB HDD, 14" monitor. No sound card or optical. Not long later we 'needed' to spend about £180 on a soundblaster 16 (massive full length card) and a single or double speed CD ROM. Never understood why, but some outofdateedness on our MOBO meant digital sound effects didn't work in some games. Heartbreakingly that included Doom, so we were stuck with soundblaster FM music and PC speaker sound effects for a good few years
Still - such fond memories of Sim City 2000, Indycar Racing, Monkey Island 2, X-wing, TFX, Worms... aaaaaahhhhhhh
My own first PC was when I was at uni. Another £1000 got AMD K62 400, 64MB. Having my priorites straight, I managed to convince the shop to ditch the bundle's scanner, printer and software and give me a Voodoo 2 card instead!
That build lasted a long time until the AMD Barton 3200 and Radeon 9800 finally replaced it, and that was eventually upgraded to Athlon 64 and a Geforce 6800 GT to improve the Half Life 2 and Doom 3 experience. Still stuck with that today as I've not played much for a few years having other stuff like reno a house and get married to do, plus the Wii and PS3. But now finally looking to build a 4GHz i5 Radeon 58xx system to finish HL2 E2 and see what this Crysis thing is all about.
Good times.
Liam
I remember my first C64 and when my dad bought me an external 5.25" floppy drive for it.... it was fantastic!
Stelly
I can't remember the spec of my very first pc... i wasn't into computers at all back then. All I know is that it ran Windows 3.11 for Workgroups.
My first PC that I remember was a 233Mhz with I think 42MB RAM. Had something like 8MB shared graphics, and a 6.4GB HDD. That ran Windows 95... No idea what the actual component models were though!
My most remembered system was the first PC i built myself. Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB RAM, GeForce 4 Ti4200 (Golden Sample!) and I think a 40GB HDD that was about twice the size of a 500GB disk now. I honestly can't remember much about it though. I didn't overclock the processor, cos I had no idea how to back then...
It does make me feel young compared to you lot and your sub 100Mhz 286's and such. I remember one person asking me if x86 was better than x64 because the number was higher... Man I laughed.
My first PC that I remember was a 233Mhz with I think 42MB RAM. Had something like 8MB shared graphics, and a 6.4GB HDD. That ran Windows 95... No idea what the actual component models were though!
My most remembered system was the first PC i built myself. Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB RAM, GeForce 4 Ti4200 (Golden Sample!) and I think a 40GB HDD that was about twice the size of a 500GB disk now. I honestly can't remember much about it though. I didn't overclock the processor, cos I had no idea how to back then...
It does make me feel young compared to you lot and your sub 100Mhz 286's and such. I remember one person asking me if x86 was better than x64 because the number was higher... Man I laughed.
When i had SLI-Voodoo2 12mb(!) after upgrading from voodoo1 and Motorhead on with a Thrustmaster steering wheel man that impressed the console dudes and got me a few gaming PC building jobs from well heeled friends hehe but then I'm old 
The only thing thats impressed me as much since has been eyefinity but I wish I had a wrap around monitor with no bezels...
The only thing thats impressed me as much since has been eyefinity but I wish I had a wrap around monitor with no bezels...
In my day I had a 40 MB(!) hard disk and we were grateful
... get off my lawn etc
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The pentium generation is the one I look fondly upon, my first pentium was a P100, 8MB (two paired 4 MB SIMMS haha) of RAM, integrated 1MB trident display (that I spent countless hours coding in mode 13h on) with a 900MB HD (it formatted down to like 808MB) and a Sound Blaster 16! I loved my Spectrum and C64 before them but it was the pentium generation that sparked my love for everything computer based.
[edit] It was also the first processor I overclocked!
[edit] It was also the first processor I overclocked!
Every era in the PC category had some great times and some not so great.
086 - And then the start of Add-on cards
286 - My first Real PC that actually had more than 16 colours
386 - Sound... My PC has sound!!!!
486 - Games, it plays games too! ( Quake on a DX4/100 roolz )
Cyrix 333 - 3D Gaming with UT & an Orchid Righteous
Athlon slotA 700 Through I was upgrading to a Celeron 900 but begged for my Athlon back and I had to pay for it too!
Socket A - Especially the XP17 & 25M ( Still got them, still clock them too )
939 - The Jump to 64 Bit at last
S775 - The realisation that even though my AMD939 setup is the best in the world and clocked to hell and back, and cost me almost a grand, my £300 klnocked up conroe has just killed it stone dead. AMD Fanboy now goes intel.
Just recently bought an AMD again with a Phenom x4 9550 and a 780 Mobo. Didnt expect it to beat my Intels, I just wanted to taste AMD again and Im happy with it.
Also recently dipped into I7 terrotory too, but not that impressed. Was expecting so much more, got nothing but more expense.
Im buying nothing more this year
086 - And then the start of Add-on cards
286 - My first Real PC that actually had more than 16 colours
386 - Sound... My PC has sound!!!!
486 - Games, it plays games too! ( Quake on a DX4/100 roolz )
Cyrix 333 - 3D Gaming with UT & an Orchid Righteous
Athlon slotA 700 Through I was upgrading to a Celeron 900 but begged for my Athlon back and I had to pay for it too!
Socket A - Especially the XP17 & 25M ( Still got them, still clock them too )
939 - The Jump to 64 Bit at last
S775 - The realisation that even though my AMD939 setup is the best in the world and clocked to hell and back, and cost me almost a grand, my £300 klnocked up conroe has just killed it stone dead. AMD Fanboy now goes intel.
Just recently bought an AMD again with a Phenom x4 9550 and a 780 Mobo. Didnt expect it to beat my Intels, I just wanted to taste AMD again and Im happy with it.
Also recently dipped into I7 terrotory too, but not that impressed. Was expecting so much more, got nothing but more expense.
Im buying nothing more this year
Soldato
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The most recent thing that made me think 'WOW' was going from a single to dual core processor.
My first PC was an 8mhz amstrad 8088 with 640k ram, i loved that thing but I made my dad upgrade it when Doom came out (still got my windows 2.8 disks here somewhere, will try n post pics lol)
I miss the days of IBM/Cyrix/IDT all making CPUs, now its just intel/amd
I loved it when voodoo cards hit the scene, oh my god lol, I thought gfx couldn't get better
My fav era tho was the ~2000 ish era when the slot 1 Pentium II/III chips and the slot A Athlon K8's wer eon the scene, those cpus and their heat sinks were 1000% easier to install than a LGA775 setup thats for damn sure
the age leading up the the release of ut2003 was gold too you had quake 3, half life and its army of mods, quake 2 was still alive and an awesome coop, the original UT, Total annihilation. I miss those days, now everyone just wants to play COD lol
(still got my windows 2.8 disks here somewhere, will try n post pics lol)I miss the days of IBM/Cyrix/IDT all making CPUs, now its just intel/amd
I loved it when voodoo cards hit the scene, oh my god lol, I thought gfx couldn't get better
My fav era tho was the ~2000 ish era when the slot 1 Pentium II/III chips and the slot A Athlon K8's wer eon the scene, those cpus and their heat sinks were 1000% easier to install than a LGA775 setup thats for damn sure
the age leading up the the release of ut2003 was gold too you had quake 3, half life and its army of mods, quake 2 was still alive and an awesome coop, the original UT, Total annihilation. I miss those days, now everyone just wants to play COD lol
Not me.
When I upped from Socket A to 939, I was on a clocked XP2500 to a stock Winchester 3200 and there was never really a jump as such.
When I upped from 1 to 2 cores, it was again the 3200 to a 3800 and they are the very same thing just 2 cores and I never saw a huge boost at all... Not really.
My first PC was an 8mhz amstrad 8088 with 640k ram, i loved that thing but I made my dad upgrade it when Doom came out
Amstrad PC1640 - I had one of those too! - Mine ran GEM though.
Favourite system? Hmm.
Had an old pentium 2 clocked at 400mhz with 128mb of ram and inbuilt graphics, had a 6gb hard drive, downside - it was running on Windows ME.
First built my own pc out of a old AMD Duron machine, with 256mb ram and a 40gb hard drive, at the age of 10.
Favourite computer has to be this one, lots of time, effort and money. Best performance I've ever had in games.
Had an old pentium 2 clocked at 400mhz with 128mb of ram and inbuilt graphics, had a 6gb hard drive, downside - it was running on Windows ME.
First built my own pc out of a old AMD Duron machine, with 256mb ram and a 40gb hard drive, at the age of 10.
Favourite computer has to be this one, lots of time, effort and money. Best performance I've ever had in games.
Had a 386sx16 after the c64s, spectrums, amigas.
Then an ASUS 486 component build = LoL, I remember the IRQ JUMPERs. Jumpers for MB clock speed, soundcard, IO card. Then the second 486 MB had VESA local bus. New technology !
Pre-CD days, think my favourite games were Wing Commander, UFO and Harpoon.
Then an ASUS 486 component build = LoL, I remember the IRQ JUMPERs. Jumpers for MB clock speed, soundcard, IO card. Then the second 486 MB had VESA local bus.
New technology !Pre-CD days, think my favourite games were Wing Commander, UFO and Harpoon.
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I think my favourite era was when I bought a geforce ti4200 and discovered it's overclocking abilities.
Technically you can call a Sinclair Spectrum a PC.. PC just stands for Personal Computer. Even a mac is a PC
. Techinically our computers are IBM Clones , but they are massively improved over the old IBM PC's.These days really, I suppose its more fair to say our computers are Windows/Intel platform rather than IBM PC clones, considering that 99% of the IBM tech is long gone... ISA gone, VGA still present during boot up but as soon as the drivers are loaded its disabled.... MFM/RLL hard disks done... MCA heck that one wasnt even cloned very often.
Though its still possible to slap in an IBM PC Dos, or MS Dos boot disk and load the dos prompt, so software wise our machines are actually pretty much 100% compatible with the oldest PC's
Just a lot faster.My first PC was an 8mhz amstrad 8088 with 640k ram, i loved that thing but I made my dad upgrade it when Doom came out
The Amstrad PC 1512, and 1640 were both based on the 8mhz 8086 a true 16bit microprocessor not the 8088. The 8088 was generally clocked at 4.77mhz and only used in very early IBM PC & Clones. While it was a 16bit processor internally it had an 8 bit bus to the motherboard /chipset to reduce costs.
Amstrad never made an 8088 based PC.