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My build history from 1994-2017

11K views 41 replies 19 participants last post by  fg2chase 
#1 · (Edited)
So I have been feeling really nostalgic lately, I decided to make a thread documenting the history of my "gaming rigs" through history.

I will start in the mid 90's, I was 8-9 years old and my dad brought one of these home, A gateway 486, I remember getting in trouble because I was able to over clock it and run pentium class games on it. My step mom took it and I never saw it again. I played games like Silent Thunder, Time Commando and Monopoly on it. It was my first PC I got on the internet with using the dial up internet at the university. Monopoly was my first online game in 1997.


It had a 33mhz 486, 8mb ram, ISA sound blaster, CD ROM and a US robotics modem.

After that PC was taken away I didn't get another one until 1999 or so, It was a Compaq Presario from Radio shack, It was the common family PC at the time, no discrete GPU and an AMD K6-2 which ran at 300MHz, I remember upgrading the CPU to a 550MHz one later on (2002ish for my dad) It looked like this.


It was around 2000-2001 that my dad grew tired of me using his PC all the time so he bought me one for christmas, it was seriously the worst PC ever lol but I was excited to finally have my own. It had a 200mhz Cyrix MII CPU, 32mb ram, windows 95.

I spent every dime I came into in that PC, Eventually it had a Geforce PCI, 500Mhz K6-2, 128mb ram.. Eventually maxed it out totally. I don't have any pics of it but it was basically in one of those early 2000's bargain bin cases. I think it even still had an AT power switch on it.

in March of 2003 I got the chance to build a website for a church, They compensated me by letting me spend $2000 on Tigerdirect! I finally had a KING rig.. I am talking nearly maxed specs for the time. "What a time to be alive! I thought!"

AMD Athlon 2500+
512mb RAM (WHAAAT)
Geforce 3 Ti500
two Geforce 2 MX400's PCI (for additional monitors)
IDE controller card (for additional 10gb drives, I had 4)
I was able to find some pics of this machine, It was my first monster build and I was so proud of it.

This is me still using the PC in 2005 shortly before I left for Iraq, I was in the barracks in Germany. I sent this PC to my little brother who was 15 at the time and was excited to have it.

These pics are from 2003














Eventually the capacitors burned out. It had the XFX-KT400ANB motherboard and they were really known for that. I think it soldiered on until 2008ish though.

I got out of desktops for a while because I was always in Iraq or in the field doing something Army related, I paid way too much for a no name laptop *(that actually still works) But here it is. Purchased in 2005 I think it had a 1.4Ghz Pentium M, can't remember how much ram I think 1gb and Mobility radeon 9800. Ran FS2004 and things like call of duty, used it for everything and aside from a dead battery it still runs!

Really felt like living in the future having PCMCIA Verizon card with 3G capability! I mean that was amazing! Even had unlimited data.
I used this laptop until 2008 or so when I got the bug while I was living in El Paso Texas, I was still in the Army but I wasn't deploying as much so I decided to get back into desktops. I went to compUSA in El Paso which was like shopping at a tigerdirect store.

Ended up with this at the end of the day which was a Intel Q6600, Intel DP35DP motherboard, ULTRA PSU and Case (which I liked because it reminded me of the Antec dragon case I had in 2003) two 750GB HDD's (my first experience with SATA), and a MONSTER Geforce 9800GTX+



I used this PC from 2008 until about 2010 or so, got the bug to build yet another new one so I parted out that machine and ended up with an AMD Phenom 2 1090T, Dual 6970's and for the first time ever some 64GB Crucial SSD's! Talk about blazing fast! I mean **** dude windows 7 was out by then and people were panicking thinking their SSD's were gonna fail from use in 3 months LOL. Upgraded to a Corsair PSU as well. This thing was fast and ran every game on max! The Phenom 1090T was a good chip.



in 2011 I moved to Copperas Cove Texas and shortly after settling in there ended up wanting to do crazy things like run a PC in a test bench. I still have the test bench but it is no longer my main PC, I started using AIO's H70, H100's. I was an early adopter of bulldozer and I bought an 8150, TWO HD6990's, this CPU is why I wasn't really a big Ryzen supporter, the 8 core thing was way hyped even back then and I was stuck with this PC until recently in slightly different configurations. It was a good PC I guess, It had it's issued but it got me through my divorce at that time.

Sabertooth 990FX
16GB DDR Corsair
yada yada





I also briefly had a SAGER gaming laptop in 2011, It has a Sandy Bridge but I needed to raise money for my divorce so I sold it.


Fast forward to 2014 (from 2011) and I upgraded that PC with two HD7990's, a Corsair carbide 500R and some other goodies here and there. By the end of 2014 it was looking like this and that test bench was actually being used for testing lol



from 2013-2016 I was working on offshore oil rigs so I did not have a lot of time for PC gaming, I didn't upgrade all that much and I was waiting until I was actually going to be home before I went all out on a totally fresh build. Which leads me to the final part of this, in April 2017, GTA 5 crashed for the final time, I was going through a big breakup so I rage/sad ordered the PC I am typing this on.

AS you can see I went all out, I did reuse my sony Surround sound from 2004 though! Sounds great anyway Look through the pics closely it makes several appearances! I have been using it since 2004!

60" Vizio TV 144hz
3x 27" Dell G-sync monitors
Asus Maximus iX hero
2x 250gb NVME SSD in Raid 0
4x Corsair LE in Raid 0
Two GTX 1080TI in SLI
HX1000I PSU
H115i AIO
Corsair 750D
7700k @ 5Ghz

all kinds of cool ****.













Update: October, 26th 2017. Upgrade to Maximus X HERO and delidded 8700k in progress.
hopefully I can keep this thread updated! Check out my other rigs though, I have them in my sig. Retro gaming rigs, Servers. ETC.

Update October, 30th 2017, received CPU from Silicon Lottery.







upgrade to Z370 Maximus X Hero and 8700k successful. Also upgraded the AIO to a Fractal S36.


OH yeah I forgot I have this inspiron 7559 as well now too, for school and stuff when I travel. Upgraded to 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR, a Corsair LE 480 and a Corsair m.2 NVME MP500. (THIS IS SOLD)


_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

update for 2018!
Update for 2018! Lot's happening!

First and foremost is this new Plex server! Ryzen 1800x and 53TB!
http://www.overclock.net/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=90721&thumb=1
http://www.overclock.net/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=90729&thumb=1


Second is that I upgraded my main PC to a 8700k @ 5GHz!
http://www.overclock.net/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=90745&thumb=1
http://www.overclock.net/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=90737&thumb=1
http://www.overclock.net/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=90785&thumb=1

Also got an Alienware 17
I7 7820HQ
32GB DDR4 2400 Mhz
950 Pro M.2 512mb
850pro SATA 512mb
GTX 1080
1440p G sync monitor
http://www.overclock.net/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=90753&thumb=1
http://www.overclock.net/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=90761&thumb=1
http://www.overclock.net/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=90769&thumb=1
upgraded the SSD's before I even turned it on!
http://www.overclock.net/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=90777&thumb=1
 
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#2 ·
holy cow what a story man!

No kidding about going all out on your current rig LOL although i don't think the monitor setup gets any better than what you have! (at least until the 4k 144hz monitors make their way)

This one should last you a while
tongue.gif
 
#3 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by IMI4tth3w View Post

holy cow what a story man!

No kidding about going all out on your current rig LOL although i don't think the monitor setup gets any better than what you have! (at least until the 4k 144hz monitors make their way)

This one should last you a while
tongue.gif
hoping for 6-7 years again.
 
#4 ·
Yeah I had a 486 back in the day. Could play games that required a Pentium 60 which was great (Diablo).

It has been so long since I've seen a game on a crt monitor. I'd love to try one again. The 90's can keep the ball mice though.
thumb.gif
 
#5 ·
First PC

Intel 486 DX2 66
4 mg SDRAM
420 mb (MEGABYTE) hd
1 mb isa video
creative sound blaster
56kb modem
14" CRT

Second PC build
 
#6 ·
Man, reading this reminded me of all the computers that I have owned. When I was younger I went through them a lot faster so I don't remember all of them but I know that the first real gaming computer I had a was a AMD Athlon at 900MHZ that I overclocked. I don't remember the graphics but I know that it played everything that I wanted it too maxed out, at the time that was diablo 2 and MechWarrior. I think that me and you are close to the same age. I am 32, so remember when all of the things that you talked about came out. The 486 was before my dad got his degree and started to make a little more money so I started a little later than you did. I do remember when windows 98 came out and it had that built in hovercraft game and some music videos from Weezer and Edie Brickell (not going to lie had to look the last one up.)
 
#9 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by sjwpwpro View Post

Man, reading this reminded me of all the computers that I have owned. When I was younger I went through them a lot faster so I don't remember all of them but I know that the first real gaming computer I had a was a AMD Athlon at 900MHZ that I overclocked. I don't remember the graphics but I know that it played everything that I wanted it too maxed out, at the time that was diablo 2 and MechWarrior. I think that me and you are close to the same age. I am 32, so remember when all of the things that you talked about came out. The 486 was before my dad got his degree and started to make a little more money so I started a little later than you did. I do remember when windows 98 came out and it had that built in hovercraft game and some music videos from Weezer and Edie Brickell (not going to lie had to look the last one up.)
Yep, I am almost 32 myself.
 
#10 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by fg2chase View Post

I am not sure, I was 8-9 years old. I do remember the cow boxes though.
YES!!! those were the days for Gateway 2000... before they moved to California and fell apart. Really sad how it all ended for them. I actually kept my Gateway2k Pentium 90 until about 2006-ish I think... and I still had those black/white cow pattern original box for it! I overclocked that P90 to 100Mhz too and it ran solid. Sold it to local person.
 
#11 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by fg2chase View Post

Yep, I am almost 32 myself.
Kids, I'm 36 now. I remember the 386 computer, floppy drive, 2mb video card, I think it had 16 megabytes of ram but it was probably 8mb, running windows 3.11, then came the 486 and with it Doom 1, pentium 1, pentium 2, pentium 3 (and the blue man group), pentium 4 (didn't buy p4, around this time I switched to amd), duron 800mhz, athlon 1.2ghz, athlon x2 3ghz, intel pentium d 3.2ghz, then amd fx 6300, 8310, and now 8370.

There was a commodore 64 in my playroom when I was a kid, had dozens of games, controllers from a sega because they used the same port, the good ol days.
 
#12 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by oobymach View Post

Kids, I'm 36 now. I remember the 386 computer, floppy drive, 2mb video card, I think it had 16 megabytes of ram but it was probably 8mb, running windows 3.11, then came the 486 and with it Doom 1, pentium 1, pentium 2, pentium 3 (and the blue man group), pentium 4 (didn't buy p4, around this time I switched to amd), duron 800mhz, athlon 1.2ghz, athlon x2 3ghz, intel pentium d 3.2ghz, then amd fx 6300, 8310, and now 8370.

There was a commodore 64 in my playroom when I was a kid, had dozens of games, controllers from a sega because they used the same port, the good ol days.
Oh yeah man anyone who was serious about PC gaming about that time had AMD, they were the true kings of gaming then. Tech TV was really pushing them, toms hardware. You name it, people used AMD Athlons. The phenom 2's were spectacular too and is why I stayed loyal up to the bulldozer. That's where my loyalty ends though. That thing was a dissapointment.

Nice jab calling us kids though lol, my ex wife is older than you by a year. ?
 
#13 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by sjwpwpro View Post

Man, reading this reminded me of all the computers that I have owned. When I was younger I went through them a lot faster so I don't remember all of them but I know that the first real gaming computer I had a was a AMD Athlon at 900MHZ that I overclocked. I don't remember the graphics but I know that it played everything that I wanted it too maxed out, at the time that was diablo 2 and MechWarrior. I think that me and you are close to the same age. I am 32, so remember when all of the things that you talked about came out. The 486 was before my dad got his degree and started to make a little more money so I started a little later than you did. I do remember when windows 98 came out and it had that built in hovercraft game and some music videos from Weezer and Edie Brickell (not going to lie had to look the last one up.)
900 was an Athlon t-bird!
 
#14 ·
Some classics there!
 
#16 ·
Duuuuuude....very similar here. In fact I think I had a couple of the exact same cases at least (that off-blue-blurplish windowed one for example). First one I ever put together was for my school back in the early 90s when Windows...2.0?? 3.0? First came out. Mom had an old IBM pre-windows that just ran on DOS, had the first "3d" game I'd ever seen (Chess, called Cyrus on it).

http://www.mobygames.com/game/cyrus

First one I ever messed with was to add RAM to a Pentium 233 mhz processor...then a GPU a friend had laying around....old school C&C, AOE, etc was played on that thing. Progressed through a couple builds in the late 90s to early 2000s and got into Half Life, BF1942, Day of Defeat, etc. Signed up for the Army in 2004, bought a laptop and brought both laptop and desktop rig to Korea in 2005. 2006 ended up at Hood (though didn't move to CC, because forget that commute. It was bad enough living near downtown Killeen but on the nice side of the freeway). Deployed frequently from 2006-2010 so didn't do much PC gaming and sold my old rig and laptop. Then got into Mini-ITX builds ~2010-2012, and after a brief break I'm now building my first water-cooled ITX rig.

edit - 32 yrs old here too.
 
#17 ·
Also 32, will be 33 in under a month.

I'll just add that my first PC I owned was a Pentium 75mhz, 16mb RAM, don't know the video card, my uncle gifted it to me when he upgraded.

Later we got a prebuilt AMD K6-2 350mhz, I overclocked it to 500mhz by moving jumpers on the motherboard, and adding a bigger fan.

I was always into console gaming, those machines couldn't do high end gaming really at all (they were prebuilts), I used them to run emulators and play fighting games which is why I overclocked (Neo Geo...)

We were pretty poor when I was young so I simply could not afford high end PC parts, but I've been fixing machines since I was 13 and even started making websites in 1997, a lot of time was spent online.

Built my own for the first time in 2008 and have stuck with it since, and PC gaming is a huge hobby though I am a retro gamer too (old consoles).

Cheers.
 
#18 ·
Back in the mid 80's had a Atari 400 with the optional 5.25" Floppy Drive(no tapes for us) + the cartridges, a printer, a color monitor, a mouse, and a collection of games and other software. Another item we had was the "desk" was actually an enclosure shaped like a arcade machine that housed everything, built by my Dad. Wish I had pictures. Later moved on to the 800 and then the ST. After that we changed platforms to the XT and then the AT. First computer I built was a Celeron 300 which I overclocked to 450mhz with a cpu fan that was louder then a jet engine. I stopped for a while after that until we got broadband internet around 1995. I went through a little laptop phase then, it all gets kinda fuzzy after that until about 2010 when I got the bug again and I'm still at it today.
 
#19 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by neurotix View Post

Also 32, will be 33 in under a month.

I'll just add that my first PC I owned was a Pentium 75mhz, 16mb RAM, don't know the video card, my uncle gifted it to me when he upgraded.

Later we got a prebuilt AMD K6-2 350mhz, I overclocked it to 500mhz by moving jumpers on the motherboard, and adding a bigger fan.

I was always into console gaming, those machines couldn't do high end gaming really at all (they were prebuilts), I used them to run emulators and play fighting games which is why I overclocked (Neo Geo...)

We were pretty poor when I was young so I simply could not afford high end PC parts, but I've been fixing machines since I was 13 and even started making websites in 1997, a lot of time was spent online.

Built my own for the first time in 2008 and have stuck with it since, and PC gaming is a huge hobby though I am a retro gamer too (old consoles).

Cheers.
I was poor too man! I really could not afford the best of the best parts until the last 3-4 years when I got real grown up income.
 
#20 ·
Yep, even this build (Big Red) was like a $500 budget build originally.... but I'll let you in on a little secret... it is not really my machine, but my wife's. I'm still technically poor (disabled), but my wife has a very good job (thanks, college) and buys all the parts. Like every single one. Yeah...

There was a lot I could do with my 500mhz K6-2 back in the day, and realistically all it would have needed was a Voodoo2 and it could have probably done Unreal, Quake and things like that. It had some kind of onboard 3D graphics and the K6-2 had 3DNow which was basically a competitor to MMX. The machine came with a few games that were 3D and they ran well and looked ok. One was Microsoft Outwars, which was actually really solid and fun. But the rest of the time, I was usually playing games in ZSNES, NESticle, Genecyst, NeoRageX, no$gb, MAME and all the other console and arcade emulators of the time. NeoRageX and MAME in particular demanded a lot from the CPU, I remember my fps was low (30-40) in NeoRage with the CPU at 350Mhz, overclocking to 500Mhz let me get to 60FPS for Neo Geo games. And that's pretty essential for 2D fighters. Neo Geo was actually a current platform at the time, so I remember playing some of these games in an emulator when they were dumped just a few days after coming out in arcades. (King of Fighters 2002 is one)
 
#21 ·
My first computer was a Tandy Color Computer 2. I think it had 16k of RAM and it hooked to the TV using one of those selector boxes like the original Atari 2600 and such used. My dad got it for me as a birthday present in the 7th grade after I begged him for one. I really didn't know what to do with it once I hooked it up since the only thing on the TV screen was a green background with a flashing "OK" prompt. So, I started reading the books that came with it and checked out some more from the school library on BASIC. Computer magazines at the time would sometimes have BASIC code you could type in for a simple game or something so I did that but had no way to save anything. I got really frustrated losing everything I had typed every time I turned it off. I eventually got a tape recorder to save my programs and started writing my own games. I wrote a Zork type clone complete with ASCII graphics called "Trapped!" in the 8th or 9th grade. You could even save games and reload them later all from cassette tape.

While I was still in high school I got an Amstrad PC1512. 512K of RAM, Intel 8086 @ 8Mhz, dual(!) 5.25 inch floppy drives (no hard drive) and a black and white monitor that showed CGA graphics in grayscale. My favorite game on that was Pirates. I had that into college when I was able to get a Packard Bell 386SX-16. It goes on from there.

There was no way for anyone to know way back then, but I credit my dad with enabling me to have the career and hobby I have now. If not for that CoCo2 and teaching myself BASIC from library books at about 12 years old I don't know what I would do for a living!
 
#22 ·
The CoCo. A couple of years before I was even born. The first computer I ever used was a Mac Plus (before I had PCs, we always had 68k Macs, because my dad was stupid and could probably never learn MS-DOS. They also had them at the colleges he went to.)

You might like this video, you may even like this guy's channel if you haven't seen it.

 
#24 ·
I have very limited experience with any 80s computers except for Macs and a friends 286 when I was a kid. Learned a lot from watching his channel, another good one is The Obsolete Geek but he has a focus on retro Japanese computers. I don't think I've ever used a C64 or any of the Atari computers or anything. Let alone something as early as the CoCo or VIC20. I'd love to get some of those (and a classic Mac or two) but unfortunately I don't have the room. With all my game consoles and games there's just not much room left in here for retro computers
frown.gif
 
#26 ·
i upgraded to my current Q9550 build in 2011 lol. Now I have an alienware M17x R4 i picked up local for $650 a year or 2 ago. shoved 32gb 1866 ddr3 and 1 tb msata in it and a 980m and swapped the internal screen for the 1080p 120hz. i should have chosen the 1070N ans the "N" series are the desktop GPUs + or - 10% as you can imagine my 980 Mobile pales in comparison the 1080N being literally double the performance, perfecting for a traveling gamer. ...shame a i don't travel that often, the opposite of your situation, lol.

Props for that *&% garbage #$%^ @%^& gateway got use one of those when i was younger, it locked up soooo much.
biggrin.gif
 
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