Best hardware upgrade of your "career"?

[StinkyPinky]

1) Getting a Voodoo 1. Going from grainy games to 3d acceleration blew my mind. My friend was there at the time and he went right out and bought one after seeing it.

2) My SSD. Everything feels nice and snappy.

3) Going from a 17" CRT to a 19.5" LCD about 5 years ago.

 

[videogames101]

First build, 9800 Pro, I loved that thing.

 

[blotto]

First would without a doubt would be adding a 4mb Voodoo 1 card to my P166mmx system. GLQuake blew my mind, Forsaken took my breath away. That kicked off my upgrade obsession. Second place would be a tie between upping the RAM in my 386 from 2mb to 4mb so I could play Doom and upgrading my SB16/Crappy generic speakers to a SBLive/Altec 4.1 system for Half-Life. Everything else I've done has been incremental, so while going from a 300A @ 450mhz to a 366A @ 600mhz to a P3 550 @ 846mhz was a boost, there was no "Holy Shit" moment. I can't wait to add an SSD, should be a big ol boost over my 74gb Raptor.

 

[trungma]

Yup same for me. P200MMX with a 4MB Voodoo card. Quake was sooo silky smooth at 640x480. It was neat to witness the birth of 3D gaming. 13 years later the SSD upgrade would be the next best upgrade I've done.

First would without a doubt would be adding a 4mb Voodoo 1 card to my P166mmx system. GLQuake blew my mind, Forsaken took my breath away. That kicked off my upgrade obsession. Second place would be a tie between upping the RAM in my 386 from 2mb to 4mb so I could play Doom and upgrading my SB16/Crappy generic speakers to a SBLive/Altec 4.1 system for Half-Life. Everything else I've done has been incremental, so while going from a 300A @ 450mhz to a 366A @ 600mhz to a P3 550 @ 846mhz was a boost, there was no "Holy Shit" moment. I can't wait to add an SSD, should be a big ol boost over my 74gb Raptor.

 

[queequeg99]

That's a tough one. Here are a few:

1. Voodoo 1 card. Gaming became fundamentally different for me at that point. When I eventually upgraded to two Voodoo 2 cards in SLI, I thought things couldn't get any better.

2. SSD. My Windows experience is significantly better.

3. My first CD burner that could rip CDs. Believe it or not kids, there was once a time when it was hard to find drives that would rip CDs. And when you could find one, you might get 2X speeds (or maybe 4X if you were lucky). But then I had to go out and find all of this new fangled encoding and decoding software. What we take for granted these days.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

Also, going from a 9600 bps modem to a 33.6 was pretty awesome. I tore up the local BBSes, downloading .mod music files at a cool 4 KB/s....till my dad picked up the phone of course.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Going from black & white to color was a good one.

TNT to Geforce 2 GTS to Geforce 8800 GTS.

Going from the venerable Toshiba SD-M1502 to a 48x writer.

 

[IgoByte]

When DSL finally became available in my area, the lowly ~768Kbps line blew my mind. Not having to dial up every time you wanted to use the internet was amazing.

Dual large monitor setups: for practical purposes, dual monitors are simply amazing. I've had dual 24" monitors since the $3000 Sony GDM-FW900 first came out. One of my monitors just died and I feel like I broke my left arm.

Hopefully, going from the Q6600 with 4GB DDR2 and old-fashioned HDD to a core i5/7 with 16GB DDR3 and SSD.

 

[blotto]

Oh yeah, I forgot about high speed intertubes. Going from 33.6 to whatever speed my cable co offered in 97-98 was awesome. Spent days downloading every demo I could off 3dnews.net and happypuppy.

 

[ModestGamer]

fully rugged panasonic toughbook cf30. Best god damned laptop I have ever owned. Virtually indestructable. A big issue in my field.

 

[AlgaeEater]

Pentium III / IV --> Athlon 64

There were a lot of mind blowing upgrades in my time since my first 486. The VooDoo 2 being one of them (as mentioned a lot here - which I'm happy) as well as the Radeon 9800 Pro graphics wise.

I would like to mention the very first time I experienced a Velociraptor drive coming from a 4200RPM greatly surpasses any SSD experience (in my personal opinion).

That being said there's always something magical to me about the Athlon 64. Never had I felt a computer to EVER feel "snappy" as the first time I used one. Coming from a Pentium III and first Pentium IV (and I mean initial release batch of Pentium IV's), it was night and day. I was (for the first time) happy to use a "fast" computer.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

Seems like monitors, SSD, and Voodoo cards are the most popular choices. I wonder if there will ever be another graphics revolution like the first 3dfx cards. 3D acceleration circa 1999 just looked amazingly better than anything that had come before it. I was a huge 3dfx fanboy; it was a sad day when they announced they were going under. In fact, I only recently bought my first nvidia product (a 460)... I guess it took me almost a decade to forgive them for putting 3dfx out of business.

 

[Disorient]

9600 baud to a 56k... everything was right with the world.

 

[Modelworks]

Dual cpu's , ran 2 celeron 300 @450mhz after having to drill out the cpus (intel soldered the pins so smp was not possible without breaking the connection) and solder wires. Slip with the drill or go too deep and you just killed a $150 cpu.

Matrox Millenium card, for 2d it was supreme
Voodoo 1 card, $349 !

 

[Bryf50]

From a 400mhz Celeron with 64MBs of ram and intel EXTREME graphics. To a p4 2ghz with 512MBs and a geforce 2 gts. Then after that to a A64 3200+ with 1GB and a 6600gt.

 

[pukemon]

I think upgrading from 4MB to 16MB of RAM on my 486DX2-66 prolonged the life of it for an extra couple of years before moving onto a Pentium II box.

Oh, the 90's...when computer hardware was still a pain in the arse to deal with, yet still fun for some reason. Then again, I really don't miss jumpers or DIP switches on motherboards.

 

[dhaddox]

My favorite upgrade was when I went from a K6-2 400mhz with 128mb ram and s3 virge video to an Athlon 1.2ghz with 512mb ram and voodoo3.

Second place would be when I went from having no hard drive to having a 40mb one.

Third place was going from a p4 to a core2duo.

 

[pitz]

Moving from single to dual processors in 1999 (dual p3-450's).

Ditching my desktop CRT for a Dell 2005FPW in 2005.

Installing a SSD in my laptop in 2009.

 

[Baasha]

Running a SSD raid is like an e-orgasm.

LOLZ... true. EGASM it is..

 

[ribafish]

Probably a 24 inch lcd=)

oh and going from radeon 9200se or le to hd3870

 

[Arcanedeath]

I'd say the bigest upgrade was going from a Matrox G200 + 2mb Orchid 3d Voodoo 1 card to Voodoo 2 sli, it was on an Intel BX chipset based board and an overclocked Celeron 333 @ 550 ish.
After that I'd say a tie between going from the Celeron to a P3 550E @ 733 & my first dual core an Athlon 64 4400+ x2 from a 3200+ a64
Most recently it would be the SSD
all memorable and worthy upgrades.

 

[Texun]

Going way back I would say my most meaningful or memorable upgrades would be...

1. My first sound card. It gave my cold and impersonal computer a "voice."

2. My US Robotics 28.8 modem. I sent my first email through a BBS with one.

3. More recently - my Dell 24 inch monitor. I'll never go small again.

 

[NAC]

I had the advantage of reading through this before deciding on my list.

1. Upgrading to broadband from dial up. This was huge. Changed the name of the game from dialing to specific bulletin boards to surfing the web. Remember when the local numbers for the board were busy? Other house members picking up the phone? The beeping and white noise sounds? How freaking slow it was? Needing to decide – I want to go online now (because it took a few minutes just to connect and start to get something done – as opposed to automatically getting any information online, from the weather to the TV listings, because it is the fastest way.

2. Getting a modem. I rank this as number two, because I found bulletin boards and dial up internet access to be nice, but not a game changer. It wasn’t until everything was fast and always on that I changed my way of life to use the internet for everything.

3. Changing from disk load to HD. In my case – from an Amiga with disks to a 486 with a HD.

4. Monitors. From CTR to LCD. From one to two. From small to large. If I had to pick one particular upgrade – about 10 years ago I got a 19” LCD… it was on sale for like $600, and was usually closer to a thousand. Lasted me, first as a primary monitor and then as a secondary until this year when I upgraded to a 23”.

CPU and GPU performance increases coincided with all of the above, but no particular change was revolutionary to me. Even the switch from no GPU to having a GPU wasn’t huge IMO. If I recall correctly, Quake ran fine on a regular Pentium, no need for a 3d card. And Quake was a fully 3d environment.

My first computer was a Commodore 64, followed by an Amiga and then a 486. So I never really experienced black and white computing, or a computer without sound.

 

[Maximilian]

My 9800 PRO, the first real graphics card i had, before that i had various other things which i now know were not geared towards games at all... S3 salvage, geforce 2 mx400, geforce 5200FX I was so dissapointed with my new A64's inability to run GTA vice city smoothly, it chugged like my old P4 1.7ghz, all down to that POS 5200FX, when i got the 9800 PRO it was amazing!

 

[IGemini]

Tough call...

- I'd also go with dial-up -> broadband. I specifically remember speedtesting my dialup to 4.5 kbps. Going from that to 3 Mbps on cable really made a difference.

- Going from a 3GHz P4 to a 2.4 GHz E6600 C2D. That particular upgrade was my first computer build from scratch. A stock E6600 bested anything AMD had to offer at the time.

- Radeon X1900XT -> Radeon 4850. Crysis playability and HD post-processing.