Best hardware upgrade of your "career"?

[Arg Clin]

Most enjoyable upgrade: my very first slot A Athlon 500 @ 650 with the goldfinger O/C device, coupled with the GeForce256. Why it was so fun? Well I suppose everybody was running PII and nobody thought of AMD as a powerful chip. It was quite fun having "the dark horse" and showing it off.

Beefing up my old 468 to break the 1 GB HDD mark ranks up there too though.

Those sure were the days. Probably not the most groundbreaking, from an objective point of view - but this is the stuff I remember.

 

[mfenn]

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!

LOL, Freudian slip?

 

[Ketchup]

The two that first came to my mind are, in chronological order:

1. 7200 RPM Seagate hard drive (from a 4000 RPM Quantum Bigfoot that came with an HP)

2. ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (from a Geforce 2)

 

[notty22]

Going from a Cyrix 100 Mhz to overclocking a Celeron 266. Then a Celeron 300a, P1 550 e. then the AMD route for a while.

I remember paying $200 for a 8GB HD. And over $100 for 4MB of RAM.

Those SSD prices don't seem that high in comparison.

I did the same upgrade ! I went from Cyrix dx 50- to the Celeron 266 and instantly o/c it to 448. Within a couple months got my first game card, voodoo1. Quake 1 , was all but unplayable without it.
Then the ssd.
So the first 2 are tied for best ever, but complemented each other.
1 80% o/c Celeron 266
2 Voodoo 1
3 Boot drive SSD

The ssd cost me 100.00 dollars. Just for weird facts and figures. I bought a 1.6gb Western Digital HD when that was the cutting edge biggest size- 350.00 dollars. -1994-

 

[stahlhart]

The SCSI CD-R drive I got in 1998 (Ricoh MP6201S). The first audio disc I ever wrote with it worked. Even after having made countless cassette tape recordings in all the years prior, that was a real rush.

 

[Xenon14]

AMD K6 233mhz ----> AMD K7 1333mhz.

 

[etrigan420]

Easy choice for me:

From s939 to my e8400.

...or maybe from 7800GTX to 4850.

...hmmmm, could be from Viewsonic VX924 to 2408WFP

...probably the e8400...

Okay, maybe not so easy. :\

 

[adairusmc]

My SSD, possibly going from Pentium 4 to Athlon64 X2.

 

[Athadeus]

When I started playing Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast, I thought the sound was particularly bad. Went to BB and got a SB Audigy gamer and Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 speakers. Most worthwhile parts I ever got, have both working well still only using the speakers.

 

[lupi]

cable modem.

 

[Texun]

cable modem.

+1 :thumbsup:

 

[Slugbait]

Mine was posting on a thread that had laid dormant for six months.

 

[Obsy]

going from IGPs to high-end discrete as a gamer

 

[notty22]

Mine was posting on a thread that had laid dormant for six months.

Yes, because the topic and content is so time sensitive.:hmm:

 

[CDC Mail Guy]

P4 to Core 2 Duo (JUST so I could play Crysis) ...then of course SDD

 

[eelw]

Another monitor vote.

1st majory upgrade was my 19" Mitsubishi Diamondtron CRT. That was then upgraded to a 22" Viewsonic Trinitron CRT. And now using 28" Hanns-G LCD. My desk thanks me. Was running the two CRTs in dual monitor for a couple of years.

 

[TexasEd]

going from cassettes and floppies to the hard drive. I think my first one was 20 MB.

 

[aphelion02]

Wow you guys are old....

Mine is from a P4 + Radeon 7600 in a Sony Vaio desktop to a Q6600 + 8800GT

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Athlon64 3200+ --> Core i7 920

Then from a Caviar Blue 640GB to a Vertex 2 60GB. That thing is awesome.

 

[Dudewithoutapet]

A couple of memorable times with computers

Going from dial-up to some good DSL

Going from an ATI 9200 SE (AGP) to a 6600GT (AGP) felt like a big jump.

Building my first computer from scratch-
A64 3200+ and OC myself
Venice 12 HsF
DFI DAGF overclocking motherboard
2GB (2 x 1GB) OCZ Gold Ram
2 x 250GB Seagate (back when they were very reliable) 7200.8 SATA set in RAID 0 for performance
M-Audio 7.1 Revolution Sound Card
X800 GTO unlocked X800XT (pipelines and clock speed) modded with an Arctic Cooler
650 watt ThermalTake
Arctic Silver
I remember calculating multiple times, cost me about $700 in 2005/2006.

Hunting and searching for parts, trying to get the best deal for my budget was very fun too.

But the most memorable thing was going from a hand-me-down 17" (maybe 15") HP CRT to the DELL 2005FPW S-IPS. OMG it was amazing. I'm still using it right now. It's lasting me 5+ years and counting. Best $450 I ever spent.

Edit- LOL searched my Gmail account and saw that I ordered it on 5/14/2005 for $446.38 after tax and CA recycling fee. So that's 6+ years and counting.

 

[OptimumSlinky]

Going from a 233MHz Celeron with 128MB RAM to a 1GHz Pentium III with 512MB RAM and a GeForce2 Ultra 64MB = GEEKGASM.

Going from composite to component video cables for my original Xbox.

Looking forward to the SSD jump.

 

[DirkGently1]

Hdd->ssd

 

[QuantumPion]

EGA->VGA. :biggrin:

 

[Slammy1]

I remember going from dual floppies to a 10MB HDD. It was on a friend's system, but still shocking. We thought you could never fill it up (do you know how many text documents that is)?

HDD->SSD wasn't that impressive, I was running Raid 0 raptors. Going from P4 3.0C to my current SB 2500 is impressive for the multimedia, but the slight bump from my generic PII to an Asus P3B-F was a wowzer in retrospect.

 

[lupi]

EGA->VGA. :biggrin:

my third computer was a partial upgrade to my second. I remember telling the guy to make sure the video card he put in it had at least XXK so it could do full VESA.