What were the specs of the first computer you ever built yourself?

[CurseTheSky]

Inspired by another thread; what were the specs of the first computer you pieced together? Not something that you bought mostly intact and just added a video card or memory to, I'm talking about something ordered completely in pieces and built from the ground up.

Mine:
AMD Athlon X2 4200+ (overclocked to 2.7GHz )
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium (socket 939)
2x 512MB Corsair XMS DDR-400
EVGA Geforce 6800 GT (PCI-E )
Creative Audigy 2 ZS
Western Digital 200GB 7200RPM
Aspire (now Apevia) X-Navigator
Included 500W PSU ()

My only regrets were getting the 6800 GT instead of waiting another month and getting a 7800 GT for only $50-100 more, and getting that stupid case with PSU (the aluminum on the inside was nice, but it was plasticy on the outside and had a million 80mm fans, no 120mms).

It was a huge investment, so I was scared to death when I built it, but did fairly well. I ended up going through a 2 week period where I couldn't get it to POST (no beep codes either), and ended up talking to ASUS tech support multiple times, since there were numerous people around the 'net with the same motherboard and the same problem. They sent me a new BIOS chip, walked through several troubleshooting sessions with me, etc. Finally one day I popped in a different stick of DDR-400 just to test, and lo and behold it started right up. Apparently the higher voltage XMS memory wouldn't work with the stock BIOS settings, so I had to set the voltage manually with the cheaper RAM, and then shut down and plug the good stuff in.

 

[HeXen]

elephant memory required? Been so long i'd have no clue what the specs were nor would i really give a crap.

 

[dguy6789]

I swapped parts and such on systems I owned before this but this is the first one I built all at once from scratch:

AMD Athlon XP 2000+
Asus A7N8X E-Deluxe
512MB PC2100 DDR
60GB Western Digital
CD Burner
Radeon 9000 Pro 128MB
Sparkle 350W Powersupply
Thermaltake Xazer II A6000A
Windows XP Pro

 

[Hyperlite]

AMD Athlon XP-M Barton
SLK-900A with 92mm Vantec Tornado
2GB...DDR400? 667? i don't remember
XFX 6800nu softmodded/OCed/flashed with an Arctic Cooling big-ass dual slot cooler
2x80GB WD Caviar in RAID0
Fortron/Sparkle 530w PSU.

The 6800 and both hard drives are still in use in various systems scattered about the country. The FSP PSU was retired over christmas. the XP-M is on my keychain.

 

[Ksyder]

I don't remember exactly but it was something like

AMD k62-500
64 mb pc100 sdram eventually moving up to 512 mb
30 gb Maxtor 7200 rpm hdd
FIC motherboard, don't remember what chipset probably VIA
SIS graphics card, no idea what gpu but the card was like 30 bucks on ebay
Plextor Plexwriter 24x cd writer
Mag 19" crt, Logitech wireless kb/mouse
E-MU pro 4 in / 4 out sound card (was into dj'ing and recording at the time)
"borrowed" a copy of Windows 98SE
Case and power supply from a broken computer I got from my dad

The back story of this setup was that I needed a computer at the time and my dad gave me that broken one. I decided to open it up and take a look and was shocked at the wires and all of the stuff inside. Despite my fear, I managed to strip out all of the parts out of the computer until I had an empty case.

I took the empty case to a well-known local shop and asked the guy what can I do to fix this thing? He looked at it and was shocked to see that I had an AT case but said he could fix me up with some parts. He excitedly moved through the aisles of the computer store, calling out the parts he would need to make the computer work. I walked out of there with a box full of parts and my wallet $220 lighter. I had no idea what to do with this box of stuff. I immediately called anyone I knew who knew about computers and found someone who helped me put it together but it still didn't work.

As it turns out the Quantum Fireball 2gb drive the guy sold me didn't work so I had to go to Best Buy and buy that 30 gb Maxtor and boy did that system fly after the ram upgrade. That computer lasted me for about a year or 2, and got me started with computers in terms of building them. Luckily I ran into to some friends that were able to teach me until I became relatively self-sufficient.

The next stop after that computer was an Athlon XP with ddr ram + XP, which was a great improvement over the previous system.

 

[spinejam]

from what i recall:

FIC VA-503+ mb
amd k6-2 300mhz
32mb pc100 sdram
enlight case
30gb maxtor hd
mitsumi 3.5 floppy drive
generic cd-rom drive
ati rage II videocard

i do remember i couldn't afford those voodoo cards!

 

[Ksyder]

the XP-M is on my keychain.

that's pretty hardcore, man

 

[severus]

Still running
Athlon XP 2200+
PNY GeForce 4 Ti4200 (Replaced with a 9800PRO)
Asus A7V8X-X (Replaced with a NF7-S)
512 PC2700 DDR (added another 512 stick)
80gb Seagate (added 60gb WD)
4X dvd burner
Raidmax case
380W antec

 

[VirtualLarry]

For some of us old people, this is going to be hard to remember.
The first computer that I "worked on" was a Radio Shack/Tandy Color Computer 2. I swapped the keyboard, they sold a bunch of keyboards with additional keys.

My first PC was a green monochrome XT clone, with a 8087. Made floating-point fly.
I think that the first one that I built myself was a 386DX-40, made by AMD. When I got that one, I was disappointed that my BASIC programs ran slower than the XT, because I had used floating-point code in my programs. But things like DOS games were faster, especially with a SpeedStar 24X ISA video card by Diamond. Even though it was ISA, it was still faster than some other VLB generic Trident chipset cards, at least for Win 3.1x, because it offered GDI acceleration.

My first hardcore gaming card was a 2MB VLB ATI Mach64 Pro card, with VRAM and not DRAM. It cost me $200-300, used, which was half or less than what they retailed for ($600+). It turned out to be one of the first and only hardware-accelerated 2D cards that worked with MS's "Games SDK" (aka DirectX 1.0). Ah, Fox and Bear demo at 60FPS!

I owned a 486 board with VLB, and then a 486 board with PCI, with an AMD 5x86-133, and then later on a Pentium MMX 166, OCed to 200 or 233.

Edit: Whoohoo. Pictures of the Mach64 Graphics Pro Turbo card. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Mach

 

[StarTech]

Circa 1976, as a hobby, I built from parts an 8080 based system with an incredible 2 KB of static memory built out of 16 1Kb chips. All hand wire-wrapped. The motherboard (bread board) had the 8080 CPU with half a dozen supporting chips and the 16 memory chips. It had no stinking bridges! It connected via a ribbon cable to a controller board with over one hundred TTL ICs and a set of 16 LEDs and toggle switches to take over the busses and load/display memory locations. I designed it all with the Intel and TI TTL manuals on hand. This was a little after the ALTAIR times.

I'll say this machine could really count ! I think I still have the motherboard somewhere.

A little later I built one based on an 8085 kit, but it was not as fun, although I did have fun hooking it up to a used DEC LA35 (?) I got for a few hundred.

You could say that I have been around for a while...

 

[Bl0cks]

This was back in 2004. I was 14.

Intel Celeron 2.4ghz Socket 478
Asus motherboard
256mb DDR333
Some generic case from Fry's with a window.
80gb WD hard drive
ATI Radeon 9200

 

[Rubycon]

CP/M, S100 bus, 4,77MHz Z80, 8" floppy drives, P31 green phosphor CRT w/80 characters. A whopping 64KB RAM! That was about 1978 IIRC.

Way too much point to point wiring in that one too.

In the 80s I had a Heatkit H8 and HERO robot. Those were lots of fun.

In 1983 I acquired a Sanyo MBC550 microcomputer. It had an NEC V20 CPU and 256KB RAM. A good compiler and cheap compared to IBM PC!

 

[SpeedEng66]

486 dx2 66
4mb ram?
some isa trident pos
100mb hd?
super vga monitor
56k modem
took me like a year to save up
man I felt like a king when i went to j&r to buy all those parts lol (and thinking this is the best parts ever and it soo fast I would never need to buy another computer ever)
lol

ahhh sigh.. to be 15 or 14 again (danm memory)

 

[PottedMeat]

5x86 133MHz
Shuttle Motherboard
SB16
8MB RAM
460MB Harddrive
...don't remember the video card
generic cdrom

lost in goddamn moving truck.
i think the next family loaded in the truck got my computer ( and my warcraft II cd! ).
we found a expensive framed doctorate degree in our stuff.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

The first computer I disassembled was a Compaq Pentium Series.
Age 10.
Pentium 90mhz
16MB ram
1MB video
1GB Quantum Fireball
No Sound
No CD
Floppy Only

First computer I took from broken to working. I found it in the dumpster at my first apartment.
Age 16.
Pentium 4, 2.26ghz
512MB DDR
Geforce 2 32mb
Onboard everything else.
20GB HDD
DVD Player.

First drop in upgrades.
Age 18-19.
Athlon 3500+ > Athlon X2 4200+ (literally two 3500+'s on one chip)
1.5GB PC2100 > 4GB PC 3200
Geforce 5500 PCI > Radeon x1550 > Radeon x1650 > Geforce 8800GTS 320MB > Radeon 3850 512mb
Seagate 80GB IDE > Added Seagate 200GB SATA
Several IDE Burners

First true complete build.
Age 21.
Intel Q8200
4GB PC6400 Patriot
Radeon 4830 512mb
SB Audigy
1TB HDD
etc in sig.

 

[tommo123]

mine? a 700mhz athlon slotA i think it was called. the ones shaped like a weird cell phone. abit mobo and 512MB ram (running 98SE i believe).

one part that's damn clear is that a friend and I ordered 2 sets of everything. i couldnt be arsed getting out of bed and he built his. i got up just in time for him to power his on and watch the cpu go poof! burning smell, cloud of black smoke rising up. thankfully, he picked a duff part. well, better him than me i guess

built mine (took over an hour as i wasn't taking chances after what happened to my housemates) and all was fine - apart from running win 98.

cd rom, some funky scsi card based cd writer and i believe it might have been a matrox card. g400 possibly. either that or an all in wonder.

 

[Arsynic]

Athon XP 2800+ Barton
512 MB Kingston RAM
Soyo Dragon Ultra Motherboard
40 GB WD HDD
ATi Radeon 9800 SE
Antec case
Antec SmartPower (forgot wattage)

It's still running at my brother's apartment.

 

[classy]

Showing my age here. My first was a 286 in a computer course. And a 486 for home a lil while later. My first decent system was my next, a K6 300. I started with pcs back in 1992. Kinda funny that I didn't do IT work for a living until just 6 years ago.

 

[cbn]

the XP-M is on my keychain.

How did you do that? I wish I would have kept my Celeron 326 for that reason. (Seriously, I made $1 after I sold it on ebay due to high shipping costs to the buyer). I originally bought that celeron as my first CPU for my Gigabyte 965P-DS3 (which is the mainboard I use today)

 

[alanwest09872]

The one in my sig

 

[bobsmith1492]

486 DX 66
4MB RAM
212MB hard drive
4x CD drive
3" floppy
15" CRT

We got a bunch of old computers in high school and looted them to put together the best PC of that era we could. Soon after I build my first real PC...

1.2GHz Athlon
256MB DDR
TI4200? (I think?)
XP Pro
TT Volcano (7000 RPM jet engine... still have it)

 

[douglasb]

First computer I built completely from scratch was:

AMD K6-2 300 MHz CPU
Shuttle Socket 7 motherboard w/ onboard sound
128 MB SDRAM
3DFX Voodoo2 PCI video card
PCI 56K Fax/modem
ridiculously tiny IDE hard drive (<1 GB, I think...maybe 640 MB)
some cheap CD-ROM drive

 

[nyker96]

486 DX 66 and the rest I cannot remember.

 

[Udgnim]

Athlon X2 4400+
BIOSTAR TForce TF7025-M2 AM2
Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
BFG Tech BFGR7950256GTOCE GeForce 7950GT 256MB
HITACHI Deskstar 7K160 HDS721616PLA380 (0A32728) 160GB 7200 RPM
Tuniq Tower 120
Silverstone Olympia 650W
Cooler Master 534

didn't OC the system, so didn't really need the Tuniq Tower 120, but it's used in my current system with an E8500 @ 4.1 Ghz. also, didn't need a 650W PSU and my current system doesn't need a 650W PSU, but guess I can view it as room to grow.

 

[spittledip]

Abit KN8 Ultra
Athlon 3800+
2 gigs Corsair XMS
Masscool 460W (JG gave it a good review- still using it 4 years later)
some Seagate HDD cant remember
Radeon x800
Some crappy cheap case