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PaperclipPerfector
1d ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Respect! Although I'm ancient enough to have had Trident-based SVGA cards, my first Nvidia based board sported a TNT. IIRC, the 128 came and went pretty fast so by the time I was ready to move on from my 4 MB ATi card, it made more sense to me at the time to grab a single TNT rather than a Voodoo 2 (I judged 2 Voodoos to be too much of a splurge) plus recycling the current card or getting a Matrox or something. Even though by today's standards a lot of that tech was really just getting off the ground at that point, it's striking to me how rich the home computing ecosystem was and how fast things were changing compared to the relatively static niche market that it is today.
It's funny, thinking about all the video cards I've owned. The family computer had some VLB SVGA card. My first computer had a Riva 128. I upgraded to a TNT, then a Pentium II system with a Geforce 2 GTS my dad smuggled home from work when his workstation got a Quadro. After that system died I ended up with an Athlon XP system and a Geforce 4 4800. Then I did some internships and saved up for a hotrod PC with an Athlon 64 and a Geforce 6800 GT. After college I got a Core 2 Duo system with a BFG Geforce 8800 GT which was hot shit. Spent more time console gaming, but I think that got upgraded to a Geforce 270, then a 570, then a 970. At some point the motherboard croaked and some random Core i5 got thrown in there, maybe 5th or 6th gen. Whatever was current at the time. Then I had a kid and build a new PC, Ryzen 3700X with an RTX 2070S. Eventually upgraded it to a 5800X3D and an RTX 4070S. Now I'm throwing $50 a month into a saving account so that 4 years from now I might have enough stashed away to build a new PC.
It's weird thinking about how PCs have demarcated the phases of my life, and how much they've meant to me.
Ahh, memory lane! While I can't remember every single component at this point I do remember just about every single build, starting with buying my roomie's old 486DX2/66, which by that time was slow enough that I quickly upgraded to a DX4/120 and thence to a 5x86/133 that I had been given. That was more than enough for me to run Windows 95 and play Civ 2 until my eyes bled and Duke Nukem 3D when it came out. My first Pentium build came after that, which at some point got upgraded to a Pentium MMX, and which at some point also housed the ATi card which I'm now not so sure was the 4 meg model, but which ran Quake 2 acceptably well. But the next build I remember really well because I started from the ground up and overclocked a Celeron 300A to 450 mhz, threw in the TNT and was gaming to my heart's content and preferring UT over Q3. At some point I tried to repeat my overclocking success with a Celeron 366 but couldn't quite get the 550 overclock to stick reliably, but I know I did get a Pentium 3 733 to 1 Ghz without even needing to juice the voltage, just a simple change in the base clock speed. On the graphics side, meanwhile, I had upgraded every single generation for a while and stayed in the Nvidia camp, going from TNT to TNT2 and thence to the Geforce and on to the Geforce 2. Somewhere along the line, I switched to an Athlon XP, which I ran until the corner of the flip chip sheared right off, then an Athlon 64, and then a 64X2, while GTA 3 blew me away and UT 2004, though still floaty, was finally good enough. On one of these I actually switched over to an ATi card on the graphics side as they actually held the performance crown for a bit at the time and Oblivion looked pretty indeed on that silicon. After that, it was all Intel and Nvidia again, from a Core 2 duo and and the new Borderlands sensation (which was nice after the gorgeous but otherwise decidedly mixed bag that was UT3) to an i5-2600 which I remember pairing with a Geforce 660. After that, an SSD was the next big performance boost but processor improvements at that point were clearly on the wane and I didn't upgrade again until Skylake, going with a i7-6700k and a Geforce 970. At some point I upgraded the card to a 1080ti and then the processor to an i9-9900kf. Ironically, I started playing 7 Days To Die on the Skylake system and was still going strong through all of its iterations on the Coffee Lake system and the last upgrade I had been contemplating was to either a 3080 or a 3090 (whichever I could get my hands on) when
hard modemidlife came for me en flagrante delicto. Suddenly, building and gaming plummeted in importance and the PC that I write this on is one of those wee little Beelink SER5 units sporting a Ryzen 5k mobile processor and ironically runs all of the old games that I love so much without batting an eye. Meanwhile, my poor forlorn former gaming rig still collects dust in the basement waiting for me to log back in to Steam and return but IDK if that's ever realistically gonna happen, even though that old part of me likes to daydream about building out a high-end Zen based system with a matching Nvidia card and monster power supply to boot. Sadly, though, I don't think there'd be anything to play that would be worth the money and in truth I often have more fun actually making old games run in Wine or Dosbox than I do playing half of them. Even so, that's a good quarter of a century that I spent building and gaming. Wow.More options
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