Anyone else here ever Downgrade their system?

[majewski9]

I was the proud owner of an AMD TBird 1.33 ghz and ECS K7S5A ( Not so proud of ) for a long while. My buddy needed a computer badly so I sold him my stuff dirt cheap. I bought a Duron 650 for like 4 dollars and threw into another K7S5A replaced my DDR with PC 133. Since I dont do anywhere near as much powerful gaming or video encoding I havent noticed any kind of speed difference. I did notice that the Athlon was a bit more stable but I think this has something to do with this ram or mobo. Also I revived a K6 system gave it 128 megs Ram from its stock 32. I love these older less powerful systems! Duron 650 in like 90 percent of what I do seems just as fast as my Athlon!

Has anyone here ever wanted / needed to downgrade there system? I hope im not the only one that thinks this is cool to revive an oldie and watch it fly!

 

[boyRacer]

Yeah i like putting it together and stuff... but usually when i see the first sign that's its freakin obsolete no matter what i do to it... it's quite depressing. so i retire it to strictly internet duties.

 

[Insidious]

I usually get hit with people wanting my leftovers......

feels like parting with a buddy or something. Right up to the point I get back to the new stuff and play

 

[BD231]

I've done that countless times myself, I like my computer fast but a quiet and cool task computer is irreplaceable. I've started substituting bus speed in place of CPU MHZ for more power, new T-Breds can hit 1.6ghz at 1.4v(probably higher), add a 200mhz fsb to that and you've got yourself a computer that's good for quiet computing and gaming as well.

 

[BD2003]

Ive done it before. I've also put the brakes on my upgrading.

Seriously, there is barely any difference between 3ghz and 750mhz when it comes to web surfing and general usage. Games are the only huge difference, but PC gaming has been so boooooring lately, that I regret buying this 9500 Pro.

 

[Mitzi]

PC gaming has been so boooooring lately, that I regret buying this 9500 Pro.

So true, since buying Warcraft III last year the only other game I've played and enjoyed was Splinter Cell.

 

[zShowtimez]

How about Freelancer, Rainbow Six 3, C&C Generals?? Not to mention Doom 3, Half-Life 2, and Deus Ex: IW. (HL2 is set to relese September 30 2003)

 

[pukemon]

I guess I've downgrade for the sake of quieting my system. The noise was driving me crazy.

First thing was the 7000rpm Delta cpu fan had to go. I stopped overclocking my CPU too. Replaced with the Zalman flower with the low speed 92mm fan. The 5 Antec case fans had to go to.. replaced with PC Power& Cooling Silencer aux fans. The 2 Western Digital hard drives were replaced with 2 Seagate Barracuda ATA IV drives. (i use RAID-1) and the Geforce3's painfully annoying fan was replaced by my Geforce2MX's. Dusted that one off for some peace of mind.

The performance really isn't noticeably different. I don't do heavy gaming. And the hard drives are in RAID-1 so it's not like it's going any faster anyway. I'm much happier now.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Have an old packard-Hell PII350 because I built my nephew a new box to replace it, and I've been having a ball with it Added celery366@550 with slotket, DVD, 7000 64DDR w/TV out, 64mb pc100(192mb total now), 40gb D740X,and wireless LAN most of which was laying around waiting for a home, the rest came from the FS/T forum. It already had a ATA66 controller card, SBLive 5.1 Gamer, FDD, and 128mb PC100. I'm using it for a media server in my master bedroom so I"ll pick up a wireless KB&mouse and TV/capture card, and extra HDD to finish it off. Had to play with bios versions to get one that would work with the ATI and Celery@550 and consequently install XP pro with the F7 option to disable ACPI to get everything to work because the bios that worked with the CPU&vid card wasn't fully ACPI compliant, but now that it's done I'm impressed with how smooth this old thing runs XP. It can't game though worth a sh*t, no T&L and slow a$$ celey. Regardless of settings used for tests and overclock on the vid card it runs within a frame or 2 on 3Dmark2k1se I guess because of the software T&L with this old Celery? Anyways, I normally wouldn't waste my time on a dinosaur like this but it's been the most fun project in ages because the old systems take so much more to tweak and such. Not to mention it's the most quiet system in my house

 

[Krk3561]

Originally posted by: Mitzi

PC gaming has been so boooooring lately, that I regret buying this 9500 Pro.

So true, since buying Warcraft III last year the only other game I've played and enjoyed was Splinter Cell.

I'm addicted to Rainbow Six 3 right now. Its a great game. And what about Battlefield 1942 w/ or w/o Desert Combat mod. Theres tons of great newer PC games.

 

[dkozloski]

I had to go clear back to a DX33 486 to get a floppy drive alignment program to run. It was kind of fun remembering how to set up Win 3.11 and MS-DOS.

 

[Atlantean]

Nope, never have and never will. I play a lot of games though.

 

[0roo0roo]

the damned ecs m/b wouldn't take 2 256mb pc133. so i downgraded to 256mb for a while to wait for ddr prices to come down. that was unbearable!!

now running 1gb ddr

 

[Link19]

I would never ever downgrade my system. That does not mean I would never use an older computer though. I just wouldn't give up my newest and most powerful PC for an older one.

 

[sharkeeper]

I had to go clear back to a DX33 486 to get a floppy drive alignment program to run. It was kind of fun remembering how to set up Win 3.11 and MS-DOS.

That reminds me of a program I used to use called Check It. It was DOS based (3.3 in that day) and had a cpu benchmark program. It detected my Athlon MP 2400+ as a 8790 MHz i486DX with a non intel FPU!

Last time I saw Win 3.1 in action was in 2000. Seriously! I loaded Dos 6.22 and installed Windows 3.1 on a K7 1000 MHz SlotA system. Typing "win" from the c:\windows prompt got me to the file manager in about two and a half seconds, similar to opening an office app!

-DAK-