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

[taltamir]

I will be darned if I remembered... I built so many over the years...

 

[ScorcherDarkly]

AMD 3800+ X2
Biostar T939 Mobo
2x1 GB Corsair XMS memory
GeForce 6800 Ultra
WD 120 GB HDD
Thermaltake 430W PSU
Antec case, don't have a clue what model though

Researching building that first computer was when I found this website. I was one of the newbs that makes an account for 10-15 posts asking for component recommendations, then disappeared. I tried to find that old account when I came back to the forums to research the rig I just built (see sig), but couldn't, so I had to make a new one. This time I decided to stick around =).

 

[RussianSensation]

Athlon XP1600+ Palomino (<-- poor overclocker)
Thermaltake Volcano 6cu (loud and weak)
Asus A7V266-E (<-- went with a very overpriced board on my first build without knowing much)
256MB PC2100 DDR1
Radeon 8500 64MB (<--initial driver support left much to be desired)
Aspire 350W power supply (<--noob move)
80GB Western Digital BB 2mb cache series HDD (<-- slow and loud!)
Viewsonic P 95F+ 19 inch CRT (<-- resolutions above 1280x1024 uncomfortable for text)
Logitech Optimal Mouse (the first one hehe)

Looking back, my choices for some of these components reflected my lack of experience. You live you learn!

 

[bigboxes]

Athlon XP1600+ Palomino (<-- poor overclocker)
Thermaltake Volcano 6cu (loud and weak)
Logitech Optimal Mouse (the first one hehe)

Looking back, my choices for some of these components reflected my lack of experience. You live you learn!

Well, I got a 33% o/c on that very cpu. (1.4Ghz --> 1.8Ghz)
I had the Volcano 7+ (larger fan, but tiny copper fins hummed)
I still use that mouse. Except for constantly replacing the batteries I love it!

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I think mine was the i850 chipset that ran the P4 423 socket 1.3

 

[soccerballtux]

very first computer was a barebones I purchased on ebay. I was afraid of putting it all together myself. I knew how to handle RAM, harddrives, CD-RW drives, etc, but putting the cpu into the mobo, mounting the mobo to the case, and heatsink onto the CPU. It was an Athlon XP 1800+

My mom was afraid of letting me use her credit card "on line" so I had to buy with a money order. The company I purchased from went out of business. Right as I bought the computer. I didn't figure this out till too late. Needless to say they took the money order. This was when I was 14 and was getting paid $5.15 an hour. I lost $200 on that. My allowance was $25/month so, it's not like I came by money easily.

I tried again later that summer, this time more courageous having read about how to mount everything just right. Looking back it's silly, but the first time I was terrified I would break something worth $100. Or, buy a motherboard that wouldn't mount in a case.
I had a Shuttle AN35-N motherboard with an Athlon XP Barton 2500+ and 512MB of DDR-333 RAM. I later upgraded to 400Mhz RAM and overclocked to 3200+ speeds but it really wasn't fast enough for WoW.

Then I upgraded to a $40 combo (best $40 I ever spent) from Fry's, that was so much fun. Sempron 3100+ and s754 motherboard. Overclocked that on my limited Biostar motherboard to 2.3Ghz. That was blazing fast compared to my AthlonXP. I still wouldn't mind running on that computer it was so fast-- it downclocked to 1024Mhz (4x256) but because the bus speed was so high it felt just as fast as if it was running at 2.3Ghz. I multitasked like crazy on that sucker, 10 huge PDFs open at once, speedfan, dual monitors, Pidgin, listening to music, webbrowsing, burning a DVD-RW, torrenting, downloading in firefox, writing homework paper + excel homework, Matlab, and surfing the internet all at once. CPU never went above 50&#37; when it was running at 1024Mhz-- that was an amazing computer. Not that all those things are very compute intensive, but it just goes to show you really don't need a dual core if you're running XP and have enough RAM.

My next upgrade was uneeded but wanted, e2180 + Abit IP35-E. Overclocked the e2180 to 3.4Ghz. 4->8GB of ram.

Then I ended up at my current rig (also an uneeded upgrade, but wanted to for fun).

 

[hans007]

first one i did from scratch when i was 16...

was an abit px-5 board, a k6-200 engineering sample my dad got from work, with 64mb of pc66 sdram from frys that i had to save some pennies for.

had an ATI rage ii+ PCI board i had gotten for free (from dad again from trade show samples) a monster 3d II from the same trade show, and a 1.2 GB drive from my old compaq.

AT generic case and a 4x cdrom rounded it out and some bestdata 33.6 modem.

 

[soccerballtux]

I was a radar maintenance tech on Guam in 1950 -- just before the Korean war started -- and my CO was a Harvard graduate who received the Alumni news letter. In one of them was a paragraph or two about a machine that had been built -- or perhaps only designed at that point -- by two undergraduates, Kalin and Burkhart, which could evaluate the truth table for logical expressions. The example mentioned was checking the terms of an insurance policy for logical consistency. He showed it to me and asked if I knew what they were talking about. I didn't, but asked him to let me take it back to the barracks that evening. By morning I had designed relay circuits that could realize and, or, if then, if and only if, negation, exclusive or etc. The most it required were two DPDT relays for the most complex functions and a single SPDT for negation. He asked if I could build such a machine and I said yes -- given enough relays. Aircraft used 28v relays so he got on the teletype and requisitioned from every supply site from Honolulu to Tokyo their stock of 28v DPDT relays. They must have thought that every aircraft at Anderson AFB had been struck by lightening to kill so many relays. Using two ganged telephone rotary stepping switches I wired up a 10 variable input -- i.e. it had ten output wires that would sequentially step through the 1024 states for 10 logical variables. Using the 28v aircraft relays I constructed modules for a large number of the functions that could be wired using pin jacks and pins from the front of the console. You set in the logical expression whose truth table you desired to map, turned on the stepping unit at state 0 --- 0 and let it step it's way through the 1024 states. When a state was reached for which the logical expression was true, a current flowed through the circuit closing a relay and stopped the stepping switches. You could then copy down the values for the ten logical variables from the state of ten lamps on the front. Pushing a button then caused the stepping switches to resume. At the end, you had the truth table for the original logical expression. It was the most satisfying computer I have ever built -- with all those relays clicking in and out and lights flashing as states changed. We named him George -- and when I returned from the South Pacific in 1953 managed to ship him home as hold baggage and talk my way through the port inspection. The secret was that George didn't look like anything they had ever seen and they were mostly looking for people trying to steal governenment property. He entertained a whole generation of student engineers just as digital computers were coming on the scene.

Awesome read, thanks for typing that up.

 

[yottabit]

Athlon Thunderbird 1.4Ghz on some cheapie motherboard, with 256 MB DDR 266 and a Geforce3 Ti200 that I overclocked the crap out of.

First one I pieced together was a Pentium 90 with I think 16 MB of ram and several 400 MB hard drives. I would go with my dad to the local dump where they had a "swap shop" that occasionally had computers and I eventually collected enough parts to build it!

 

[SteelyKen]

AMD K6-2 400 Mhz
Epox Super 7 board (Can't remember the exact model but it was an Anandtech recommended board)
64 Mb ram
Pioneer slot drive dvd/cd rom
Voodoo Banshee
Enlight case and power supply
Windows 98 OEM

 

[RussianSensation]

Well, I got a 33% o/c on that very cpu. (1.4Ghz --> 1.8Ghz)
I had the Volcano 7+ (larger fan, but tiny copper fins hummed)
I still use that mouse. Except for constantly replacing the batteries I love it!

Ya, I could only get ~ 1.63ghz on that one. The system I was using before that was my dad's P2 233mhz MMX+, with 32mb of ram and 1mb graphics card. So having an XP1600+, even at stock speeds, seemed great

 

[CurseTheSky]

I was a radar maintenance tech on Guam in 1950 -- just before the Korean war started -- and my CO was a Harvard graduate who received the Alumni news letter. In one of them was a paragraph or two about a machine that had been built -- or perhaps only designed at that point -- by two undergraduates, Kalin and Burkhart, which could evaluate the truth table for logical expressions. The example mentioned was checking the terms of an insurance policy for logical consistency. He showed it to me and asked if I knew what they were talking about. I didn't, but asked him to let me take it back to the barracks that evening. By morning I had designed relay circuits that could realize and, or, if then, if and only if, negation, exclusive or etc. The most it required were two DPDT relays for the most complex functions and a single SPDT for negation. He asked if I could build such a machine and I said yes -- given enough relays. Aircraft used 28v relays so he got on the teletype and requisitioned from every supply site from Honolulu to Tokyo their stock of 28v DPDT relays. They must have thought that every aircraft at Anderson AFB had been struck by lightening to kill so many relays. Using two ganged telephone rotary stepping switches I wired up a 10 variable input -- i.e. it had ten output wires that would sequentially step through the 1024 states for 10 logical variables. Using the 28v aircraft relays I constructed modules for a large number of the functions that could be wired using pin jacks and pins from the front of the console. You set in the logical expression whose truth table you desired to map, turned on the stepping unit at state 0 --- 0 and let it step it's way through the 1024 states. When a state was reached for which the logical expression was true, a current flowed through the circuit closing a relay and stopped the stepping switches. You could then copy down the values for the ten logical variables from the state of ten lamps on the front. Pushing a button then caused the stepping switches to resume. At the end, you had the truth table for the original logical expression. It was the most satisfying computer I have ever built -- with all those relays clicking in and out and lights flashing as states changed. We named him George -- and when I returned from the South Pacific in 1953 managed to ship him home as hold baggage and talk my way through the port inspection. The secret was that George didn't look like anything they had ever seen and they were mostly looking for people trying to steal governenment property. He entertained a whole generation of student engineers just as digital computers were coming on the scene.

Awesome story. You, sir, win at this thread.

 

[Spikesoldier]

p4 1.8A @ 2.4B w/BSEL & Vcore pinmods
abit BD7m
(2) 256MB PC2700 samsung original
ATi Radeon AIW 8500DV 64MB
80gb ibm deathstar
pioneer slot load dvd rom
zip100
3.5" floppy disk drive
soundblaster live 5.1
Dell 1701FP
Logitech Elite Keyboard
Logitech MX500
Logitech Z-560
win2k

was rather smoking in 2002, i recall playing max payne on it on the dell LCD @ 1280x1024

 

[Phynaz]

Zilog Z-80
256 Bytes RAM
8 Segment LED Readout

 

[Munky]

Athlon XP 1800 palomino..... (+ a weak 200mhz OC on stock cooler)
Asus A7V....................... (supported 166mhz ram, but only a 133mhz fsb)
OCSystem 512 mb ram........ (failed in <1 year, but replaced under warranty)
Radeon 9000pro graphics..... (pretty good budget card; didn't fall for the gf4 MX rebadge)
Maxtor 80gig hard drive......... (failed after a year, the replacement failed shortly after. I swore off Maxtor forever)
Lite-On 16x dvd rom..................(still working in my current system, lol)

 

[Knowname]

Hmm...

Thinking back to 1998 or so....

I think it was an
IDT Winchip C7 266mhz (wouldn't oc for crap)
some cheapo PC-Chips Super7 mobo (SiS SuperTX chip!)
Trident AGP video card (THREE DEEEEEEE!!!!!)
Diamond Supra 33.6k HSP modem (two cups on a shoe string, winmodems SUCKED, I believ it's DSLVD too... whatever the hell that means... data signal line voice dual... I think I got the D's mixed up lol... what I got the memory of a hippopotamus) for the ISA bus
Yamaha YMH720 sound card (also ISA)
probly some 140mhz AT psu (they didn't even sell these sepperately back then) that came with the crappy inwin-like case... no it was probly crappier than inwin ^_^

all for about 750 in 1998 was BIG news for me! I waz poor poorer than mother theresa... poorer than I am now!!

Yeah I was REALLY into alternative sources back then (lol now... I still have never owned an SB Live/ Audigy/ X-Fi)

 

[Knowname]

I still use that mouse. Except for constantly replacing the batteries I love it!

The blue potato masher ~.~ first semi viable wireless mouse IMO

 

[Knowname]

P2 233mhz MMX+

MMX+ is a Cyrix Monicer, P2 is Intel, it was probly a 6x86 233 MMX+ or a P2 233 SSE.

 

[The-Noid]

First I built was a dual celery 300 @ 450 mhz. Those were awesome cpu's way back in the day.

 

[MrK6]

Off the top of my head, A64 3000+ Clawhammer 2.0GHz overclocked to 2.4GHz (2.5+ on suicide runs), 512MB DDR400 (forget the speed exactly, upgraded to 1GB soon after), EPoX mobo, 160GB Maxtor HDD, Antec 350W basic PSU (upgraded to 470W Enermax soon after), ATI 9800 Pro 128MB, all in an Antec 3700AMB case. Up until then I had always worked on or modified existing systems (e.g. my family had a Dell 8200 series desktop with a 1.9GHz P4 Williamette, which I installed a Ti4200 and extra RAM in).

 

[TheHolyLancer]

a64 3200 venice s939 with SI-120 and a 120mm 100CFM delta screamer (that really never needed to spin up much at all lol, go smart fans and low heat vennies)
DFI lanparty nforce4-UT
1 gb (2x 512) sticks of OCZ High voltage low latency ram gold i think
evga 6800 GT (boy did it fly, and burn hot lol) added a artic cooling NV silencer 5 or something, one of those things that exhausted the head out the back.
crappy 25 dollar case (oh yeahhhhhh) from local shop with 120mm exhaust and 80mm sides
enermax noisetaker 475w (noisemaker more like with TWO 80mms )

 

[Kblast]

K6-2 500mhz @ 550mhz via jumper, Generic Socket 7 cooler.
Gigabyte Ali Aladdin board (maybe GA-5AX)
PC100-133 256mb sdram (forgotten which)
Voodoo 3 Graphics card
Sound blaster either AWE64 ISA or LIVE! PCI
HP 2x-4x CD Burner (later upgrade)
20gb HDD
Generic PSU
Generic Case

Still in service today and now im having flashbacks to my next build, including a PowerVR KYRO II!

 

[bigboxes]

MMX+ is a Cyrix Monicer, P2 is Intel, it was probly a 6x86 233 MMX+ or a P2 233 SSE.

My first pc was a Compaq w/Intel Pentium 200 MMX. The MMX was (supposedly for multi-media). Maybe Cyrix licensed it out. Don't know. I was given the machine and used it until I built my own (see my post above). It was night and day.

 

[BathroomFeeling]

AMD AthlonXP 1700+ Palomino (replaced with faster and cooler AthlonXP 1800+ Thoroughbred)
256MB PC2100 DDR Ram (upgraded to 1.5GB)
GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB (failed and died, replaced with ATI 9800PRO 128MB)
Asus A7V266-E Mobo (failed and died, replaced with some expensive Asus mobo)
El Cheapo 300W PSU (upgraded to Enermax 400W)

And... yea. I still use that today whilst twiddling my thumbs and drooling at all those fancy systems in those sigs. People ask me to help with sparkling new builds, I agree and I lick components like 5850s, i7s, etc.. behind their backs. No Phenoms though, they taste bad.

 

[Lazlo Panaflex]

My 1st PC was a Commodore 64

Hmm...1st PC build was a PII 350@392, Abit BH6, 128MB SDRAM, ATi Rage Pro (?) Enlight case, Win95. I was hooked. Caught the upgrade bug, clocked it back to stock & sold the system to a co-worker a short time later.

First "real" build was a Coppermine Celery 566@850, Tt Golden Orb on an Abit BM6 w/ 384MB SDRAM, a SB Live! PCI, & a TNT32 Ultra running Win98SE. Played all the 1st person shooters quite nicely at the time (Unreal 1, HL 1, AvP 1, Quake 2, etc). That PC lasted quite a while (~3 years) until I upgraded to a Athlon XP 2500+ (o/c to 3200+) & WinXP.

I also had one of the original Diamond Voodoo 3D 4MB PCI cards with the passthrough cable connected to a POS on-board Cirrus logic video in a pre-built HP (with a Pentium overdrive 166 Mhz) to play GL Quake! Wish I hadn't sold that card.