Which hardware marked you most?

[Loop2kil]

ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro. I loved that thing. Lasted me forever, too.

Exactly what I was gonna say, except just the regulard 9700 pro...I remember it being the best card out for the longest duration of any card. It was the first card that I could play Q3 with AA turned on at decent resolutions.

 

[rudder]

The Pentium-60. Blew the 486 out of the water.

 

[Regk]

Voodoo 2 in SLI, I was a king!

 

[dguy6789]

Geforce 2 MX400 64MB. Was the first stand alone graphics card I ever put in my PC. Prior to that, I played games mainly on consoles and my PC games ran slow. My PC could run Quake 3 Arena at 320x240 lowest details and get sub 30fps average with the integrated graphics. With the Geforce 2 in place, it could run 1280x960 with all of the details cranked and perform better than the integrated did at 320. It was amazing.

 

[KeithP]

My first hard dive, an external 20MB SCSI drive (SuperMac DataFrame 20) that I used with a MacPlus. Before that I had it I used nothing but 3.5" floppy disks. $750+tax and it was worth every penny.

Found a picture (not mine) http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2262/2538029246_fd9a7fdd46.jpg
-KeithP

 

[Imp]

Voodoo 2 just when 3D accelerators were getting big. I eventually got a Voodoo 3, but 3DFX was almost dead by then.

 

[Dark4ng3l]

My Voodoo 3 3000. That thing was so great when running games that had Glide API support. It might not have gotten as high FPS averages as my Radeon 64 that replaced it in Unreal engine games and Diablo 2 but it always felt "smoother" to me when playing those games and since the only thing I would play was CS, UT, D2 and some other unreal engine games nothing else ever felt the same again...

It was also fun when you would work at overclocking your card and you would see direct impact. Like making a particular game smooth enough to play at a higher resolution or being able to turn the graphics up one notch without it slowing down too much. These days I don't care if my video card averages at 100 FPS or 130 FPS.

 

[Texun]

Adding a sound card to my deaf-mute 286. It surpassed my expectations by miles when I first heard it play a clip from the MS Encarta CD.

 

[gayannr]

Well! Shifting from a shitty Pentium 166MHz to an AMD Duron 950MHz, oh boy everything went to smooth as silky! XD

P.S. and adding multimedia capabilities to my dumb 486DX, that was handled with settling with the Pentium 166MHz, some ESS sound card, a Creative 2400 CD-Rom and Creative - Cambridge Sound Works ,PC works 2.1 Sub woofer

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Back in early 2000, I bought a 36g Ultra 320 SCSI drive

 

[WT]

Going from a 386 to a 486 setup which had a CD drive. This was at the time that many games were filled with chintzy video that played in a window and that was terribly pixelated, forced down our throats as 'interactive'.

Some games were OK .. Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father, Kings Quest, but others were just garbage. Flight sims were 'the' games at the time, with no fewer than 5 on the market at once it seemed.

 

[adairusmc]

My first 3d accellerator.

I was working multiple fronts with it. I was looking at buying a voodoo2 from a couple of other people that needed the money when I was in High School, but I also asked for one for my birthday.

I ended up getting a TNT2 for my birthday, and I bought a pair of voodoo2 cards at around the same time, so I had a pretty sweet first 3d card setup with that combo.

 

[ShawnD1]

Geforce 2 MX400 64MB. Was the first stand alone graphics card I ever put in my PC. Prior to that, I played games mainly on consoles and my PC games ran slow. My PC could run Quake 3 Arena at 320x240 lowest details and get sub 30fps average with the integrated graphics. With the Geforce 2 in place, it could run 1280x960 with all of the details cranked and perform better than the integrated did at 320. It was amazing.

I experienced this when I upgrade from integrated ATI Rage (4mb) to ATI Radeon 7200 (32mb). Resolution in Team Fortress changed from 320x240 to 800x600 and rockets had trails behind them because of "OpenGL". Absolutely amazing.

 

[dac7nco]

Moving from a Commodore 64 to an Amiga 2000HD, 25MHz 68030, with discrete graphics and a high-resolution monitor (1990).

Graduating from editing video on C2Q 6600 to a Tylersburg (2009).

Or my first computer, a 1977 Commodore PET w/4K RAM (1980).

 

[grrl]

I don't game and don't pursue the bleeding edge, but I suppose the most exciting change was going from a Tandy SX1000 desktop with green screen to an IBM Thinkpad 350C with 9" color screen.

 

[yottabit]

Usb !!!

And if I had to pick a feature of a computer it would be Plug 'n Play... no more IRQ resource conflicts (well, at least most of the time..)

 

[Piano Man]

The original Voodoo. I was blown away. Utterly transformed 3d gaming for me.

Absolutely Agree. Such a huge leap in gaming. Tacking this onto my ATI Mach 32 2MB was like , well, I don't know, but it was incredible.

 

[WildW]

I've been struggling to decide - eventually I think the biggest wow-moment I've ever been given by my PC was by software. The day I changed from running Windows 98 to Windows 2000.

Under 98SE my computer would grind to a halt after an hour of multitasking (as I recall between Dreamweaver, Paint Shop Pro and Internet Explorer), as the remaining system resources dwindled slowly down towards a bluescreen.

Installed Windows 2000. . . suddenly I had uptimes of over a month, and programs didn't randomly crash any more. At the time it was nothing short of incredible.

 

[edro]

Voodoo3 3000 AGP

It was my first AGP card and what made 3d gaming really fun and exhilarating.

 

[acheron]

When I went from an 8088 to a 286.

this, except I jumped from an 8088 all the way to a 386. almost all my strong memories of growing up a computer geek relate to that 386.

 

[pukemon]

I'd probably have to go wit the Voodoo3 2000, because at the time, the games I actually played used and supported GLide.

 

[lumbus]

Amiga 500 -> 486 DX 33 MHz

 

[Modelworks]

cdrom - when all you had before was floppy disk and you loaded up software for the first time using a cd it was unforgettable. The first video I ever saw on a pc was the video included with windows 95, the wheezer music video.


Voodoo 1, paid $300+ for the card and it came with tomb raider.

 

[Modelworks]

Usb !!!

And if I had to pick a feature of a computer it would be Plug 'n Play... no more IRQ resource conflicts (well, at least most of the time..)

Come on, you know you miss moving jumpers, plugging in cards and having a conflict then pulling the card back out, changing them again.

 

[coolVariable]

AMD K6-3 450MHz running at 600MHz.
Boy - my watercooling setup was SWEET!
I actually wish I could get that chip back. Gave it to someone 4+ years ago.