Hi guys,

I was in two minds to post this as not strictly "Retro, Retro" but thought people might be interested in the back story and the history behind this machine since it is now 10 years old. Whilst the PC was relatively top end at the time, it only lasted me a year before I sold on!

Back in 2006, Aged 22 I was just about to move out of my parents into our recently bought house with my girlfriend (Wife now) I was working and very into my PC hardware. At the time I had a AMD Athlon XP 2800+ with a 9800 Pro (Check out my 2003 build in System Specs which I recently built up)
I remember having the itch to upgrade since I bought Quake 4 which didn't run to well on the 9800 Pro at High/Ultra. I came into some money and decided to upgrade.

I had £1000 to spend and spent the next few weeks researching night after night on what to get. At the time I took photos of all of my builds, here are a few taken back in 2006...

Photo Time Stamp :- ‎17 ‎March ‎2006,

Photo Time Stamp :- ‎17 ‎March ‎2006, ‏‎20:44:37

Photo Time Stamp :- ‎17 ‎March ‎2006,

I remember the PSU being very expensive but the reviews were fantastic. The PSU is still running perfectly and been in a number of machines. I was using in it in my main machine until I upgraded to a GTX570.
The CoolerMaster Stacker was... big! again.. very expensive but built very well. I just under estimated how big this thing was. For case temperatures it was fantastic - I don't think I've had anything which matches it's thermal capabilities.

At the time I was very much into overclocking, everything I could tweak to extract the most out of the system. I managed to run the X2 3800+ @ 2.8Ghz stable with very tight ram timings.
I went on to replace the 1800XT with an Nvidia Geforce 7900GTO which clocked very well @ 720/830. The ATi X1800XT, although a decent card was very short lived. A couple of months after it's release (...and my purchase) the X1900XT came out which was a superior card for pretty much the same money. The cards used noisy coolers. I did change the cooler for a Zalman for a couple of months before I sold it.
I remember playing Oblivion on this rig with the X1800XT and being impressed with the HDR or Bloom settings. At the time, I don't think you could have them both on together.

I think the new Intel Core 2 Duo Platform completely killed it, what a processor the Core 2 Duo was for it's time - It trounced everything. Despite having the build for just over a year, In April 2007 I sold the Athlon X2 build to a close friend of mine who re-cased it and put his PSU & Hard drives in it. I sold him the Motherboard, Processor, RAM & Graphics Card (7900GTO)
I replaced it with a E6300 (Overlcocked to 3Ghz) on a P5B-Deluxe Motherboard with 4Gb of Geil DDR2 Ram with a 8800GT.

Here is the time frame.

1The Build     		        March 2006
2Replaced 1800XT Cooler    July 2006
3New Case (AKASA)	 	August 2006
4New 7900GTO			November 2006
5New Build (Core 2 duo)      April 07

A few months back my friend asked if I wanted the machine back, otherwise he was going to dump it. I jumped at the chance. It had been in storage for the last couple of years and came back to me in good condition in a decent Antec Sonata case. It just needed a clean. I stripped it down and replaced a couple of the components with what I had and had her back! 10 years old and still had my overclock settings.

Anyway - enjoy the photos...

CPU AMD Athlon X2 3800+ @ 2.70Ghz, Zalman CNP LED Cooler
Motherboard ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe Motherboard
RAM Geil 2Gb DDR400 RAM
Primary Graphics Card 512mb Nviida Geforce 7900GTO @ 720/830 Clocks
Sound Card Creative X-Fi Extreme Gamer PCI Card - SB0770
NIC O/B 1Gb Adapter
Storage 2x WD800 80Gb SATA2 7200RPM in RAID0 (16k Stripe) ~108mb per/sec / 230mb burst @ 2.3% CPU
Optical Pioneer DVD Writer Drive
PSU Seasonic S12 500w
Case Cooler Master ATC-S 201
OS Windows XP Home Edition, Service Pack 3

I found the ATC-S on ebay. I always wanted a ATC-S 201 and thought it works quite well being a retro case with a newer build. I have my original 8800GT pulled from my Core2 Duo build in 2007 but it just does not feel right. The 7900GTO seems more at home here! 🤣
I dug out the Seasonic S12 which was the orignal PSU for this build which I've kept - it's been in various builds but never sold or given away as I love it to much 🤣

Hope you enjoyed. I'm going to dig out the photo of my Computer desk in my room at my parents, before I moved out.