First post, by Socket3
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hey guys. I was wondering what your favorite piece of retro hardware is - be it in your collection or not - pictures are encouraged!
For me it would be the Geforce 4 Ti4600 - specifically the Leadtek Winfast A250 Ultra TD. The reason is probably pretty boring - it was in most tech and PC gaming magazine ads when I was in highschool - and I was never able to come close to affording one.
Here she is:
... and only 20 years too late!!! 😜 (got her about a year ago). In fact I plan to collect all the cards on that ad page. So far I've got the A250TD (Ti4200), the A170 DDR T (Geforce 4 MX460), Winfast Geforce 2 MX400TH and the WinFast Titanium 200 TH. I'm only missing the regular Winfast A170T and the Winfast Geforce 2 MX64.
A close second would be the Slot A platform, with the reason being intel of all things. Their pricing in my country back in 1999-2000 was horrendous - not because of intel themselves (well, partly) but because the sole intel CPU importer had near 50% markup on all CPUs - so a 400MHz pentium 2 cost double what a 400MHz K6-2 cost. i440bx boards were also more expensive than any super socket 7 - so when I could finally afford to upgrade my ancient 586... a no-name via MVP4 chipset board with a 450Mhz K6-2 is all I could afford. Kinda made 8th grade me hate intel. So when the Athlon started showing up in tech and gaming magazines it was love at first sight - especially considering a 650Mhz slot A Athlon cost as much as a slower Celeron + slotket (according to the offers printed in magazines at the time). So I used to drool over these things up until I finally managed to raise enough money for another upgrade, but at that point slot A had been superseded by socket A - so I went with that.
What about you guys? What did you wish for back in the day and were never able to afford (or were able to and loved it)?