When I was 10, my dad gave me his old work PC, a Pentium II 400 with 256mb SD RAM. I upgraded it and tinkered with it and after about half a decade or so it is now my official Windows 98 gaming pc (specs in my signature)

It was around 1993 or 1994. I was ready to graduate from my Packard Bell 386SX-20. Bought one of those beige box barebones kits from Fry's Electronics. Generic AT case, generic 486 motherboard, 486SX-25 CPU, and probably 4MB of RAM. I can't remember what graphics card and hard drive I used. I do remember buying a Hercules Dynamite Pro VLB (ET4000), but that might've been after I upgraded this system once (I do remember going to a DX2-66 and DX4-100 before moving on to Pentiums). I can't remember if that first 486 board, with an SX-25, even had VLB slots.

Our original PC was purchased in 1993 or something - An Ambra 386SX-25 with 2MB RAM, 40MB HD and SVGA monitor (640x480) which was fine for Windows 3.1 and DOS but was already out of date when we bought it and, very soon, the latest games would not run on my humble machine. Of course I ran Doom, but only in a postage stamp. This is probably the one game that pressed me to go for an upgrade, after I saw it running on my mate's DX2-66. Bastard. Anyway, the machine got a CD drive and Adlib-compatible sound upgrade before its limitations became unbearable. I started researching an upgrade through adverts in magazines and worked out my perfect PC. I wanted to build it myself as I was convinced it was cheaper this way. I would circle items and indiscreetly leave the magazine lying on the dining table for my dad to see. I can't remember exactly how much it cost but I could probably find scans of adverts back then to work it out (I read PC Pro, PC Zone and PC Plus a lot). Of course, given that the Pentium had already been released when I had my 386, the 'new' system was outdated by the time I bought and built it (I have always been a generatiob behind). But what an experience:

Micro Tower case
A-Bit AB-PB4 rev 1.3
AMD 486DX4-100 (later overclocked to 120MHz)
8MB RAM
SB AWE32
Diamond Stealth 64 Video (Trio64+)

I think I kept the same monitor, as a bigger one would have comprised a significant proportion of the cost - Win95 in 640x480 is not fun but, damn, I must have had the best times of my life gaming on that PC. I later swapped the AWE32 for a GUS with a mate, as I did a lot of tracking and demoscene stuff at the time. I still own the MB, the CPU and the GUS, plus the memories and the music I created.

My second computer - my first was a Tandy 1000 with 384K (later upgraded to 640K), 2 360K floppy drives, and the whole vintage 1987 kit that came with it.

I was probably about 15 (circa 97' or so) when I started technically because it all started with a family friend who gave us a ZEOS 386/486 Upgradable Systems Mainboard with the promise that I got my grades up he would build out a decent Windows 95 based 486 PC for me to surf the web and do things with. Well, this guy and the family parted ways, and left the motherboard in our Kitchen cabinet.

For about 2-3 years that ZEOS motherboard sat up there, mocking me, taunting me, some nights I would pull it down and just look at it! - Here's a picture of one just like it. - http://www.ebay.ie/itm/Motherboard-ZEOS-with- … r-/162210038167

Finally by age 17, I'd had enough, I figured, "well crap, I can build a guitar, I might as well try my hand at building a computer".

By this point it was 2000, so I started scrounging the junk piles near my house for cases, power supplies, and components. What I started off doing was grabbing 2 monitors from across the street, big mistake, one of them was a mac monitor that DID work but starts smelling like burning coffee and showing scrolling horizontal bars and a happyface at the bottom. The other was a completely dead 17" CRT.

Unable to find an AT class chassis for the ZEOS board, I decided to take it my own way, I got my hands on a Packard Bell 386 bottom half, and a Packard Bell 486 top cover, I hack-sawed and Dremeled until one could literally use ISA cards in it in the standard AT configuration. Sure enough it did work, save for the lack of a display card.

However, as luck would have it the metal band I was in at the time......our rhythm guitarist's dad was a Military lawyer and former computer tech who had some old (now vintage) machines kicking around, and he gave me, out of the blue, a 386 SX just around the time of my birthday. Branded "Flight 386 SX" with an Addonics MON-7C4B 14" Color VGA monitor and a Chicony 8551 101 Key Keyboard with Alps Keyswitches.

I used the Flight for about a week, pondering about the 486 board in the Packard Bell case and decided to go and do it. At this point the PC had THESE Specs...

CASE: Kingspao Model 35 Chassis
PSU: Hi-Pot 230 Watt Baby-AT PSU
MoBo: Unknown 386 SX-25 system board
CPU: PLCC 386 SX-25 soldered right to the board
CoPro: NONE
RAM: 5MB
FDD 0: 1.2MB TEAC 5.25"'
FDD 1: 1.44MB Mitsumi 3.5"
HDD: Maxtor 7120AT 124MB IDE HDD (CHS is 936 16 17 - I dunno HOW I still remember that)
GFX: Western Digital PVGA1A ISA VGA card
SND: INternal Speaker
NET: None
O/S: MS-DOS 5.0

The following Sunday, I took the whole machine apart, and took to installing that 486 motherboard. It took about 3-4 hours, and after that time I could not get the damned thing to POST to save my life. It wound up being just ONE thing wrong and that's that I had the IDE cable backward. Once I flipped that around - the chain reaction of part additions started, I needed a new CMOS battery because the old board used a soldered-on rechargeable, and this thing needed one of those black/white lithium cell brick things, usually sold by Tadiran. It took me quite some time before I got it all ironed out but by July I was given $150 and permission to sign up for AOL....this was the end specs of the machine

CASE/PSU: The Same
MoBo: Zeos Upgradeable Systems Mainboard w/ 486 daughtercard
CPU: Intel 80486 DX-33
RAM: 8MB
DRIVES: The Same
GFX: The Same
SND: ESS AudioDrive 1869
NET: US Robotics External Faxmodem
O/S: MS-DOS 5.0/Windows 3.1
INTERNET/BROWSER: AOL 3.0/AOL 4.0 with IE integrated into it

I had this computer a very long time, until about 2012 when I decided to let it go to someone else because I was no longer using it much anymore. At that point I'd upgraded it to an AMD K-6 and had an MSI PCI video card in it running Windows 2000. Kind of regret getting it of it because I would love to have had the case to put my 486 system into now. Live and learn. It was kind of falling apart though from all the case mods done to keep adding more stuff to it - we're talking things akin to so many hard disks I had to double-stick tape them to the power supply, and cutting the drive cage so the thermal unit would fit. Adding 2 more LED lights during it's final 486 incarnation so I could have individual indicators off the Future Domain PowerIDE dual IDE controller I had in it (at it's strongest, it had 4 hard disks, CD-ROM, and 2 Floppies). I called it the IRQ challenge during that time because I literally had to make a written-out table of memory addresses and interrupts to get all 8 expansion cards working in it - and I did.

I'm on the younger side of life and my first PC was build in around 2005ish using mostly used parts.

Abit Be6-ii.
550mhz Piii later updated to a 1ghz.
256mb pc133 ram.
40gb hdd, no clue what.
voodoo2000 agp. later upgraded to a 5.5k.
sound blaster vriba 16.
The same model case that was used to display the voodoo6000.
OS:98se.

Intel Core i7 4790K/16GB RAM/GeForce 780 Ti in a mITX case 😀

It's just that I've been surrounded with laptops for most of my life. The first PC I ever used was my father's Toshiba 486 laptop. It later became "mine" and I used it till 2002 or so when my parents gave me my first desktop (a Pentium 4/GeForce Ti 4200). I was 12 then, and this computer stayed with me until the end of school. Ever since I've entered university (and started renting a place of my own), I've been exclusively using laptops for study and work — mostly because I didn't have the space and liked the mobility.

This is why I actually built my first desktop when I was 24 years old. I finally got enough space and money and wanted a powerful machine solely for gaming.

So I guess my second build must have been a Pentium MMX machine last year 😀

Kind of a weird line for me. I started out with a Tandy 1000 SL that my parents bought and then moved on to an IBM PS/2 Model 50Z that my dad brought home from work. I got that in 1995 or so, by which time it was already quite long in the tooth. I remember that came with PC DOS 5, and it was the first machine I played with alternative OSes on (not counting booting the SL from a PC DOS 5 boot floppy), upgrading it to DR-DOS at one point and Frankensteining from there.

I bought my next machine but didn't really build it from parts, sometime around 1997 - it was a 486DX4/100 with PCI. It wasn't marked as an IBM, but did display an IBM POST splash screen - I think it might have been a PS/Valuepoint in a generic case, actually. I consider that my first real computer. It came with DOS 6.22 and a somewhat broken installation of Windows 3.1, but I eventually put OS/2 Warp 3.0, DR-DOS and Red Hat Linux on it.

The first one I really built from parts was also my first Pentium-class machine:

Asus SP97V AT motherboard with the onboard SIS graphics. Didn't learn why this was bad until later!
AMD K6, 233MHz
32MB of RAM, can't recall if it was EDO or PC66. I think I eventually had as much as 96MB in it.
4.3GB Western Digital ATA disk
SoundBlaster 16, eventually replaced with an AWE64 Value and then a PCI512 (that was a real letdown, IIRC).
Wearnes CDD-620 ATA CD, left over from when I upgraded my 486 to a no-name 10x CD.
Generic floppy
Random el-cheapo AT case and PSU. The PSU never did croak on me, surprisingly, but the case *sucked*.
Parallel port Zip drive
OS: DR-DOS, OS/2 Warp, Win95, Red Hat Linux. I loved multi-booting then. (Still have an unreasonable fondness for it). I wound up bunging in a second disk just to make multi-booting easier.

That box served me quite well, all things considered, though I did eventually bung an S3 Virge GX into it, that I had in the 486 box. Silly me had assumed that newer == better, but the S3 card was way more skookum than the silly onboard video on that board. I hung onto this one for a few years, upgrading it first to a Cyrix 6x86-MII and later to a K6-2/350, and at some point in there replacing the video card with a newer ATI Rage Pro of one make or another. Eventually it gave way to a Super Socket 7 rig, and then a Slot A, then a Thunderbird, then a dual Athlon MP, then a dual Opteron, and finally on to the stable of modern machines I have now. Interestingly, other than that Cyrix, they were all AMDs until my most recent three. Those are all Intels, two Haswells and a Skylake. I never had a classic Pentium, P2, P3, P4, C2D or any of those other much-storied chips. Maybe I oughtta build a dual PIII here one of these days.

Unfortunately, many, many moves all over the northern hemisphere meant I could really only hang on to my "main" box, and I long ago sold or gave away most of my early boxen, which I now rather regret. I really wish I still had either of those dualies, or the old 286 PS/2. (The 486 I just put together is mostly as good as my old one, except that it's VLB instead of PCI, so no Virge/GX, alas.)

My dad bought our first computer in 1993, a generic ISA-only clone with a 486SX-40 (probably AMD), 4MB of RAM, a crappy OAK 256KB VGA, 160MB HDD, 3.5'' floppy, 14in monitor and little else, no sound card, no CD-ROM.

With that PC I got into many games, mostly LucasArts/Sierra adventure games, side-scrollers and so on for a while.

Soon after that I bought my first upgrade, a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 which I was pretty scared to install, but it worked out fine. Then came a beastly 4x CD-ROM drive to complete the "multimedia experience" 😁

However, in 1994, when a schoolmate gave me the shareware copy of Doom everything changed. It played horribly on my machine, so I started saving money to do a "serious" upgrade. Stuff like RAM was really expensive (at least here in South America), around $50 per megabyte.

Anyways, I then went to the computer store and basically said: "Look, I have this amount of money, just give me new components that will allow me to play Doom properly". I got back home with a new "Laser" branded VLB motherboard, a Cyrix 486DX-33 (yeah, I couldn't afford a DX2), 4 more megs of RAM for a total of 8 and some kind of Paradise VLB card.

So I guess that + my older components could be considered the "first" computer I built myself. The upgrade process went relatively well, except for the VGA which artifacted horribly so I got a refund and went with a cheaper 1MB ISA Trident 😒.

The thing I remember struggling the most with my first build is for some reason those stupid nylon standoffs AT motherboards use. Not only I broke all of them while trying to remove them from the old motherboard (had to get new ones from the store), but also the mounting holes of new motherboard only matched with the brass standoffs in a single location, so the motherboard was basically held in place by that single screw and the expansion cards, as the nylon standoffs only provide spacing with the tray but do not secure the board...

About a year later I upgraded again to a 486 PCI motherboard with an AMD DX4-100 and PCI VGA (Trident of course 😒) and the story goes on.

Interestingly enough, even though I had 3 different 486 CPUs, I never had the most "popular" 486 CPU, the DX2.

The first PC I built myself was my 2nd PC, actually. The 1st one got put together before it was shipped to me (I picked out the parts). This one was built around the 2002/2003 time. I don't remember exactly when I got the parts and put them together, but I know I initially put Windows 98 on it before I found a DVD of a licensed (but not previously used) Windows XP I could use.

ATX Standard case
Abit KX7-333 motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 1800+ "Palomino" 1.53GHz processor
256MB DDR-266 (single stick)
ATI Radeon 7500 64MB AGP 4x graphics card
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 PCI sound card
SMC 10/100 Ethernet PCI network card
Western Digital 80GB UDMA-100 hard disk drive
Whatever DVD drive I had available at the time
Windows XP (original version)

That system has been tinkered with over the years. The current status is now:

Same exact ATX case (with a few cracks on the front plastic and some broken tabs here and there)
Same exact motherboard
Same exact processor (although a "Barton" 3000+ chip is on the way to attempt to use)
2GB DDR-400 (2 x 1GB sticks)
ATI Radeon 9550xl 256MB AGP 4x/8x graphics card (looking for a replacement - perhaps an x700 Pro)
Same exact sound card
Same exact network card
Same exact hard drive
Sony DVD-RW
Windows XP (SP3)

Probably the youngest here (17). My first PC built from scratch was about 6 months ago. Ive been tinkering for a good 3-4 years though. Mostly modifying prebuilt OEM systems.

Coolermaster CM690 II Advanced
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64
EVGA 500w White Certified Power Supply
EVGA nForce 680i SLI Mothrboard (First AR Revision)
Intel Core2Duo E8400 @ 3GHZ
6GB DDR2 667MHZ
EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 896MB
Creative Soundblaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro PCI soundcard
2 SATA Hard Drives (80GB Seagate Barracuda drive for Windows 7, 500GB Western Digital Black for Storage)
Random SATA DVD Superdrive

Oddly this machine wasn't even my fastest when I built it (I already had Quad machine in my sig for about 2 years). I just wanted an Ok DX10 build. Oddly enough I'll likely get a QX6800 and a GTX680 for it at somepoint and make it my main PC. I'm currently waiting on a replacement 680i as the one I had in it died recently (Capacitors I think. I'll probably end up selling it for parts. I'm no good at motherboard repair plus I don't have a soldering iron or solder right now much less the capacitors i would need to replace the current ones with). I don't know what's with this board, its died twice and I've brought it back once. The second time i didn't get so lucky (the first time a CMOS reset did it).

That machine actually hasn't changed much. Its just sitting right now. I'll upload some pictures when I get home.

I had my first PC in 1997 and it was built by a friend of my dad's. Later I gradually swapped out the parts and I think somewhere around 1999 it became purely my built.

CPU: AMD K5-PR133 -> Celeron 366 -> Celeron 1GHz Tualatin
Mobo: some VX board -> Pineview 430LX -> Soltek VIA Apollo 133 -> Gigabyte 815EPT
RAM: 8MB EDO -> evergrowing SDRAM
Video card: ALG2032 1MB -> S3 Trio64V2 1MB -> i740 8MB -> ATi Rage 128GL 16MB -> SiS315 64MB
Sound card: ALS007 -> CMI8338 -> Creative Vibra128 -> integrated
Monitor: some 14inch -> Philips 17 inch
Speakers: unknown -> Soundworks 2.1
HDD: Fujitsu 1.2GB -> Seagate U4 8GB -> IBM 60GXP 40GB -> Barracuda4 40GB
Case/PSU: some AT -> some ATX
MPEG decoder: some ISA -> none
Modem: none -> COM 33.6K -> PCI 56K V90 -> PCI 56K V92
Well I kept the same ol' FDD... Does it defeat the pureness of being my built? 😵 I later gave this machine to my cousin.

The first machine built by me from the start was born in 2002. It was built from used parts in the secondhand market.
CPU: AMD K6-2 300
Mobo: FIC PA-2013 with 2MB L2 Cache
Video card: Voodoo Banshee AGP 16MB
Can't remember the rest of the list because I had kept replacing parts in this machine in a really fast pace. I was amazed by how cheap used parts were back then in China; I am still amazed now. I clearly remember I paid 30 CNY for the mobo; now they easily go over 100 USD on ebay. I later bought a pair of 12MB Voodoo2 for 10 CNY each, and Voodoo3/4/5 AGP for less than 100 CNY each. I literally dumped all 3dfx and other vintage parts in 2006 because I thought their values would slide straight down to nothing... How dumb was I. In contrast you guys even formed a rescue team for an i740 AGP days ago. 🤣

It was a cheapie A4 FM1 APU machine with no dedicated graphics, 4 GB of RAM and a 160GB HDD.

Since so many people have mentioned their first PC in general I guess I will mention mine too.

One day my grandpa wheeled over (lived not too far apart, could each our houses from each others) a bunch of boxes and stuff. He gave me a Commodore 64 (breadbox), it had a printer, modem (useless 🤣), an entire box full of Run Magazine issues, 1541 & 1571 drives.. it was good. I had a friend that had some games luckily. Even on the amber Magnavox monitor it was pretty great.

I regret that is died on me at some point. I wish I had kept it to try and troubleshoot. My first actual PC (but not built) was an IBM PC Jr. That one I kind of disassembled at some point and destroyed, not really considering the valuable piece of hardware I had been given. It did have an issue with the memory like half of it disappeared. I think it was a virus or something, haha.

I miss my C64 the most though.

Well I got our first PC in April 2001 along with my sister (I was 10 😁).
It had Celeron 733MHz S370, Soltek MB [dk model], 128MB RAM, GF2 MX 32MB AGP w/o TV-out, 20GB HDD and Win 98 SE (my mom focus on printer and scanner instead of box itself - school aid and all).
After a year Floppy was replaced, and after another year 128MB RAM was added with CD-burner.
Then I changed GPU to GF FX 5200 128MB/128bit (dat speed up was awesome).
But after I put a 1GHz Pentium III inside, PC was pretty much maxed out, it lasted quite long because HDD had to be exchanged (20GB drive died after 2Y, was replaced with IBM 40GB/512kB), and original MB was "wonky" (at least that's what guys at repair shop said 😉).

First PC I build on my own is from around 2005-2006 (don't remeber exact date), and it was because I couldn't play in Medal of Honor : Pacific Assault on old one maxed out (SSE2 requirement...).

2005-2006 PC Spec :
Celeron D 326 2,53GHz (I remember talking to my mom that Celeron D 326 = Pentium III "2,53GHz", because both have 256kB of cache :E)
ASRock 775Dual-880Pro
Intel BOX cooler
GEIL 2x256MB 533MHz of DDR2 (CL4, I think...),
GeForce FX 5200 128MB (from last PC, AGP),
250GB HDD (ATA) - I still have it, but it's "almost dead" since I dropped it on the table quite some time ago... 🙁

First I built 100% myself hmm.

Generic AT Case
ASUS P5A-B
K6-2+ 450
128mb PC100
10gb Hard Drive
Riva TNT2 M64
Soundblaster 16 PCI
Windows 98SE

Built this back in 2002 after my Athlon XP got hit by lightening, didn't want to be without Civ II and Tiberian Sun, it worked until i built another one in early 2003 that my mother paid for the parts (birthday present). It was very similar to my first computer which this board came out of as well as the Sound Card. The rest I sourced from my dad's barn, I was 16 at the time.

The first PC I built that I also bought every part was. It replaced a XP 1600+/Pc Chips/Geforce MX440 computer I got in 2003

AMD Athlon 64 3200 Newcastle
MSI K8N Neo Platnium
1gb DDR400 2x512mb
200gb Hard Drive
XFX 6600GT AGP
Soundblaster Audigy 2
Windows XP Home SP2

Now I want to list my memorable computers 🙁

I did my first semi-build in 1995. The motherboard and CPU was installed in the case, by a technitian in a shop.
The rest of the cards/hardware, were added by me personally. It was this setup:

- Edom 486VL3H MV020 motherboard.
- Intel 486dx2-66 CPU
- 8x1mb 30pin 60ns Ram modules
- Cirrus Logic 5428 1mb VLB
- Side JR Pro VLB controller
- Creative SB16 Value Edition (CT-2770)
- 800mb Qauntum Trailblazer
- Mitsumi 4xspeed cdrom
- Conner QIC-80 125/250mb TapeDrive
- 1.44mb Floppy

Still miss that 486 machine. It was awesomme.
The next computer I got, was build up from the ground. It had this hardware.

- Gigabyte GA-5AX Rev. 4.1
- K6-II-500
- TNT2-M64 (later upgraded to TNT2-Pro and V1)
- 32mb Ram (later upgraded to 128mb)
- 800mb Quantum Trailblazer (reused from the 486, later upgraded to 8gb Seagate)
- Acer CD-RW Drive (still have it, and it is working perfectly)
- Creative SB-128 PCI card.

I can not remember all the spec's, as this machine went through a lot of upgrades throughout 5 years.

The first machine I built with my own hands was a socket A AMD duron in mid 2001:

- 850MHz AMD Duron
- KT266 matsonic DDR/SDR combo board
- 128MB of SDRAM left over from my K6-2
- 4GB Samsung IDE drive left over from my K6-2
- 64MB Radeon DDR (Radeon 7500)
- Creative Voodoo 2 left over from the K6-2
- cheap ass chinese ATX case + 350w PSU that came with it.
- genius soundmaker value (Yamaha YMF-718 ISA)
- 24x Creative CD-ROM left over from my K6-2

As you can imagine, coming over from a overclocked 350MHz k6-2 to this modest (at the time) socket A machine was a dramatic improvement. First thing I did after loading win98se on it was try out all games that wouldn't run properly before (due to CPU or GPU limitations), and boy did it go! The following year or so I kept upgrading it. In late 2002 it had the following parts:

- Athlon XP 1800+
- 256MB DDR266
- 40GB Maxtor HDD
- Radeon 8500LE
- 2x Creative Voodoo 2 12MB (got a second card really cheap from a friend)
- slightly nicer chinese case (Delux brand) witch was roomyer, much better looking, built better and came with a 450w PSU
- cheap C-Media (8738?) PCI sound card
- Realtek 8139AD PCI LAN card
- unknown speed (can't remember - I think it was 32x24x32) CD-RW made by Asus

From there the builds and upgrades just kept coming.

Also about that time I build another PC for my sister. She was using an old IBM Aptiva 100MHz 486 witch was given to her as a "trial PC" to see if she could properly take care of one, and if she would use it at all - and that she did - daily. Paint, winamp, dos games and some windows games like warcraft 1 and 2, red alert, starcraft and heroes III, all witch did not run very well on the obsolete machine. I used what was left over from my old K6-2 machine - namely the case, PSU (both AT), the sound card, the 24x creative CD-ROM and the 4GB samsung drive. I traded the MVP4 board for a Lucky Star P5MVP3 that had an AGP slot, bought some second hand PC100 SD-RAM and bought a cheap geforce 2 MX 400. This is what came out:

- 350MHz K6-2 running at 450MHz / 2.4v under a socket A Spire brand cooler modded using a socket 7 clip (original clip wouldn't really fit properly)
- Lucky Star P5MVP3 motherboard
- 128 MB of SD-RAM (2x64MB PC100)
- 4GB Samsung Spinpoint HDD
- Palit Daytona Geforce 2 MX 400 64MB
- SMC PCI LAN card I pulled off a dead socket 5 PC dad had at work
- AT case with 250W PSU
- genius soundmaker value (Yamaha YMF-718 ISA)
- 24x Creative CD-ROM left over from my K6-2
- 14" IBM CRT monitor left over from the 486

I took every part as well as the case, cleaned it, inspected it, and even applied thermal paste between the CPU and the cooler (it originally had some sort of thermal pad like GPU memory has today). I still remember laying everything down on the big table in the kitchen, cleaning, inspecting and assembling 😀 - the good old days 😁. I later replaced the whole PC to a socket A Palomino (2000 or 2200+) with 512MB of ram and an FX5200 before leaving for collage in 2004. She actually managed to play world of warcraft for almost two years on the thing - imagine that.

As for the old K6-2, it was retired to the attic for over a decade under piles of stuff we never used anymore - until about 3 years ago when I decided I wanted to play my childhood games, and dosbox wasn't cutting it. I remembered I had some old PCs in the attic, and retrieved the K6-2 on the next visit to my parent's house. I found the PC near some old discard computer cases, boxes of old PC parts and some CRT monitors tucked away in a corner. It was dirty, the case was bent and scratched up (still is) and it was full of dust - but as soon as I pushed that power button, it came to life, making some horrible fan noise. CMOS battery was flat too, and a heap of dust came out of the PSU's back. Hhere's some pics of the old K6-2 after I gave it a good cleaning and replaced some parts:

I replaced the geforce 2 MX with a voodoo banshee and the ymf 718 with a AWE64 gold. The cd-rom no longer worked even after cleaning so I replaced that with a Sony DVD-ROM. The original samsung HDD is still in there, and still kicking alongside a 20GB IBM HDD. The ram was upgraded to 256MB. I couple of months after that I replaced the overclocked 350MHz k6-2 with a 400MHz K6-3+ witch I ran at 550MHz (an now sits in the rig in my signature). I still have the Geforce 2 MX - it's still kicking 😀

kanecvr wrote:

From there the builds and upgrades just kept coming.

Yeah, there was a period of my life (in my early to mid twenties) when I started making decent money and had very few financial responsibilities that I was upgrading faster than I can remember. Motherboards maybe once a year, cpus maybe 2-3 times a year, graphics cards probably 4x a year, etc. In the DOS days, I'd buy a graphics card just to benchmark it. If it was really bad, I would return it. If it was decent, I would keep it. But I never got rid of my old stuff until I moved. Back then I had no idea about holding onto hardware I no longer used, or the potential value down the road (either monetary or nostalgic). So sad that I don't have most of that stuff anymore. 🙁

That's what makes my Genoa VLB graphics card so special. It was in a drawer in my old bedroom at my parents house since the mid 1990s, and I'd forgotten all about it until I visited last year and was asked to "go through your old room because we're trying to clean the house out in case we decide to downsize".

Since I'm younger than most people here, my story will be a tiny bit different (no pentiums, no K6, no socket 1-2-3-4-5-7-8, no slot 1 or a ...) but it might interrest you since I think it's kind of different to what most people did when they built their first PC ^^. If I recall correctly, the first PC I really built myself was made out of hardware that I bought here and there. It was a socket 754 sempron 64 with 1GB of ram and no cooler for 10€ a few years ago. I bought a brand new cooler on the internet. The case I first used was an old acer case from 2001 which was our first PC. But there was no P4 connector, so I cutted a big wire in 4 parts and I managed to plug that in a molex connector. I still don't know how I managed to make it stay in place X)

But knowing that this could end up terribly, I bought a fortron psu which was most of the time making a horrible noise 🤣. I built that computer because I wanted my own minecraft server where I could invite friends on (but with my terrible upload speed, we couldn't be more than 4-5 until it started to lag X) ). I really liked that game back then (I still do, but now it gets a little be repetitive ^^). So yes, this was kind of my first build, which was really bad in fact 🤣. Later I found a socket 939 board with an athlon X2 and an SLI of 6600GT.

But the first real PC I built to use for myself is more or less my actual pc, except that over time I upgraded every parts in it.

First it was a fujitsu siemens core 2 duo with a motherboard that had a problem that I bought locally with a pentium 4 system and an athlon XP system. Replaced it with another one which I got on ebay with a ton of random hardware. I used a GT230 that I shoved in the oven at least 4 times over time 🤣. The hdd was missing so I took the 320GB hdd from the P4. I think I started with 2GB of RAM. My OS was windows vista for few weeks (my father didn't want me to crack oses 🤣) until a friend of mine gave me his own windows 7 64bits license because he had no use for it (he could crack his windows, lucky him ^^). This was my computer for some time. Then I was given a 2GB stick so it gave me 512 more MB, I also got a 2,2GHz C2D instead of the 1,86GHz one (I don't recall why though). But next, the motherboard started to show signs of weaknesses (the computer wouldn't even POST 1 time out of 3, but over time it became worse), so I bought a socket 1155 mobo ... Alone because I didn't have enough money and after 3 month I got the rest (8GB of ram, sata dvd drive and ... A celeron, because I couldn't buy more, again ^^). This was already a LOT better ! But the new "reliability weakness" was now the GPU. I was given an 8800GT wich worked for 6 month and the the oven didn't work anymore. For some times I was stuck to the IGP of my cpu ^^. But then I bought an HD radeon 7790. I don't recall when but at some point I got a new PSU that could deliver a lot more than the 350W that the Delta I had could deliver. After the gpu upgrade came the cpu upgrade where I bought an i5 3350P and after that another upgrade for the GPU : I found a GTX 580 for only 26€ ! Great deal ! I didn't upgrade my computer until last christmas where I got an SSD and a new case (it started to become a little tight in there and the 580 was so hot in games that the computer crashed if I didn't open the case which lead to a lot of dust iny computer. Oh I forgot to mention a 1TB HDD that my father wasn't using anymore since we bought a NAS few years ago and the 500GB HDD I found in a binned computer last year (which had a great motherboard and so I shoved in a Xeon. I would have been so happy if I had found that motherboard in the dumpsters back then :'( )

So yeah after 4-5 years I finally have something that looks and is as powerful as a modern computer, finally !

I could almost rebuild the computer I previously had since I kept most of these parts ^^