For the record I never buy anything that's high-end (when brand new). After all, there's always gonna be something newer and better within months.

But for a high-performance PC, I was able to play Quake on my Pentium 90 at a decent enough frame rate when a lot of folks were still using 486s. And of course, Doom was fast as usual (snore).

It is the same for me.
I only had this feeling twice with a new rig (and the second one was a Phenom II with a mid-range graphics card. Not high end at all).

I remember my first (and only ever to buy high-end computer) computer was a stunning P2-350 with the then brand new Diamond Viper 550 16 meg graphics card and a whoppingly huuuge 128MB while my friends were still busy overclocking their P1's to 200Mhz and playing on a Voodoo 1 with 24 megs of FPM. Also my harddrive was so huge, it's 6.4GB's would last forever (HA!) compared to the 800 meg drive one of my friends was using.

We tested it with Falcon 4.0 and my friends were dripping mucus from their mouths when they saw the reflection in the cockpit and NO CHOPPING whatsoever 😁 😁 😁

Man.....good times 😁

I remember what I had back in 2001. My main pc was then a celeron 500, with 64MB RAM, and if I remember well I had an S3 savage4 video card. One day, there was a problem with the electricity in the area, and we had lots of repeating power cuts. After that my pc was dead. I took it to a friend who owns a computer store so as to test it to see which of the parts were dead. The only one that survived was a plextor 8x CD-R. (btw, he had checked another pc over there that stop working due to the same cause, and from that the only thing that survived was also a plextor cd-r... I guess they were very well built....) . Then I learned the hard way on ATX systems there is power even when they're switched off.
So then I had to rebuild my system. Luckily my dad didn't mind the cost much at the moment. So what I got was a Pentium III 1GHz, a QDI Advance 10F board, 192MB of RAM, and a 32MB Hercules 3D Prophet II MX(GF2MX). I remember it run Quake 3 Arena very good. I was really happy then.

in around March or February 1998, watching a Voodoo2 dash through Quake2 really did make me shit my pants

So I guess the day I went Voodoo2 was my first taste of the high-end

Not counting the 2000 Geforce2 or the 2003 Radeon9800pro I had later

My first genuine attempt at a high performance PC was my Core 2 Quad Q6600. 😖

My Pentium 133 machine with a CD-ROM drive. The day I started running CD-ROM based DOS games using the then hot AWE32! I felt like I was playing in heaven. "Multimedia" was the keyword back then. 😁

I had access to a Pentium 120 machine when the most powerful systems out there were Pentium 166s, so that made me feel a bit special for awhile. I could actually play Quake with a decent framerate while all my friends couldn't. ;)

Since then, my systems have been relatively strong, capable of running all current software acceptably, but nowhere close to the highest performance possible.

I'd either have to go with my Pentium 75 or my first 3dfx card.

The pentium 75 with a whopping 16MB (I think) of memory... I think I got that before Gemini moved out of 486 territory, so I had the edge in Descent deathmatches (muahaha).

The 3dfx card was my first 3d accelerator, which I got for playing Starsiege:Tribes. I'd previously been rendering in software (on an AMD K6-2 333MHz), and it was an absolute world of difference.

I lagged behind a bit until I got a 2.8ghz Netburst P4 and an asus p4c800e/dlx board. I was the envy of the area with that beast. lasted forever. Still have the box, I keep my spare memory in it, but I gave the motherboard a viking funeral a few years back, the voltage regulators just couldn't handle the high end p4's. Even the good boards would die.

gave the motherboard a viking funeral

Ah, yes. Nothing like the smell of burning computer components.

I remember my first kinda high berformance retro rig was a pIII 600ghz with an ati card (30mb I think it was!) Sbpro sound card 10X cdrom win98se.

Round about 2000/2001; 1Ghz Athlon Thunderbird, 512MB RAM, Videologic Vivid!XS Kyro II, 40GB HDD. Didn't think it was that awesome at the time, but it probably was.
Bought the CPU and RAM off a guy at work, they 'were delivered to the wrong address', too naive to realise something dodgy was going on, 🤣.

The Gecko wrote:

I'd either have to go with my Pentium 75 or my first 3dfx card.

The pentium 75 with a whopping 16MB (I think) of memory... I think I got that before Gemini moved out of 486 territory, so I had the edge in Descent deathmatches (muahaha).

The 3dfx card was my first 3d accelerator, which I got for playing Starsiege:Tribes. I'd previously been rendering in software (on an AMD K6-2 333MHz), and it was an absolute world of difference.

Your memory fails you. :P

You had a 486/DX4 at something around 80Mhz or higher when we first met, and I was still on a 486/DX2 66Mhz. Then, I got my P120 with 24 MB RAM. You hated the fact that I could run Quake so well and you couldn't. Not long after that, you got your first Pentium, still slower than mine but many times better than what you had before. You did however get a 3D accelerator long before I did, so even though you had the slower system you had access to PC games lacking decent software rendering.

Markk wrote:

One day, there was a problem with the electricity in the area, and we had lots of repeating power cuts. After that my pc was dead. I took it to a friend who owns a computer store so as to test it to see which of the parts were dead. The only one that survived was a plextor 8x CD-R. (btw, he had checked another pc over there that stop working due to the same cause, and from that the only thing that survived was also a plextor cd-r... I guess they were very well built....) . Then I learned the hard way on ATX systems there is power even when they're switched off.

You can never be too safe; I always cut the power switch on the supply whenever I shut off my computer. I don't feel completely safe even behind a surge protector.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standby_power

Yeap. I'm doing the same thing ever since. 😀

My first high-end experience was a Pentium 90 with 16 megs, the latest Diamond (s3) graphics card and a really great, obscenely costly midi capable soundcard called Tropez from Turtle Beach. All I say is Wing Commander III. That machine was a beast at the time, truly the latest and greatest. I could only afford it because I had a summer job at a PC dealer that year.

Before that I had an Amiga 500. So this was an entirely new world of computing power. Not even my first Voodoo card, which I bought pretty early on, came even close to this jump from the good old Amiga to a Pentium 90.

Mine was a Duron 750 system which I upgraded to a Duron 1200mhz after like a month or two. 256 megs of pc133 ram, 10 gb ata 100 hard drive, Muse Xl audio, and a highly overclocked Visiontek Geforce 4 MX 420. Not mind blowing by any means, but over all, for gaming, it did the job nicely.

During early 2002 when I had the thing running, I was able to run any game out at that point just fine at medium to high details, 800x600 to 1024x768. That included Serious Sam, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Max Payne. A massive jump from the K6 233 mhz Voodoo 3 system I was using during mid 2001.

ProfessorProfessorson wrote:

During early 2002 when I had the thing running, I was able to run any game out at that point just fine at medium to high details, 800x600 to 1024x768. That included Serious Sam, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Max Payne. A massive jump from the K6 233 mhz Voodoo 3 system I was using during mid 2001.

Things went crazy with gaming rigs past 2001- I bet that system woulda struggled with games released in 2002 like Morrowind and GTA3. A fast, complex and thirsty P4/ Athlon XP rig very quickly became necessary from '02 onwards, and what's remarkable is that just 2 years later even the fastest of these were being strained by titles like HL2 and Far Cry.

The Duron 1200 actually held its own quite well. You should look up reviews for it, it was able to battle with the lower end Pentium 4 1400 and 1500 mhz systems pretty well gaming wise. Most gamers/people I knew at that time on Guru3d and Tom's hardware were either using Durons or Athlons between 1000 to 1400mhz still mainly.

The MX 420 would have had real issues with Morrowwind as it was heavily DX8 reliant. That game was a late 2002 title, not a early one. By the very end of 2002 I was using a different graphics card as my main gaming card, a Apollo Devil Monster Radeon 8500. By then DX 8 was in full swing really too game wise. One of the best games I beat using that card/cpu combo was Unreal II. Had a total blast playing that game and it ran at high settings @ 1024x768 fine.

Back to Morrowwind for a second, I never cared to play that game much anyway. I tried it out for a couple of days, and hated it. Not my cup of tea personally, though the 8500 did run it well at 800x600. Seems like it lagged in some spots if I ran the res higher though. My son currently has it installed on his Win 7 system and is playing that game now and then.

GTA 3 actually averaged between 28-45 fps on the MX 420 at 16-bit 800x600 with about a medium draw distance. I actually remember that because I used to play the game a lot on that card when it came out on pc in spring 02. That was when I really started monitoring framerates excessively on that game to compare with others I knew who were having problems with it. At that setting it was worlds ahead of the PS2 version, so mission accomplished there either way. It wasn't a very optimized title at all.

By Nov 03 I was running a new main gaming system using a Athlon XP 1700+, ECS K7VTA3, and ATI made Radeon 9600XT. Red Faction 2, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Postal 2, NFS Underground, Chaser, and Call of Duty posed no threat to that build. A year later, Athlon Xp 2500+ on a Nforce 2 board with ATI Radeon 9800 Pro flashed to be a XT to handle Halo, Half Life 2, and Doom 3. I'm guessing by now you can see a trend with me, constant system builds each year 🤣.

Most all of my gaming was done mainly at 1024x768 up until I went to Athlon 64 builds in 2005. By then I had a monitor that could display 1600x1200 fine, but I was mainly gaming at 1280x1024, striking a balance between a decent res and decent performance.