B - stayed a long time on AGP - I had an ATI HIS x1950x pro platinum; bought the card in 2007 for ~ 250 USD, using it with a Northwood CPU. I remember liking this video card a lot, it was silent and fast. I had an 6800gt before, I recall it being quite mediocre, got obsolete quite fast.

In 2009, I bought a HIS 4830 PCIE. I was definitely not impressed by this card, it was twice as cheap compared to x1950pro.

B

I went from an Athlon 2500+ (Barton) to an Intel Core2 E8400 with a Radeon HD 4850.

Judging by the release dates of the latter, that must have been in 2008.

Thanks for your stories everyone.
For me it was also D. GeForce 6150 IGP was ok for occasional Warcraft 3 and CS and newer games didn’t interest me much by that time.

I kinda missed the jump, was running 2.6Ghz on socket A with an AGP GF4200 at 4600+ speeds, so that held me over until early 2008, then I got an AM2 board and a GF7300GT at first which gave way to a HD4650 on PCIe. I think I was waiting for 64bit OS to mature really, didn't see a point moving off 32bit until actual benefit to 64bit. So it wasn't really about AGP vs PCIe for me.

I jumped on the PCIe train ASAP.
Still have the motherboard, an ASUS P4GD1.
And if my memory serves me right a 6800LE (unlocked obv!) did the graphics.

Nforce3 to Nforce4 with X800 Pro VIVO flashed to XT to X800XL. I was insane back then and bought almost every release. I side graded after that and then EVGA let me "Step UP" two times in a row.

A - saw which way the winds were blowing, and switched early. Upgraded from an Athlon XP and Radeon 9800pro and got the DFI NF4 socket 939 board with an A64.

I kept that system through multiple GPU upgrades, from X800 to x1900xt to 8800gt to a 4890, until upgrading in 2009.

B

B- I was still using AGP a bit into the PCIe era.

My last AGP card was a modified and overclocked ATI X850 Pro (still have it, seen below).

From that I moved to PCIe with my next build, using an X1650 XT I think it was. 😀

It's rare I jump on the new tech/standards bandwagon. I like to give it time to be "flushed out" before I make the move on my builds. Especially if my current build(s) still work good and meet my needs.

In order of ownership...

286-16, 256k ISA VGA (Oti)
386sx-40, 512k ISA VGA (Oti)
486dx2-50, 1mb VLB VGA (Cirrus)
6x86-166, 2mb PCI VGA (S3 trio)
P3-450, 32mb AGP (tnt2 ultra)
Athlon 1400, agp ti4600
Athlon MP 2800, agp fx5600
Athlon II X3, PCIe 8800gt
C2Q 6600, PCi 8800gt
C2Q 6600, PCIe gtx 260
I7 3770, PCIe gt 750
I7 3770, PCIe gtx 980
I7 4790, PCIe gtx 1050
I7 4790, PCIe gtx 1080
I7 9700, PCIe gtx 1080
I7 13700, PCIe rtx 4070ti

I think that's it for the order of GPU upgrades in my main pc. That doesn't include additional 'retro' builds I have done along the way - they are all systems built at the time those components were available. You can tell which systems I upgraded by the carried over cards!

I think I went from an ATI 9000 AGP in an Athlon XP systems to a Geforce 9400 PCIE.

I had a fast Socket A + 9800PRO. It was still in second hand demand, so I sold it, bought a mATX AM2 motherboard and an X1600PRO PCI-e. Done.

I picked B.

I had a Celeron Northwood and GeForce FX 5600XT until early 2007, at which point I found a second-hand Northwood HT for my board and a cheap AGP GeForce 7600 GS that clocked to 7600 GT levels and that made me happy for about a year.
Jumped the wagon in early 2008 when I picked up a Core 2 Duo, P35 based motherboard and a very very cheap, second-hand 7800GTX which I replaced come that summer with a Radeon 4850!

I skipped PCI-e and am still on AGP. 😁

Stayed on AGP until early 2009. I was a broke high schooler back then.

It was pretty straightforward for me. My last AGP build was based around a Radeon 9800 pro and Athlon XP 2600+ on a fairly decent motherboard that I've forgotten almost everything about aside from the nforce2 chipset and the useless, but neat dual channel memory (the CPUs connection to the chipset could be saturated with a single channel). I replaced it with an Athlon X2 3800+ on socket 939 with an X850 XT. That X2 build was interesting in that I was able to get an an entire pre built Acer for less than the cost of the CPU itself. I shoved a cheap CPU in the Acer and flipped it for a little profit and put the X2 in something a little more fitting.

As I recall I made the switch from a 7600 GS AGP to a 8400 GS PCIe circa 2010.

This was also when I switched from Windows XP to Windows 7 and from 32-bit to 64-bit.

shamino wrote on 2024-02-26, 13:21:

I was using older hardware so I didn't face that transition until after it was over for most people.

Same here. I've pretty much always been far behind "the curve" on PC hardware.

We had only one PC in the house: a Pentium II 400 MHz, 64 MB of RAM, 20 GB Maxtor HDD, and a S3 Savage 4 w/ 8MB (AGP, obviously). I think we got it late 1999 when Pentium II was a little more affordable. Ran it until around late 2003, when it just became a PITA to do anything on the web. I actually wanted to get/upgrade our PC earlier, but my parents thought it was fine and didn't see a need. I finally convinced them the following year, as I really started to need a good working PC to do my homework on (1st year in high school.) So a family friend helped us pick out some hardware. We got a socket A motherboard (Jetway N2PAP LITE), AMD Duron Applebred (T-bred) 1.4 GHz, 256 MB of RAM, and a Radeon 9200 S(low) E(dition) w/ 64 MB and 64-bit bus. HDD, case, and PSU were re-used from Pentium II PC, because my parents thought we really shouldn't spend too much on a new PC. The primary partition (3.5 GB 🤣, originally with Win 98) was nuked and XP replaced it. The PC was a complete hack box, but it worked (at least for a while 😁 ) and I learned a ton about PCs with the various issues it had. Best of all, despite being such an anemic build, it was able to "run" (I'm using this term loosely here) Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source, so I was pretty happy.

I suppose at this point, PCI-E had already rolled out... though I remember it wasn't until mid-late 2004 / early 2005 that I'd see more and more people on various gaming forums switch to PCI-E. Nevertheless, I kept using the above PC up until late 2006 or so, at which point it started becoming too unstable (PSU blew some caps, though I didn't figure that out until much later.) I asked my parents if I can get a new PC, but they didn't see any reason for it, given that they just gotten a new PC for their office use - a Dell Dimension 3000 with a P4 2.8 GHz Prescott (non-HT), 512 MB of RAM, 80 GB HDD, XP SP2 Home, and onboard video (intel i865 / "EXTREME GRAPHICS 2"... 🤣!) Not having a working computer, I just started using theirs (HA!)... that is, until I got my driving license after high school and started driving around. Enter the beginning of my journey with picking up junk/discarded PCs. 😀

Between 2007-2009, I found several discarded PCs: a Pentium 4 w/ 1.7 GHz Willamate, an HP NetServer E800 (Pentium III 800 Mhz), and a Gateway Select 750 (slot A AMD Athlon @ 750 MHz.) I got cheap used parts for these off of Craigslist and started upgrading them here and there. Then in late 2009, I found another system: an HP Pavilion 8756c with PIII 850 MHz CPU. Even though this late addition was slower than the others (Intel i815 onboard graphics, anyone? Anyone? No? - Yeah, I understand. 😁 ), it became my main PC and I ran it until late 2012 as such. In early 2013, I switched colleges and also happened to run across two Dell Optiplex 170L machines (2.8 GHz P4 HT, 1.25 GB of RAM, 40 GB HDDs, onboard i865 graphics again.) I set one up for myself and gave the other to a family friend of ours that needed a PC at the time. Fast forward to 2024, and I'm still using this Optiplex 170L as a daily driver of sorts. Of course, between then and now, I've gained... oh, around 50 more desktop PCs, many of them a lot newer and better than the 170L.

So where does that leave me in regards to this thread?
I'd like to think somewhere between choices B and D.

One could say I never really got to PCI-E, if judging by my "main" PCs. Of course, that's not really the case. Actually in 2011 or early 2012, I got a motherboard with a PCI-E from a forum buddy... but it was a dead socket 775 motherboard that he thought I could revive. I couldn't at the time. Otherwise, this would surely have become my college PC. So somewhere in late 2013, I purchased a broken/parts MSI motherboard (bad caps, I wanted to fix it for fun.) It had a PCI-E slot. Same year I got a 7600 GS video card that a classmate was going to dispose of due to a failed fan - easy fix for me! When I got home from college, I quickly recapped the MSI board and out the 7600 GS card in it - welcome my first PCI-E system! In 2014, nonetheless. Only 10 years late to the game. 😁 (but better late than never??)

*EDIT*
Oops, I lied / fudged it a little.
Around 2011 or 2012, there was another PC that I picked up that I forgot about: some random custom build with an AsRock 939Dual-SATAII mobo. But I didn't have any PCI-E video cards at the time. Instead, I ran this PC with a reflown Radeon 9700. The reason I forgot about it is because this system was really short-lived. IIt only worked for about 3-4 months before the mobo became too unstable. I put it in the closet for several years and completely forgot about it until much later when I figured some workarounds for the instability. So technically speaking, I think that was my first working mobo with PCI-E, but I just didn't have a PCI-E GPU to use with it at the time.

Anyways, I'm sure the above wall of text / details are not important to anyone. But at this point, I'm just trying to recall what PC came when for my own sanity (if we can call it that, given the # of systems I've hoarded at this point, 🤣!)

I stayed with my old PC for a while until I switched to an iMac 😀

At some point in 2005, I upgraded from nForce 2 / Radeon 9700 to nForce 4 / Radeon X800 GTO2. I was excited about overclocking dual core Opteron 165 and X800 GTO2.