Fair enough - but what holds back software - that is games - from forcing system requirements to double or quadruple on regular basis. It seemed that up until the 2000's software/game developers constantly pushing the envelope were as much a factor for the *need* for a faster system as was tech knocking out faster parts on a predictable basis that actually made it possible. Have we reached an acceptable plateau, perhaps, where developers/tech [and users] are more or less content with the 'bang', so neither side feels a strong pressure to push harder? Or is that just what "Console Stagnation" is all about?

tincup wrote:

Fair enough - but what holds back software - that is games - from forcing system requirements to double or quadruple on regular basis. It seemed that up until the 2000's software/game developers constantly pushing the envelope were as much a factor for the *need* for a faster system as was tech knocking out faster parts on a predictable basis that actually made it possible. Have we reached an acceptable plateau, perhaps, where developers/tech [and users] are more or less content with the 'bang', so neither side feels a strong pressure to push harder? Or is that just what "Console Stagnation" is all about?

I think it goes hand in hand - sure EA/Valve/whoever could come out with a game that requires some unholy amount of power just to start it up at full minimum, but they know it won't sell very well because not many people can run it (and remember that the majority of PC sales are now laptops, so "upgrade" is not part of that vocabulary either), and if they want to release it on consoles its cheaper/faster to develop it for all platforms at once, and that can limit what kinds of features they implement based on what the hardware they have to accommodate can do (that's where console stagnation is a factor).

Personally I'm all for a "plateau" effect - I like not having to build a new computer every 1-2 years. 😀

obobskivich wrote:

...Personally I'm all for a "plateau" effect - I like not having to build a new computer every 1-2 years. 😀

I'm with you on that. Frees up time and resources for retro gear haha...

Gonna bring this thread back from the dead.

Current Rig:

Intel 3770K 3.5Ghz Quad Core 4GBs Generic DDR3-1600Ghz RAM Jetway Q77 Motherboard (I like my "workstation boards") 240GB Intel 3 […]
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Intel 3770K 3.5Ghz Quad Core
4GBs Generic DDR3-1600Ghz RAM
Jetway Q77 Motherboard (I like my "workstation boards")
240GB Intel 335 SSD
PC Power & Cooling 400w PSU (This is getting replaced.. It's acted weird through 2 motherboards now)
Nvidia GT230 (GTX750 when ever I get around to it)
Auzentech X-Meridian sound card

Retro rig is in air at the moment, prolly end up being a low end early C2D (E6300) XP rig.

I was going to tell you my whole history but damnit this timed login logged me out and when I pressed submit I lost it all. 🙁

So here is a recap-

Way back when my father bought a PC that was a Pentium 1 Packard Bell of some sort, in the late 90's though he found a bunch of other computers to play with that people were throwing out. By the mid 2000's we had whittled it down to his Packard, some form of Compaq p-200 and a Compaq Deskpro Pentium 3. For a brief time we had a Compaq Presario SP1053WM however that computer blew up inside of a year. In the summer of 2008 I purchased a Pentium 4 IBM ThinkCentre S50 with a 2ghz 32bit CPU and 512 MB of RAM for 100$ from Micomp and (like a moron) threw out the Compaq computers and the Packard Bell. I used the old Compaq monitor from our blown up PC and this computer served me well for about a year until the graphics bug bit me and I decided to upgrade. So with Fallout 3 in hand I went back to Micomp and purchased a Hewlett Packard Pavilion a5433w with a E2180 2ghz Pentium Dual Core CPU, 2GB RAM and an Nvidia Geforce 9500GT GFX card with 512mb Vram. That set me back around 500$ but it turns out I wasn't done paying yet, little did I know but my monitor couldn't handle the resolution they had set it at so I went back yet again and purchased an HP1730 LCD monitor for 100$ (The bastards!). Everything went hunky dory until about 2013 when something happened and I thought it was dead for good so I put it off to the side and went without a PC for the time. Not much after I found a Compaq DC7100-SFF at the local Salvation Army for a mere 20$, so I took a gamble and bought it since I happened to notice it was a Hyper Threaded Pentium 4 CPU and sure enough it booted up fine but was chock full of viruses. So rather than combat the hoard of evil that was undoubtedly lurking on that install of OEM Windows XP I decided to give linux a try. The DC7100-SFF has a Pentium 4 HT 64bit CPU clocked at 3ghz and (originally had) 512MB of RAM. It was my first computer I really decided to build up since I had never really gone in and gotten my hands dirty so to speak (I had always left it to the experts and concerned myself with the OS and Networking). So one day craving a performance boost I went and purchased 4 GB of RAM for the Compaq and 2GB of RAM for the IBM ThinkCentre (Now being used by my parents) but that wasn't quite enough. It still wasn't very modern in it's graphics chip set and so I ordered an AMD FirePro 2200 from Ebay for 14$, this was my first venture into AMD products and Dual screens. Now I was cooking with gas. 🤣
In early 2014 I decided I wanted my HP Dual Core back and finally took it in to have it looked at (since I feared it was the mobo). Luckily it only turned out to be my Besttech PSU that had finally kicked the bucket, and so having only been set back 20$ I decided to go whole hog (for me at least) and buy a "new" CPU and some RAM. I purchased an E8400 Core 2 Duo for 30$ and 8GB of RAM for 10$ (Since the ram was not the latest greatest I got a good price). I also ditched Windows Vista and upgraded to Windows 7 when I rebuilt the computer. It was wonderful having it roar back to life after almost a year of collecting dust but as fate would have it I got another upgrade on the cheap.
My graphics card was feeling quite aged by this time, after all it first came out 6 years ago and I mentioned something to a co-worker of mine. To my great surprise he told me he wanted to sell his old GFX card for 50$, since it was an AMD Sapphire HD 7700 with 1GB of Vram I didn't even blink. I bought it immediately and now I'm quite happy with this computer. The graphics blow me away, especially on this HP w1907 monitor I got from Goodwill for 2$, don't worry my HP1730 is still being used too. It's seeing life as my secondary monitor on this rig. 😁

So that's my journey as of yet, we'll see what happens from here but I suspect this will be my go to PC for years to come.
Hope this was entertaining. 😜

One thing I'll say is that the current Mothership is not leaving W7 64 bit anytime soon. W8/W8.1 just looks and acts weird. My brother got 8.1 on a neat laptop this Spring to do CAD work and a bit of gaming, and after enjoying it initially now says it's a very uneven and often frustrating experience. This puts a big question mark on the future Mothership - where to move after W7 runs it's course? Will W9 be a more 'normal' OS?

OT: Eh, I've had 8.1 on my main computer for quite some time. Just put Classic Shell on it and it's just like 7 with better performance. You won't see the tiles again unless you want to.

On topic, mothership PC components:

CPUs:
AMD Am386DX-40
UMC 486 w/ 40 MHz
AMD K5-PR100
AMD K6-200
AMD K6-2/300
AMD Duron 700
AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1333
AMD Athlon XP 2600+
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
AMD Athlon X2 5400+
Intel i7-2600K, current
...longest runners would be the Athlon 1333 (4 or 5 years, don't remember) and the i7 (three years to date and still blazingly fast, no reason to upgrade)

GPU
cheap 256k VGA adapter, OPTi I think
Cirrus Logic CL-GD5424 1MB
Elsa Winner 1000, I think - S3 Trio 64 2 MB
Elsa Victory something, S3 Virge DX 2 MB (or 4 MB? don't remember)
Virge DX w/ Voodoo1 (miro HiScore 3D, 6MB)
Virge DX w/ Voodoo2 12MB
GeForce 2 MX, 32 MB
GeForce 4 Ti 4200, 64 MB
GeForce 7600 GS, 64 MB?
AMD Radeon HD 4660, I think
AMD Radeon HD 6770, 1 GB, current

Audio
PC speaker
unidentified 16bit card, later w/ unidentified Wavetable daughtercard
AWE 64 Value
SB Live!
SB Audigy
SB Audigy 2
M-Audio MobilePre USB - there's still an Audigy 2 in there, but I use this almost exclusively. It's just convenient.

Mobos - that's hard
unidentified 386
486 with VLB, UMC chipset
Soyo something-or-other, I think Socket 7, could've been Socket 5
Gigabyte GA-586, don't know which one anymore, definitely Socket 7, not Super Socket 7
Abit KT7-RAID
Abit KD7-RAID
Asus K7V-333, I think (for a short period after the Abit died, the Asus didn't take long to blow some capacitors either)
MSI K9N-Neo??? something like that
Gigabyte P67A-D3-B3 (current)

Went from 4 MB of RAM to 16 GB in less than two decades.

obobskivich wrote:

I think it's also a reflection of hardware not making the strides it once did in terms of performance - between the early 1990s to the early 2000s improvements in CPU/GPU/etc performance were usually many orders of magnitude (consider a 486 vs a Pentium 4 for a moment), but from the early 2000s to the early 2010s the improvements weren't as substantial (consider Pentium 4 to Core i7).

I'd say the jump in CPU performance from the early 2000s to the early 2010s was nearly as great. Consider this:

-A 66MHz 486 system from 1993 will not play a 128Kbps MP3 without major stuttering.
-A 2.66GHz P4 build from 2003 will play the same MP3 track showing 0-2% overall system CPU utilization. This P4, however, will not decode a 25mb/s 1080p H.264 video file (in software) without major playback issues. Frame rate will be around 13fps, and the CPU will be completely pegged.
-A 3.4GHz Core i7 4930k build from 2013 will play that same 25Mb/s video file with just 1-3% CPU utilization using a software decoder. Turn on hardware decode, and CPU usage will drop to 0% and stay there.

The 1990s do seem to have been a time of very rapid technological advance in computing, compared to both earlier and later eras.

I'm in the process of having the last massive upgrade for my mothership computer - SSD added, HD4870X2 replaced faulty HD5670, Corsair RM750 replaced a tired 450W Inwin/Powerman PSU and a full tower Thermaltake Shark case is going to replace a half-decent Inwin. The case is about to be bought, the seller delays the deal for some reason.

In the meanwhile, my mothership PC is this:

Ahlon XP 2600+ Barton core
GA-7n400S
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
1.5GB DDR2-400
Creative Audigy ES (For the first time I have EAX)
ASUS PCI-N10 wireless PCI adapter
Seagate Barracuda 7200 250GB SATA
Pioneer DVR-111 DVD-RW drive making funny noises yet functioning well
New, budget yet trustworthy Zalman 450GS PSU

The build is stuffed into my old Inwin case. It's also got an 5.25 STW F4 4-fan controller with 4 thermal sensors and a screen to monitor temperature/RPM. The controller and the case have some special synergy, providing that special feeling of period-correctness, although none are actually period-correct.

It runs Windows XP SP2 with Opera 9.64 I missed oh so much. The interface and the functionality are awesome, altough it is no longer compatible with a lot of websites. I played a little Max Payne on it, then started Gothic II: NoTR and lost track of time for several days. Btw, Gothic II gives 100% CPU load %) After several hours of gameplay the temperature of CPU and GPU heatsink (measured nead core) is 40/42°C. Not bad:)

CPUs:
AMD 386DX-30
486 DX-2 (60mhz I think?)
Pentium 166 (IBM Aptiva)
Pentium 166 MMX (Some Packard Bell that was given to me)
AMD K6-2 300
AMD K6-2+ 550
Pentium III 600
Athlon Thunderbird 1400 (Heat Sink Clip let loose and the chip fried)
Athlon XP-M 2400+ 1.8ghz
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
AMD Phenom II 965
Intel Core i7 2600k

GPUs:
ATI Rage II+
Palit Daytona SiS 6326
3dLabs Permedia 2
Nvidia TNT2 M64 (I was so let down by this card I bought with allowance money as a kid)
Nvidia GeForce 256 - The original GeForce, found in a 5 dollar bin around the time the GeForce 2 came out)
Nvidia GeForce 3 ti500 (First card I was blown away by - Morrowind ran so well)
ATI x800 GTO (Did something with the BIOS to unlock pixel pipes or something? Killer card)
GeForce 8600GT (Another let down by Nvidia... Terrible card)
ATI 4850
ATI 4850 X2
GeForce 660 Ti

Sound Cards: - I don't remember a lot of the cards I had
mWave in the IBM
Sound Blaster AWE32 - Huge card with the expandable memory that I have no idea what for
Aureal Vortex (found in the same 5 dollar bin as the GeForce 256)
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
Sound Blaster Live!
Sound Blaster Audigy
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Currently using onboard

Motherboards - Really really don't remember these much
SuperMicro P6DBE (found at yard sale for five bucks with the Permedia 2)
ECS K7S5A Pro
There were always piles of motherboards I had laying around... Only remember these two because one took two different types of memory, and the other could handle two slot 1 processors.

It's been a long adventure now that I look back on it...

Private_Ops wrote:

Gonna bring this thread back from the dead. […]
Show full quote

Gonna bring this thread back from the dead.

Current Rig:

Intel 3770K 3.5Ghz Quad Core 4GBs Generic DDR3-1600Ghz RAM Jetway Q77 Motherboard (I like my "workstation boards") 240GB Intel 3 […]
Show full quote

Intel 3770K 3.5Ghz Quad Core
4GBs Generic DDR3-1600Ghz RAM
Jetway Q77 Motherboard (I like my "workstation boards")
240GB Intel 335 SSD
PC Power & Cooling 400w PSU (This is getting replaced.. It's acted weird through 2 motherboards now)
Nvidia GT230 (GTX750 when ever I get around to it)
Auzentech X-Meridian sound card

Retro rig is in air at the moment, prolly end up being a low end early C2D (E6300) XP rig.

E6300 was not a low-end C2D! It belonged to mid-end (remember, there were still LGA775 Pentiums) and, as far as I remember from the reviews I read when I got one new, it was faster or on par than most top-end AMD CPUs at that moment.

CPU:
Pentium 100
Pentium 166 MMX
Pentium II 350
Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton)
Core 2 Duo E6300
Core 2 Duo E7600
Core i5-4690

GPU:
Onboard 1MB chip.
Trio64V+
RivaTNT (PCI)
Radeon 9600
GeForce 6600GT (AGP)
GeForce 7600GT (PCIe)
GeForce GTX 260
GeForce GTX 660

Soundcard:
Onboard for life!
Except for a short spurt with a Creative Vibra 128.

Motherboard:
Unknown socket 5 motherboard. Computer built by AST
Unknown socket 7 motherboard. Computer built by Brick
QDI P6I440BX B1S (Slot 1. Survived all kinds of abuse, still works)
Abit NF7-S v2.0
Asus P5B
Asus H97M-PLUS

I used that Pentium 100 all the way from 95-96 until I found a used Pentium 166 MMX system for cheap in about 02-03. Upgraded a few months later to a used slot 1 system. A few months after that I bought my first brand new home assembled PC around the Athlon XP 2500+. I upgraded to a C2D a few years later, which I kept using for years.