What game did you Build your 1st Rig around?

Comixbooks

Comixbooks

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I was using a Dell Dimension for Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot. I built my first rig a AMD XP 3000 and a 5200 FX for Everquest 2 in 2002 I wanted to play that game really bad like I knew my current Dell Dimension couldn't handle it.
The thing is the Rig I built could hardly handle the game so I added 512 megs of value select Corsair and was in business with loading times.
 
I've been a gamer since the early 80's but actually built my first rig in 09 so I could play Crysis. I was broke as hell so it wasn't fancy.. AMD 7750 and MSI 9600GT all at 1024x768 lol. Spent more time tweaking settings and benchmarking than I did actually playing it lol.
 
I can't say I've ever built a system around a single game. The closest I've come to doing that was around the time Crysis was coming out I built the highest end system I could afford and wanted to see how well Crysis would run on it when the game finally released. Though that was a good seven months before it released. Comparing the $1300 I spent on that system to what you could get today for the same amount of money (about $1600 counting for inflation), if video cards were at normal prices, its a pretty clear sign of how far prices have dropped on hardware and how much the price to performance has gone up.

I can't find the specs or price of the very first system I built since most of it came from Zipzoomfly but I didn't even build it to play games so much as I wanted to have something that I bought and built myself. It wasn't a super high end system or even super expensive. I remember it had some Gigabyte socket A board that kept dying on me until I got sick of RMAing it and bought a DFI one, it also had an Athlon 2500+ and according to Newegg I bought a single stick of 512mb DDR1. Can't remember the GPU model number off hand, but it was an ATI card. One of the ones that you could firmware unlock to make it perform like a better card. I do know it was the first and last Powercolor card I ever bought as the fan on it died while I was away from home for a couple hours and the entire card fried itself.
 
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Started watching The screen savers as a kid that liked tech. Saw that Doom 3 was going to be released and I had to have it, and an optiplex gx110 wasnt going to cut it. So budget system, sempron 2500, 256mb of ram because I didn't really understand what ram did then. And a Nvidia GeForce 440mx. It ran it but not well. Later bumped it to 512mb and it was ok. Then after that put in an fx 5200 so it would keep up with NR 2003
 
I have been building computers for over 30 years. My father would bring home computer parts that the company he worked for would throw away. I remember putting in a new memory card, ISA I believe, sucker was longer than any video card ever was and it only had 1 mega byte of ram. The first system I ever went out and bought, when I was a younger, was a x86 286/16.. and I built it so I could play Mech Warrior 2.
 
Been playing PC games since the mid 90s but was using prebuilt Packard Bells and Compaqs. Loved the Mechwarrior series and Mechwarrior 2 ran well on mediocre systems but by the time Mechwarrior 4 came out you needed a decent dedicated GPU. The first hardware upgrade for me was a GeForce 2 Ti paired with a 733Mhz PIII. The first full build for me was for Doom 3. Slapped together an Athlon XP 3000+ and and FX 5700 and it did alright. It wasn't until I later upgraded to the 6600GT that Doom 3 ran really well on high settings.
 
Wing Commander

I had a 286 at the time with CGA graphics when I bought the game. I upgraded to a 386DX 40 MHz (WOOOT AMD!) with a Trident VGA video card and a whopping 2MB of RAM.
 
I bought a Commodore PC with a Cyrix 166+ CPU, with an EDGE 3D GPU and souncard on 1 card, oh how stupid was I, did not take me long to get a new soundcard so I had sound in more then 2 games, not that much later I rebuilt most of that PC for Duke3D iirc with a Pentium 200MMX and probably some matrox GPU
 
I didn't build it, but I spent like $1700 for a Sony Vaio with a P2 266 at the Base Exchange where I was stationed. But it still wouldn't play Quake 2 well enough, so I spent a buttload more money for a 3dfx Voodoo. Worked great!

This was in 1997, LOL.
 
Holiday season 2000, I was 16.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Evolve, and Sacrifice were the "shiniest" games at the time....

So I scrimped, saved, and planned carefully. Ended up with this:

Duron 700mhz
256mb SDRAM
Geforce 2 GTS 64mb
20GB Seagate
SB Live!

While awesome, I kinda wish I could go back and tell myself to get the 32mb Geforce 2 GTS instead and spend the difference on a PIII 866mhz.

I was soooo close to actually going this route, but I didn't fully understand how vcard RAM worked lol. (I thought bigger numbers were the tits etc)
 
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AMD k6-2 450@500 128mb pc100 and ati rage xl for ut99....

p3 450 256mb pc100, tnt2 ultra for sierra viper racing / some sort of offroad game that came after

duron 600 @ 700 256mb pc133..... kyro2 for q3....

current.....for everything I own.....
 
Don't think I've ever built a PC around any specific game. It was more like I began buying higher end GPUs to enhance whatever games I was playing at the time. To that end, my first "advanced" GPU was a BFG GeForce 6800.
 
Diablo. Friend of mine had it on his moms Emachine PC, I was blown away by it & this little thing called Internet Multiplayer.

AMD K62 350mhz
 
First gaming PC was built for Half-life Deathmatch/Counter-Strike (Thunderbird + GeForce 2 MX400). I did build a PC before that but it wasn't really a gaming PC but I played Starcraft and Warcraft 2 on it (AMD K6-2 500mhz, Savage 3D). Did play some CS on the K6-2 machine but only got like 30fps.
 
My dad was the alpha geek in my family. I always inherited the old pc when he upgraded, which was fine because he upgraded frequently and the hand-me-down was always quite good.

But I remember buying my ATI 9600 256mb to play DOOM 3 with my own money.
 
It was Pentium 4-based (though I originally had a Celeron in it until I could afford the Pentium 4 - because high school student), Geforce 4 4200 (maybe?) - and can't remember the rest of the specs. It was light blue in colour.

Looking back, I don't remember any specific game I would've built it for, I was primarily playing Tribes 2 so probably wanted to play it at a fast clip.
 
First time I ever upgraded a PC past its initial specs was a Pentium 166 machine to run Combat Flight Simulator... probably 1997-ish.
 
Sadly, my TRS-80 Color Computer 3 was abandoned by Tandy/Radio Shack and the PC really started to explode with games. My stepfather bought an IBM compatible PC for gaming and I was introduced to what was coming out on that platform.

In 1991 my stepfather had gotten Might & Magic II: Gates to Another World on his PC and I was rarely allowed to play it on his machine (he was busy playing on it himself). So that summer (using money I saved up from a summer job) I built my own 286-12 w/1M of RAM, EGA graphics and a 40M IDE HDD. I priced it all out and ordered it piecemeal from the pages of Computer Shopper magazine when those things were bigger than a telephone book. This same machine later received an upgrade to an AdLib sound card to accommodate Eye of the Beholder. Later upgrades were VGA, 4M of RAM (SIPP modules, no less), and a 80287 math co-processor. This machine lasted me until 1995 when it got replaced by an AMD 5x86-133 P75 system I also built.
 
There was always a pretty decent computer around the house due to my fathers work and i always got the handme down that i would do small upgrades too but half life 2 was the first scratch build for me.
X800 pro that i had worked all summer to saveup for is the only component i can remember haha, that card lasted me over 2 years until i got a 1950pro
 
First for me was battlefield 1942 with a 9700 pro. Before that I got hand me down parts from my dad
 
I didn't build a PC around a game, but I did upgrade my PC quite a bit to play Battlefield 2 decently.
 
486 - Doom.

Pentium 66mhz - Starcraft and Wing Commander 4.

AMD Duron +1700 with a Radeon 9200. Later upgraded to a Radeon 9600xt. The first one I ever really built - Ghost Recon.

AMD x2 3800. 2x 7600gt in sli. Where my passion for system building started. I started ignoring consoles at this point and was a proud PC gamer. - World of Warcraft shortly after release.
 
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My first build was a Celeron 400, that I overclocked to 448. This was to play Asheron's Call, with I believe, a Riva TNT2 video card.
 
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It was a robbery planning simulator called The Clue

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clue!

Could not get enough things in extended memory to run it on my old PC so upgraded. Tweaking config files to try and get to 580k free memory, those were the days.

Never really had a problem after that, got new graphics card for HL2, rebuilt my PC last year for VR. That's about it.
 
NASCAR Racing 2002 Season was the game I built my first PC for. Needed to take advantage of that DirectX 8.1 goodness with Windows XP.

I didn't build a new PC for DirectX 9 and Half-Life 2, but I did buy a new video card. I still didn't have a lot of disposable income, so went with a GeForce FX 5900 XT. If I could go back in time I would tell myself to go for the Radeon 9600 XT instead.

The second PC I built was for Crysis. Needed to take advantage of that DirectX 10 goodness with Windows Vista. Cost four times as much as my first.

The third PC I built was for Battlefield 3. Needed to take advantage of that DirectX 11 goodness with Windows 7. Cost half as much as my second. Still running the same PC to this day.
 
Comixbooks said:
I was using a Dell Dimension for Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot. I built my first rig a AMD XP 3000 and a 5200 FX for Everquest 2 in 2002 I wanted to play that game really bad like I knew my current Dell Dimension couldn't handle it.
The thing is the Rig I built could hardly handle the game so I added 512 megs of value select Corsair and was in business with loading times.
Click to expand...

Unreal Tournament. I initially had an HP with integrated 8mb graphics that wasn't cutting it, so my next machine needed a gfx card to handle Unreal. Unfortunately, this was all on a cashier/retail $7/hr wage, so the rig never really handled Unreal that well.
 
My first entirely home-built rig was a Pentium 133 with Duke 3D and Quake in mind.
The first games I actually wish I had a better PC for were the D&D Ravenloft and Menzoberranzan games. They crashed like mad on my Packard Bell 486.
 
Flight Simulator 2000. I had played most of the previous versions but FS2000 was pretty demanding and required a few upgrades to play well. A Pentium III I believe. Couldn't wait to fly the concorde and the Boeing 777. I had to upgrade again when "The Century of Flight" came out and Call of Duty my first FPS which is the love of my life in gaming.
 
Quake 1 would have been the driving force, as I recall I had a MX200 Mhz CPU and a Matrox Mystique. I was able to see Quake in all it's 3D accelerated glory however I followed up with a Voodoo card as the Mystique was a little slow.
 
My most memorable pc purchase was when I was 17 I visited relatives in the states and brought back a 486dx2 in a suitcase. I cant remember if I bought it or built it though.
 
I was always into motorsports, so when I saw Test Drive 5 on a friends computer I knew I wanted to play it. But my macine was a pentium 233mx with a integrated 1mb gpu and no soundcard, 32mb of ram and 2.1 gb hdd. So I went and bought a creative blaster sound card and Diamond Monster II 8mb gpu. Except it turns out, it needed a separate GPU to work, as it was used for 3D gaming only. So had to buy some 4mb gpu (don't remember the make), and after that Test Drive 5 was running fine on it. This was all in 1999.
 
FIC PA-2013 super socket 7 with AMD K62-350 (later upgraded to K63+450) 128MB and a Riva TNT card and AWE64 (still have everything but the VooDoo2 too), shortly after I added a VooDoo2. This was to play Quake 2, coming from a P233MMX with 16MB and no 3d acceleration.
 
First computer I built was an Am386-SX40 (the 486 was already out when I built it, but damn were those expensive); this was probably late '91 or early '92.
* 1MB (4x256KB SIMMs) of RAM
* 255MB (yes, you read that right: MB) Samsung HDD
* (the following were carry-overs from the 8088XT this system replaced)
* 1.44MB 3.5" and 1.2MB 5.25" FDDs
* Paradise EGA480 graphics card

Didn't build it specifically around any game(s), but it was nice to finally have an actual HDD to store all my games on, since the circa 1989 8088XT I had was run off of FDD only. The EGA480 lasted until I scored a deal on a 1MB VGA graphics card and found a floor demo 15" N.I. SVGA monitor at a local big box retailer...I think both together ended up costing $200-225, which was a steal of a deal back then.

That build lasted until the winter of 1996, when it was replaced by a build consisting of a Cyrix 6x86 P120+, 32MB RAM, I think a 1.2GB HDD, and a Trident 9440 4MB graphics card. Windows 95 was installed from the FDD version (thirteen 3.5" diskettes!)
 
World of Warcraft.

I wanted a new computer because it wasn't up to the snuff, and the first game I played on my new was WoW.

But I wouldn't say I specc'ed my computer exclusively for WoW. After all the build survived for 3 years before I upgraded.
 
around 1994 or so I got my first P166 to fly D.I.D.'s EF2000. Ever since I build rigs for flightsims. If it can run a flightsim properly, it can run anything ;)
 
I always had PC's growing up and they would normally handle the games I wanted to play, however the one I specifically build for was Half-Life in '98, it was a Voodoo II card I believe.
 
I haven't built a PC with a specific game in mind since I built my first back in 2000-2001 for Counter Strike and Everquest.

Ever since, God willing (and the OK from the old lady) - I just buy the best of everything I can afford and pray it lasts me a solid 3-4 years.
 
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