Most significant upgrade you ever made ?

gesicht said:
2600 barton > Q6600
x800 gto flashed > 8800GT
same system upgrade
Click to expand...

Did the same path upgrade myself. Going from my i7 950 to my i7 8700k was a pretty big difference as well.
 
My first PC was a 486 SX 33. And as noted by many above, there were numerous mile stones along the way. But honestly, not that I miss all of the tinkering and spending money, but back then you had to upgrade something at least every 6 months to keep up with the latest games. And when you did that upgrade, you could almost always see/feel the difference (even in day to day activities). Unlike the last several years where you can upgrade anything and tell no difference at all. At least back then, you felt like you were actually getting something for your money.
 
Mine was a major upgrade from an Athlon x2 64 6000+ & 7800GTX to a I7-4790K & 970FTW. I also upgraded to SSD at that time. I couldnt believe the speeds.
 
When I was 13 in 1994, I spent $3200 I've earned to buy a Compaq Presario 486 dx100...it was great...but unfortunately as much as I upgraded the parts to it, I never upgraded the cpu. It wasn't until 1998 I could afford to purchase a Pentium II-450 with a sound blaster awe 32 and a Voodoo Banshee all together. That difference from the 486/100 to the pentium II has been what I consider the most MAJOR upgrade pc wise. While I'm not exactly old or young in the pc thing, I also was massively impressed with how solid state memory changed how things are, but in my case it wasn't an ssd, but actually a 8 gig ram disk I messed with when my old Core 2 Quad 9500 (or somehting like that) had 32 gigs of ram back before ssd's were a thing. That kinda made me realize how sucky spinning drives were. Now ALL my systems require a ssd or nvme drive.

My most insignificant upgrade? Probably getting a 5960x in my main machine over my 5930k. Both are wonderful, but I ate a lot of humble pie realizing that I really didn't do things that justified the difference between the two until this year. Despite owning the 5960x for over 3 years now.
 
trentchau said:
When I was 13 in 1994, I spent $3200 I've earned to buy a Compaq Presario 486 dx100...it was great...but unfortunately as much as I upgraded the parts to it, I never upgraded the cpu. It wasn't until 1998 I could afford to purchase a Pentium II-450 with a sound blaster awe 32 and a Voodoo Banshee all together. That difference from the 486/100 to the pentium II has been what I consider the most MAJOR upgrade pc wise. While I'm not exactly old or young in the pc thing, I also was massively impressed with how solid state memory changed how things are, but in my case it wasn't an ssd, but actually a 8 gig ram disk I messed with when my old Core 2 Quad 9500 (or somehting like that) had 32 gigs of ram back before ssd's were a thing. That kinda made me realize how sucky spinning drives were. Now ALL my systems require a ssd or nvme drive.

My most insignificant upgrade? Probably getting a 5960x in my main machine over my 5930k. Both are wonderful, but I ate a lot of humble pie realizing that I really didn't do things that justified the difference between the two until this year. Despite owning the 5960x for over 3 years now.
Click to expand...

Back in those days, upgrades were more pronounced due to the speed at which hardware was evolving. The last ten years have been much more incremental as the shift towards efficiency and performance per watt has put raw performance on the back burner.
 
Intel p1 233 mhz to Intel p4 2.6 ghz
Dial up to Cable 20 mbps
Spin to Raptor to SSD
1080p to 4K
on board graphic to AMD 9700
 
Most significant software-wise - the migration from Windows XP/2003 to 2008 Server. About that time MS introduced Superfetch I think andI felt the most dramatic performance boost that can compete with HDD -> SSD step few years ago which... was also maybe the equally big leap.
Otherwise I always see computers as a means to do something and I upgrade platforms once in 7-8 years. Can't tell one prominent upgrade path that made me Wow. Maybe the Duron 1.3 GHz after a P166MMX when I could for the first time watch a movie on a computer normally :) which impressed me the most then.
My next upgrades were nice of course (once in 4-7-8 years) but not something I did not expect. Maybe the other way around, I expect too much but then someone tells me CPUs are only so much progressing, 5-10% from generation to generation.
 
Most significant PC upgrades for me have been video (big 4K screens) and audio (DAC/amp/speakers/subwoofer).
 
A year ago, going from a Q9550 / 8GB RAM /GTX780 / Samsung 840 Pro to a new X299 platform with an i9-7940X @ 4.8Ghz All Cores, 64GB 3600 DDR4, NVME Drives and 1080Ti - all watercooled and overclocked.
 
Its very difficult to pick the most significant. If I really had to pick the most significant, I think it would be moving from a green-and-black monochrome display to glorious 4-colour CGA back when I was a kid.

So basically, in a kinda-descending order:
1) Going from green-and-black monochrome display to 4-colour CGA,
?) Going from CGA to 256-colour VGA,
?) Getting my first CD-ROM drive,
?) Going from PC speaker to AdLib sound card,
?) Getting a 3.5" stiffy drive in addition to the 5.25" floppy drive,
?) Going from AdLib to my Pro Audio Spectrum, included in the said CD-ROM drive package above, and finally
?) Getting my first SSD.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Nenu
like this
GDI Lord said:
Wait, what? How? How did you earn what was essentially a bazillion dollars for a 13-year old?
Click to expand...

A year of physical therapy after a Ford Mustang Sideswiped the car we were in. Insurance settlement. The earning part was pretty much the shit show of pain, which when you consider how limber young kids are, I probably lucked out on that it wasn't worse.
 
GDI Lord said:
Its very difficult to pick the most significant. If I really had to pick the most significant, I think it would be moving from a green-and-black monochrome display to glorious 4-colour CGA back when I was a kid.

So basically, in a kinda-descending order:
1) Going from green-and-black monochrome display to 4-colour CGA,
?) Going from CGA to 256-colour VGA,
?) Getting my first CD-ROM drive,
?) Going from PC speaker to AdLib sound card,
?) Getting a 3.5" stiffy drive in addition to the 5.25" floppy drive,
?) Going from AdLib to my Pro Audio Spectrum, included in the said CD-ROM drive package above, and finally
?) Getting my first SSD.
Click to expand...

Haha yep, if you want to go that far, moving from a ZX81 to a BBC Micro Model B!
From black and white block character (8x8) graphics, no sound, flat keyboard, 1K ram on a 1MHz CPU with cassette load/save...
To 16 colour hires gfx (was really 8 colour), amazing full frequency beeps, proper full keyboard, 32K ram on a 2MHz CPU with floppy disk load/save.
A much more comprehensive BASIC with built in Assembler.
Wow!

I converted an Atari 2600 console joystick to work on it.
Games were fantastic, Defender, Zalaga, Pacman ... were practically perfect arcade clones.
And dont forget Elite!! It had the only early version of the game that let you do all the missions.
Life was golden!
 
Last edited:
Each one of these was a "wow" moment for me that made me remember it vividly when I first experienced it.

For download speeds:
2400 baud modem --> USR Courier 14.4 HST Dual Standard (1990)
BBS pages load so quickly now! Holy crap downloads are fast! Hey, I can get my Trade Wars turns done much faster.

USR Courier v.Everything --> Cable internet (1997)
Phone lines suck.

For video:
IBM PC Herculese and CGA --> ATI VGA Wonder (on Sony 1302 monitor) (1988)
Color. Glorious color! 256 of them out of 262144! Downloads first AVI video at 2400 baud from local BBS: Look at that can of Jolt spin around!

For sound:
PC Speaker --> Roland LAPC-1 (1989)
Finally, my PC has real sound. Games are absolutely incredible now.

For CPU:
80286 8MHz (college-issued PC) --> 80486 DX2 66MHz (my own PC) (1993)
Wow this is fast. This is how games are supposed to be played. Now I understand why people buy the fastest hardware available at the time.

For disks:
40 MB HDD --> 1 GB HDD (1993)
Ahhhh... disk space. Damn, that was a lot of money. So much disk space...

For games in general:
Matrox Millenium --> Orchid Righteous 3D Voodoo 1 3DFX (well, the Matrox stayed since the Voodoo used passthru for 2D work) (1996)
Whoa, what is this? I've never seen such smooth and fluid 3D graphics. It is like an arcade game. This is going the future of gaming on the PC and I am a part of it. Awesome!

For overclocking:
Celeron 300A @ 300 MHz --> Celeron 300A @ 450MHz (1998)
50% overclock?! From a cheap CPU? How is this even possible?

For noise and disk storage in general:
Spinning platter HDD --> SSD (2012)
No more bearing noise. No more seek noise. So much speed. So quiet. Damn fans and their noise.
 
Bunch of people going to Q6600s and SSDs
Click to expand...

Yes, for me going from a single core 2.6-2.8ghz S939 Athlon 64 3000+ with 2gb of DDR400 and an AGP ATI 9600 pro to a Q6600(at 3.6ghz) with 2gb of DDR2 1066 and a BFG 8800gt 512mb gpu was a large boost.

I do think that one the largest all around improvements I'll ever appreciate would be when I got my first Intel X25M G2 80gb ssd for that same Q6600 build.
 
Oooh, tough to say.

Replacing my aging Pentium 166mhz IBM Aptiva a90 with a celeron 400mhz and Voodoo 2 brought me into the world of 3d accelerated graphics.
I jumped from a voodoo 2 to a geforce 2gts which felt like a big jump.
Replacing my Geforce 5200 with a 6800gt put me back the high end for a while.
Once my 6800gt system started showing it's age I jumped to the 8800gt x2.

I replaced my amd phenom 2 965 (with 2x6870) with a i5 4670k with a gtx 780 and that one lasted me up until November 2017 when I replaced my 780 with a 1080. Also adding a ssd to this rig helped immensely.
There were other upgrades here and there between, but those felt like the biggest jumps.
 
Last edited:
spine said:
The ATI Radeon 9700Pro was a game changer for me. Coupled with the release of BF2, gaming just had never been better, or arguably since. The pinnacle of PC multiplayer gaming and graphics progress right there. :cool:
Click to expand...
Exactly my story. I had ATI Rage LT Pro to an 8x AGP 9700 pro... I even had additional heat spreaders on the ram. Hooked on Battlefield
 
The upgrade that blew my mind back in the day was adding a 4MB Orchid Righteous 3DFX card to the system alongside a Matrox Mystique PCI graphics card! The difference in games that had been patched to run on the 3DFX card was like nothing myself and friends had ever seen outside of a video arcade! I can remember playing Tomb Raider on it and seeing Lara's chest with curves instead of triangles was droolworthy at the time lol
 
During the 2000's I mostly never upgraded anything. Maybe it was back in 2001 my main rig was a dual p3 1.13 tualatin with an ATI TV capture card; at least, all the drives were SCSI. Next big upgrade was 2011, a maximus gene motherboard, 2500k, all SSD 16GB ram, and an ATI 6950, quicky upgraded to a GTX680 which I still have; plugged it all into a 55" Toshiba TV and used an old stereo receiver & speakers for sound instead of the little under monitor radio shack gadget. Noticeable upgrade? You betcha. Other than the video card, all parts for that machine are still the same.
 
went from a pentium 90 to an Athlon 700 - that was a jump. other than that the biggest jump was going from my nv6800 to a 8800gtx
 
  • Like
Reactions: N4CR
like this
I didn't get into PC's until later in life but the biggest jump I made was a GTX 680 to a GTX 1080ti.. Just a bit of a performance jump.
 
The biggest wow moment for me was going from a Pentium 4 2.4GHz on Windows 98 and moving to a Pentium 4 3.06 "supporting Hyperthreading Technology" on XP.

Not sure how much of that was the CPU or the OS but since then I've never had another moment like that. Multitasking was significantly faster and the game I was playing at the time was much faster.

Looking back, I don't remember the PIII 1GHz to P4 2.4 upgrade I had prior as a huge uplift but you would think it would be. I just don't remember.

In modern era, there really hasn't been a moment like that. Moving to an SSD around 2010 the first time was nice, but it wasn't noticeable until I went back to a HDD on the same system just to see how much worse it was. That was significant but I only noticed it going backwards.
 
Last edited:
gigabyte audros Intel z390 gaming m matx with 2x nmve drive slots.... stupid fast hdd performance
 
How 'bout a Texas Instrument Graphic (TI-81) Calculator to a Commodore 64??
 
Honestly, for me it was when I first moved to my Dell 34" QHD Display. That curved ultra-wide goodness at 3.5K is/was oh so good.

-Silver
 
On board graphics to a Voodoo card back when Half Life 1 released. Holy crap.
 
Viper16 said:
Mine was a major upgrade from an Athlon x2 64 6000+ & 7800GTX to a I7-4790K & 970FTW. I also upgraded to SSD at that time. I couldnt believe the speeds.
Click to expand...
That's a massive upgrade. You waited quite a while I'm surprised.
 
HTC Vive - Hands down, no other computer purchase ever blew my mind like that, if you can call VR an upgrade.

Before that though:

TNT2 M64 -> Geforce 3
15" 1024x768 LCD -> 20" 1600x1200 LCD
A64 3200+ -> Q6600
Spinny HDD -> SSD
2600k -> 3950x :p
 
In order of significance

serial port mouse -> ps2 mouse (10hz sampling rate to 200hz overclocked, very much a - you don't know what you don't know)
PC Speaker -> Sound blaster (another didn't know what I didn't know until I went to a friends house and their wolfenstein 3d was way better than mine)
quake 2 software -> rendition v2100 (opengl)
286 -> 486
dialup->cable
HDD->SSD
rendition v2100 -> Voodoo 2 12mb


Also I saw somebody else post this and it's true
Windows 3.1->Windows 95
 
andrewaggb said:
dialup->cable
Click to expand...

That's a really good one!

I remember when we moved from where we had dial up and every minute online was counted and expensive and slow AF, forget downloading anything, to suddenly having always-on flat rate cable, it boggled my little mind. Leaving the internet "on" was like leaving the hot water tap open, or the stove on.
 
Going from my 486 DX-2 66 with an ISA only motherboard so Cirrus Logic 1MB graphics card to a Pentium 200MMX system with an S3 Virge 4MB/3dfx Voodoo 1 that I built in 1997.......like everyone else at the time GLQuake was an amazing sight, considering my 486 struggled to run Doom because of the ISA video card!
 
For video card upgrades, the S3 Virge to a DIamond Monster 3D (Voodoo 1) was mind blowing.
 
Krispy Kritter said:
My first PC was a 486 SX 33. And as noted by many above, there were numerous mile stones along the way. But honestly, not that I miss all of the tinkering and spending money, but back then you had to upgrade something at least every 6 months to keep up with the latest games. And when you did that upgrade, you could almost always see/feel the difference (even in day to day activities). Unlike the last several years where you can upgrade anything and tell no difference at all. At least back then, you felt like you were actually getting something for your money.
Click to expand...

I think that's due to back then PC owners had an actual real need for a PC and so when they upgraded, it was out of necessity.

*Looks at all that RGB crap out there today* :cautious::rolleyes:
 
Cool thread. For me one that sticks out is the first part I ever bought. I had an HP with an Athlon xp 2800+ and integrated GeForce 4 mx graphics or whatever it was, and upgraded to a GeForce 4 ti4400. That was nuts, since I thought the games were just supposed to be running at 10fps before that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top