What game did you Build your 1st Rig around?

[M76]

I upgraded from 4 to 8MB of ram because of Nascar in 1995

That's probably the first and last piece of hardware that I got with a singular game in mind.

 

[dyscreet]

I think mine was Half-Life 2 with a purchase of an ATI 9800 pro. That card was beast.

 

[Saturn_V]

386DX, for LucasArt's X-Wing

X-Wing as my raison d'etre too, but it was a 486DX4 100Mhz that Gateway 2000 built in 1994.

Sure miss those black and white cow boxes.

 

[zamardii12]

Doom 3 in 2004. I had bought a HP PC at Best Buy (rather my parents did) which was great. Had a Athlon 64 x2, 2gb ram... I then used my own money and bought the 6800gt at launch along with a upgraded PSU. So I didn't build it, but it was my first foray into building PCs of any kind. Half Life 2 was in my considerations too as was Far Cry.

Shit... 2004 had Far Cry, Doom 3, and Half Life 2 release. What a epic year.

 

[Nytegard]

I've never built a PC around a game. My first build was in 1998 and upgraded yearly, but no specific games in mind for that. I have bought prebuilt computers though for games, particularly King's Quest 5 & 6, as well as Betrayal in Antara.

 

[Sonicks]

I think mine was Half-Life 2 with a purchase of an ATI 9800 pro. That card was beast.

Half-Life 2 was also the game I built my first PC around. I had wanted the 9800 Pro but that was out of my price range and went with an Nvidia 6600 GT instead.

Later when I got a summer job before my last year in high school I built a PC around Battlefield 2 and managed to have enough money for a 7800 GTX.

 

[Sikpupi]

Wing Commander III (Damn I feel old!)

 

[zamardii12]

I think mine was Half-Life 2 with a purchase of an ATI 9800 pro. That card was beast.

Remember years before Half Life 2 released, there were ATI cards being sold with a voucher for a free copy of Half Life 2? I remember that. I didn't have a PC at the time but my dad did. He needed to upgrade the graphics card for some reason (not for gaming) and I remember being at Best Buy with him looking at them and seeing the box for a ATI card and talking him into getting that one b/c it came with a free copy of Half Life 2 (when it released). I think 2 years after that card is when the game released or something like that.

Found a news tidbit from 2003 about the delay of Half Life 2 and the associated game codes for Half Life 2.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/55224-ati-clarifies-halflife-2-bundle-plans

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ati-offers-bonus-to-half-life-2-bundle-buyers/1100-6077350/

"Many gamers bought a Radeon 9800 XT, 9600 XT, All-in-Wonder 9600 Pro, or 9600 SE card this year because the products included a coupon redeemable for a copy of Half-Life 2."

Whatever card was the cheapest out of those was the one I talked my dad into. Probably the SE. So I was mistaken. A year after the ATi HL2 bundles started, is when the game released. It must have felt like 2 years.

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

Doom lol

 

[McClintoc]

My first "bulid" was a multi-part upgrade of a Compaq Presario in 1999. I installed a NIC, a Voodoo 3 and doubled the RAM from 16MB to 32MB so I could go to LAN parties and play Half-Life DM and Quake 2 DM.

My first true build was a year later for Counter-Strike.

 

[Sardaan]

Porn err Descent... build included the thrustmaster controllers. The year 1995, I actually got the PC in 1994 just before Christmas as the Pentium 90's were released! 486 upgrade

 

[MrC4]

Doom lol

Doom for me as well. Made the mistake of only buying 2 MB of ram instead of the required 4 at $42 per MB . Yes, I said 2 MB of ram.

 

[That_Sound_Guy]

Unreal Tournament

 

[T4rd]

Half Life 2 came out right after I graduate high school and basic training for the Army. Spent my first "big" paycheck on the following:

AMD 64 4000+ (~$730, just under the FX55 that was $1000)
X850 XT PE (~$600)
1GB DDR RAM
Gigabyte nForce 4 Mobo
ThermalTake Xaser III V1000D

I'll never spend that much on a CPU again, at least for my personal rig, lol.

 

[ChoGGi]

I got a copy of Q3A for my birthday, then I found out it required an OpenGL video card

 

[UnknownSouljer]

I got my first computer at around 13. And it was built for me. It was a 200MHz AMD K6 with 64MB of RAM, a 1TB HD, and a Matrox Mystique (with 4MB of RAM!!!). This is if you don't count other machines I used up until that point, like an old Tandy 486 running DOS 4.2.2.

The Mystique wasn't fast enough to play really any truly 3D games of the time. Although it was a "graphics accelerator" there wasn't the kinds of lines drawn then as to today, and companies definitely exploited the definition of what that meant a lot more than today. Technically it did accelerate 2D graphics of the time, very well.

The Mystique allowed me to play quite a few games in that time before I had something that could run the Glide API or OpenGL/DirectX (most on these boards probably don't remember DX1). I played a lot of Fallout 1/2. Diablo 1. Duke Nukem 3D. ROTT. DOOM 1/2. And other big titles of the day.

A few years later I bought an 8MB CreativeLabs Voodoo2 for a friend. That was a revelation. It changed everything for me. It allowed me to play Quake II fluidly. The first night I had it, I fooled around with it all night. The voodoo2 was in service for a while. Through HL and Shogo amongst other FPS’ of the day (Tribes!).

And from there I never really built a full system. I'd just upgrade some of the components here and there throughout HS.

I managed to build a raid setup and got a GeForce 2 MX by around my sophomore year. By that time it was mostly Q3a. Mobo's and CPU's got changed in and out.

 

[craigdt]

The now defunct Paragon made me realize an upgrade from my GT640 was in order.

 

[TwistedMetalGear]

I'm not even sure I know the answer to this question. My first rig was handed down to me from my grandma. It was a Packard Bell with a blazing fast 486 processor which could just about handle Wolfenstein 3D. First rig I built though? Damn I can't even recall. I would guess it was around the time that Half-Life released. I was definitely building custom rigs by the time Unreal Tournament was released. I remember my Voodoo 3 3000 fondly. That thing was a beast. Unreal Tournament with a Voodoo 3 + Glide was soooooo smooth.

 

[redmasc]

Unreal Tournament back in 1999.

 

[oldmanbal]

Technically I put a videocard in the family computer for Quake 3 TA. First actual computer I built from scratch was for Unreal 2: XMP (the multiplayer game that shipped with U2)

 

[oldmanbal]

Half-Life 2 was also the game I built my first PC around. I had wanted the 9800 Pro but that was out of my price range and went with an Nvidia 6600 GT instead.

Later when I got a summer job before my last year in high school I built a PC around Battlefield 2 and managed to have enough money for a 7800 GTX.

When I was playing Battlefield 2 competetively I upgraded 2 7800gtx in sli for 2 7900gtx in sli for better frame rate. Looking back, it was the most egregious hardware upgrade I've ever made. I was a little too obsessed back then apparently.

 

[RomeoGolf87]

Half-Life 2/Counter-Strike: Source. February 2005: Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe, AMD Athlon 3000+, Crucial Ballistix DDR-400 512MB Kit, Evga 6800 Ultra, WD Raptor. Had a lot of fun building my first pc. After the Geforce 7000 series came out that June with BF2, I told myself I would never spend that much money on a video card again! All my previous PCs were prebuilt Dells.

 

[MrGuvernment]

Intel Pentium III 533, intels first 133FSB chip... played Quake Arena back then and Delta Force 2

 

[Pivo504]

Tribes with vodoo card and overclocked cpu..The beginning of building overclocked PCs.

 

[ThreeDee]

Tomb Raider .. PII 350 w/ 128mb PC100, Matrox Millenium G200, 8GB hard drive on an Asus P2B mobo .. Win 98SE !! Messed up windows countless times "tweaking" stuff to maximize gaming capacity turbo settings.. yeah, what she said..

 

[Draax]

Quake 2. I don't remember the specs but I still remember how excited I was to get a Canopus Pure 3D video card.

 

[harmattan]

My first "build" i.e. computer I built from components was a 386DX with Sound Blaster, primarily for Wing Commander, Ultima 7 and King's Quest series.

 

[blert]

Original Diablo

Pentium 3 1 Ghz
256 MB memory
30 GB HD
Voodoo something vid card

 

[Chikia12187]

Cs 1.5 back in 9th grade

 

[N4CR]

My first budget/scraped together parts rig was built for CS/TFC
But my first balls out, no expense spared rig was for HL2. It still played source games at 1080p/60, 7 years later.
Oppy 165 @2.83 (1Ghz+/57%+ OC!!) (Held the air cooled WR for a month or so, took two weeks to get that OC perfect..)
Scythe Ninja Rev 1 939 (still used today on my 2600k via noctua brackets lol)
512mb Corsair XMS 3200 LL hand matched
X800XT
DFI lanparty Ultra-d NF3
80 and 120Gb Seagates
Intellimouse and some 80s' era IBM keyboard (at this point I didn't understand the point of nice screens and input devices..)

Playing O-game really pushed it though.. ;D

 

[Flogger23m]

No particular game, and my first from the ground up PC dedicated with PC gaming wasn't top of the line either. GTX 260, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, AMD 9950BE. Pretty fast for the majority of games at the time but I wasn't using a 1080 monitor back then. Everything prior were lower end PCs with mid tier GPUs shoved in them. FX5700VE, X700Pro, 7600 GS 512MB (or 256?). Being able to run most games at 40-45 frame rates with max settings was amazing. Prior to that I always had to turn settings down.

Gradually my requirements shot up and my hardware has gotten higher end overall, but I still don't go top of the line. I keep upgrading to stay current and no particular game drives my upgrades.

 

[ikevi]

While I didn't build it for just 1 game. The first game I got for it was Quake 2. P2 233, with dual voodoo 2s. It was a beast. I can't remember memory/HD sizes anymore, gone through so many at this point.

I think these threads are just designed to make folks feel old ;-)

 

[twonunpackmule]

I built my first around Oblivion/FEAR. I spent close to $800 on a 7800 GTX 512mb. :/

However, I did my first upgrade to my GPU for Doom 3. I went from a TNT 2 to a 9700 (non-pro) then flashed that to a Pro Bios.

 

[THRESHIN]

I have never really built a rig for a game or even upgraded for one specifically. Well sort of a half truth.

You see, I'm cheap. I like to use my hardware as long as possible. That means overclocking to extend life, putting up with lower detail settings, suffering low framerates. I upgrade only when there's a game that my system will not run. Sometimes there's single part upgrades along the way.

I remember spending a lot on more PC-133 memory for Diablo 2. Got a voodoo3 mostly for quake 2 and half-life. Most recent was a full rebuild for witcher 3. That was because my old system just couldn't be upgraded more reasonably. Apparently witcher 3 doesn't run so well on a first gen core 2 duo and an ati 6850....go figure.

 

[JayteeBates]

First one I bought was AMD 486 DX4-120 with 8 MB of RAM and a 1Meg Generic (Cirrus Logic?) Video card and a 512MB Quantum BigFoot HDD

First one I had was a Tandy 386 SX-20

I bought the 486 to play games and learn on...MYST was a big one lol.

 

[Aireoth]

Warcraft. It was a 386 with a whole 8mb of ram, and a soundblaster. Beige case and a hard drive big enough to install several games on.

 

[haris]

I built mine for doom when I was 8. the hardest part for me was to install an operating system, the rest was basically an experiment to see what plugs where.

 

[fallguy]

Jedi Knight, Moto Racer, and Quake 2. I realize its a single game question, but it was for all three after playing them on a friends PC. 200mmx.

 

[Frraksurred]

Jedi Knight

This. It was one of the first games I remember having a "hardware mode". Don't think I've experienced the same wide-eyed, pure Norepinephrine fueled, buyers elation since.

 

[silk186]

When I started college I build my first rig for Far Cry!