What was the first computer you ever built?

Azureth

Azureth

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Feb 29, 2008
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I think it would be interested in hearing what everyones first build was (if they even remember lol), when they built it, and if there were any problems with it.

I built my first computer back in I think it was 2004. I used an ABIT NF7-S mobo and a Radeon 9700 Pro IIRC. I remember when I first started it up it wouldn't come on, thankfully it was just the pwr switch wire in the wrong area IIRC. I really liked it too, ah the memories:)

EDIT: Found this little tidbit:

AGP 8x

Firstly it has AGP 8x support so you can fully utilize those latest graphics cards such as the Geforce FX and the Radeon 9800. This provides an AGP bus bandwidth of 2.1Gb/s instead of the 1.1Gb/s provided with the AGP 4x specification. With more and more complex textures coming into games the AGP bus speed is getting more and more important all the time as On-Card memory is not large enough to handle everything.

DDR400

The current fastest memory available DDR400. DDR400 also known as PC3200. DDR400 provides a 200Mhz*2 memory system. Remember the days of PC100. Only 2 banks of DDR400 can be used though with a max of 2Gb. Should really be enough though. Only problem is that without upgrade you wont be able to go beyond 2Gb without using the slower memory. No problem for anyone other than people looking to run a network server or something similar.

The Abit NF7-S uses a Dual DDR400 system which incorporates two independent memory controllers

USB 2.0

USB 2.0 is up to 40 times faster than the standard USB1.1 ports. This is great news if you are using external Hard Disks CD-Drives or scanning large pictures on a USB scanner. with 480Mbs transfer rate there will be no slow down is your USB transmission.

Serial ATA 150 Converter

The Serial ATA converter allows you to use the Serial ATA technology with your current ATA 100/13 parallel devices.

5bit FID (Frequency ID)

By ABIT 5-bits FID Override technology, users can get variety of CPU over-clocking sets.
ABIT CPU H.T.P (Hardware Thermal Protection)
ABIT CPU H.T.P. uses pure hardware detection, which not like others use software detection to prevent CPU overheating. ABIT CPU H.T.P provides more reliable result for customers' investment.
Click to expand...

Man, those were the days....
 
Mine was an Athlon XP 2100+ system which I overclocked to 2.2 ghz, rock stable on air cooling. Some of the other components which I just remember off the top of my head:

Asus A7N8X Deluxe mobo
Corsair PC3500 512 MB (yeah, I only got one stick at first but it was BH5...)
Sapphire Atlantis 9700 non-pro (which I flashed with a pro bios so basically it was a 9700pro;))
80 GB WD hdd of some sort
CD-R/RW drive and floppy drive (can't remember exact details)

In the final days I made a couple upgrades, including boosting the memory to a Corsair XMS PC3200 1 GB TWINX set (didn't oc as well as the BH5... boo). I also upgraded the vid card to an eVGA GeForce 7800GS. I still have almost all this stuff save for the BH5 memory, which I once sold for more than I originally paid:p. If I had a second case and power supply I could get it up and running again, though not sure what I'd do with it.
 
mine was an old 486, if i remember correctly it was a DX4 @ 100MHz, with a Trident vid card with a whopping 1MB or Vid RAM!!, and a 540MB HD
 
I was the first one in the office of IT guys to build a 386 machine.
Everybody was jealous of my 386 20Mhz monster rig! :cool: :rolleyes:

Then I decided it wasn't fast enough a few months later and bought a 386 33Mhz mobo thinking that would be the fastest thing around for a long time. :rolleyes::rolleyes:

You guys that complain about expensive mobos being a couple hundred bucks these days have no idea..... that friggin' 386 33Mhz mobo was $1800. :eek::eek:

It did include the CPU and a whopping 4MB of RAM onboard though. :)
 
heh.. funny you should ask. I recently came across a list of parts I used to build my first PC back in 1996:
- 486DX4-120Mhz (the motherboard isn't listed for some reason)
- Cirrus Logic 2MB VLB video card
- AdLib ISA soundcard
- Hayes 28k ISA modem
- 1GB Western Digital harddrive
- a whopping 32megs of EDO RAM
- a ridiculously huge and expensive 17" Viewsonic CRT monitor.

A friend of mine helped me build it. It ran Windows 95. I remember how awesome Photoshop 3 was on it because it had so much memory! It also kicked ass in Duke Nukem 3D, Doom 1 and 2, and Hexen.
 
i forgot, i also had an Awesome sound card, the AWE 32 ISA 16bits !!!! that was a total win back then, when all the games had MIDI sound for music
 
Athlon XP 2300+. OCd to 2.3 (200X11.5) GHz.
Asus A7N8X-E
Sapphire 9600Pro or SE (later upgraded to 6600GT).
512mb samsun DDR 400. Later added a 2nd 512mb DDR 400 stick.
ahh yes, samsung Spinmaster 5400RPM 80gig.

and worst of all, the same crappy "480W" PSU that came with the case. I put it in quotes because I'm sure that PSU couldn't handle 300W of DC out in any usable fasion. When I finally got into reading PSU reviews I ended up buying an Enermax Liberty 400W.
 
leSLIe said:
mine was an old 486, if i remember correctly it was a DX4 @ 100MHz, with a Trident vid card with a whopping 1MB or Vid RAM!!, and a 540MB HD
Click to expand...

jeebus... a 486? My calculator has more horsepower. Windows... 2.11? Or did you manage to get 3.0/3.1 on it?

edit: wow a 386? man you guys are older then sand.

anyone here ever seen a 4004? anyone care to link me to a logic diagram of it?
 
MrWizard6600 said:
jeebus... a 486? My calculator has more horsepower. Windows... 2.11? Or did you manage to get 3.0/3.1 on it?

edit: wow a 386? man you guys are older then sand.
Click to expand...

Dought the calc has more power but for a lot of us a 386 isn't that old.

I have prebuilt systems untill the penium series where I built my own p1 120(to replace a 486 dx2 66mhz). Had 64 megs of ram on it which was an issue as that intel chipset had issues with that much memory. Had a 1 gig hard drive or something and a 2x cdrw(which was like 400 bucks when I got it and added it to my system).

First computer was built by at&t and had like an 8 inch green screen monitor. Had it upgraded to a half of meg of memory and dual floppy drives. Thing screamed.
 
MrWizard6600 said:
jeebus... a 486? My calculator has more horsepower. Windows... 2.1? 1.1 even? Or did you manage to get 3.1 on it?
Click to expand...

I'm tired and my sarcasometer might be off a bit, but Win95 worked just as well on a 486 as it did on anything Pentium or higher.. :D

My first build was also a 486DX2-80 when I was 14. It was a barebones though, so maybe that doesn't count.

American Megatrend Inc motherboard (I don't remember the chipset since it didn't matter back then). It had three VLB slots, but I never used them.
AMD Am80486 DX2-80
8 x 1MB 30pin SIMM memory
Western Digital 1280MB EIDE hard drive
Creative Sound Blaster 16
Creative EIDE 6x CD-ROM drive
Trident 9000 512k ISA video
Mid-tower AT/baby-AT case
uknown AT PSU
 
ryan_975 said:
I'm tired and my sarcasometer might be off a bit, but Win95 worked just as well on a 486 as it did on anything Pentium or higher.. :D
Click to expand...

Yea as long has you had a dx 486(the sx ones sucked even then) and enough memory windows 95 ran fine on it. With 8 megs of ram it needed some help but still ran fine for the most part. I upgraded my 486 to 24 megs of ram and it ran great.
 
swatbat said:
Dought the calc has more power but for a lot of us a 386 isn't that old.
Click to expand...

Zilog Z80 @ 6MHz on the Texas Instruments TI83+ vs a 16MHz 386... yeah I guess your right, but I bet the Z80 would outrun the 8080...

but it is that old. i386 > sand.

and how did you guys get Win 95 to run on a 486... I thought that was released in '88....? Try running Vista on a P3... hmm... maybe my years are off. I donno man I was learning my alphabet at the time...
 
MrWizard6600 said:
Zilog Z80 @ 6MHz on the Texas Instruments TI83+ vs a 16MHz 386... yeah I guess your right, but I bet the Z80 would outrun the 8080...

but it is that old. i386 > sand.

and how did you guys get Win 95 to run on a 486... I thought that was released in '88....? Try running Vista on a P3... hmm... maybe my years are off. I donno man I was learning my alphabet at the time...
Click to expand...

Nah. Hell my 486 dx2 66mhz was bought in 94. The pentium 1 had just come out in 60 and 66 mhz offerings(want to say their was a 63 mhz too but maybe that was an overdrive chip for a 486) and was having some issues. Really the pentium chip wasn't anything special untill the 75 mhz chip came out and faster.

Hell the 486 chips are still around. A bunch of embedded stuff uses them still.

Hell windows 95 was speced to run on a 386 with 4 megs of ram. Really you needed a 486 with 8 megs of ram to run it worth anything. You wanted a 486dx too as it had the math co-processor built in. The sx had it disabled. Think of it as like what a celeron is today but more torn down. The 486 chips sold well into 95 when well windows 95 hit.
 
a socket 754 computer a couple years ago that i put together for under $400. it booted and POSTed on the very first power up! too bad it was a piece of crap
 
1st. Atari 600XL
2nd. C= 128
3rd. IBM Clone @ 4.77Mhz
4th. IBM Clone @ 8Mhz
5th. IBM Clone @ 10Mhz
...
Xth. IBM CLone @ Q6600
 
AMD 2500+
Abit NF7-S
9800 Pro
Kingston memory 512mb
Samsung 120Gb

that's all I can remember :p
few years ago.
 
My first computer I built was a Cyrix 166+ based PC.
Can't remember all the parts but it had a 1.6gig HD, 32MB of ram (I think), 4 or 8 meg S3 card, 8x CD-rom, 15" Mag Monitor, Win NT 3.51. this was back in 94-96 I think. $1600 for the PC and $350 for the monitor.
I upgraded the machine with a huge tower case that I paid probably $200 for, a Pentium 200MMX chip that cost me $525, upped the Ram to 128 megs, Put Windows NT4 on it and added another hard drive.
I ran a dedicated phone line with a 24/7 internet connection with a static IP address, and hosted files that linked from my website since webspace was expensive back then. I used a program called Serv-U.

A couple of video stills since I have no actual photos of the setup.
The machine above is the one on the floor on the very far right under the desk.
old-desk01.jpg


old-desk02.jpg
 
AMD K6-2 500MHz
256MB Crucial PC100 CAS2
FIC PA-2013 with 2MB L2 Cache
3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI
Soundblaster Live!
8GB Maxtor HD
4x HP Burner
Windows 98
 
Met-AL said:
AMD K6-2 500MHz
256MB Crucial PC100 CAS2
FIC PA-2013 with 2MB L2 Cache
3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI
Soundblaster Live!
8GB Maxtor HD
4x HP Burner
Windows 98
Click to expand...

I built one very similar it was the 700mhz variety with an MSI board and the AMD Irongate 751 chipset. It was very solid for it's time.
 
Pentium II 233MHz
Intel 440BX mobo
256MB Kingston PC100
Intel i740 AGP
3Dfx Voodoo PCI
Creative Soundblaster PCI 128
8GB Maxtor HDD
2x CD-RW
Win98

I remember the Intel video card actually overheated and melted part of the tiny heatsink, it still worked but I got no textures at all in D3D...and that was my first RMA :)
 
Intel 8085 SBC in Jan 1978.

8085 at 3 Mhz, 1KB RAM, 1KB ROM. An ASR terminal eventually replaced the hex keypad/7 segment LED display.
 
My first computer ever was an old Mac Plus

The first computer I built was
AMD Athlon 1700+
PCChips motherboard with an SIS chipset (double ouch!)
512MB of RAM
GeForce4MX 64MB AGP

man that thing sucked
 
I first partially assembled a 486DX from a barebones kit and I can not remember all the parts on that build. After that computer we had a few family pre-built systems and then I built a slot 1 Celeron 400 based system with an Abit BE6-2, 128MB PC100, Maxtor 15GB 5400rpm hard drive, and an NVidia based card. For the life of me I can not remember if I had a TNT2 or GeForce 256 in that system.
 
First time to use a computer: Everex 286 beige box circa 1990

First time I've built a computer: mid 2003 (mostly parts ripped from a Dell 4100)
Specs: P4 Northwood 2.8GHz OC'd to ~3.1GHz
Asus P4P8X motherboard (Intel 865 chipset IIRC)
512MB RAM (later upgraded to 1GB)
GeForce3 Ti200 (soon replaced by 9600SE>9600XT>9800PRO)
Soundblaster Live (Dell OEM version. Soon replaced by Audigy 2ZS)

Retired about 2 years ago as it is my sister's machine now. But it was a fun and educating experience, especially using the "How to build a Computer" video on a DVD that came with Leo Laporte's 2003 Technology Almanac (sorta miss seeing those guys on TechTV). :D :(
 
CPU: 1) 1.7ghz 400FSB P4, 2) 2.4ghz 400 FSB P4, 3) 3.06ghz 533FSB P4 Northwood(fastest 533-bus proc).
Asus P4B266 then Abit IS7(i865G chipset, so pcwizard says).
512MB PC2700 ram to 512MB of Kingston hyperX PC4000(DDR400/500, then upped to 1GB)
Nvidia Geforce FX5200 128MB, 2) FX5950 Ultra 256MB, 3) BFG6800GToc.

Some parts in Sig not acquired yet(hopefully this week, we shall see).
 
The first non-prebuilt system I learned to build on was a 486DX4 120Mhz w/ Trident vidcard and 32MB EDO RAM. Oh yah, had a 540MB HDD and 8x CD-ROM, too.

The first system I built on my own was an Intel Pentium MMX 200Mhz on a QDI group board with 64MB of EDO RAM and the same Trident vidcard, lol. The thing wasn't even ATX, and I got all my parts from Fry's. My homies all pitched in to buy me a 4x GoldStar DVD-ROM to replace my 8x CD-ROM! Ahh, and my case still had one of those LCDs... you know, that display the clock speed... The "problem" was, the first digit could only be a "1" or nothing, lol, so I made it say "69," (I was in HS, lol). My next system was a Celeron 300A on a 440BX Abit board. ;)
 
First computer or what I called sort of a computer back in 1956 it was a bunch of relays and push buttons that played tic tac toe. Sounds simple now days but back then it baffeled teachers.
 
ZX-80 from a kit, then rebuilt my ZX-81, then Spectrum, BBC B (after getting inquisitive enough to take them apart) and first IBM compatible was 8086.
 
Can't remember the specs of my first PC but I know it Windows 3.1 was the OS.

My First PC build was this:
Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor (Later a 2.0Ghz P4, then finally a 2.53ghz P4)
MSI 875P Neo Socket 478 motherboard
2 x 256 Patriot DDR400 RAM (Later added an additional 1GB of Kingston DDR400 RAM)
Western Digital 250 GB Hard Drive
ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card (Replaced by Radeon 9500SE, then finally Radeon 9800PRo)
Memorex CD-RW/DVD-ROM Drive
Apevia X-Dreamer II with 350W PSU (Yeah I know. It's been replaced by a FSP PSU as shown in sig)

This is how that PC looks today:
Intel Pentium 4 2.53Ghz
Asus P4S800-DX S478 Motherboard
1.5GB DDR 400 RAM
2 x WD 80GB HDD
ATI Radeon 9800Pro 128MB AGP
FSP AX450-PN 450W PSU
X-Dreamer II

Here's why it looks so different:

CPU: Replaced the stock TIM with some AS5. However I was in a bit of rush to get back to playing some games and ended up inserting the CPU the wrong way. Without knowing that CPU was inserted the wrong way, I then locked in the HSF. Bent and broken pins all around. So had to use a 2.0Ghz P4 my stepdad had lying around. Later upgraded to a P4 2.53Ghz that I took off my mom's decommissioned work PC.
Motherboard: Apparently died when I attempted to boot the misplaced CPU. Replaced by an Asus mobo
RAM: Had to do an RMA on the Kingston RAM. You'll see why in a bit.
Video Card: The 9200 went to my Uncle's PC. The 9500 ended up in my bro's old PC. Finally settled on the 9800Pro.
Hard Drive: Ended up dying. You'll see why in the next line.
Case/PSU: Damn PSU took out the WD 250GB drive I had as well as 4-5 other hard drives that I had in that system throughout the year. May have corrupted the RAM as well. Finally found out that the PSU was a POS and was the cause of my dead hard drives.

So what did I learn from building my first PC?:
- Never skimp on the PSU
- Always check the orientation of the CPU
- Don't rush building a PC
- Always have a backup plan for your data
- 80mm fans are damn loud
- Asus website sucks sometimes. Takes too long to load sometimes.
- Kingston RMA is awesome!
- Always check to see if your parts still have warranty.
 
My first computer I built I believe was in 2000

Specs: (AS Far as I can Remember)
Abit KT7-A
512MB Crucial/Micron PC-133 Ram 1 Stick
AMD Athlon 1GHZ
Yamaha CDR/RW Drive 8X Write 4X Rewrite 24X Read (Latter Added a Pioneer Slot load DVD Drive)
Creative Soundblaster 16 PCI
ATI All In Wonder 16MB AGP
Sohoware 10/100 PCI NIC
 
486/33mhz (maybe it was 25mhz I forget?)
2 x 100 mb hard drives (I was hard core ;) )
hardly any ram
1mb video
Windows for workgroups
 
You win :)

crewzen said:
First computer or what I called sort of a computer back in 1956 it was a bunch of relays and push buttons that played tic tac toe. Sounds simple now days but back then it baffeled teachers.
Click to expand...
 
Let's see if I can remember back that far. After frustrated on how to use my first pc I bought I learned how to build them. My first build was an old Intel processor with just a heatsink as cooling and Win95.

After that I went AMD and my first was the K62-500 which was a good little processor.

I just wish I would have saved some of the old stuff as a collector's item.
 
Back in the day, we used to have a thing called sundials. Amazing invention, really. Baffled many people..

:p
 
Hmmm, my first wasn't as long ago as some of the dinosaurs on this forum but... :p

AMD Athlon XP 2200+
Cheap ECS motherboard
256mb of generic/no-name memory
20gb hard drive
and a ATI Radeon 9200

All of this in a suprisingly nice case. It's a mid-tower thats silver and aluminum. I wish I could figure out who made it.

I have since upgraded it a little. It now has 512mb of ram and a Radeon 9600 (from the computer I build after it).

I still have this thing as its still puttering along.
 
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