What was your first build ever???

C

chrisman17

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 19, 2007
Messages
422
Mine:

From what I can remember, back in 1999....

The first AMD Athlon CPU (game cartridge style) 700 Mhz....
HUGE Maxtor 40 GB HDD
Abit Mobo can't remember the model, got it from TC Computers.... First one came DOA...
128 MB PC100 RAM
Voodoo 3 card
Golden Orb CPU cooler
Some crappy black case(first time i saw a black case at the time)
played a lot of QWTF on it!

BEAST!
 
First build was in August 2004:

Lian-Li PC-65b
AthlonXP 2800+ Barton
Antec TrueBlue 480W
Abit NF7-S v2.0
2x512MB Corsair ValueSelect
GeForce4 MX440 until I got a Sapphire x800 GTO

Wasn't that great, but I was in college.
 
AMD K6-2 300 is the only significant detail I can remember of the initial build. Added a 20GB Western Digital, which was unfathomable at the time, and a Diamond Viper II (S3 Savage 2000) card.

Second complete build was a 1Ghz AMD Thunderbird, totally top of the line at the time.
 
The first PC I build was an 8086 and I built it right after the 486 CPU was released. I was young and it took me almost 3 years of saving just to buy the used parts from local computer shows to build it at that time. Hell I even had to settle for a monitor that had a burnt screen since it was all I could afford. Fortunately I was able to pick one where the burn in was hardly noticeable when powered up.
 
An Altair, in 1975... made of a perfboard, wirewraps, resistors, capacitors, some LEDs, DIP and toggle switches, grommets, screws... purchased as a kit and built from the bare components into a working "computer" over a weekend. Didn't have a monitor as the "display" was whatever the sequence of LEDs provided based on the programmed input, aka "the software."

All at the ripe old age of 7. :D

Over 5,000 machines later - all built the same way from components (things are a bit different now, of course, but still built by hand from the first part to the finished product with the OS installed and tuned up as well) - not much has really changed.

Ah, the good old days...
 
The first system I ever built, was I think back in nov 99

Abit KT7-RAID (Later KT7A-RAID) NB Fan died, rma'd and got an upgrade
2x256 PC-133 SD-Ram (wasn't cheap back then)
Duron 650@1ghz:D cooled by a glabalwin FOP38 (LOUD!)
40GB Maxtor 7200rpm IDE
Diamond Viper V770 Ultra (Later Radeon 7500)
SB Live
Huge No Name Fulltower Case
Some 300W PSU (was probably crap)


Was my first time building a system, I had pissed around with my K6-2 system for a year after getting it as a gift, was tickled pink I could get my duron to 1ghz (was a big deal at that time....)

That ABIT KT7A-RAID motherboard was the shit too, tons of oc options

Also got one of the few factory unlocked durons, that has the l1 bridges still intact and mine ran at the lower core voltage of 1.5v vs 1.6v of all the others, probably why it oc'd so nice.
 
AMD Athlon X2 4200+ 2.2GHz Socket 939
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
XFX 7900 GT
ADATA 2GB
Crappy HD
Crappy 500W PSU
Lian-Li PC-60 something
 
AMD 1.4GHz Thurderbird
512MB SDRAM
Geforce 3 ti200
20GB Drive

*scratches head* I think that was it.

Only had that system for like 4 days and I fried the CPU. Never went back to AMD after that and have always gone with Intel.
 
First build was this year or late last year..
First play with the insides was with an IBM when I got a GeForce3 to switch out with a TNT2, after that it's been laptops until recently.
 
Cyrix 166+ proc, 8MB ram, Windows NT 3.51, 2meg Jaton VGA card, less than 500meg HD (can't remember the size but I remember 500meg drives were pricey and mine was smaller), 15" Sony monitor, 2x CD-Rom reader, some speakers. it was around $1500 or so without the monitor, IIRC.
 
First "full" build:

AMD T-Bird 1.4
DragonOrb 3
Gigabyte motherboard (amd 760 chipset?)
Carried over GF2 GTS
2x40GB WD's raid 0
Antec beige big case
Plextor CD Burner
Creative soundcard (not sure which one)
 
Abit mobo, athlon barton mobile 2500 -- boy could that chip overclock like a mothaf*@*a
 
I spent 300 bucks at age 14 on my first computer. Funny story, nonetheless.
AMD Athlon XP 2600+
512mb Corsair Value Select
ASROCK mobo
GF Ti4200

Had my new soon-to-be stepsister (first time meeting her) step in the middle of my comp case because she got mad at me.
Yep. Broke my mobo and CPU right in half (hadn't put the HSF on yet)
Boy that made me pissed off, espec. when it takes about 6 months to save up enough money at the age of 14 lol.
Needless to say, I didn't get reimbursed, my uncle felt sorry for me and sent me an Althlon XP 2000+ and an ASUS board.
That thing is currently my file server lol :D

Oh, and when I had saved up enough money at 15, I bought a 6800 vanilla, unlocked the pixel pipelines from 12-16.. oh that beeyotch was SMOKIN' hot.
 
Zepher said:
Cyrix 166+ proc, 8MB ram, Windows NT 3.51, 2meg Jaton VGA card, less than 500meg HD (can't remember the size but I remember 500meg drives were pricey and mine was smaller), 15" Sony monitor, 2x CD-Rom reader, some speakers. it was around $1500 or so without the monitor, IIRC.
Click to expand...

Yup my first was a Cyrix too. My college roomie was so anti-Intel back then. We had the 166+ in there that we OC'd to like 200 or maybe 233+ rating and 16mb of ram which I recall tripling to 48 later on and then I thought I was the shiznit. Shortly after I pawned off the Cyrix and got an Intel p166 which I did get to a real 233, Good times
 
GonzoP said:
Yup my first was a Cyrix too. My college roomie was so anti-Intel back then. We had the 166+ in there that we OC'd to like 200 or maybe 233+ rating and 16mb of ram which I recall tripling to 48 later on and then I thought I was the shiznit. Shortly after I pawned off the Cyrix and got an Intel p166 which I did get to a real 233, Good times
Click to expand...

I ended up selling the 166+, ram, and mobo to a friend after I did some test renders with Lightwave and found my brothers Pentium 100 was almost twice as fast.
After that, it was Intel all the way.
I can't recall what proc/mobo I replaced the Cyrix with, but I did eventually buy a Pentium 200MMX for $525 when they first came out. That is the most I have ever spent on a processor.

I started to just get hand me down parts from friends and clients since I didn't feel the need to spend so much money on the latest and greatest parts.

My main rig in my sig is my first major build with all new parts since 1996.
 
Zepher said:
I ended up selling the 166+, ram, and mobo to a friend after I did some test renders with Lightwave and found my brothers Pentium 100 was almost twice as fast.
After that, it was Intel all the way.
I can't recall what proc/mobo I replaced the Cyrix with, but I did eventually buy a Pentium 200MMX for $525 when they first came out. That is the most I have ever spent on a processor.

I started to just get hand me down parts from friends and clients since I didn't feel the need to spend so much money on the latest and greatest parts.

My main rig in my sig is my first major build with all new parts since 1996.
Click to expand...

Not me from that p166 I was into the K6-2 and K6-3 after that. As a recent college grad I didn't have the Intel$$
 
I forgot to add the SB Live! card and the Network card, back then nothing was integrated....
 
Took me a while to save up my cash, but I was reading [h] while I was rocking my Dell rig for the 4 previous years.

Athlon 64 3800+
Biostar Tforce 550 AM2
2GB Corsair DDR2-800
Radeon x1800GTO
Audigy 2
WD 250GB HDD
Dell 1801FP LCD <3 kept from previous setup <3

Eventually I swapped the 3800+ for an X2 4600+ then 5600+.....the x1800 for an 8800GTS 320MB.......and the Tforce board for an EVGA Nforce 590 SLI board. The rest is history.
 
First machine I built myself was a p2 350, 64 megs of ram, cdrw, real3d video card, etc on an intel motherboard. Soon replaced the intel board with an abit and upgraded the memory to 128 maybe 2 months after building the machine. Ran windows 98 and nt4. Used 98 for games and nt4 for pretty much everything elce.
 
286-16
math co processor
16 megs of memory
120meg HD...big and new at that time
sound blaster or ad lib soundcard not sure, its been a long time.
256KB video card
case, keyboard and 13" monitor

about $1400
damn that was stupid...oh and I bought it all to play MW 1
before that an amiga ...damn that was a good machine
 
Intel 3GHz P4
512MB RAM
MSI board with SIS chipset
60GB hard drive
Geforce 4 MX4000

Some parts were new, others were reused. It was a barebones kit. This was back in about 2004/2005.
 
Athlon Tbird 700 mhz (socket A)
Some Cheapo ECS KT133 Chipset board
2x128mb pc 133 ram
40gb 7200rpm WD drive
8x CD burner
8x DVD rom Drive
non name 250w psu
Hercules Geforce 2 MX
Soundblaster Live

I pretty much canabalized the rom drives, sound card and gfx card from a compaq and pretty much put it into a generic white atx case.
 
de ja vu... didn't we have a thread like this already? :p

i think mine was a 486dx4 120mhz, 2mb trident pci vidcard, 32mb edo simms, 1gb hdd, 4x cdrom... i could be wrong about some of those specs though... I've built too many, lol.
 
sparks said:
before that an amiga ...damn that was a good machine
Click to expand...

My first computer I bought for myself was an Amiga 3000 I bought in 1993. 68030@25mhz, 6megs of ram, 120meg hard drive 14" Commodore multisync monitor ($2500 for everything).
A year later I bought the Video Toaster 4000 card ($2495) and some upgrades to support it, 12more megs of ram ($360) bringing the total to 18, and a 345meg Maxtor SCSI hard drive ($345, $1/meg :eek:).
 
enginurd said:
de ja vu... didn't we have a thread like this already? :p

i think mine was a 486dx4 120mhz, 2mb trident pci vidcard, 32mb edo simms, 1gb hdd, 4x cdrom... i could be wrong about some of those specs though... I've built too many, lol.
Click to expand...

Yeah but its always fun to stroll down memory lane
 
AMD Athlon XP 3000+ Barton
Soyo KT880 Dragon 2 V2
Corsair XMS 512MB DDR 400
Seagate 120GB SATA150 HDD
eVga e-geforce 6200 x8 AGP
Windows XP Professional

Built back in 03'
 
My first was an 8086-4.77mhz in 1992ish. Had 2 10GB MFM drives and a full length controller. Also had a full length 1200 baud modem and a CGA graphics card. Had a mono green monitor too. It took all summer to save up enough to get even that from the boxes of broken stuff at the computer shows.

I did have a bitchin commodore setup first... first a vic-20, then a C-64, then a C-128D with the 512K expansion 2 1541s and a 1581 - and even the composite monitor. I ran GEOS like a mofo!
 
First build I did...

Athlon XP 2500+ Barton
Abit NF7-S v2
2x 256mb Corsair XMS DDR400 2-2-2-5
Abit GeForce4 Ti4200
Antec TruePower 430w PSU
Lian-Li PC-82

First custom computer...

AMD Duron 1GHz
Abit KG7
256mb Kingston DDR266
GeForce2 Ti
Sound Blaster Live
Antec 350w psu
some random NIC
some random antec case
 
First PC..

I think I would have been 13 or 14 at the time..

Cyrix PR133 @ 120Mhz.. Overclocked that bad boy to a PR166
Dual-Booted NT4 and 98
Some random Socket 7 board
16MB EDO
1.7GB IBM Drive.. Died about 2 years later..
S3 Virge card with a 2MB upgrade (4MB total)
Sound Blaster 32 (NOT the AWE-32, I couldn't afford it.. :( )
I had a 1x CD-ROM (Yes, that is a ONE SPEED CD-ROM drive). It was a Mitsumi and hooked to the Mitsumi port on the sound card.. I was too broke to actually buy a CD-ROM drive so I got this from a friend..

After that it was quite a few..
Cyrix MII 333
Asus P2B-D with a single PII 350
Abit BX6 2.0 with a Celeron 366 @ 550
Abit BP6 with dual slocket Celeron 400s @ 600
Asus A7V Duron 700 overclocked to 900, still have it at my parent's place..
Thunderbird 1400, sold that
Athlon XP 2200, sold that
Dual Athlon XP 1700s modded to be MPs, sold that
P4 2.26B, sold that to a friend, who still has it AFAIK
P4 2.4C, sold that when I moved to the US from Canada.. First time since I was 13 I didn't have a computer for an extended period of time..
Athlon 3200+ Winchester, still have it in the closet
Opteron 170, computer at work..
Core 2 Duo E6700, computer at home..

That's where I am now.. Quite a few when I write it down..

Riley
 
Started with a cyris PR133 too. Bought it at onsale a auction website before ebay ever existed. since then a PII 200, Celeron 266, athlon 650, duron 700, athlon xp1800, athlon xp2500. a five year break til the system I have now. I've had used every generation nvidia vid card up til the 5000 series that includes that $150 diamond viper 770, voodoo1, 2, and 3, and even the savage card. played with the A3d cards and the sound blasters. Had a 2x CD burner that I never used cause it was too slow instead had internal zip100's in all my comps. set up a coax network using a linksys kit before upgrading to 10baseT!!! Was first in my neighborhood to have high speed access at home using a one way cable, could only d/l had to use my USR 56K modem for upload so surfing still tied up the line. Set up tribes clan matches on my 56K USR with 3 comps hooked up!!! Funny things is... computers are still too slow.

Gave all the comps away when I joined the army. :(

Had an mp3 player with 32 MB of storage that connected via serial 5 years before the ipod. :)
 
First Build:
Year: Between 2002 and 2003
p4 2.66 w/ HT
512 MB Ram
80 GB Hard drive
ATI 9800 PRO
4x DVD Burner
19" CRT @ 1600 x 1200

This was a big jump from my previous computer:
Year: 1998
p1 233 mhz w/ mmx
16 MB Ram
6 GB Hard Drive
CD Rom
13" at 640 x 480
4 MB Video Card
 
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ overclocked to 2.5GHz
1GB Corsair Value Select PC3200
Chaintech VNF4 nForce4 Ultra
EVGA 6600GT overclocked (don't remember to what speeds)
Zalman CPU cooler (can't remember exactly which model)
ThermalTake Soprano case
80GB Seagate SATA HDD
Lite-On IDE DVD burner
...and some very crappy 550w PSU
 
I had a 486/33 at work I upgraded to a 486/66 in 1994 which gave me some confidence.

When Win95 came out in Sept. '95 I ordered a Micron P133 system without a video card and ordered a Matrox card separately, I can remember wondering if it would work when I got it together. It had 32mb RAM and 1.6gb WD Caviar drive, pretty smokin' for that day.

My first full build was a P2/233 in 1996? I have built and rebuilt a series of from scratch boxes since. I can remember a P2/333, Celery 400, P3/550E, 700mhz T-Bird, 1.2ghz T-bird, Athlon 1600+, 2500+ Barton, A64/3000+, A64/3200+, A64/4200+ X2, E4300, E6600, E6550, and currently I have an E6850.

Some of the upgrades weren't huge but release times were still agonizingly long in-between and I have always had a buyer lined up for my 'old' system or parts before I upgrade. Plus I've done about 10x more upgrades for myself/coworkers/friends/family.
 
Nice to see so many of us start with Cyrix; ahh the mid 1990's good times
 
This thread makes me feel like a huge nub.

E2180 + Golden Orb 2
2x1GB of Crucial Ballistix Tracer ($20!! after MIR)
XFX 610i Mobo
XFX 8600GT
Corsair VX450
Lanbox Lite
Leftover 80GB Seagate 7200.7 IDE
Shitload of bling

Early 2K8. Cost me roughly ~$300
 
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