Discussion What was some of the most revolutionary PC hardware since the 2000s?

[SyCoREAPER]

Sarcastically? Home PCs use more electricity than a fridge.

In seriousness, that owning a PC while still expensive, it's comparatively even with inflation cheaper than it was 20 years back. That you can even get a laptop, even if slow for $150 is mind boggling

 

[USAFRet]

Sarcastically? Home PCs use more electricity than a fridge.

Not even a little bit.

 

[SyCoREAPER]

Not even a little bit.

How isn't it? Fridges can use 100-800w of power.

And if you meant it not being sarcastic, that was in regards to keeping things on topic and just joking around that it's not a good thing.

 

[AgentBirdnest]

*43rd person to say SSD* I don't think any upgrade I made, ever, had such a dramatic performance impact as my first SSD - from booting up, to loading games, to general everyday non-gaming use.

Otherwise, I'm gonna go with high-refresh monitors. After using a 120hz+ screen, I dunno how I ever lived without it.

 

[USAFRet]

How isn't it? Fridges can use 100-800w of power.

And if you meant it not being sarcastic, that was in regards to keeping things on topic and just joking around that it's not a good thing.

Electricity bill calculator | Energy cost calculator

Electriciy bill cost calculator. Electricity usage/consumption calculator.

www.rapidtables.com

How much does a PC use, daily?

 

[SyCoREAPER]

Way too literal my friend. Hence the sarcasm...

Just having a bit a satirical fun

 

[sitehostplus]

What was the most revolutionary PC hardware since the 2000s? Ex: Intel hybrid x86 CPUs (12th gen)

Multi core processors.

I would also add fiber optic broadband here even though it's not PC hardware, because it pretty much eliminated CD-Rom drives and possibly in the future, GPU cards.

 

[Tac 25]

being able to use my cellphone to connect to the internet. Yeah, it's not the fastest, but it's enough to play gacha games without lag.

Sandy Bridge. Upgrading into a 2500k is like night and day compared to a core 2 duo.

and as several people have said already.... the SSD. It makes loading times a lot faster in most games.

 

[Order 66]

Compared to the difference between spinning drives and solid state anything, SATA III SSD to NVMe SSD is not that big a jump.

Or the responsiveness of EMMC to solid state anything.

 

[stonecarver]

If not said yet mouse with a wheel and or just a wireless keyboard and mouse.

 

[FAhentai]

Nvdia GF256. Nothing can stand above this.

 

[Flayed]

I would say the graphics cards of today compared with the Geforce 2 I had back in the day.

 

[Moonstick2]

SSDs felt like an obvious one to me at first, but you can live without them. For me it's the USB flash drive, which first appeared in 2000.

I bought a preconfigured PC in 1999, then from 2001 (?) onwards I always self built. I remember only being able to use floppy disk for file transfers, which meant becoming familiar with disk-spanning software and having to keep something like 7 disks together just to e.g. back up AMD Catalyst software before reinstalling Windows 98 (spanning saving more time than re-downloading over a 56K modem + dial-up). When I first planned to build a PC I remember agonising over whether I should get a Zip drive or not, until a few months later when CD-RW drives became affordable (around the £120 mark, if I recall rightly) and I went with one of those.

Then USB drives came along and, while they might not be good for archival purposes, their ability to keep pace (in capacity and read/write speed) with the ever increasing size of files means they've more or less totally replaced other removable disks as a method of quick and easy portable storage, whether you want a handy copy of something replaceable or to transfer files between different computers. Plus the fact that while you couldn't always count on the destination PC having an optical or Zip drive, you knew it would have USB.

I think that unless you know the pain of having to write-span across multiple floppy disks, labelling them to keep the order and knowing that one disk fault renders the whole lot useless, just to move a dozen or so MB to another computer and taking probably the best part of ten minutes or more to complete the whole process, you don't realise how wonderful the humble flash drive is.

 

[gamerk316]

You could argue SSDs, multi-core CPUs, but I think the most revolutionary singular piece of PC Hardware was the 8000 series GPUs. Why? Programmable shaders.

 

[Colif]

RGB... where would Razer be without it? Seriously, it makes your PC faster...

runs away 😀

comes back:

Cases that aren't just steel boxes... no, they fish tanks now but they also have non sharp edges, cable routing, dust filters and other nice options that didn't exist in cases before or just after year 2k. Some even know that letting fresh air in helps.

 

[Order 66]

RGB... where would Razer be without it? Seriously, it makes your PC faster...

runs away 😀

comes back:

Cases that aren't just steel boxes... no, they fish tanks now but they also have non sharp edges, cable routing, dust filters and other nice options that didn't exist in cases before or just after year 2k. Some even know that letting fresh air in helps.

I would argue that RGB makes your PC slower, because if you don't go with one brand, you end up having to install 50 different pieces of RGB control software which are always running in the background.

 

[Unolocogringo]

I would argue that RGB makes your PC slower, because if you don't go with one brand, you end up having to install 50 different pieces of RGB control software which are always running in the background.

RGB like big spoilers make everything faster.
Don't you know nuthin?
I mean it's light speed right?

 

[punkncat]

I would also add fiber optic broadband here even though it's not PC hardware, because it pretty much eliminated CD-Rom drives and possibly in the future, GPU cards.

Fast internet of this kind is severely lacking in the US outside of the major cities. A lot of ground to cover, for sure. I like to gripe about mine, but just a few miles down the road from where I live, things like "working from home" aren't a possible reality.

 

[MaestroColby]

What was the most revolutionary PC hardware since the 2000s? Ex: Intel hybrid x86 CPUs (12th gen)

As someone who grew up in the early 2000s,
I would say the most revolutionary PC hardware since has got to be all of them.

A lot of people take for granted the computer power we can achieve today, but long time ago that was just fantasy.

A personal favorite of mine was the NVIDIA 8800 GT.
It was a card that was underappreciated in my mind, because I played a lot of Halo using this card in the early 2000s.

Hopefully, this satisfies your question.

Have a splendid day.

 

[Colif]

I would argue that RGB makes your PC slower, because if you don't go with one brand, you end up having to install 50 different pieces of RGB control software which are always running in the background.

I wasn't being serious but there are programs that can handle a wide range of rgb already but not all. Eventually Microsoft will have basic support for most of it in windows. Be a while before they get to Corsair levels of customisation though. I only have to have one running to maintain my lights and I have 3 different makers in here. Icue would be on anyway as it runs my AIO.

I would say the most revolutionary PC hardware since has got to be all of them.

that is true, its almost easier to list what hasn't changed in the last 20 years. I am not going to start. As it is possible everything has changed a little bit in 20 years.

BIOS - UEFI is so much better than Legacy. Without it being updated most of the advances would be really painful to add into a BIOS you cannot expand. How much storage do you want? MBR can only do 2.2tb max. MBR may not know what that M.2 drive does. Not sure how restricted GPU would be if they only ran in legacy. Without the platform everything installs onto being updated, a lot of upgrades would have been different.

GPU - Before 2000 we didn't have 3d Graphics hardware. Most PC only had 2d graphics.

 

[neojack]

Stable-ish windows, whithout bluescreens, need to reinstall every 3 months (i am talking to you win98)
Automatic updates of all kinds
automatic / easy driver installation
Drivers incorparated into window's default install

So to summarize, i would say windows 2000/XP really traced a line between the ancient era and the modern era of computing

as for hardware, what changed is that at some point there was a threshold from the ancient to the modern era. Which means no need to change your computer every 2 years as it was the case before.


- the Q6600 CPU, first quad core. Still relevant today ! It can still run win10 and general day to day computing just fine with it's maximum allowance of 8Gb of DDR2

- The Hexacores from AMD from before bulldozer (AM3). Those can support 16GB of DDR2 ! 6 cores at 3Ghz.
still usable today

- The RX480 GPU, wich price and value didn't changed since it's launch. still worth about 100$ lol and it runs most games fine at1080p

- the 1080ti GPU, also still relevant

- power supplies came from garbage that lasted 2-3 years max to now solid harware with 10 year warranty ! more than a car !

 

[boju]

From RF tuning a console to using a/v

 

[Colif]

power supplies came from garbage that lasted 2-3 years max to now solid harware with 10 year warranty ! more than a car !

Perhaps in another 20 years that will be true for all of them. You can still find really bad PSU out there on Amazon right now.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Stable-ish windows, whithout bluescreens, need to reinstall every 3 months (i am talking to you win98)

Never had to reinstall Windows 98 unless there was a major hardware change or HD failure. Same for all previous versions.

- power supplies came from garbage that lasted 2-3 years max to now solid harware with 10 year warranty ! more than a car !

I have a slew of older analog power supplies (8086, 8088, 286, 386,486, Pentium days) that are still plugging along with no problem for up to 30 years now. If your power supplies only last 2 or 3 years they're either, as you say, garbage, or you are abusing them in some way.

 

[boju]

Quality of psus back in the day was an afterthought, there wasn't anything that could abuse them to the point we're at now. Scary to think the kind of knockoff brands that were in my computers before pcie was a thing. Nothing bad ever happened so ignorance was bliss.