Discussion What Were the CPU and Specs of Your First PC?

[Tac 25]

Before sound cards, the basic PC speaker was only there for operation (error) beep codes. Nowadays sound cards are built in to almost every motherboard produced. Today, the better sounding 'add-in' sound cards are just a small niche market.

Before SoundBlaster, I had one of their competitor's products - AdLib. Both were good but, truthfully, SoundBlaster was better.

Voodoo3 3000 is about where they hit their peak quality "Wow!" factor.
I remember picking up a Voodoo 5 5500 and being totally disappointed at the slight performance increase in the games I played, vs. a card that was from the previous gen. It was way too expensive for the marginal increase, so I returned it.

I see.. well, my dad's Windows 3.1 pc probably had some sort of sound card, although not as good as a Soundblaster. Now I recall.. when I played Operation Wolf, there are squeaky 8-bit sounds of gunfire, tank exploding, helicopter explode. There's sound when dunk a ball in NBA. And in the game Test Drive, which is a driving simulation.. there's a sound like a car engine - I don't mean real car engine sound like today's games, it's just a simple pc sound that tries to sound like car engine (lol). And now all this talking takes me down memory lane.. I miss that pc now. My parents should not have given it away.

 

[Order 66]

My first PC that I remember using (I am still in school lol) was an HP laptop for school. It had an intel Celeron N3350 and HD 500 graphics 4GB of DDR3 RAM and only 64GB of storage. Keep in mind that I was trying to game on it as it was the only thing I had at the time. the only games I had enough space to actually install were Roblox and Minecraft, which didn't even run beyond 30fps (Roblox) and Minecraft wouldn't either without optifine.

 

[JohnBonhamsGhost]

i never did know the actual specs of it but it was an Apple IIe back in ~1985.
our stepbrother also sent us a box with probably 50 5.25" copied disks with software and games.
the DE-9 joystick was awesome.

the first i built myself was a VIA C3 based system in 2001.
think it was ~1.2GHz.
i had just started a Microcomputer Applications program at our local Community College and my father just had all of the parts delivered to my house with a note saying, "here build this and see how it works".

been hooked on DIY computers ever since.

 

[stonecarver]

Power Mac 7100

CPU 66Mhz
I got free and looking back now when I got home from work I would play Microsoft pinball on the old mac. My kids could play Math blaster, Orily or something learning kids game. I did go online and took forever to bring up a web page. Gotta love dial-up

 

[Order 66]

I still run into people that think adding ram will drastically increase the performance of a computer. You do have to go back to those days to get that effect. I made it a habit for a long time to at least double the memory in my systems as I went along. 16MB -> 32MB -> 128MB -> 512MB -> 1GB -> 2GB -> 6GB -> 12GB -> 16GB (DDR3) -> 16GB (DDR4) -> 32GB. Hmm, rather neatly lays out all the systems I have built...

I used to be one of those people, I almost upgraded the RAM in my laptop from 4GB to 8GB, before I realized that the bottleneck was the CPU (Intel Celeron N3350) and not the RAM, or the IGPU (intel HD 500).