Remember Your First Build?

OhSnapWord

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We all had to start somewhere. Do you remember your first build? Mine will always hold a special place.

Mine was a barebones kit from Tigerdirect with the motherboard already installed in the case. I was some cheap beige case, some of brand.

The build had an AMD Duron 750MHz CPU with 128MB of PC-133 and a 40GB hard drive running Windows 98.
 
I've built 286s, 386s and 486s but they were all used and salvaged. My first build with new parts were the ECS mobo with AMD Duron 1Ghz CPU. It's been a long time that I can't remember what size HDD and memory. I do remember the Duron because I was impressed with its performance being a budget CPU.

I was an AMD fan boy because they gave me bangs for the bucks. Now I built two Intel systems for myself because I found that Intel CPUs are better nowadays.
 
My first build was an 8Mhz 8088 with 640K RAM, 20M hard drive, 360K floppy drive, CGA video card, 150W PSU and DOS 2.1 in 1985 or so. I used a really cool case with a hinged top that could be opened easily by pressing a release button on either side. The Twaiwanese made motherboard came with an ERSO BIOS that was marginal at best so I used an eprom reader/burner to copy the BIOS ROMs from an IBM XT. This resulted in a machine that was 100% compatible with an IBM XT (complete with BASIC interpreter in ROM) but ran almost twice as fast since the IBM machine ran at only 4.77Mhz. I later replaced the Intel 8088 cpu with an NEC V20 which was a clone of the 8088 but ran about 15% faster.

A genuine IBM XT sold for $4,995 but I built a machine that was twice as fast with twice as much disk space for around $1,800 (the 20M hdd alone cost $500).

ibm_xt.jpg


Since then I have built and owned machines with just about every generation of Intel CPU (as well as a few with AMD cpus) in them but I'll never forget my first.
 
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we sure have come a long way sense 8mhz CPU :)

My first build is actually the one i am using right now.... well.... some of it is anyway.
everything from the case, HDD (using SSD now) GPU, PSU and cooling has been changed.
I still use the same CPU, Mobo and RAM. But that is about to be upgraded... when i have the money.
You see, my car just broke and i have also invested in some reptiles and reptiles equipment. so i got to lay low for a time.
 
we sure have come a long way sense 8mhz CPU :)

My first build is actually the one i am using right now.... well.... some of it is anyway.
everything from the case, HDD (using SSD now) GPU, PSU and cooling has been changed.
I still use the same CPU, Mobo and RAM. But that is about to be upgraded... when i have the money.
You see, my car just broke and i have also invested in some reptiles and reptiles equipment. so i got to lay low for a time.

I thought awhile go you were planning to go with Intel's new haswell CPUs?
 
I thought awhile go you were planning to go with Intel's new haswell CPUs?

yeah. that is correct.
but i made some other purchases (like reptile stuff, a katana and some other stuff) and also got a ticked from the police.
I did get the GPU i was thinking about though (gtx 770)
i will upgrade to haswell this year for sure. no doubt about it.
 
yeah. that is correct.
but i made some other purchases (like reptile stuff, a katana and some other stuff) and also got a ticked from the police.
I did get the GPU i was thinking about though (gtx 770)
i will upgrade to haswell this year for sure. no doubt about it.

Ahh ok. I can't wait to get the money together for my build, If you had seen my thread about it I decided to go with the haswell i7
 
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