The year is 2003 and my OC’d Athlon XP/5900 ultra rig was tearing though the latest games like Vice City, Splinter Cell, and Max Payne 2. I was also getting enjoyment from being kicked off of counter strike servers after being accused of hacking. My cs clan was awesome and I loved practicing and playing in ogl matches. I spent hours upon hours tweaking every last fps out of that rig and Guru3D was my go to for everything. Well life, kids, and other responsibilities got in between me and pc building/gaming and sadly my rig eventually became an internet browser and was finally retired to the closet when windows stopped supporting WinXP in 2012 Fast forward to the present and my teenage boys are sick of hearing me talk about the good ‘ole days of PC gaming and how 120gb hard drive was a lot of storage . They kept pressing me to drag out the old tower and getting it updated so they can play CSGO and Fortnite. So I call an old friend and he tells me he’s got an MSI 970 motherboard with an FX6300 and 8gb of DDR3 sitting in his closet and says I can have it for free. So I throw it all together with an R9 380 I found on CL for cheap and it works suprisingly well on mid range settings. Problem is now I’ve got the bug again... I want to tweak every last ounce out of it as I learn all about the newest gear and plan to build a brand new rig. So I start digging around the web and what do you know, my search brings me here. It’s like seeing an old girlfriend So my question is are there any other old timers like myself still hanging around here or am I intruding on a new generation of gamers and pc builders?
Hello fellow guru! Every forum has and needs so called old timers. There are many, many old timers here and their knowledge is vast and very valuable. I came here for advices and i received so much more. Came here with a overclocked Athlon 3200 Venice and loved the computer to bits...good old times. Nowadays the old-style tinkerink, overclocking as it was shifted to a new level, but not better. Why so? Intel allows OC only on K model CPUs, motherboards according to the chipset they have allow or not some features needed for overclocking. More, a lot of hardware manufacturers lately are favouring the paywall feature style, so in order to obtain a higher overclock, you need to spend money which anyhow allow you to buy even high end hardware, so in a way beats the initial purpose, geting more but not spending much. Anyway, you can always tweak things, but depends of what are your expectations. Those FX6300 chips can overclock pretty well, but be aware of chip binning. There is also software to tweak, or try new OS, Steam/Proton on Linux lately is huge. If you want to build a new computer, there is always something new around the corner. 2019 will bring the new Ryzen 2 cpus, and Navi graphics cards...and so much more. Cheers!
...been playing games since the 70s when all that was available was what the arcades or console cartridges had to offer. The first 'rig' I had was a VIC-20 with 3583 bytes (not KB, MB, or GB... just B) of RAM for use. Things have gotten better from there, but without getting into, well, the entire history, there's nothing like having lived without these things (computers, cell phones, Internet, all that) to make one really appreciate how much nicer they can make one's life.
These types of sites always have a diverse age range, that is the thing about being a pc tech enthusiast, young or old, its a hobby that usually stays with you until they drag the thermal paste out of your cold dead hands or Nvida and intel price you out of the pc hobby scene, which every comes first these days. Lol Now get off my lawn you delinquent.
Oi oi Killa! WB. 46yo here, been gaming since 70s (arcades, pong) and got my own C64 Commodore in the 80ies. Amiga500 around 1989, then in 1993 my 1st PC (386DX 4MB Ram, 320MB HDD). Good times!
Started with Amiga 500 1991. Here from 2005. Still have my first Commodore pocket calculator from 1979. As youngster our town library got punch cards after written ones - a great leap to computer era. Old gang?
Hey Hilbert, did you know there's no wikipedia article about this site, or you!? It's kind of interesting, since you and this site are mentioned in tons of articles on there. If I recall, this site was started in 1997, right? I'm pretty sure it was not too long after 3dfxmania was up? It was originally voodooguru or something similar if I'm not mistaken?
Hmm... I think it was my Uncle's CBM64 that was my first ever computer I started on - he brought it home from work; back East guy worked ata PCRichard's - not sure if they still got em... live out West now but anyway used to play stuff on that as a kid I can barely recall now, helicopter vertical games, Tetris-like stuff - Then it went kinda backwards... he gave me an Apple ll to fix and keep... I got older saved up money doing chores n crap running routes doing work for people local stores n stuff, keeping holiday money. Was the year mm whenever it was Apple released those Tangerine iMacs I bought one - man I was all amped up about the ethernet jack lol. I remember playing friends on Unreal-Tournament since it was probably the biggest Mac-Classic OS game at the time... anyways. At some point Socket 478 came around for PC and then I recall seeing PCI-E release on socket 478 and yeah - built my first Pentium 4 - Prescott rig (spontaneous fires included) with a Geforce 6 card probably at the time (mighta been earlier) loved it. Been building PC rigs ever since. Still grab an Apple on the side too for the old love of Mac but that's slowly being killed of by Tim Cook sad to say.
Happy new year all you GURU'S!!!! I came here when i built my first system an AMD fx55 2 evga 6800 ultras 4 wd raptors i think it was around 2004 i joined(cant look im on my phone). Any who i also worked on slot machines for the past 16 plus years. For a few major slot companies. It aforded me a quick learning track to computers, self taught. And yes though i dont have the kids n house I still Love to TWEAK!!! My current system an inlet 5930k 2 M.2 ssd a 1080 vanilla water cooled. And the future for us geeks seems good what with AMD knocking in Intels door and all....
Joined in 2004 but was lurking a couple years before that. Through the 80's and 90's I was only a console/arcade gamer, but when I got my first gaming PC in 2000 I haven't looked back.
Lurked some time then i joined 2008 but even that makes me feel old. Also posted quite a bit, maybe i just enjoy this forum.
Been here since July 2008....I think....lol Little over 10 years, regardless of the month...lol I lurked for quite a few years before joining though.
It’s great to hear this site is still what it used to be. I’ve been a member on many forums over the years(mostly car forums as one of my other hobbies is engine building), but this forum always had the best members and conversations. Everyone’s stories about where they started are awesome. It’s also nice to know some of you are older than me. Makes me feel like a spring chicken again haha
My first PC had a Voodoo 3 3000 with a whopping 16mb of ram! Playing Aliens VS Predator at 800x600 is what sold me on PC gaming.
This was my first, back in Xmas '75: http://www.pong-story.com/pics/executivegames/tennisunit.jpg http://www.pong-story.com/executivegames.htm One of these is for sale on Ebay right now, looks like new. They want $500. First Computer: TRS-80 Color Computer, Xmas 1981 First PC: Packard Bell Legend II, 1989, 286 16MHz, 2MB 30-pin, CGA graphics, Adlib sound. First Gaming PC: Intel Pentium 166, Diamond Monster 3D 4MB / Matrox Mystique 2MB, Asus PI/P55T2P4 mobo, 16MB RAM, Xmas '96
49 and the first pc I upgraded was a 386 sx2-50 to a Dx2-66 loved gaming using DOS and the upgrading and modding has never stopped. Still gaming and still loving my PC. I tried consoles but hardware aged to quickly with no improvement until new console was releases so Xbox was my last console and console graphics were always playing catch-up with the PC. I am an eye candy addict though I never jump on hardware 1st gen liking the possibility's RTX will bring but not for me yet. My hopes for hardware in the future either a new player in the GPU world to compete with NVidia or AMD start competing with a high end GPU we as the consumer really need competition to stop these crazy prices and AMD in the midrange helps nobody
Our first computer was an AST Advantage with a Pentium 133MHz chip. Think we got it in 95,96. It looked similar to this: It taught me that pre-built computers were garbage as you could hardly replace any parts due to it all being soldered/glued together.
