Best computer kit you've bought over the years

Khannie

What was the best piece of computer / techie kit you ever bought? Pick an absolute best plus some other honourable mentions.

Absolute best:
For me, the stand out winner is my projector. 600 euro delivered. Years of big screen, 720p goodness. I love this so much.

Honourable mentions:
My Q6600 processor. Many years later and it's still reasonably holding its own at stock (and can be pushed to 3GHz from the 2.4 stock should I ever need it in the future).

I got a lot of use out of my amiga back in the day. That was money well spent.

ATI 9800 pro graphics card saw a lot of very heavy use too. That was a good buy.

PSP (unlocked). I never used this for games but I got many hundreds of hours use out of it as a portable media player. Great battery life. Very good quality screen (at the time). Super piece of kit.

yoyo

Still running a Q6600 @ stock for many years now, it cost €250 at the time and I got it when it was new on the market (B3 stepping so you'll know how long ago that was). Still a great CPU by todays standards, gaming, video encoding, running vm's etc all great with it.
Another great thing I did was to fix an old monitor (had to replace €5 worth of capacitors) and setting up a dual screen desktop. It's an amazing expierience, particularly for web programming (you can have code on one screen and design on the other!). Definitely wouldn't be able to go back to a single screen in a hurry

Nick

juan.kerr

My Amiga 1200. Wish I hadn't sold it.

unkel

yoyo wrote: »

Still running a Q6600 @ stock

Another Q6600 here

Bought it for €150 4.5 years ago and I still cannot justify upgrading it. Never had a CPU that long in my main rig, hell I don't think I ever had one for more than 2 years

Best thing I ever bought was a Zalman Reserator (bought second hand about 8 years ago). Still cooling my CPU in complete silence, frugal too using just 5W

Big Lar

I'm gonna go with the Q6600 also, have it now for almost five years. Would like to upgrade but its been so loyal to me.

bonzodog2

Sounds like a beast then, I have one sent to a UK address which I have yet to pick up (free postage) , for about eur50. The folding farm gathers momentum! Also got a GT630 NVidia card for the same purpose.

RUCKING FETARD

bonzodog2 wrote: »

Sounds like a beast then, I have one sent to a UK address which I have yet to pick up (free postage) , for about eur50. The folding farm gathers momentum! Also got a GT630 NVidia card for the same purpose.

The Best Ways to Make Use of an Idle Computer



Whats the equivalent to a 6600 now?

Khannie

RUCKING FETARD wrote: »

Whats the equivalent to a 6600 now?

According to this page, it's about half the processing power of a Core i7-920.

Torqay

RUCKING FETARD wrote: »

Whats the equivalent to a 6600 now?

A mid-range dual core Pentium of the current Sandy Bridge range (G8xx) would be comparable to a Q6600.

Tea_Bag

Best for me was my Catleap monitor @ $358. 2560*1440 in S-IPS goodness. 1080p when I have to use it looks woeful for me now.
also i could never go back to a single screen either.

ED E

ANOTHER Q6600 here, and I only spent like €40 on it. Upgrading soon, but only due to mobo RAM limits.

ScumLord

My SSD was a stand out improvement.

Khannie

ScumLord wrote: »

My SSD was a stand out improvement.

Ah yes....I forgot this. I bought one for an ancient laptop some time ago and it completely revitalised it.

Gone Drinking

Bought a Dell XPS 720 HTC at an auction a few months ago. 160 blips, Q6600 quad core, 2 x GTX8800s, 4 gig of ram, 10k raptor and its water cooled.

Great bargain I thought! Was playing the newest games on high settings the day I took it home.

kippy

ScumLord wrote: »

My SSD was a stand out improvement.

Yep,
Bought one last year and put it into the laptop I carry around with me.
Made a massive difference to performance/bit of a difference to battery life but most of all it's not getting damaged anywhere near as much as the older drives I've used and hence far more stable.

unkel

Of course the SSD, how could we forget?

Bought mine (60GB, €65) about 3 years ago - bargain at the time! Stuck it into my oldish laptop I used for work to revive it and extend battery life. At some point replaced the work laptop with a €80 second hand great nick first gen netbook that already had a (8GB) SSD in it.

So SSD went into main rig and I haven't looked back since

Gyck

First has to be a second hand mono soundblaster card. Made a huge difference to Wolfenstein 3d and Dune 2.
Next best part has to be my 3dfx voodoo card. Expensive but wow! A night and day difference in gaming visual quality.
After that its the SSD.
Anything else has been incremental in performance or quality but these three items were game changers for me.

Khannie

Gyck wrote: »

Next best part has to be my 3dfx voodoo card. Expensive but wow! A night and day difference in gaming visual quality.

You've just reminded me of when alpha open gl drivers came out for my nvidia riva 128 (4MB) which came with my P2 dell. I had never seen hardware accelerated graphics before. I was absolutely blown away. That card (the riva) made nvidia. The voodoo was a great card, but very pricey at the time. 3dfx kinda disappeared off the map shortly after it.

Gyck

Khannie wrote: »

3dfx kinda disappeared off the map shortly after it.

Yes, much of 3dfx got sucked into Nvidia. Pioneering company.

Torqay

IIRC, I only bought one computer in the last 15 years: an Eee PC 701 4G, in a boot race it still puts any laptop with a regular HDD to shame.
(IMO the still the best netbook ever, apart from the Eee 900 with the same form factor, after that they became too big and clumsy and the departure from SSDs hasn't done them much good either)

Other than that I only bought 2 28" monitors and a few SSDs. Everything else around here is 2nd hand freebies: 2 Optiplex 360 w E7500 (salvaged from a business gone belly up), 2 (formerly "kaputt") Eee 1005 HA and a very old P4 1.6 GHZ desktop.

vibe666

i get most of my kit 2nd hand or freebies, but i did just buy one of these which i think is going to come in very handy.

http://www.ebay.ie/itm/180912579131?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649



one cable to rule them all!

I am hoping to get a transformer infinity for the wife very shortly as soon as amazon get their act together and stop selling french ones.

Overheal

Probably has to be the G930 headset



wireless 7.1 Surround Sound. So sick of cables, and for that matter stereo sound. Games like Left 4 Dead have completely different context in these cans.

For very similar reasons an honorable mention goes to the more portable RF-MAB2s from Rocketfish. 14 hours of playback or call time on a single charge. Bluetooth. I remember taking a business call from my bank on these the other morning in the college's front lawn with my hands freely slurping coffee thinking to myself 'ah sure isn't the future lovely?'



I can't really speak for my PC components they're only about 2 years old now. A Phenom II X6 never chokes though, I'll tell you that. And a Seagate Barracuda never makes a noise.

ED E

Overheal wrote: »

Probably has to be the G930 headset


wireless 7.1 Surround Sound. So sick of cables, and for that matter stereo sound. Games like Left 4 Dead have completely different context in these cans.

Hows the sound quality for music(and how picky are you)?

imitation

Ah I have so many bits down through the years its hard to pick any outstanding one. I'll immediately discount anything thats just a straight bigger/faster/better upgrades, as they are too many to list.

My current build PC, the specs are good,games are as smooth as butter, but my favorite thing is the fact I decided to make it quiet as possible, my last PC sounded like a fan heater set to full tilt, I have to check the light on my new one to see if its on or not !

A momentus XT Hybrid ssd/hdd was a great upgrade for quality of life, I brought it around the time when 60gb ssd was the only affordable size and reliability was questionable. Its such a fantastic drive, took loading time in some games down from 20-30s to 5s, halved the loading time for windows etc. The jump from this to SSD seems alot less dramatic than the jump from 5600rpm to the Momentus.

ATI 4850 - The notable thing about this is it lasted so long, I upgraded it recently, but I would have been happy to leave it in for another year. Playing Skyrim on high graphics after 3 years is fair going.

19" Samsung LCD - Got this in 2005 to replace a CRT 17", only cost 400 Euros - Man what a difference, no more flicker, the screen seemed massive and so easy on the eyes. And it could be moved without a crane.

Windows XP - An OS that didn't crash all of the time !

Voodoo 3DFX - This thing was amazing, it was a second graphics card you sat next to your VGA adapter. The difference it made was phenomenal at the time, it doubled or tripled FPS and got rid of the heavily pixelated textures you got with CPU based rendering. I loved play Quake 2 and Unreal on my old PC.

My familys first PC - I remember this beast, it was a Cyrix 166mhz. Changed everything, 3d games, doom, quake. Internet through dialup. Awesome VGA graphics.

My A1200, this was my first computer, and where I learned the basics and played more than one game. Scandalously expensive hardware upgrades included a cdrom drive, a hard drive and an upgraded processor. I also brought the Amiga Computer magazines regularly (Amiga Format, CU Amiga) My family thought I was mad, and my brother pointed out a PC almost cost as much as all that stuff, but what I learned then is paying off dividends now

Torqay

ED E wrote: »

Hows the sound quality for music(and how picky are you)?

Not very picky myself I'm afraid, rather oldschool... got the JVC UX-1 in the late 1980s and for some reason it is still with me, hooked up to my main rig.



It was one of the first micro systems and certainly one of the finest back in the days. One of the amber LEDs recently failed, other than that it's still in top shape. Also using my ancient Sennheiser HD414 headphones, which are even older.