I've gotta be a late bloomer amongst y'all. But then again, I'm also quite a bit younger than many of you.
My first PC came straight out of hell, though I didn't know it at the time. It was 2004/05, I was basically too young to know anything, Intel was waist-deep in yet-to-be-uncovered, nefarious anti-competition behaviour towards AMD and thus my first was a Gateway tower powered by none other than the
venerable (HAHAHAHA) Pentium 4 530. For the next 8 years, I tried to eke out of that piece of shit some semblance of "performance", of course failing because there was
nothing that sonuvabitch
couldn't do. I learned to endure the screaming of its Cooler Master-manufactured abomination of a CPU cooler for hours at a time. Nothing comes close. If all the young'uns think that the R9 290X was loud, then they should be damn grateful they never got to make this POS' acquaintance.
2012 came with an XPS 8500 from Dell (still repurposed and acting as a work computer for a family member). It was interesting for me because it was the first time I had experienced such performance. It had an i7-3770, 12GB (4 + 4 + 2 + 2) DDR3-1333 and a very special GT 640 (full GK107 core with all the TMUs and ROPs). The GT 640 was special because it was basically a downclocked GTX 650 without the connector, none of the ROP-cutting, GDDR3 or Fermi-rebranding bull of the rest of the GT 640 variants. In 2014, I built in an H440 with an E3-1230 v2 and R9 280X...the rest is history. I think I've assembled no less than 8-9 PCs in the past few years, and continue to care for a good chunk of them as they fulfill their various purposes.
Ol' Beastie came in January of 2015, and with its 7th flight and 50,000km mark due in less than 14 days, it's going to need an upgrade to keep doing what it does. That said, the other thread with all the pics of everyone's PCs will know when Ol' Beastie gets a makeover
In the process of my tinkering, I also developed a penchant for collecting old CPUs and GPUs out of the [really] old ones at the office. If I'm not mistaken, my current collection stands at:
P2 MMX 233MHz in glorious Slot 1 / Some Mendocino Celeron in Socket 370 (could be 333MHz?? not sure until I find it again) / A metric ton of desktop Core 2 family CPUs throughout the different generations (including E5200, E2140, E7400) and one mobile T7100 in Socket 478 / beloved Q8200 still runnin'
As for the GPUs, my collection is small but certainly vintage. One is a S3 Trio64-based Expertcolor DSP3364 circa 1994, and the other one is a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5446 circa 1996.
Even though it's taken sort of a backseat to my insatiable keyboard obsession, getting started with PCs is something I'll never regret. The knowledge I've gained from trudging through more forums than I can count and almost building more PCs than I can keep track of is invaluable and cannot be summarized in a single document in any form. And it's definitely something that I won't be putting down for as long as I can help it.