I just bought a new gaming PC this weekend because my current one is a bit old now since I bought it in MoP. Doing this reminded me of the time before I had a gaming computer.
I started playing WoW in 2005-2006. At the time, I was 12 years old, and my parents bought me some new computer from Walmart or something. One of those cheap low performance office work kind of computers with integrated graphics cards, etc. It worked great during in vanilla. Expansions started releasing, and by WOTLK the computer was not doing so well. I had to play on the lowest settings possible, and at some point in Wrath, the world would turn black during play and I couldn’t see anything other than UI elements. I had to submit a ticket and a very helpful GM gave me some command that would disable a particular internal setting that made the black screen go away.
I continued with this computer into Cata, and I remember posting a screenshot on the WoW arena forums showing a bug I encountered, and someone replied “Wtf are those graphics, are you playing WoW on a toaster?”. To me, the game looked fine so I didn’t pay much attention to it. I’ve never seen WoW on high settings before.
MoP launched and I started questing in Jade Forest since I was horde. I noticed that pretty much everywhere around my character, like 10 yards or greater, was covered in white fog. I figured this was normal and it was because the expansion was called “Mists of Pandaria”. So I figured that was the mist. I met my best friend around this time, and he played WoW too. One day he invited me over to hangout, and he showed me his computer. He had a very high performing custom built PC. I couldn’t believe what I saw. It literally looked like a completely different game. I was quite baffled and ordered a custom built PC within that month.
I just thought this was a pretty funny story, thinking the fog from low graphics settings was due to the name/theme of the expansion.
I started playing when BC was coming out. A friend I played EQOA with
had been telling me I need to play. After reading a preview in my gaming
magazine on BC. I decided to give it a try. Just like you OP. I started out with a crappy PC. I bought a HP from Best Buy. With everything turned down, I was
getting 20 fps.
One day, a patch caused my settings to all go to max. I logged on, and
could not move. But man, did the world look amazing. I decided I
must have it look that way all the time. So, I charged a Alienware
Aurora 2 to my Best Buy card.
It was amazing to me at the time. Playing on max settings all the time.
It lasted nine years before it started having issues. So I looked into
upgrades, only to find the AW was built where it was very limited on
what upgrades it could use.
So in Jan. 2017. I ordered the parts to attempt to do what I never
thought I would be able to do. Build my own PC.
I love it, and hope to do some upgrades in the coming years.
Every computer I have ever owned, I’ve built myself, and they have all been “gaming computers”.
The technology wasn’t great back in the late 90s when I built my first one, but I built it with the intention to play games on it.
To be honest. Trying to build my own intimidated me until I tried it.
Thats why I bought my first gaming PC. I was so afraid of screwing
something up where it would damage something and not work.
Now that I have built my own. I will never buy a prebuilt again.
Pretty fuzzy for me. First computer was a Z80 in the late 1970’s. Gaming wasn’t exactly around. Second computer TI/994a it eventually had games. Next computer the IBM PC 8088 I suppose my first gaming computer upgrade was from monochrome graphics, to CGA, then EGA, excetra. like around 1982.
Strange, as soon as I posted this, there was a flash, blip, I was disconnected. Logged back in, and this character was not available. Not untill I rebooted. Strange
I just bought a custom gaming pc few days ago… God damn WoW looks good on ultra…
I upgraded my PoS E-machine with a Radeon 9250 to play AoE 3 and called it a gaming pc.
When I started Wow in tbc I was up to a pentium 4 3.4Ghz Prescott and a Radeon HD 3850 agp.
My first gaming PC I received n about 2005 when I started playing PreCU Star Wars Galaxies around age 14.
I had been playing PC games for a while on my dads PC, like Team Fortress 1, Half Life, Counter Strike, Tribes. Was always hilarious when grown men were getting their butts beat by a 10 year old.
Dad ended up buying me a desktop in 2005 with a Dual Core AMD Athlon Processor and we upgraded the internals to 4GB of RAM and an nVidia 6800 Deluxe. I still have this PC in storage at my grandparents house. Had a top of the line gaming rig back then.
My first ever upgrade for a gaming computer, as in hardware which didn’t come with the original machine (even at my discretion), was a 12MB 3DFX Voodoo 2 to fit into a Celeron 333A system. Prior to that I used the on-board SiS 6326 graphics adaptor, which was fine up to around 512x384, but that V2 was awesome all the way up to 800x600.
If you’re referring to actually upgrading to a gaming machine, however… yeah, that’s probably the 333A itself. It was bought specifically for gaming to replace a Am386 SXL-25-based system. What was 5MB of RAM became 64MB, 3D acceleration from the on-board SiS 6326 rather than a 512KB Trident 8800, an Aureal Vortex 2 soundcard instead of the ESS 1868… was pretty sweet at the time.
That system was actually where I learned to dislike onboard audio (ironic given my current situation). Experimenting showed a noticeable and significant drop in performance just by changing between the hardware Aureal and the onboard Realtek, and disabling the onboard entirely proved slightly faster again.
I think that whole system is still in the shed somewhere. That V2 is probably worth a small fortune, assuming it still operates.
Sound cards aren’t worth the price you pay anymore.
Most motherboards today have a reasonable audio boost in them that perform/mesh 100% with 99.999999% of any audio device your purchase.
Perhaps not any more, but certainly back then you could basically go up a CPU speed grade or two by fitting one for much less than actually buying the corresponding CPU.
Though they do at least have far better software support than onboard offerings. Not that they have particularly good support, but it’s still better.
I never really thought to call any of my systems “gaming PCs” since I only built my systems for general better performance and not for a main focus playing games.
Specifics are fuzzy, but I remember at some point in the late 90’s my first system that I installed a standalone card was a 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee on a Pentium II system. I had Windows 98, 1GB of RAM, a single HDD (can’t remember the size but for certain it was less than 20GB).
Yeah. I built my first pc back in 2011 when bought a PII 965 and a GTX 560. Going to that from a P4 with onboard graphics was really nice.
I built my first PC in the early 90s , I want to say 1992 or 1993, it was a 486 DX 50 , it was a large tower made to run a multi-line BBS. Since then It’s been a practice of mine to build them every 3-5 years. Went back and forth between AMD and Intel but intel has been my choice for CPU for the last 10 years.
Today i am on a I7 8700K & Nvidia 1080TI.