A Brief History of all the PCs I've Ever Owned

 

This is what our 386 was used for.

I've been building computers since I was a kid, so I thought I'd review every single system I've ever possessed in the interests of jogging my memory as well as producing that all important content for the blog. So I'm going to take a trip down memory lane and see what I dredge up.

Prebuilts

i386/i486--We definitely had a hand-me down 386 or 486 PC that we used to play shareware such as Wolfenstein and Commander Keen. It had no internet connection, so it was basically used as a word processor or gaming machine. This would've been in the middle nineties when I was a kid, so my memory is really foggy.

Mystery machine--I feel as though we may have had another PC, possibly a 90 to 166 MHz Pentium, likely another hand me down. It's even possible that I'm confusing this hypothetical Pentium computer for the i386/486 machine. All I know is that I had something that I played Dark Forces and its sequel Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2 on, and it certainly wasn't a 486.

Compaq Presario with a 300 MHz Celeron processor and an ATI graphics card with 4 megabytes of memory (likely a Rage 3d Pro). This was the first real PC we owned as a family. I still remember playing Tomb Raider 3 on it Christmas morning. This was likely in 1998. I actually purchased a four meg upgrade for the built-in graphics card, which is hilarious in retrospect, since I doubt that it made a substantial difference, this still being the era of 3dfx (before the Geforce TNT 2, 3dfx was the only reliable 3d graphics card maker). I eventually put a Voodoo 3 PCI in this computer, which got me through the rest of the of the nineties and many hours of Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, and Quake 3. I still have that Voodoo 3, by the way. It sits in a place of honor on my mantle.

Custom Builds

Mystery PC 2. Somehow, I can't remember the first computer I built. It may, in fact, be the next computer on this list, but I believe I had a K6 AMD based PC for a couple years. Oh well. We'll never know.

Athlon XP Thunderbird 1000 Mhz based system with a mystery graphics card, probably a Geforce 2 GTS or a Geforce 3 200 ti. Fairly certain I had a Geforce 3 200 ti in this system, which lasted me about three years. This was around 2000 or 2001, so I was a freshman in high school when I built this PC. My main games of this era were Half-Life and its mods (Counter-strike, Team Fortress Classic, Day of Defeat).

Athlon XP 2000+ with a Geforce 4 ti 4600. I went through my entire college career with this PC. I remember buying a Geforce 4 ti 4400 at Best Buy and then opening it and finding a little note that said "Congratulations! You've been upgraded to a Geforce 4 ti 4600!" which was cool as hell. Since I built this PC at the end of high school and kept it till almost the end of college, I played all sorts of games on it, from Unreal Tournament 2004 to Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4. I was a low spec gamer for quite some time there.

 This was the Mac version of the Geforce 4 ti 4600, but the PC card looked similar.

Athlon 3000+ with some type of ATI graphics card (likely Radeon 9500 or 9700). I built this PC for my parents around 2002 or 2003, but I made sure it would play Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. Was a little mini atx case that was about the size of a shoebox. 

Athlon X2 6000+ dual core 64 bit processor with a Geforce GTS 250. I can't remember what card I initially had in this PC, but it was definitely an ATI card that couldn't run Crysis on High Quality. I soon upgraded to a GTS 250. Played Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Turok, Unreal Tournament 3, Orange Box, and many more on this PC. Was still rocking a Samsung 19 inch CRT. I still have the monitor and this PC today; I recently did a post on how I installed Windows 10 on it. This system now enjoys a second life as an audio recording station and a retro gaming PC.

i5 2500k with 16 gigs of memory, a solid state hard drive, and a Radeon HD 6950 graphics card, eventually replaced with a Radeon R9 380. This is the best PC I ever built, in terms of longevity and performance. I built it in 2012, and used it until 2020, and during that 8 year span it was a decent gaming PC, even at the end. It's now on its second hard drive and serving as my parents' desktop. I also purchased my first LCD monitor with this PC, a 1080p Viewsonic that still works great. I played everything from Skyrim and Mass Effect 2 to Jedi Fallen Order and Prey on this computer.

Ryzen 7 3700x with 16 gigs of DDR 3200 ram, a 5700 xt graphics card, 1 terabyte ssd drive, and a 27 inch 1440p 165 hertz MSI monitor. This is my current system, built last year before everything went to hell and three year old graphics cards ballooned in price to 500 dollars. I'll probably replace the 5700 xt when something affordable comes along in order to take advantage of the higher refresh rates of my monitor, but this is the most expensive PC I've ever owned, and I'm glad I built it when I did.