My Desktop PC History

My PC history and I literally mean PC's, so we're talking after my Atari ST, this is a list of the machines I've owned and used in order and a little bit about what I did with them.

486-SX-25 (1994)

The first PC I used was built by a company based in Baseford in Nottingham, it was at college and was equipped with an Intel 80486SX, it ran at 25Mhz, ran DOS 6.2 and a netware network layer.  It had 4MB of ram and basically was very much locked down, that was until we figured out how to quit out of the netware login screen (repeatedly CTRL+C whilst hitting enter fast).  The college had loads of these machines of this specification, the three main IT labs of course but then there were two more directly outside one of the lab doors, another in the head of Chemistry's office and a bunch in the library.

I primarily programmed in Turbo Pascal on these machines, I remember playing about with writing my first games on this in EGA graphics mode.

486-SX2-50 (1994)

My first home PC, it was from Watford Electronics and had their own ISA riser connecting to a dual speed CD-ROM, I remember Encarta amazed me, as well as working out how to just play CD's whilst programming.  I of course did my college work on the machine, and I remember my brother did his too.

The machine came with 4MB of RAM and a 200MB hard drive... MEGABYTE... I remember windows 3.1 ate into the disk significantly.

But DOOM came into view, now at the time I had no idea really what SX meant, but it had effects on DOOM's speed.  One of them was the maths.

I actually programmed around the limitations of t he SX chip without realising it and this came back to save me (or curse me) later.

Later we got Dark Forces and another 4MB of RAM, giving us a total of 8MB in this machine as I went to Uni.

But basically the SX had no floating point unit, it had only integer mathematics as well as a bunch of other operations being missing.  It was basically a DX chip which had failed QA and had come part of it disabled, but this was a "2" which meant it ran twice as fast as the machines at college.  And that speed difference was reflected in my little home brew games suddenly running twice as fast.

This remained my main and only PC going to Uni, but in my second year of Uni, sharing this machine with my A-Level studying brother I needed my own and these "Pentium" machines had been released.

Pentium-100 (1996)

The power of the penium, with the EDO ram SIMM's was so massive compared to the 486, and this was the first machine I started to program in C on.  Indeed, it was also the first machine I wrote Java on and even played with Linux.  But I never loved this machine.

Running at 100Mhz, it was blisteringly fast to me, but I was still using DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 for the most part.

I should have, it was the first machine I bought with my own hard earned money, I did keep it until my final year at uni, but by then I had started to build my own machines.... But I'd also been to work in IT.

HP Pentium-166 (1998)

This was a machine at work, it was mainly a windows 95 platform for me to work with, I soon had Windows 95 at home too, so things balanced up.  All I used this for was some very basic database work, which the prior incumbent in my job had left (and which was awful).

Compaq Pentium-II 233 (1998)

Another work machine and at 200Mhz, it seemed like the things of legend, but this was a compaq deskpro to which all the analysts and myself upgraded, with  massive 17" CRT monitors, they were really nice machines.

I did a bunch of Pascal programming on it, a bunch of Cobol and some database work (I think it was in FoxPro).

Pentium-III 300 (1999)

Returning to Uni for my final year I built this machine myself, I remember this was a slot-1 processor, and I put a whopping 32MB of RAM into it.  I wrote my dissertation on it and networked it to my older Pentium 100.

Voodoo3-2000 AGP.... Which I only sold in 2013 on ebay, at a profit.

Cyrix-150 (1999)

This was actually my pentium 100, but I found the Cyrix chip for sale for only £10 at maplins so bought it and stuck it in the old PC, to find it was a massive performance improvement when compiling and running both C and Java.

Celeron-III 450 (1999)

This was a machine I actually built for a customer, I spent a bit of time making PC's and making money doing so in the late 90's.  And this was one which stuck out to me because it was such a nice performing machine, it included a graphics card (I think it was a Voodoo3-3000).

The build was with a gigabyte motherboard using slot-1, but the processor was socket 370, buying it and using a daughter board was cheaper than buying a socket 370 motherboard, and performed no differently.  It actually made adding the cooler so much easier.

Pentium III 500 (2000)

I bought this after uni, just a new chip, with 128MB of RAM as I set off away from uni.  I just played a lot of games on this machine, dabbled with Java, but I didn't have the compiler suite we used at work to my programming was mostly all in the office.

Pentium III 500 (2001)

This was the office machine I had at the time, I'd had one before, but don't recall it, this one however was by the local computer firm in Redditch and I remember it was a 500mhz Pentium III.

GeForce... At some point at home in 2001/2 I got the first GeForce card at home and started to babble with OpenGL on Linux.

Pentium III 1ghz (2003)

Another office machine, this was a bod standard HP I think, the job here was C++ programming, but coming from a pure Borland using history (all the way from college to now) I was suddenly not in a Borland using shop and... well... I didn't stay at this job very long.

Pentium IV - 1.5ghz (2004)

A prescott Pentium 4... at the high speed of 1.5ghz, this was my first hyper threaded machine, it was built from the ground up for gaming... so it had 1.5GB of RAM (the most I could afford)... the dual thread pentium 4, overclocked to 2ghz on air.

A pair of GeForce 8800GTX in SLi.

I bought it to run Battlefield 1942 really well, and was really very good.  I also played national league Day of Defeat and started my dual obsessions with World of Warcraft and Eve-Online on this machine.

Core 2 Duo 3ghz - Wolfdale - 2.3ghz

I built this machine for my father, he didn't appreciate it at the time.

Core 2 Quad Q6600 - 3ghz (2007)

This was my main driver for years, and the machine I first put into the Cosmos 1000 case.  It had various RAM, disk, graphics configurations until the last iteration being a GeForce 260 GTX (squared) so this was two GeForce 260's on the same card in SLi together.... It was really good.

I spent time coding for Lordz Game Studio on this machine, as well as playing lots and lots of games.

Core i7-920 (2012)

Yeah, we're at Core i7.... the best I could accord for the i7 release set and it went into the same case as the Q6600 was in.  This machine was a main-stay until I actually swapped out the Core I7 (4 cores 8 threads) for a Xeon which was 6 cores and 12 threads... I did that in like 2016... so I've had 12 threads at home for a long old time.

Ryzen 5 3600X (2018) -> Ryzen 9 3900X

Team Red.... Aside from the cyrix I've always, always been Intel... Ryzen turned my head, and the 6c12t 2600 was the first I could get my hands on.  But the motherboard was purchased with upgrades in mind and the same machine now has a Ryzen 9 3900X 12c24t.

It was a mchine built around the 64GB of RAM, dual m2 NVMe and a stack of 4TB disks, all in a corsair obsidian case.

From intel to AMD...

Well, that just happened... I bought a Ryzen CPU...

That may not seem a huge revelation, but let me be clear in my PC's I have always (well nearly always) had Intel CPU's.  But the current 3rd generation of Ryzen has Intel on the ropes and I have to get moving with my new PC build.

And I've gone in what may seem a strange direction.

Initially I thought about third gen Threadripper, but I really can not justify the expense, most of my work is done on servers and though I could bring it all onto my workstation for compiles (like LLVM) but really its a convenience and not worthhy of nearly £2500 (after a processor and motherboard).

So what did you do Xel?... WHAT DID YOU DO?

Well, I've gone with an AM4 socket motherboard, a very good AM4 socket motherboard, and I've gone with a 3rd Gen Ryzen Zen 2 architecture processor, but perhaps not the one you'd expect.

You may expect me to have gone with the Ryzen 9 3950X, and you'd be right sometime next year, when they're properly out and in stock and prices have homogenised some.  But today, pre-Christmas, they're like rocking horse shite and costly.

The processor I've gone with then is the Ryzen 5 3600X...

Yes, it's Zen 2, yes it's AM4... Yes it's only 6 cores and 12 threads like my current workstation machine.  But it was only £200.  It comes with the stock cooler, so I cam practice with that before delving into fitting the AIO.

I've gone with an Asus ROG top tier motherboard for this class of processor, and I plan to let it go up to the 3950X with it's 16 cores and 32 threads sometime next year.

Memory, I've gone with two sets of 2 x 16GB Corsair Dominator RGB.  For a total of 64GB of RAM, which is a massive upgrade and maxes out the motherboard.

For that's the big thing I'm giving up, if I had gone with the threadripper3, then I'd have automatically had access to double the RAM slots (8 to be precise) and 128GB of RAM is common as a maximum on the X399... But here on the X370's it's usually 64GB (though some are 128GB).

The motherboard, RAM and processor all come from Amazon, for (to me) the princely sum of £700.  So the whole new machine, with the PSU, AIO, Case and storage I already have has topped me out at £1,100.

Expect build videos and tech tinkering footage soon.

Gaming, AMD & HP

Over the next few weeks I'm going to be musing about the connections between the humble concept of the PC, where it started for myself, which processors and upgrade options I've taken, which dead-ends I've been down and where that took my gaming experience.

And where I hope to take my gaming experience in the future.

Today of course I'm running a quite nice Intel i7 processor and an EVGA GeForce 1080 GTX graphics card, however, that rig is nearing end of life for me, only the graphics card is a recent edition, and so as a high-performance low budget kind of chap I will be looking at my options, including the latest offerings from both Intel and AMD and the modern differences in nVidia versus AMD graphics offerings.

The secondary thread from this will be a little retro-grade gaming, this is not going to be full on retro - though I am in the mood for some Carrier Command on my Atari ST - we're going to be looking at retro post 2000 stuff.... Watch this space.

So why does this post have "HP" in its title, well... the community out reach team over at HP have sent me a missive, and though they have a zero budget want to share my posts with you guys in the world.

If you came here from a HP/AMD re-tweet, post in the comments below!