Where does the hardware "nostalgia era" lie for you?

[pipnina]

I have done some thinking recently about building a setup that replicates a PC you might buy or build around 2000ish, which is the hardware time period most of my childhood games were played on. slot 1 PIII etc.

But then I realised going up to the Pentium 4, which I also used for many years as a kid, felt like something less interesting and too much like a worse version of what I have now, even though it would be perfect for a different part of my childhood experiences.

 

Something about the late 90s/turn of the millenium holds a dear spot for me, partly because of the alien (compared to now) way CPUs were formatted, the simplicity of the product lineups, and the totally different players in the GPU market etc.

 

What time period do you have to go back to, in terms of hardware, for your nostalgia to kick in and the sense of "this PC is just old junk" to fade away?

[Justin_Case]

5 minutes ago, pipnina said:

I have done some thinking recently about building a setup that replicates a PC you might buy or build around 2000ish, which is the hardware time period most of my childhood games were played on. slot 1 PIII etc.

But then I realised going up to the Pentium 4, which I also used for many years as a kid, felt like something less interesting and too much like a worse version of what I have now, even though it would be perfect for a different part of my childhood experiences.

 

Something about the late 90s/turn of the millenium holds a dear spot for me, partly because of the alien (compared to now) way CPUs were formatted, the simplicity of the product lineups, and the totally different players in the GPU market etc.

 

What time period do you have to go back to, in terms of hardware, for your nostalgia to kick in and the sense of "this PC is just old junk" to fade away?

100,000% the core 2 duo... man that thing was.. bad lol. Also, dude, pci, no express, just pci

[podkall]

My dad's PC is like from around 2000 year, that pc had close to 100% cpu usage just on desktop, 1 core.

 

In some games, graphics artefacts would appear, literal spikes.

 

Might have been good when it was new, but I experienced it's glory when it was already like 7+ years old so pretty good survival from an old pc.

[Zodiark1593]

1 minute ago, Justin_Case said:

100,000% the core 2 duo... man that thing was.. bad lol. Also, dude, pci, no express, just pci

Core 2 Duo bad?

 

That thing was eons better than the outgoing Pentium D and P4, and put Intel well in front of AMD for the better part of a decade. 

[AlexQC]

I have 2 era of nostalgia: #1, late 80's computers. It was my first interaction with technology while being old enough to understand how to fully use it. No HDD, 5.25" floppies, 16 color monitor (when you were lucky)... I would not own the real hardware today because it's too big and at that time (most of the time) you would buy everything already built.

 

#2, the 386/486 era. At that time I was older and interested in customizing the hardware of my machine and still own the real hardware for a future retro build.

 

I'm also fond of the Pentium II & III because the slot 1 is soo alien to today's standard (I own some hardware for future project if I ever get the space). After that it's irrelevant since the apps/game mostly works on modern hardware.

[FruitOfTheLum]

I've been around computers since I was a mini-Fruit helping my dad build 486 machines on the floor for his business. But I never really properly got my own computer - one that was all mine and brand new - until my dad gave me a machine he'd built for me for Christmas with a K6-2 processor. That was when I really started to pay attention to the parts in them, as I could rip them out and put new ones in mwuhuahahaaa! The first addition was a Voodoo 3 3000 using my birthday money the following year, incidentally. 

 

The last PC I built before 2021 was an AMD FX-55/GeForce 6800 Ultra machine, when I'd just got my first proper job. I don't really feel so nostalgic about that one though - possibly because it died on me when I'd just lost my job two years later and couldn't afford to repair it. I kinda lost my enthusiasm for it all for a while after that unfortunate death. So I'd say my 'nostalgia era' would probably end around the time of the Athlon XP CPUs.

 

The 1Ghz Thunderbird is the one I'm most nostalgic about. I'd been saving up my pocket money for ages for an upgrade when that came out, and spent nearly all of it - I was so proud of having the first ever 1 gigahertz CPU. It felt like being part of a bit of history to me at the time.

[Justin_Case]

1 minute ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Core 2 Duo bad?

 

That thing was eons better than the outgoing Pentium D and P4, and put Intel well in front of AMD for the better part of a decade. 

Thats fair but I'm younger than many people on these forums. to me personally, the core 2 duo was horrible.

[Zodiark1593]

Just now, Justin_Case said:

Thats fair but I'm younger than many people on these forums. to me personally, the core 2 duo was horrible.

What was horrible then were the molasses slow Hard Drives. The advent of fast SSDs was pretty huge. 

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, Justin_Case said:

100,000% the core 2 duo... man that thing was.. bad lol. Also, dude, pci, no express, just pci

The C2D was pretty great when it came out, and remained a variable choice for a very long time. From that point on up until Ryzen AMD failed to come close performance-wise to what Intel has engineered. Also, I think you are mistaking AGP for PCI. AGP was common on motherboards since the late 90's. PCI was used for expansion cards, such as ethernet, wifi etc. not graphics. At least in the past 20 years.

[Levent]

  

2 minutes ago, Justin_Case said:

100,000% the core 2 duo... man that thing was.. bad lol. Also, dude, pci, no express, just pci

PCIE has been around before Core2 architecture was released and was quite well established when Nehalem architecture was released. Boards that didnt have PCIE and supported some dual core Core2 CPUs were the i865 and some via chipsets. Core2 CPUs were really good (Nehalem architecture IIRC), Netburst was shit and there were couple (PentiumD, CeleronD, etc) of Netburst CPUs on socket 775. Anyways.

 

I would argue 2011, the release of Sandy Bridge and HD7970 was the best era for hardware. If you have a 2600K and a HD7970, you can still play games with it at resonable settings. Which never happened before.

 

[Tan3l6]

I enjoyed the biggest jump from Pentium 100 to Duron 800 - suddenly games like RTCW and CMR2 became playable. Geforce 2 MX400 as GPU iirc...
Best nostalgic upgrade anyway.

[FloRolf]

To me it's Q6600 Era, so like 2007. My first PC was an E6750 or something and that sucked. I used a Q6600 in a PC until 2019 so whole nostalgic it's still up to the task lmao

Also 8600GT was boss, I even bought a second one years later for SLI testing and it's... Yeah well... 

[BondiBlue]

18 minutes ago, Justin_Case said:

100,000% the core 2 duo... man that thing was.. bad lol. Also, dude, pci, no express, just pci

You're completely confused. Core 2 Duo machines basically all have PCIe. Also, they were excellent chips for their time. Pair them with an SSD and they still make a good web browsing machine these days. 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

19 minutes ago, Justin_Case said:

100,000% the core 2 duo... man that thing was.. bad lol. Also, dude, pci, no express, just pci

Um? 
I’ve had p4 pga boards that had a pcie slot, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

for me, a 14 yo, it’s going to be like Wii era tech

[pipnina]

12 minutes ago, Justin_Case said:

100,000% the core 2 duo... man that thing was.. bad lol. Also, dude, pci, no express, just pci

I would have killed for a Core2 Duo back when I had my Pentium4 machine, that was the *recommended* CPU to play the original Crysis with! The game we've memed to death over the last 14 years about how hard it is to run lol.

 

11 minutes ago, AlexQC said:

I have 2 era of nostalgia: #1, late 80's computers. It was my first interaction with technology while being old enough to understand how to fully use it. No HDD, 5.25" floppies, 16 color monitor (when you were lucky)... I would not own the real hardware today because it's too big and at that time (most of the time) you would buy everything already built.

 

#2, the 386/486 era. At that time I was older and interested in customizing the hardware of my machine and still own the real hardware for a future retro build.

 

I'm also fond of the Pentium II & III because the slot 1 is soo alien to today's standard (I own some hardware for future project if I ever get the space). After that it's irrelevant since the apps/game mostly works on modern hardware.

You remind me of my mum's Commodore computer that we found in her dad's loft when he died. I can't remember which version of the Commodore it was, but it had three computing boxes, a box full of tapes, and a controller. The only thing we were missing to actually use it was an odd-looking power cable.

I begged my parents to try and find one for us to use for it, but they did what must have been a very lackluster search and said they didn't find any (I remember dad saying he went to the computer shop, in 2008, and said they didn't have the right cable, no shit dad lol).

They threw it away. A real shame. : (

 

10 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

What was horrible then were the molasses slow Hard Drives. The advent of fast SSDs was pretty huge. 

*clicks to open game*
grbgrbrrgrbrgbrgrbgrgrbgrbrgbrgrgb

[Justin_Case]

3 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

You're completely confused. Core 2 Duo machines basically all have PCIe. Also, they were excellent chips for their time. Pair them with an SSD and they still make a good web browsing machine these days. 

I wasn't saying they were paired together, just saying them as 2 seperate things. And also, I was comparing pci and the core 2 duo to todays electronics, not at the time. 

[pipnina]

1 minute ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

Um? 
I’ve had p4 pga boards that had a pcie slot, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

for me, a 14 yo, it’s going to be like Wii era tech

My P4 (3.00GHx with HT) ran alongside a Radeon HD6450 near the end! Because the internal graphics were an ATI Xpress 200... I tried to play KOTOR II, and the framerate basically stopped as soon as a smoke effect or grass appeared lol. Put the 6450 in and suddenly the game ran maxed out without a sweat.

I messed around with that PC when me and my bro both got our own individual ones, and I ran Cinebench R14 (the one with the car chase GPU bench). It got 9fps. I used FSB overclocking to pump the P4 up as high as it would go. It reached what it claimed was 4.25GHz but only managed to POST like one in 3 attempts. The GPU bench went up to 12.5fps LMAO.

The CPU test was still so slow I didn't have the patience to let it finish.

Good times.

[IDontKnowLiterallyAnything]

I was born a few days before the launch of the original Playstation 3. Nothing else to say. Maybe some foreshadowing for the 3 years to come

[BondiBlue]

40 minutes ago, Justin_Case said:

I wasn't saying they were paired together, just saying them as 2 seperate things. And also, I was comparing pci and the core 2 duo to todays electronics, not at the time. 

Oh, I misunderstood you. You meant Core 2 Duos as one thing and PCI as another, right? If so, what was so bad about the C2D?

[Justin_Case]

Just now, BondiBlue said:

Oh, I misunderstood you. You meant Core 2 Duos as one thing and PCI as another, right? If so, what was so bad about the C2D?

Yes. And the problem was the first time I got my hands on  core 2 duo was 2011 and by then it couldn't hold its own against other cpus

[BondiBlue]

3 minutes ago, Justin_Case said:

Yes. And the problem was the first time I got my hands on  core 2 duo was 2011 and by then it couldn't hold its own against other cpus

You must have been comparing it to a rather high end CPU at that time. Core 2 Duos were still quite usable as late as 2016-2017. I know because I was still actively using them at the time. Heck, I've still got a few running. 

[Justin_Case]

6 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

You must have been comparing it to a rather high end CPU at that time. Core 2 Duos were still quite usable as late as 2016-2017. I know because I was still actively using them at the time. Heck, I've still got a few running. 

Yeah I was comparing to more high end stuff. I tend to buy latest and greatest, hence why I have an i7 11700k and 3080ti.

[RollinLower]

For me it's definitely the first nvidia Titan X. The maxwell one.

I loved that generation of gpus!

[da na]

Pretty much anything that existed before I knew about computers. Most systems I work on are older than I am in fact so I'm used to old hardware but my favorite era probably has to be the mid 2000s "what dumb stuff can we put in a drive bay" era. Back when cases had way too many drive bays and you could find literally anything - fans, VU meters, cigarette lighters, cupholders, you name it - to fit in them. 

[CerealExperimentsLain]

I'm just gonna pimp my 'Anachronistic Time Machine' build:
 

A Windows 9X gaming PC built all from parts mostly from the mid to late 2000s, plus a modern SSD, PSU and case.

Is it accurate?  No.  Does it run Windows 9X games at 1600x1200@60 at max settings?  YES.  It's the computer I wish I had before 9/11.   The main take always is you could build a computer that ran like it did when you were a kid, but did your parents buy you a great computer when you were a kid?  Or even if they did how long until that hardware became obsolete?  You've not seen Windows 9X gaming till you've done it on hardware that offers unholy performance relative to what should have been available at the time, it's often cheaper to get into, and maintains that classic compatibility.

Since the ATX standard has not changed much since it was rolled out, you could mostly do the same hardware in a more 'authentic' case.  I just found myself with a blue PCP mobo, GPU, and a Noctua cooler on order so I said 'Let's go for it.