The hardware upgrade you have been most impressed and satisfied by... EVER

[QuantumSingularity]

Well, got really curious with you guys what is the hardware you purchased over the years which not only impressed you, but impressed you big time, to the point where there wasn't even the slightest trace of buyer's remorse? That one soul fulfilling upgrade, where everything just feels as a bliss?

I'll start first - for me there were 2 such upgrades. The first one was my Radeon HD5870 a long time ago and the other is my latest upgrade - the 5800X3D. Both of those products performed so well since the very first time experiencing them, that i wasn't just satisfied, i was blown away by how good they are, especially for the great deals i had on them. The HD 5870 paid for itself in 2 months by mining bitcoins while i was at work during the day. The 5800X3D still impresses me with the gaming performance uplift, especially in ACC.

 

So what about your similar upgrade experiences? 

[podkall]

So my first PC which I'm still partially using, has a GTX 1050, and it had a Dual Core pentium no hyperthreading.

 

Then when the Ryzen exploded, I bought the cheapest one, it was on sale 50% off brand new, 4 cores 3,5Ghz.

 

And it turned my PC from stuttering often, to stuttering never or when really pushed on CPU (so basically never),

multitasking doesn't stutter, it's smooth and the combo really works decently with 95% of the games, running them on decent sometimes Ultra details.

 

Not only that, but I bought the CPU with ASUS Prime B450-M-K,

 

which is really impressive, because that motherboad, not only was the cheapest option, but it still has strong enough VRMs for me to upgrade to like a 5 5600.

 

So a really great deal of a CPU, with a first result motherboard that came up when sorted by "cheapest" still supporting up to 6core hyperthreaded Ryzens. PC no longer studders when doing simple tasks or multiple.

 

Really happy I don't have to buy a new MB once I get to upgrading my CPU.

[SkilledRebuilds]

Moving from booting off a HDD to booting off the SSD.

Even Sata 1 SSDs vs HDD was still something but Sata2 SSD vs HDD and beyond it was pretty clear the way to go.

 

Night and Day.

Like the FIRST time you launch something (Not in RAM)

The HDD uncached delays... vs SSD access tomes.

Huge deal, impressed day one.

[jaslion]

In 2013 I got a fx 8320 new for 80€.

 

Before you say fx is bad. Yes it was worse in everything EXCEPT the 1 task I purposefully bought it for: blender and 3ds max.

 

It was much faster than the i5 650 I could have bought for similar money as my budget was extremely limited and this kickstarted my path to 3d modeller.

 

So whilst fx is objectively a bad series it was a massive upgrade from my pentium 4 I had and was perfect for the main task it needed to do and acceptable enough in everything else

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

nvidia nforce 520 --> ATi X1950GT

[Echothedolpin]

Upgrading from a 7900gs that cost $200 or so to an 8800gt that was $150 on sale.

 

I could argue that using an SSD for the first time or going from single core to quad was better. But that 8800gt truly was the best bang for the buck upgrade by far and away over ever purchased.

 

 

[chris219219]

 

1 hour ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

Moving from booting off a HDD to booting off the SSD.

Even Sata 1 SSDs vs HDD was still something but Sata2 SSD vs HDD and beyond it was pretty clear the way to go.

 

Night and Day.

Like the FIRST time you launch something (Not in RAM)

The HDD uncached delays... vs SSD access tomes.

Huge deal, impressed day one.

This, SSDs make a huge difference, my main rig has two of them (one for OS and programs, one for games and other files) and I feel like I never have to wait for file transfers.

[Arika]

Going from my 2060 super to an rtx a4000

[Alcarin]

Buying my first SSD a long time ago and reinstalling Windows 7 onto it for the first time, around 2011. It was a 60GB OCZ SSD.

 

The performance difference was mindblowing.

 

Second time was upgrading from the R9 390 to a GTX 1080, in early 2017. Night and day difference in just about every metric. No more heat issues, less power draw, vast improvement in performance. 

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

funny how often SSDs come up here, not surprising,  i worked in a repair shop, one of the things they did was replace the drive of old sluggish computers with a SSD and the owners were amazed... i always thought its a crutch... still not impressed by SSDs today, yes it copies faster that is *very* nice but as in overall responsiveness its just, uh, a hard-drive... doesn't give more fps either,  maybe slightly less latency (i have folders with tons of screenshots etc, it doesn't load them instantly... its always doing this windows thumbnails thing... takes forever sometimes,  i feel if anything any speed advantages outside of read/write are negated by windows stupid way of handling files ... why is my thumbnail cache only 3GB... it should be like 100, realistically... nope, every time... *loading...* ) 

 

 

33 minutes ago, Alcarin said:

my first SSD a long time ago and reinstalling Windows 7 onto it for the first time, around 201

that may be around when i bought my first SSD too, a Samsung evo 850 (not sure about release date?) for my PS3... it was kind of a game changer tbh, installs were blazingly fast and playstation home loaded much faster (because that often needed to download new "spaces" but even for already downloaded spaces the actual "loading" was a lot faster)

 

However,  it did *not* become more responsive or anything,  yet again the only real advantage was due to  pure speed, which the PS3 couldn't even utilize fully, it still dwarfed whatever hitachi drive came pre-installed.

[Bitter]

SSD hands down the single most noticable improvement for daily use. Came from a RAID 0 array with the same peak numbers to a SSD and that instant zero latency was amazing. Click on something and it just happens, no waiting.

 

Uhh otherwise I'd say going from a Northwood to Prescott P4 to gain more hertz and hyperthreading or from a FX 5700 XT to a 6800 Ultra.

 

Modern wise Ryzen 2700X upgrade from an i5 4590 was pretty good . Other upgrades have been more incremental, RX 580 to Vega 56, from SATA to NVME SSD. Nothing crazy.

[Godlygamer23]

I think for me, it was upgrading to an SSD for the first time back in around 2012. Prior to that, trying to do any kind of multi-tasking on my PC was impossible because the hard drive would just be churning, especially if I was installing Windows updates in the background. Boot times were improved as well, but I think system responsiveness was the most improved, and made me a huge believer in putting an SSD in every computer. 

[IkeaGnome]

In all honesty, a 4090 with a water block. They get a lot of shit for the price and the size of the cooler. Even on the air cooler it was difficult to get above 80C, but with water it's in a different world.

Spoiler

 

[WhitetailAni]

My GTX 690. I had been using a GTX 650 Ti BOOST, which is a little better than a GT 710.

The GTX 690 was now actually able to play games! Sure, it's loud, but my games are old enough to be able to use SLI. Battlefield 4 especially - 90 FPS at 1080p high.

[QuantumSingularity]

I see the HDD to SSD transition made a big impression on many people. Idk why it wasn't that big of a deal for me. Maybe i had some bottleneck elsewhere in my system because i  don't remember the transition being that drastic between the WD blacks i used at that time and my first SSD. Sure, copying and transferring files was much faster, but windows loading wasn't that much more impressive. I'm currently switching to all SSD system not because of the speed, but because with the CLC and the Arctic fans the whole thing got so quiet, that i hear the drives spinning and the heads rummaging through them.

[wseaton]

HD to SSD obviously. I do agree with this being attributable to the way Windows poorly handles caching. The most obvious difference in application speed after migrating to SSD was browsers. Ask yourself why an internet browser responds so much better after you install a lower latency drive? Also, don't just blame Windows because it's obvious with Linux as well. The BSDs are in my opinion the least affected by drive latency. I ran several Citrix servers back in 99' (NT 3.51) that had quad core P200's and 2GB of RAM on what is by todays standards pathetically slow storage. However, even with a dozen users logged in general MS Office performance was not much different than a PC today. This is proof in my mind that OS / Software bloat is real and the big reason storage improves things. Every time you click on anything there's a jillion registry polls and edits and constant paging of bolted on subsystems.

 

For CPUs my quadcore i7 2600 continues to run *ANYTHING* I want it to, and that box is 10years old. 

[Godlygamer23]

4 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

funny how often SSDs come up here, not surprising,  i worked in a repair shop, one of the things they did was replace the drive of old sluggish computers with a SSD and the owners were amazed... i always thought its a crutch... still not impressed by SSDs today, yes it copies faster that is *very* nice but as in overall responsiveness its just, uh, a hard-drive... doesn't give more fps either,  maybe slightly less latency[.]

I fully disagree with you here. Any build I create must have an SSD in it. The main advantage SSDs offer over HDDs is random read/write performance. Sequential is still significant, including when comparing SATA SSDs to HDDs, but the real game changer was the random read/write performance. 

[Heliian]

Going from the utilitarian beast known as the Nhd15 to a "refurbished" h110 elite capellix.  Cost me $100cad and it makes my pc look so pretty.  

[podkall]

1 hour ago, QuantumSingularity said:

I see the HDD to SSD transition made a big impression on many people. Idk why it wasn't that big of a deal for me. Maybe i had some bottleneck elsewhere in my system because i  don't remember the transition being that drastic between the WD blacks i used at that time and my first SSD. Sure, copying and transferring files was much faster, but windows loading wasn't that much more impressive. I'm currently switching to all SSD system not because of the speed, but because with the CLC and the Arctic fans the whole thing got so quiet, that i hear the drives spinning and the heads rummaging through them.

I think it's because if you compared old HDDs to new HDDs, it would be still a noticable difference.

[LloydLynx]

Getting a dedicated SSD just for SWAP and virtual machines. I can now comfortably do other stuff while running a VM, and SWAP thrashing hardly impacts system performance compared to before. Night and day difference. 

[xAcid9]

#1 is for sure SSD, I even voluntarily upgraded my office PC to SSD back in 2014 and my manager was confused why my i3 PC was faster and more responsive than his i7. 

 

#2 is mechanical keyboard. I can't go back to non-mech keyboard, I'm still using my 10 years old CM Storm Quickfire TK, 4 buttons already lost it's LED light.

I bought a mech keyboard to use at office as well.

[TetraSky]

Boot and loading times were certainly impressive when I got my first SSD.

 

Other than that... there hasn't really been anything that blew me away. I expect hardware to be better when I upgrade, so of course a new CPU or GPU will be great compared to the one it replaced.

 

Edit : Ah no, wait. While I don't own one, I did get to try one at Best Buy... An optical switch keyboard (Corsair K100). That, was impressive. My mechanical keyboard was complete rubbish in comparison.

Just too bad after going back home and looking up info on it, found out it has some issues. Like keys registering more than once and all. But man did it feel so nice to type on.

[Ripred]

Hmm let's see the first biggest thrill I had was my first self built PC, in hindsight it a was slow turd compared to now but compared to the my mom's Walmart Pentium computer and some 2010 $250 new gateway laptop my FX 4170 was a rocket ship, then my first SSD was nice but wowser when I plugged in my first NVME, I thought something was wrong when I was first installing windows, it was so fast I thought maybe it failed...then windows said hello every upgrade since then until recently was meh like being impressed and underwhelmed at the same time, just whelmed and occasionally annoyed by stutters and lag, then I recently dropped in my X3D ,it's not overwhelmingly faster than my last chip but lag,stutter, random freezing and system restarts have all vanished like they never existed 

[QuantumSingularity]

12 hours ago, LloydLynx said:

Getting a dedicated SSD just for SWAP and virtual machines. I can now comfortably do other stuff while running a VM, and SWAP thrashing hardly impacts system performance compared to before. Night and day difference. 

Hmm that's interesting. I used virtual machines for ages now and i never thought of this one because usually i had just 2 VMs running from one drive. Had 4x 500GB 32MB cache 7200 WD Blues and each on of them had 2 VMs on it, but since they were mostly used for light stuff like Lineage 2, backuping broken data from infected storage etc.. it's never been an issue. To be brutally honest, the very first time i saw a really noticeable difference in loading times between HDD and SSD was when i moved Cyberpunk 2077 on my then new NVMe drive. But still wasn't as impressive as the performance the HD5870 gave me back in the days or the doubled framerate in ACC on the same GTX 1070 just from changing from 5600X to 5800X3D.

[rikitikitavi]

1. After years of desktops and laptops with Windows, I've tried a 27" iMac during a family trip... the next week bought myself a 2009 13" Unibody MacBookPro. Didn't know that computers can be so luxurious and well built (SW is a whole another topic). Today it is very slow (C2D P8700) and the battery is a ~15min 'UPS', but its build and design are still superb.

 

2. Getting a 3070 and being able to play anything without caring for graphics settings. It was the first high-end (and the priciest) gaming related purchase I've ever made (always ashamed to pay much for anything gaming related).