Your first PC Gaming Rig

[AnthrSolidSnake]

I ask two questions actually. Obviously one being, what was your first complete gaming PC? How much did it cost, what was in it, what was it capable of? And the second question being, what was/is your best Price/Performance ratio gaming PC? I ask the second question because while I know my personal first gaming PC I built two years ago was affordable, everyone else I get into debates with still swear up and down that a decent system will cost around $1,000.

My very first gaming PC rig was in 2009, being a dell PC I bought used online for about $240, and placed in a $120 graphics card and I was able to play F.E.A.R. at around 40-60 FPS and Crysis at around 30 FPS.

My best Price/Performance ratio gaming PC cost about $750 altogether, being a HP p7-1020 with 8GB of RAM, a quad core 3.0Ghz CPU, 1.5TB hard drive, and a GTX 480 graphics card.

 

[AD-Stu]

Honestly can't remember what the cost of my current rig was, as it was part new and part bits and labour donated by a friend. Total cost was under a grand though.

As for my first one though? LOL, it's showing my age time. It was a 386 DX 33 with a whopping 1MB of RAM and dual floppy disk drives. We didn't do specialised gaming video cards or anything back in those days. Specialised sound cards WERE kind of a big deal, I honestly can't remember if we had a Sound Blaster in that PC or if we had to wait for the next one to upgrade from PC speaker sound.

 

[Joccaren]

My first dedicated gaming computer was years back, and had a 3.4Ghz single core Pentium IV or something, not entirely sure, some motherboard or other, a 400W power supply, 2Gb RAM and a 9800GTX, and 3 250Gb Harddrives. Cost me $1000 when the fans and case and monitor and such was factored in.
My most cost efficient rig for bang-buck was my current one.
i7 2600K
2 * 560Ti 2Gb in SLI
16Gb RAM
P8P67 Motherboard
256Gb SSD
Liquid Cooling
Chaser Mk-1 case with 6 fans or so
1000W power supply
Yamakasi Catleap 2560*1440 monitor
Steelseries Sensei Professional gaming mouse
And the three Harddrives from my old PC

All up cost around $1800, though that's 'cause I've been consistently upgrading it over the last year with better sound systems, better monitors, better Mouse and Keyboard and stuff like that. Originally cost around $800 for the upgrade. Not the most balanced rig I know, but it was built a couple of years back with parts that were cheap at the time - I.E: On sale so I could get the RAM, Motherboard, Liquid Cooling and CPU for under $300.
Might upgrade to a 770 this year and ditch the two 560s when the new generation is out. Starting to show their age a little, and SLI is annoying as all fuck.

 

[uzo]

As for my first one though? LOL, it's showing my age time. It was a 386 DX 33 with a whopping 1MB of RAM and dual floppy disk drives. We didn't do specialised gaming video cards or anything back in those days. Specialised sound cards WERE kind of a big deal, I honestly can't remember if we had a Sound Blaster in that PC or if we had to wait for the next one to upgrade from PC speaker sound.

Ahh yes the indomitable 80386. My beast had an 80MB hard drive (WOAH!), 4MB RAM (GTFO!), 33MhZ (DAMN!), with not only a 5 1/4" floppy but ALSO a 3.5" floppy drive, a dot matrix printer with one (that's ONE) colour (black! awesome!), and (because my dad was cheap) we had some generic brand version of a Sound Blaster. Shit was soooo awesome.

I could play all the latest and greatest; from the Sierra Adventure games (big fan of Police Quest hero Sonny Bonds here) through to Elite:Frontier (still one of my faves - check the avatar!), from Duke Nukem (the platform game!!) through to UFO:Enemy Unknown !!! All the kids were jealous of me.

 

[shrekfan246]

My first one is also my current one, technically speaking. I never had a PC really built for gaming when I was growing up, and I haven't had a desktop in years because of a lack in space to house it, so I'm getting price-gouged on the cost to stay relevant.

My current one was more expensive than I'd like to reveal (mostly because it wasn't cost effective for the hardware I got), but it's got an Intel i7 740Q processor, 6 GB of RAM, and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850. 15" monitor that goes up to 1600x900, and a hard drive that's far too small, all things considered. I've been using it since 2010, and it's taken on everything except the Crysis series, The Witcher 2, and Batman: Arkham City/Dragon Age II (because they had poorly optimized DirectX 11 modes) at maximum settings or pretty close up there.

At the moment I'm looking at getting a laptop with an i7 3630QM processor, 16 GB of RAM, two Nvidia GT 650m's in SLI, a 15" 1080 monitor, and a 1 TB hard drive, which costs about $1250 US.

 

[Summerstorm]

As for my first one though? LOL, it's showing my age time. It was a 386 DX 33 with a whopping 1MB of RAM and dual floppy disk drives. We didn't do specialised gaming video cards or anything back in those days. Specialised sound cards WERE kind of a big deal, I honestly can't remember if we had a Sound Blaster in that PC or if we had to wait for the next one to upgrade from PC speaker sound.

Ahh yes the indomitable 80386. My beast had an 80MB hard drive (WOAH!), 4MB RAM (GTFO!), 33MhZ (DAMN!), with not only a 5 1/4" floppy but ALSO a 3.5" floppy drive, a dot matrix printer with one (that's ONE) colour (black! awesome!), and (because my dad was cheap) we had some generic brand version of a Sound Blaster. Shit was soooo awesome.

I could play all the latest and greatest; from the Sierra Adventure games (big fan of Police Quest hero Sonny Bonds here) through to Elite:Frontier (still one of my faves - check the avatar!), from Duke Nukem (the platform game!!) through to UFO:Enemy Unknown !!! All the kids were jealous of me.

Yeah, i remember these times too. I got 2 MB of Ram for Christmas to stock up to 4 MB. 33 MHz when i pushed the "Turbo"-Button. Ah and the fun times having to clear out drivers and such for 4kb more EMS... because the game you wanted to start DEMANDED more or wouldn't start up.

Ah, but ok... that was the "Family"-PC

My first OWN PC was a 266MHz Pentium II, unknown RAM... i think 32 MB. Damn thing was a BEAST. 56K-Modem, bought a Video-card for it: S3 Somethingsomething Metaltech. The Thing ran Unreal pretty well in 98'.
Man i am old...

P.S. Well that is the Intel side of it, i did have a C64 mainly for gaming before. Also a Schneider CPC (The C stands for "Color")... but it only had a green/black monochrome screen *g*

 

[Vault101]

got it a couple of weeks ago....what a fun ride it was

first I did my reasearch, building myself didnt seem like the best option for me at the time so I decided to buy one

just out of curiosity I found that Dell/Alienware are a fucking joke BTW

anyway so I look around, and look around some more, I found a Seller on Ebay (I know...I know) they look legit and are upgradable/customizable, and I see one of their pre-builds has good specs for a good price (somthing you rareley see with pre builds) so I agonize over the decision...its alot of money, but they have an excellent feedback record so I take the plunge

on the same day that ebay/paypal HAPPEN to be having technical difficultys, long story short I keep trying to pay but it doesnt work...so I look at my pay pal account and I have payed, several times thats almost $12 000 dollars

....fuck

so after panicking and sending out several emails and calling up paypal I can it mostly resolved as it is a known issue, except theres still one extra payment there (because it was an instant payment instead of an echeque) anyway I call up the nexr day or so but it can't be cancelld because unknown to me at the time it already went through, so Ive payed for it twice and my bank account is over drawn at -$900

...fuck

thankfully I have a seperate savings acount so I'm not out of money..if I didnt I would have been screwed, but then thankfully the matter was resolved quickly and I got my money back

ok

so after wating and realising that the seller was still waiting on my case choice the thing arrives...I manage to get to the post office just at closing time and because I dont drive I just decide to carry it home to save the hassle of taking it on the bus

stupid Idea

so there I am dragging this giant box along, sweating arms on fire, people looking at me in concern like I'm going to die from a heart attack and I take the bus anyway

next day I buy thr peripherals (a bigass screen) and finally comes the moment of truth I boot it up and

OS is not installed, I go to install it I can;t find a hardrive...I die a bit inside

OBVIOUSLY the universe hates me, obviously its not suposed to work because then life would be too fucking simple...obviosly the powers that be are fucking with me!

so in dispair I write an email to the tech suport refraining from going on a speal about how I havnt slept properly in days and their incompetance and RUINED MY WEEKEND,

after that in desperation I open up the case and take a look the hard drive is there....I grab it and its slips right out...so I plug it back in

turn on the computer and it comes alive, windows 7 and everything...must have come loose in transit

its so beutiful I want to cry

 

[AVeryClassyCat]

I haven't ever had a gaming PC, just prebuilt crap that I force to play games. Someday, though, someday...

Actually, hopefully this year. I'm looking at coming into a little money and can't wait to pull together a beast of a system with it.

Edit: Actually, if I had to call anything I've had a Gaming PC, it would be this one...but it's only 2.1Ghz Quad Core/6GB RAM/1TB and a Geforce 540 or something I had to add myself. One problem with this PC was the fact that the case is full ATX and the mobo is microATX with a giant northbridge chipset right where a decent graphics card would be if I had been able to buy one. I settled on a smaller card and even now the system is way too underpowered for the games I want to play. If there wasn't some issue with the BIOS that I can't even begin to understand along with a need to replace most of the internals, I might consider just continuing to upgrade this machine but at this point it'd be much less of a headache to just wait for the finances to support building a new one.

 

[Baneat]

My first one? Oh boy:

1280x1024 monitor I'd taken from an old Dell PC
Thermaltake Soprano case with the side-window (I actually still am using this, bought a new one today)
AMD Phenom x4 9950BE (Oh man what a piece of shit processor this is the point where AMD stopped being better than Intel)
9800GT w. 1GB memory
750W deathtrap no-name PSU (750W for this thing what was I thinking!?)
500GB 7200RPM HD
4GB of RAM
Deathadder + Dell OEM keyboard
ASrock k10n78fullHD-hsli r.3.0

I fucking loved it though even though I was fucking retarded for buying such a small motherboard for a midi tower, an AMD processor, a terrifyingly loud and overpowered PSU etc. etc.

anyway so I look around, and look around some more, I found a Seller on Ebay (I know...I know) they look legit and are upgradable/customizable, and I see one of their pre-builds has good specs for a good price (somthing you rareley see with pre builds) so I agonize over the decision...its alot of money, but they have an excellent feedback record so I take the plunge

List your full specs?

 

[Get_A_Grip_]

I got my first gaming PC last month and I decided to go for a good price/performance set up with an i3 3220 and a HD 7850. Runs most games pretty well.

 

[RyQ_TMC]

I don't really have a rig at the moment, since my previous gaming PC started shitting all over itself and I switched to console a couple years back. I'm just playing older stuff on my laptop now. Considering getting a new PC once the new console generation hits the market.

My first dedicated PC (1998) was Pentium II 200 MHz, 32 MB RAM, and no 3D card. It was high-end at the time it was bought, but the 3D era was about to start, and once that happened, my rig became obsolete within months. I was actually quite used to playing demos of newer games at absurdly low resolutions, with graphical artefacts and occasionally no textures - just white models interacting in white rooms.

Before that, I used to play on my dad's laptop (but just about the only game I played on that was Settlers II), and even earlier, my mom's office computer, sporting a 5.25 floppy drive and the ever memorable Turbo switch.

 

[Roxor]

First PC I can actually remember us buying was a 486DX/33 with 8MB of RAM, 120MB hard drive (later upgraded to a 500 and 250MB), 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives, ET4000 video card. We later added a SB16ASP sound card and a Creative CDROM drive. Cost about $4000 (AUD) at the time. Was good for games up to Quake 1 (borderline slideshow and needed a boot disk), though.

 

[spartandude]

my first was in sort of my current one minus a few upgrades

Windows xp (i now have sp3)
2.3 ghz processor (now have 2.17 dual core)
1 gig of ram (now 3 gigs)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512mb (now have GTX 460 with 1gb)
256 gb HDD (now have that and a 1TB HDD)
and a cooling system wich has been somewhat changed since then


it cost me £500 from my uncle who also gave me the monitor, mouse and keyboard, surround sound system (and another one for my xbox) as well as about 5 games, Stalker SoC, Medieval 2 Total War, GRAW, Company Of Heroes and KotOR

so its a pretty good deal and the upgrade other the 5-6 years have costed me roughly another £150 so that was pretty good. ofcourse looking at what i do have now still needs a massive overhaul and im currently saving money to pretty much gut my pc and put in all new hardware

 

[mirage202]

First self built was:

i7-920 2.66Ghz
6GB 1600Mhz DDR3
2x Nvidia GTX 285 OC2's
SB X-Fi Xtreme Gamer
128GB SSD
2x 1TB HDD's
Blu-ray drive

Then a 23 inch monitor (2048x1152), and Logitech G5/G15 mouse/keyboard.
All in that cost just under £3000 in 2009, probably not a great deal but I went with everything from one supplier to keep it simple.

Current machine is going to be best price/performance (recently immigrated to the US, so funds at a premium)

i7-3770K 3.5Ghz
16GB 1800Mhz DDR3
Nvidia GTX 650
SB Recon3D
WD Caviar Green 2TB HDD

Still using the same monitor, mouse and keyboard same models, but both were replaced between 2009 and now. All in this one was slightly under $1200. Could likely have been cheaper, but we had to use BestBuy for most of the parts due to the 18 months no interest. Case and basic DVD-RW came from Tiger. Overall Im fairly impressed with it, just both the GFX card and the cooling are due for overhauls once it's affordable.

 

[Eleuthera]

We (my brother and I) bought a Commodore 128D (the D is important!) when I was 11 I think, so 1988/89. So a whopping 128kB of memory and a 1MHz processor that you could set to Turbo (2MHz), if you didn't need graphics.

Our first PC was a 486DXII with an astounding 66MHz processor, 4Megs of RAM and an insane 215MB harddrive (that everyone assumed was already 'doublespaced'). A few years later we added a SoundBlaster Pro 16bit soundcard and a dualspeed CD-ROM drive.

We were so 'the Shit!'

I have no idea what they cost back then though.

My best deal was probably my second to last PC, a Pentium IV 2.54GHz, 1 GB memory and 3 Gigs harddrive at a pretty good pre-made deal.

 

[Boris Goodenough]

Commadore 64 with tape station was my first gaming PC.

 

[lechat]

my first one is just a few years back and it's pretty boring but i will say that i would never pay over the 600 mark for a rig. at that price i expect to be able to play nearly anything at max or near max settings. i really don't see the point of shelling out thousands for a set up that is 10% more powerful than what i have and will be worth a couple hundred dollars in a few months time

my first run on a decent computer however is an interesting story. i can't remember the exact specs but i can tell you it was built specifically for creating and rendering (render farm would have made more sense) 3d graphics back in the days when that basically wasn't a thing.
i remember it cost my school 10 thousand dollars and had a whole 1 meg of dedicated video memory. the computer lasted 1 day before it was stolen and they had to up security. the new one lasted a week before it was stolen with all of my work on it mid render. i can still picture that low rez exploding robot crying out my name as the thieves stole him away from me.

 

[DoPo]

after that in desperation I open up the case and take a look the hard drive is there....I grab it and its slips right out...so I plug it back in

turn on the computer and it comes alive, windows 7 and everything...must have come loose in transit

I still take full credit for the PC working. And curiously, my cookie account is at -1 cookie

OT: it was back in...2002, I think Or 2003. It had a Pentium 4 1.5GHz processor, 256 RAM (when building it I wasn't sure why would I want so much but, like 2-3 popular games demanded it at the time), GeForce MX 420 video card (I still keep it, damn, it got me through quite a few games) and a 40GB hard disk. It was alright, I think I even used it to play HL 2 and it worked with no major hit in performance. Looked a bit like an ass but it worked.

 

[Saulkar]

My first true gaming/workstation rig was an I7 940, 12 gigs of ram, Windows Vista&7, and a 9800GX2 from late 2008. Overall it cost about 1500 dollars over a period of 3 months. I later sold it to my brother for 500 bucks with the 9800GX2 replaced with a 560TI 448.

My best in terms of price to power ratio is a render node with a 3570, 16 gigs of ram, and a 650TI videocard. It is part of my small render farm however it is a mini-itx thus I gave it said videocard for when I am traveling. It cost about 800 bucks CAD 2 months ago.