What CPU did your first Computer have?

As per the title really, What CPU did your first machine run at its heart?

Mine was a Cyrix MII 300 - Ive actually got one in my parts bin to try and build a machine of the same spec when I get some spare time!

I honestly cant remember my first CPU but I do remember my mate at the time being blown away that it had a 1Ghz clock speed..

Mine was a 8-Bit-MOS-7501 in a Commodore C16 with a Commodore 1530 (C2N) Datasette.
That's over 30 years ago...

Damn, I'm old...

Nik wrote:

Mine was a 8-Bit-MOS-7501 in a Commodore C16 with a Commodore 1530 (C2N) Datasette.
That's over 30 years ago...

Damn, I'm old...

showing your age Nik

I actually went straight from the Cyrix MII 300 to an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ @ 1.53GHz! it was quite a step! including 32MB > 256MB, Windows 98 > Windows XP, Dialup > 1mb broadband - That Christmas was the best day ever!!!!

The first machine I built all by myself had an AMD Duron with 750 mhz on a ECS elitegroup K7S5A mobo with 256 MB SD-RAM and a 40 GB Maxtor harddisk in a big tower.
So this is the system the madness REALLY started with...
750 mhz, upgraded to 900, 1000, 1100, 1300... changed the board at some point, upgraded RAM and disk, better gfx card etc etc...

Still own at least the box...

some people say ECS motherboards aint that good but to be honest I used a lot back then for budget builds for people and NEVER has one let me down! Ironically ASUS is the only board ive had one fail on me, yet that's what I use for all my builds now!

I had a Duron 1.6GHz it used to overclock REALLY well! sure I was running it at 2.1GHz if memory serves me correct.

These old ECS boards were really good and affordable for everybody.
Ive had only one that failed and that was my own fault, been too stupid to flash the bios correctly...

Martin wrote:

some people say ECS motherboards aint that good but to be honest I used a lot back then for budget builds for people and NEVER has one let me down! Ironically ASUS is the only board ive had one fail on me, yet that's what I use for all my builds now!

Ive seen the ECS boards but never used one. Im like you I tend to use Asus boards.

Ive found if Im overclocking Ive got better results using an Asus board.

as for boards failing. Ive only ever had an OEM board fail Ive been lucky that way.

Boards generally are all pretty reliable these days, ive yet to see a modern suffer from dodgy caps, and as Nik found with project wild cat, modern boards are rarely picky with RAM like they used to be!

I also remember people talking of IRQ conflicts but that was before my time!

Oh yeah, those were cruel times to set up a system without any IRQ or DMA issues and which PCI or ISA port to choose to avoid interference with the AGP or IDE controllers...
But choosing IRQ 220 DMA 5 or IRQ 240 DMA 7 worked good in most cases (If I remember correctly... )

Nik wrote:

Oh yeah, those were cruel times to set up a system without any IRQ or DMA issues and which PCI or ISA port to choose to avoid interference with the AGP or IDE controllers...
But choosing IRQ 220 DMA 5 or IRQ 240 DMA 7 worked good in most cases (If I remember correctly... )

yea I think my self lucky that I got into Pc's just as XP came out. I never had any major issues.

Those machines kept the building a thrill and the noobs away.

I remember when I first started getting into building machines probably around 2003-ish people were still recommending using earthing straps, to earth yourself to the case etc. not heard of that for a long time! Although I do still make a point of touching the case before touching any components to try and get rid of any static in my body (this is what people recommended at the time to replace a good old earth strap!)

You started around 2003 building your own systems?
That's just 2 years after I did.

Earthing strap...haven't heard this for years.
but I do it like you do, touch the case to get rid of the static and try to avoid touching the contacts and components on the pcb whenever it's possible.

yeah been trying to remember exactly when but I believe I got a new machine around 2002, it was a basic white box machine from a large chain store that no longer exists! but it used pretty much all standard components so I probably after about a year in around 2003 added a bit more ram. if I remember correctly however it used SD Ram, it was an Athlon XP 1800+ using an early chipset and the board had no AGP slot.

I bought an Asus A7V8X-X motherboard and 512mb of PC2700 ram and a buddy gave me an old AGP graphics card (a GeForce 256 DDR - it was old at the time but I loved it as it was so much faster than anything I had owned before) and reused my existing case, psu and Athlon XP 1800+

Later I swapped the CPU for a Duron 1.8GHz I was supposed to be using for a build for someone when I realised it was a good overclocker and they took my Athlon XP.

I then moved over to an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (Nforce 2) motherboard and Athlon XP-M 2500+ - The mobile chips used the same Socket A but ran at a lower voltage for the same clock speeds but also had unlocked multipliers! , so you could reverse this and run them at reasonable voltages while running big clock speeds, I'm sure mine was running around 2.4GHz on air!

All of this took literally years as I was still at school at the time and was doing anything I could to earn some money to save up for PC parts. - Better times!!!!!

The rest is history and ive now been through more systems than I care to remember hehe!

How did you get into building your own machines Nik?