Did anyone here get into custom PC building a long time ago? like 15+ years?

Hell yeah my friends and I used to spend all the little money we had buying computer parts and throwing shit together. Installing pirated windows xp 64 bit even though we felt like 64 bit was total overkill (for the time it was). Flashing firmware with floppy disks, good times.

hell yeah motherfucker
built my first rig at 13, back in '04, from a summer at my first job. making gyros, $5.50 an hour cash under the table.

the VIPER
hisssssss
what a piece of fucking shit

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Like what you'd expect. Setting irq's on cards with jumpers, hard drives with lists of bad sectors on stickers, etc. That was probably longer than 15 years.

bought one of these for like $80 in 2006 or so and doubled the clock on air. shit was about as mindblowing as the 8800 GT for my poorfag teenage self

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hey kid, wanna barton *FIRE INTENSIFIES*

Molex up the ass, compensated by the lack of RGB and UEFI garbage. Would trade back.
Otherwise same shit really.

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whenever you hear boomers go "eww rgb" just remind them of an era of brushed aluminum and blue plastic windows with UV reactive everything and enough cold cathodes to make a gay bar light up like the night sky

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ugh
that thing is gross looking

Same shit except more jumpers and dip switches. Also a lot of games were made for specific sound cards which kind of sucked.
>t. played original Doom when it came out on a 386

Hey, I can answer this almost (2006, close enough)

I was 12
>computers were expensive
>not everyone had them
>they were loud as fuck because processors were insanely inefficient and (apparently) no one cared
>except for Zalman's crazy copper flowers (pic related, I'm sure someone has the Jow Forums meme of a dual socket motherboard with two of these things on top, done up like a swamp fanboat
>cases were fucking ugly
>absolutely hideous
>there was no space behind the motherboard tray to hide cables, ever
>insides of cases were not painted black, just ugly grey steel
>windows were rare, tiny, and always made of acrylic (tempered glass didn't exist in the PC world)
>cases were, in general, way bigger. People would often use huge full ATX tower cases just to stick a microATX motherboard in and one hard drive
>the Antec 900 was THE case to get
>Cooler Master CM 690 II was also great
>Maximum PC magazine still existed, the forums were basically my first foray into the internet

If I think of anything else I'll post it

Yes, actually - 15 years on the dot.

It was simpler because the market was smaller and less developed. At the same time, products were generally worse and were obsolete much quicker.

>Also a lot of games were made for specific sound cards which kind of sucked.
I liked some of those because as long as your hardware is working you can usually get the game and its sound working with a very minimal OS. Makes boot disks and testing easier.

No RGB
No tempered glass
DUAL CORES OMG HAVE YOU SEEN THIS SHIT
Bare minimum GPU acceleration

I have that case free from a rebate. Still unused. As you say, a piece of shit.

>he didnt grow up with gpu waifus

Built my first PC in 2002. Exactly the same as now, except you had to get a few more PCI cards for stuff that wasn't integrated on the motherboard. Oh and Socket A cooler retention lmao.

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Forgot the picture. If I remember right the first computer I built, which was for my dad, had Zalman's fan-shaped cooler (like, those folding japanese fans made of paper). I might have even had blue LEDs, can't remember. Then I used pic related in the computer for my brother.

Also, 8800 GTX was the be all end all of graphics cards and I remember when a guy in my World in Conflict clan got one. I was so jealous, since I was still running a Radeon X1600 or 1650 XT.

Lol, just remembered on my first computer (a prebuilt, but it was the first PC I had that was actually "mine") the power supply fan took a shit after a few years. Started rattling, making an awful sound, so I stuck a pencil through the grill to stop the fan from spinning.

Ah, different times.

kek

>also everything was much more expensive (in relative terms) which kept idiots away
This guy's right. Also no smartphones, no facebook, no instagram, no twitter. You were either on a forum, in IRC, or a Vent server. Social media didn't exist.

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And billet aluminum shit everywhere.

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Oh yeah, one more thing: reddit was a *huge* haven for pedophiles and people sharing jailbait/"questionable" porn. Absolutely huge aspect of its growth before Digg bit the big one.

They try VERY hard to sweep that aspect under the rug. But I remember, because I was a horny teenager and I wanted porn. I know who you are, reddit. I know your past.

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Whatever that has with PC building to do.

Not like it was any less "eww" back then.

>You were either on a forum, in IRC, or a Vent server. Social media didn't exist.
What's the difference between social media and fora?

do you have brain damage?

>I had an Antec 900
I fucking hated that thing 2 years after I bought it.

No. Both are websites where you make retarded posts.

Internet culture, which at the time was still almost exclusively people who built or were otherwise "into" computers.

Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube) is public-facing, forums/Vent/IRC were inward-facing. People on Instagram care about how much outward attention they can get from as many people as possible; forum users were mostly only concerned with their own communities.

Also moderators were, are, and always will be enormous fucking cunts. The only exception to that was Hackman2000 (I think that was his name) on the Maximum PC forums. He was super knowledgeable and super friendly, which was amazing to have as a 12-15 year old wanting to learn and understand more about computers. Always looked up to him. If he's still alive though he's probably a redditor today, and in his late 30s or early 40s.

Never owned one, what was wrong with it?

Multiple jumpers on the motherboard which could potentially fry if you didn't read the manual.
Exposed CPU dies getting crushed by retarded mounting mechanisms like the Socket A relying on 4 rubber pads and excessive force with a flat head screw driver needed to mount.
IDE cables arbitrarily fail if you bent them too much, or the tab breaking and separating the ribbon from the connector, also bent pins or broken pins on the hdd connector if you accidentally had one side come out before the other.
ISA sound blaster and all it's clones.
Multiple expansion cards for audio, modem, ethernet, and port expansion for something like serial ports.

x2~x8 CD drives vibrating the whole tower and sometimes exploding.

Fucking 15" CRT monitors only good for 800*600 and the whine when you hit 1024*768, astronomical amounts of heat, and degauss, degauss, degauss.

Please insert disk 2, disk 3, disk 4... oh fuck disk got demagnetized and I lost all mah shit.
Ribbon dot matrix printers.

AT power supplies.

>Never owned one, what was wrong with it?
Got dirty really fast, and had shit cable management. (Most cases until like 2012 were like that) But mostly I didn't like how dust clung to everything in there. It did have really good airflow but I had to clean it every 3-6 months because I had a few dogs and their dander/hair plus the dust that was usually around made it a pretty gross case.

I miss them dearly. amd clearly had half their r&d on it

Ram were extremely expensive and so where GPUs, so we end up going with bare minimum of ram and used onboard graphics (which was part of the northbridge on the mobo, yes, the mobo had 2 chipsets, one for northbridge and one for southbdrige)

This. Kept the case open with a table fan blowing at the cup just to play everquest without blue screen.

I was still running dialup during those times, so my machines weren't connected to the internet 24/7. Oh, and going to the internet to research products wasn't really a thing, so people did succumb to marketing bullshit (e.g. Pentium 4 being good, GeForce FX being garbage even though Nvidia tauted it as the next great thing)

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There were jumpers you had to move around to get things working right. Way back before plug and play you had to set IRQ and stuff of all your devices. It used to take a tiny bit of skill+knowledge to get things working 100%. Now any monkey can do it

Those were the days... I replaced my side panel with a box fan on my athlon xp 2500+ overclock rig

Also, things moved very quickly back then. Your "high" end rig was obsolete in a matter of a few years, the GeForce4 Ti 420 (Prolink, yellow PCB) was very good (equivalent to today's RTX 2060) in 2002 but was dogshit slow in 2006. Remember, it was only three years between Doom 3 and Crysis. Compare that today where a GTX 980/980 Ti from 2014 will still comfortably run 1080p, or a i5-2500k from 2011 is still fast for day to day tasks.

This was the first step that got me into custom PCs when I was a kid. Wondering why my awful OEM PC couldn't run newer games correctly if at all. Then I learned about the difference of onboard graphics vs having a graphics card. Got a (then new) AGP card and it worked like a charm. After that I just had to upgrade everything in the PC. Added more RAM, bigger hard disk, etc. Once I learned how easy it is, I stopped with the crappy storebought PCs altogether and have only built my own ever since.

I had one of these on a p4 I overclocked from 3.4 to 4.2.. funny thing is there is a gas in the tubes to help transfer heat quicker...
but if you pump in -4F air into your system that gas freezes and heat doesnt transfer at all and you end up with bsod and resetting cmos

>Also a lot of games were made for specific sound cards which kind of sucked.
Wasn't that essentially always a Sound Blaster? I remember hearing stories about how a lot of people ran into awful problems because sound cards marked as "sound blaster compatible" generally weren't.

back in my day we built PCs uphill both ways with an onion on our belt. Which was the style at the time.
Anyhow a p233 tower running Win98se with a graphics and tv tuner card combo with a 17 inch flat screen Viewsonic was awesome for a bedroom. Playing mp3 from winamp using my sound blaster card and enjoying the company of ladies who did appreciate the tech know how to setup.

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2 words op
Setting jumpers.

Let's see.. I had a job building PCs in 1999, and I've been building my own since then.

There was no youtube.
Everyone had single core. If you wanted two CPUs, you needed very special motherboard. Basically no one had it. My friend had one in ~2003? We called it the "Dualie" and oohed about how smooth using it was.
The performance heatsinks were all copper then.
For a while, there were slot cpus instead of socket.
Hardware was still gaining rapidly every year.
For a while, there wasn't even Serial ATA. Look up the old cables that we used to hook up hard drives.
Internet gaming sucked, so there was still a reason to go to Quakecon and lan parties.
Using linux felt a bit more underground and cool, rather than something people learn when trying to get a job.
Intel fucked up with the P4 and AMD was just better in the early 2000s.
Buying a separate sound card was normal. Also floppy / optical drives.
I remember there being a lot of emphasis on what the FSB speed was (front side bus).
We also got to see wireless appear in the early 2000s.

I don't remember the year but I think it was 2000-2001, I put together a computer around a Duron 2000 because I got it for free.

PC building today is easier because:
-You don't need the owners manual for the mobo for esoteric shit, especially as to knowing which jumper does what since none of them were labeled back then
-RAM issues are far less likely, the worst you get today is the mobo detects the wrong settings by default
-You have to upgrade far less often. iD would come out with a game that would wreck your PC every so often and everyone fro dev to retailer to consumer would follow suit. Nowadays just any ancient quad core with a reasonable GPU can play anything
-Standards would change more often. New CPUs? Incompatible socket, sorry. Also new RAM standard. Also we went from AGP to PCIe, so sorry. Also we're switch from IDE to SATA. Also the PSUs are switching to 24 pin as the usual.

Also the absolute, 100%, standard beyond question method of updating bios was through floppy disks. Nobody used anything else.

I have this cooler attached to my i7 4790k. Works fine.

First pc I built was an AMD k6-2 475mhz with an FIC PA-2013 motherboard with a Diamond 3dfx Voodoo2 card.
I ended up trading it for an Intel Pentium 2 400mhz on a 440-bx motherboard with a Banshee card, and it ran twice as fast and crashed half as much.

2003 system builder's guide
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/12/system-12-01-2003/3/

We had magazines like this, it was comfy

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the main diff was that we used the AGP port instead of PCI-e and cards that went over 100USD were considered "hardcore gaming".
Most of us were using 50-80 dolla cards and they were actually quite able to run games.
Today the most basic half decent GPU (GDDR5 gt 1030) will set you back 100 easily.

There were more brands to choose from, Soltek, Elsa, Abit, Dfi. Motherboards came with extra pins for infra receivers, temperature sensors. CPUs were sold as tray units, without any hsf or packaging. Rebooting after each driver install on windows 98 is best practise to avoid issue later on.

I unironically miss all the UV acrylic and

About the same but with less gay shit and shit people. Cases were subjectively uglier and cable management was harder comparing to today. We didn't have RGB LEDs, but cold cathode tubes which were cool as fuck the first time to see. Modding cases was the in-thing to do in the late 90s, long before side panel windows and black towers were commonplace. We didn't have gay shit like Discord, Facebook or Reddit shitting up every resource on the internet, either. I've been building them since I was a teen in the 90s and I still enjoy doing it for friends and family. Now that I'm a dad I enjoyed building my first one for my kid with my kid. She wasn't interested but it was still good to bond and teach her my hobby.

You forgot
> install HDDs
> finally get PATA ribbon folded and sitting all pretty like
> realise you forgot to set MA/SL jumper
> pic related

Those ribbon cables were cunts.

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>About the same but with less gay shit and shit people. We didn't have gay shit like Discord, Facebook or Reddit shitting up every resource on the internet, either.
Based and redpilled

>Rebooting after each driver install on windows 98 is best practise to avoid issue later on.
I remember that some boards had an issue where you'd get odd random fuckups and endless problems if you didn't install the drivers in the correct order. I want to say that was some shit with Via chipsets.

The duron 800mhz would forever bring up bad memories for me.

To be fair, they had cable select later down the line, but it often fucked up lol.

I had an asrock board that had AGP and PCIe slots sadly it died from a power supply going bad after a few years. Still it allowed me to keep my graphics card for a 2 more years before switching over to PCIe.

based Q6600 and 8800GT
the first pc I built for Team Fortress 2

I was like 16 years old or something, very grown up but I learnt a lot

now I'm running voidlinux with tilling window managers in a tiny thiccpad laptop
never going back to PC building, it's autist nigger tier shit

My first build was a Dell Optiplex half stack that I had mounted an old AMD Radeon graphics card in that my friend gave to me when he upgraded. Bought the optiplex for $20 in an auction. Had an old CRT monitor from my dad's windows 95 computer.

I couldn't even close the case on the Optiplex because the card was too tall. It ran REAL hot. Like, fry an egg hot. I had about 6 ice packs that I used to cycle on top of the case and I had a desk fan blowing on it at all times. My room didn't have an air conditioner and was on the second floor of my dad's house. It was roughly 96-100 degrees in said room at all times, so I would sleep in the day and play at night. That was the NEET life until I was 20.

I remember when I was 15 though my friend had three high end computers in his garage (his brother worked for Microsoft, actually) and I'd go over to his house and we'd play Battlefield 1942, Diablo 2, Unreal Tournament 2003, etc. all day. It was literally a dream life because his mom was always really nice and they had coca cola and air conditioning. It's the equivalent of a poor kid getting to test drive a ferrari every day. Guess you could say I was hooked.

Nostalgia goggles off though, there was a lot more that could go wrong with a build than there is now, and some stuff was a lot more expensive. Like a core 2 duo that costs as much as an i7 today would. On the bright side, there was no need for stupid ass RGB shit to make your build look good. On the down side, there was no stupid ass RGB lighting to make your build look good.

>how to install 4 OSes on 1 PC
kek

Jesus I'm old. Been building computers since back in the days when a hard drive wasn't standard and an expensive one was only 33Mb.
CPUs got hot, but didn't need a heatsink.
Windows wasn't a thing. Fuck GUIs, and mice.

It was a tough and lawless land. No standards, hardly anything was compatible. EGA, CGA graphics would make your eyes bleed.

It's so much easier today. Once the ATX standard started coming together, picking out parts was a breeze

Yea, dude thats 25 years. I came in just after IRQs were no longer and issue.

Yes.

About the same except you needed to pay more attention to compatibility.

The rate of generation on generation improvement was much much better than it is now.

Much less emphasis on aesthetics.

Mid-tier wasn't frowned upon. High-end was really really high end. Now-a-days, high-end is a lot of cores. Back then it was just faster cores.

So in a way, today's mid-tier was like yesteryear's high-end.

>On the down side, there was no stupid ass RGB lighting to make your build look good.
There were LED fans and cold cathode tubes, totally clear acrylic cases were really big at one point, but they weren't the customizable cycling RGB shit that exists today

>tfw no MBR hard drive with 5 primary partitions
The life is suffering

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I got sucked into overpriced RDRAM instead of DDR.

RIMMs were twice as expensive than other RAM

how many jokes did people make about RIMM jobs when rambus was still a thing

Google was plenty available for tech support during the 8800 GTX era. I got into building during the GeForce 2/3-series era (2003-ish?) and tech support was readily available online. Gaymen shit was even tackier, disgusting box art galore.

Yeah. First trash box I built was in 02 or 03 from literal trash parts with like a Pentium 2 or 3 in it or something.

Was super dissapointed in how uninvolved the process was even back then.

I never had money for cases as a kid so I'd just screw standoffs into a piece of wood and mount the mobo on that. Worked like a fucking charm.

>disgusting box art
I think you meant awesome box art

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Back then pcworld and pc magazines in general were actually good.

>he didn't have a LANParty motherboard

My 8800GT lasted me until 2011. Absolute trooper of a card.

I actually had my 9800GT until a month ago when a friend took it for his old system.
I still have my GT250

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ATI.

Maximumpc is what I read

You had to overclock your ram and CPU together via the frontside bus... no cranking a multiplier (unless you had a wicked expensive CPU).

HOW COULD YOU LEAVE ME OUT. I'LL SKIN YOUR FINGERS YOU CUNTS

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They were better by mid-late 2000s. I still have the Beta EVO sitting somewhere in the basement. What a gem of a case. Too bad I don't have any of the fixings

>buy a sapphire x800 so BF1942 doesn't run like shit anymore
>can't wait for BF2!
>it shits itself mere months before
>RMA it twice
>works briefly once, 2nd time DOA
>never touch ATI/AMD GPUs until GCN comes out
>buy a sapphire 7950

I think I replaced it with some piece of shit, like a 6200GT or something, a really shitty AGP card just for output. I replaced it with something better for BF2 and 2142, and Rainbow 6 vegas but I can't remember for the life of me.

Damn you're an old fucking boomer. Why are you even here?

Same. I think Gordon Mah-Ung (I think he was the editor for a while) or however you spell his name works for PC Gamer now. Who was the other editor, Will Smith (as in "Not That Will Smith")? I used to have a stack of those magazines but I tossed them out probably a decade ago. Loved the shit out of that magazine when I was younger.

God damn

Oh fuck I still own the black nVidia branded version of that. I remember being pissed off because I thought it was just a black/green version of the cooler(it was for my Athlon x2 7750 & HD 4870 build), I should really try and find it.

HELLO, RODNEY REYNOLDS HERE WITH 3DGAMEMAN DOT COM

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Radeon 9800pro was the king back then.
I could only afford a 9800SE back in the day and using softmod drivers to unlock the 4 extra pipelines to get regular 9800 speeds.

Grandpa here.

It was pretty much the same as today minus cable management, no one cared about that.

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no stupid RGB and stealth design shit

It used to be a bit more difficult to assemble your system and there were a lot more ways to screw yourself over as well.

>certain PCI peripherals that refuse to play nice with each other
> naked CPU die and shitty HSF physical mouning setup + one false move = dead CPU
>having to worry about device resource allocation via jumpers (IRQ, DMA, port) on legacy interfaces (SCSI, SATA, ISA, Serial, Parallel)
>plugging in the AT power connector the wrong wrong = guaranteed magical smoke release on power-up

It is because RAMBUS versus the rest of the memory cartel spat-fest over DDR1/DDR2

RAMBUS tried to screwed over cartel via royalties and ligation while the rest of the cartel payed back by selling DDR1/DDR2 at a loss and refusing to build RDRAM despite being paid by RAMBUS to do so.

it was the exact same from back then minus the cables and a few extra parts like dedicated sound cards and now integrated shit

I think the biggest difference I can think of is overclocking.
Overclocking was about buying a cheap processor and making it run just as well as an expensive processor instead of buying an expensive processor to run it a little faster.

Assembly was mostly the same as today (minus coolers), but software configuration involved manually assigning IRQ, DMA, hard drive parameters etc. via jumpers, dip switches and editing config.sys. Also, you could blow up your motherboard by plugging the AT power connectors wrong.
You also had to keep all the manuals and make backups of driver disks because you couldn't just download stuff from the internet.

Lrn2molex

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there'll never be another Celeron 300A