Features - QOTW: What's the best PC component you ever bought?

Quote:

---

Put on your thinking cap and take us on a trip down memory lane.

---

Read more.

Well, my i5-2500.

My AMD Phenom ii X6 1090t

was a nice big upgrade especially coming from just a dual core 4800+. lets me multitask like hell. Havn't found anything to throw at it that it can't handle. Also it is fairly good with Folding@Home (when i'm on the universitys power bill of course! :P )

Vesa Local Bus IDE card for my 486-SX33 - my mate had a DX40, but I would have loaded DOOM way before him 8-) VLB Graphics card a close second, followed by my 30gb SSD a few years ago!

OCZ Vertex 2 60Gb SSD - made such an awesome difference overall, more than any other upgrade I'd done before.

8800GTX - off ebay for £80 less than anywhere else. Lasted me years and kept my room lovely and warm during cold winters!

I think, the best of all time, has to have been the 40Mhz crystal that I managed to source back in the day, that allowed me to upgrade my 486dx25 from a 'hmm not bad' to a 'woohoo oh yeah'.

My 3DFX Voodoo, ahhh the mmories

4MB 3DFX PCI Voodoo graphics card and loading quake in OpenGL(Glide) for the first time.

my pc is so poo, my radeon 5770 is the best pc i've bought so far.

My 2x74GB WD Raptors which just died last year after 7 years or so of service, running practically non-stop. Compared to the 7,200rpm disks of its day, they just blew them all away, and thanks to striping, continued to perform better in real world use than even modern 7,200rpm disks thanks to the low latency and seek times, right up until the end.

Clearly the Vertex 2E which replaced them is the better performer by far, but I still miss them, particularly not having to worry about SSD-specific issues.

I also have great fond memories of my 3Dfx Voodoo days, but it's secondary to the Raptors.

as of the end of this month my i7 3930k...

My 486DX2 66 - just for the fact it made my girlfriend of the time fall off her chair backwards when a baddie popped out from round the corner in Doom...

The one I've cherished most over the years? The one I refuse to part with? The one that's become part of my every day life?

It has to be my Antec Aria. There's something of a litany to its wonders in my APU Bundle review, and I honestly can't imagine ever getting rid of it (particularly since I've modded it to take a 1u flex-atx PSU so I can always replace that if I need to). Well designed, well built, I am adamant that there is no better mATX case available, particularly for a HTPC. It was by far the most money I've ever spent on a computer case, but every penny was well spent. Very happy with it.

I have to give honourable mentions to two other things though - my AOpen h360b (yes, I've got a thing for well designed mATX cases) and my 20" CRT monitor (which I don't seem to have inflicted on Hexus photographically yet! ;) ).

My red NZXT Phantom case. Once I sorted out the loose rubber grommets and replaced a hopeless inbuilt fan control it really provides a eyecatching and well laid out case

Revodrive3 240 x2, biggest noticable performance jump since I went from a gameboy to a Pentium4 :)