QOTW: Which was your most memorable PC component?

[T1nt1n]

3DFX Voodoo 2 card was a revelation, it allowed me hours of enjoyment in Carmageddon.

Edit: Also Celeron 300a 50% overclock and firmware Radeon HD 6950 to 6970 unlock.

[tonyd2233]

Sound Blaster Xfi for Battlefield 2, increased fps and the sound quality at the time was amazing

[OOSeven]

I know it's not technically a component but YEARS ago I got one of those Korean 27" 1440p IPS monitors that were going about for about 250 quid when the cheapest one you get here was 3 times that. I've still got it as my second monitor and it's never skipped a beat. Value right there.

My original Soundblaster in my old 286 was a revelation too.

[hairyonion]

My first ssd, that little thing made such a difference.

[simonpreston]

Proably worth mentioning the first CD-ROM drive, i bought for my Amiga. All of a sudden I had access to a lot of software, courtesy of CU Amiga (and later Amiga Format), that was impossible, before. So I guess the drive was unspectacur, but the library, it opened up, was game.

On a similar note, buying a 2.6GB hard drive, for my Amiga. Before I got one I was used to installing Workbench to the RAM disk, and booting from that. Fast. But the RAM disk meant installing, on every boot from cold. The harddrive meant once installed, it was there every time. Moving from a handful of floppies, to a hard drve was another night and day change.

[FRISH]

Unfortunately I'm not really the sentimental type.

[Mlok]

Aside from mentioned HD->SSD transition, possibly a Teac CD writer, back in the times it was a thing. Forgot the model number, but that thing was magical. Guess it would read data from a loaded beer coaster.
Oh and my trusty 486 DX2-66 P24D. How swift was that DOS.

[Ravenhearty]

Radeon 9700 Pro, my brother bought it for our PC when I was like 12, was the most awesome two three years, every single game ran perfectly and I never had to look at requirements or anything, pure bliss.

[LtSkitzo]

My Radeon 7850. I stuck a corsair h50 aio on it with zipties and managed to overclock it by 50%. Never have i seen such a massive overclock on hardware so easily possible, and I imagine I will never see it again.

[Ttaskmaster]

Most memorable is probably my MSI 780 Lightning, as I had to risk my life in order to get it.
Bascially it was funded by the payout from a bike crash.

[Al9984]

Q6600 - my trusty quad core for so many years

[lnz]

My first hard drive was certainly memorable.
It cost us about one year’s salary. We all took a small pay cut to finance it.
They came to install it and the following day it broke.
The were a bit miffed and tried to claim it was our fault, but gave us another one anyway....
It was a Corvus 10 MB Winchester connected to an Apple II.

[squirrelz]

Definitely my first Voodoo card - Orchid Righteous 3D

I was astonished at how much better the graphics were when I installed that. The only step-change that compares was the jump from hard drives to SSDs

[DrNick]

I bought an ATI Rage 128 in Canada in 1999. The demo is on Youtube, and it was mind blowing, everything since has just been an increment. I had a game called ReVolt, which was a remote controlled car racer, and was gorgeous, I could get 100 fps at VGA, and it was super-smooth. You could choose CPU rendering as an option so you could actually see what your card was giving you. I think I had a Pentium II, maybe 200, 233. About 6 months later I got a SoundBlaster and finally had audio, that was also a giant leap forward.

[Quartz]

How far back do you want me to go? Yes, I'm old.

I'll pick three hardware game-changers, suitably far apart:

1. The original Creative Labs Soundblaster card. No more beep-beep but proper sounds.
2. 3dfx Voodoo card. Paired with a Trident or Cirrus Logic graphics card. I really don't need to elaborate, do I?
3. My first 4K monitor. It was a Samsung purchased 5-6 years ago and paired with a GTX 780 Ti and the uplift from HD was awesome.

I think the only bad upgrade I've purchased was a game controller from Microsoft. It was the one with the ball joint and I never got the hang of it.

Software-wise, there was OS/2 2 which let me multi-task - usually playing Wing Commander or Doom while downloading a large QWK packet - and Windows 2000 which caused me to drop OS/2 immediately.

[TeaLeaf]

The JIUHB stepping of the Athlon XP1700. Overclocking and getting over 2.4GHz on air back in those days for just £45 was amazing.