QOTW: Your favourite component of all time?

[sjaxkingpin187]

My first 3d card, the Videologic Apocalypse 3dx - there's been no one thing that revolutionised gaming that come close to the transition from no 3d-card to 3d-card

Agreed. For me it was a Voodoo card, but same story, it was night and day and hooked me for life.

[GaryC1234uk2]

I loved the "Turbo Boost" button on early PC's (286/386 processors) - which had the 'effect' of slowing the thing down!

[Tropi]

In the days when 32-40 chars per screen line was the norm, slotting an 80 column card into my Apple II was a revelation when used with Visicalc and Apple Writer. It was made in Australia, around 1981 at a guess. I established trade relations with the manufacturer and made quite a few quid selling them for a while. No Internet in them there days!

[ablang]

My favorite component is easily the SSD. It's the cheapest, fastest way to improve the performance of my PC (desktop or laptop).

Worst component for me is usually the graphics card because they tend to cost the most. And if you buy one that is too advanced for your system, then it is money wasted.

[badass]

a 68060 Accelerator with 8 MB RAM for my Amiga 1200. IIRC it boosted CPU performance something like 40 fold and floating point ops 1200 fold. I already had an HDD so it went like greased lightening.

[squirrelz]

My first 3d card, the Videologic Apocalypse 3dx - there's been no one thing that revolutionised gaming that come close to the transition from no 3d-card to 3d-card

I'm with this too - for me it was an Orchid Righteous 3D (first generation 3Dfx card) the transformation for Quake (glQuake - remember that?) was amazing, and I went into work the next day with "You have to see this, you have to buy one of these cards"

[g8ina]

My current mouse - Logitech MX Master. Amazing bit of kit, now about 10 yrs old and still going strong.

[mark_a_scott]

The Creative Labs DVD Encore, it was a DVD reader drive with an MPEG2 video decoder which you then had to link to the graphics card via VGA cable.