The biggest game-changing PC upgrade of all-time?

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

Having eyesight. What's the good of playing games if you're blind?

 

[Scavengers]

It came with a controller card that plugged into a PCI slot

I'm fairly certain you mean ISA

Oh man you are right Cliff. I completely forgot. Good catch.

 

[namesrejected]

1.) Turbo cart for the C64
2.) GUI ( graphic user interface )
3.) Magnetic Core Memory ( first practical form of RAM )
4.) Nano Lithography processes
5.) Transistor ( Mentioned earlier, computers would not be what they are now without them. )
6.) DOT Matrix printer

 

[amghwk]

Buying a mouse for the first time itself is the most important upgrade. Optical mouse is just an enhancement of one of most important component ever to arrive on a PC - the computer mouse itself!

 

[amghwk]

And of course, getting a first 3D-capable graphics cards was another major game changing upgrade ever. Nowadays, this is taken for granted. Obviously, the author of this clickbait is either too young and missed those days with REAL major upgrades and hence the question and answer given by himself was ... meh

Nowadays everything is saturated ... nothing innovative or "game-changing."

 

[amghwk]

And oh yes, the sound cards too! Anyone who upgraded from the humble PC speakers can attest to the difference and game-changing moments.

 

[Adhmuz]

Aftermarket heatsinks pure and simple, because where would overclocking be without a huge freakin' hunk of aluminum and copper hanging off your motherboard. But they're not just for overclocking, they effectively remove that annoying CPU fan buzz from most systems a necessity for creating a silent PC and can even be run fan less with today's ultra low wattage chips. Other than hard drives aftermarket heatsinks are the one component I've bought the most of over the years, CPU, GPU and Chipset coolers even a couple hard drive coolers I can't even count them all anymore.

 

[DukeD]

Windows 3.1 No more TSR apps, memory manager, actual multi-taksking, destop was no longer just a shell (well it still is but you know what I mean) over dos. I remember when MS sent it to everyone via Fed Ex. LOL ... Oh yeah, I believe that was the version that Apple sued them over.

 

[That Other Guy]

Moving from a completely proprietary assembly to a somewhat open platform system design. Not only allowing near endless customization but also leading to the numerous pioneering component companies we have today pushing forward to new and ever evolving technologies

 

[TitoBXNY]

The Internet and GPU's for me.

 

[commanderasus]

For me it was the Voodoo 3dfx. I bought that card so I could play UNREAL which I still play today. Next would be the advancement of the cpu and ram interactions. I also remember the big changes that Western Digital made with the Raptor hard drive, sure it was not big in capacity and at the time there was nothing faster. Now we have insanely fast ssd drives. Best bang for the buck award goes to the ssd - putting one of these in a older computer makes a big difference. You must also give credit to the thousands of people who made all this possible for without them we would not be reading this forum on a 144hz monitor.

 

[Soulburn74]

This is easy, hands down, no doubt about it. The SINGLE biggest game changing pc upgrade I've ever made, Making the jump to 3d acceleration when the original 3DFX card came out. It was a game change for me, and the gaming industry as a whole (both good (with quake 2's usage of 3d acceleration, it cemented FPS's as a thing) and bad (with that change to graphics, it ended the adventure/thinking mans game that PC ruled at (sierra/lucasfilm adventure games etc). Look now at PC graphics, the 1080GTX probably makes the 3dfx 1 look like a calculator compared to a supercomputer. But it all started somewhere, and I joyfully remember being on the ground floor of that innovation!

 

[trgz]

Some people must've had really poor monitors back in the day. It took me ages to repalce my old Mitsibushi with a Samsung Syncmaster that just about met the same quality and only recently are we seeing DPI of the same level as CRT - and don't forget that you simply HAD to run in native mode or there was no point in turning it on.
My vote is between the mouse (of any kind), the OS and any 3d card - the rest are merely refinements

 

[mosu]

Just to put them in some ...evolutionary order: x86 and subsequently x64 CPU's,Windows, Internet, multimedia capabilities and peripherals and to crown integration, heterogenous computing and IoT. All tied together.

 

[Randomthom]

In my lifetime of using computers (born in '85 so thinking of 1990 onwards really) I'd rank the following...
1. Flat-screen monitors (wow... my desk is how big?)
2. Mouse enhancements (rolling scroll wheel & optical into one here for brevity)
3. SSD.

I think WiFi has probably had the biggest effect globally but I'm still a firm believer in ethernet cables wherever possible!

 

[gamerk2]

In no particular order:

3dfx Voodoo 3
Adlib Soundcard
Mouse
Windows 3.11

 

[BadThad]

The GPU and AGP were the biggest gaming revolutions. Agree with the others on the VooDoo card, that improved gaming a TON on the graphics side. However, the greatest change was the rapid development of AGP cards.

 

[mbrowne5061]

Surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet:

The physics processor.

Started out as a dedicated unit, and is now pretty standard in every GPU. All of a sudden, you had truly destructible environments in games, instead of just walls with hitboxes and pre-animated destruction. It also meant that splash damage became much more realistic - no more surviving just because you were slightly around a corner.
I still have to remind myself that finding a high corner and sniping' is no longer a valid strategy - they'll just take down the building from underneath me.

 

[hood6558]

Thought control (brain-computer interface). Although still in it's infancy, when perfected, it will make monitors, keyboards, mice, speakers, microphones, headphones, etc, all obsolete. Imagine just thinking about your login, and then anything you think about will have maximum info available for you to see or hear in your head upon request (as described in the Niven/Pournelle novel "Oath of Fealty" in 1981). Very expensive, but definitely the best upgrade ever, even though it's still in the future. For now, though fast SSDs help a lot...

 

[Squid Surprise]

Thought control (brain-computer interface). Although still in it's infancy, when perfected, it will make monitors, keyboards, mice, speakers, microphones, headphones, etc, all obsolete. Imagine just thinking about your login, and then anything you think about will have maximum info available for you to see or hear in your head upon request (as described in the Niven/Pournelle novel "Oath of Fealty" in 1981). Very expensive, but definitely the best upgrade ever, even though it's still in the future. For now, though fast SSDs help a lot...

So when a hacker hacks your PC, do they get access to your brain?

 

[StrikerRocket]

For me there have been quite a few, I'll note the year I first got it:

3D accelerator card. Diamond Monster 3D with 3dfx Vooodoo Graphics chipset (1998) => this is the BIG one

IPS Monitor (2007)
SSD (2013)
Mechanical Keyboard (2013)
144Hz monitor (2016)

The first optical mice were not that good imho, the ball was fine.

For me there have been quite a few, I'll note the year I first got it:

3D accelerator card. Diamond Monster 3D with 3dfx Vooodoo Graphics chipset (1998) => this is the BIG one

IPS Monitor (2007)
SSD (2013)
Mechanical Keyboard (2013)
144Hz monitor (2016)

The first optical mice were not that good imho, the ball was fine.

IPS monitor existed before 2007. My HP Pavilion ZV5310 bought in 2004 had an IPS panel, though I discovered that when I changed for a crappy TN Acer laptop... (Not sure you meant IPS appeared in 2007 though...)

 

[Invizibleyez]

USB ports. Everything used to have it's own port, and if you didn't have enough, you had to add them in using valuable motherboard isa/pci slots. Having multiple multifunction ports that fit a universal standard opened the world up.

 

[yodecat]

I have to say as an avid Street Fighter player I still play on a CRT because of the faster response times. If only LCD's could get on that level.

LCDs. Pfffft. What you *really* want is plasma!

 

[lripplinger]

The SSD is the single biggest upgrade you can do for the average user. I install them in customer computers as much as I can, and they can't believe how fast their computer suddenly is. Hard drives are the bottleneck on any modern computer now.

 

[Phr3d]

It's All about the data, so - the internal Hard Disk Drive. Computers were useful, but miserable before them, and the affordable HDD's size increases allowed most everything mentioned here, excepting the transistor/ICs.

Modern-ish has to be USB, long time coming, long in adoption, but it affected so much connectivity within and without all computers that we would still be inching performance forward without it.