Weekend Open Forum: What was your first-ever PC build?

My first machine ever build was an Aopen MX3S-T Socket 370 with a Intel Pentium III Tualatin processor, it had a 40gbts maxtor hard drive and 512 mbts of ram. Used for entertainment and coding, it was a nice piece of machine back in 1999
 
P-166/16mb ram/2x1.2gb HDD/S3 Tro64 gfx in 1995, it was my second PC and first self-built (the first was some noname 386dx40/4mb ram/130mb HDD/14" svga crt display in 1993; the display served me until 1997 when I replaced it with Samsung 17").
 
486 with co-pro and 2MB ram. My 2nd was similar, and is still running AFAIK. I told that customer to open it up twice/year and blow out the dust with an air gun. It has had CPU fan and hard drive replaced a couple of times, but otherwise, it does what is asked of it, 2-D CAD with an old printer-port dongle that won't work with faster machines.
 
My first homebuilt computer used an Athlon XP processor. It was so long ago I cant recall I had gotten to put it together. That was back in 2004 or thereabouts
 
Built an electronic calculator in the early 70s. First Computer build was a Sinclair ZX/80. Oh I miss the days of simple computing and programming where you knew the program well enough you could fix it, then Microsoft happened.
 
AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (FSB overclocked, of course)
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700
An ASUS nForce2 motherboard (I forget the model, but it was unmistakably dijon mustard yellow)
Tinkering with the hardware and of course games were my priority: Diablo/Diablo 2, StarCraft, Counter-Strike

My parent's funded my first build, picking parts from Fry's, likely to encourage me to pursue tech as a hobby. I have the privilege of doing systems administration today and loving it. I'd say their investment was worthwhile :) I used their prebuilt computers before this, but these parts were the start to my hardware independence.
 
I don't recall the exact time, but my first build was because a new manager was buying parts to build our own office computers circa ~1995. Pentium 1 - 150Mhz. They were office computers, so nothing notable and no sound card. They had the floating point issue so I believe we swapped them out to 166MHz via warranty. I did not have my own computer, so I bought a sound card to play games there at night. :) My first personal computer build was around 1997 and was an AMD K6 - 166MHz (ran hot and little overclocking). It had a 3DFX Voodoo card (still have it!) and a Soundblaster 32 for audio I think. I don't recall the primary 2D video card or how much memory. It had a 15" monitor.
 
I have never had the guts to build my own pc after my 1st time spending close to 800 pounds in 1988 and did not put the risers under the motherboard so fried EVERYTHING but now I buy a nice set up when I can and add what I need when I can afford it
im now 60 years old and want to build my own gaming PC so wish me luck I have 1200 to spare so any advice will help
 
Like a lot of folks here, I started with an OEM Epson 386SX/16. As the SX moniker indicates, it sucked. Luckily despite it being an OEM machine, everything was industry standard. As soon as I could afford to, I dropped in a 386DX/40 with a new motherboard that sported 64kb of SRAM L1 cache. That thing could trade blows with a 486SX/25 and indirectly led to my first IT job.
 
Now, I may not be as ancient as most forum posters :)P) but my first build was at the end of my high school career to help with my senior project in 2010. I think I was really luck to have been able to save up and build it the way I did as I still have it and have learned so much. I have an i7-2600k, 8gb ram, an intel "speed demon" ssd that is 40GB. I started with a radeon 4850 that died and sucked when it was working (but was soo cool to me as my first ever gpu anyways) I have been able to add things like storage and change coolers on the cpu, learn how to troubleshoot my own OS and even hardware. It's been an awesome experience!
 
I built my first PC (from scratch) in a PC recycling center when I was working as an intern.

It had an Athlon 64 X2 6400+ (which uses the AM2 socket), 4 GB of DDR2 memory (clocked at 800 mhz), and a shitty geforce 8400 gs.

Funny enough, the CPU has a 125 W TDP, but the motherboard only offically supports 95W CPUs. That resulted in BSODs all the time, so I had to underclock CPU to get a fully stable system.

I actually still have it, because it has a pretty good upgrade path (the mobo has both DDR2 1066 and DDR3 1600 mhz dimm slots and I can plop in a 95W 6-core Phenom II X6 1045T in here).

It´s still chugging along.
 
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