I still remember my first upgrade. For Christmas in 1995 I received a CD Rom drive bundled with a game called Myst. I was so excited! Of course I was 10 years old, and had no idea how to install it. My dad helped me install it on my 133 Mhz AMD 5x86 and soon I was enjoying Myst. (This wasn't my first CD Rom drive, I had one on my 33 Mhz Intel 486 prior to this in the early 90's) Since then I enjoyed upgrading my computer, but I had much to learn.

In 1997, I wanted to play a game called Comanche 3 but it didn't run well on my computer. I realized I needed to upgrade my graphics card, so I went to Fry's with my dad and bought a 2 MB VGA card. Although 3DFX launched their Voodoo PCI graphics accelerator (4 MB) that same year, I had no idea what it was. In fact I didn't know what a 3D accelerator card was until 1999.

In October 1998 I got this computer for my 13th birthday:

Compaq
AMD K6-2 450 MHZ (Performed on par or better then the Intel Pentium II for less $$$)
64 mb ram (actually only 56 dedicated as 8 was shared for video memory, i wish they would have explained this)
3D Now! Integrated Graphics 8 MB
6 GB Hard drive (LOL)
Windows 98

It was nearly top of the line for the time. I still didn't know what a dedicated video card was, so I was stuck on integrated graphics. AMD's 3D Now integrated graphics worked quite well for games that supported it; but unfortunately that was very few. I actually ended up buying a 3DFX Voodoo Banchee (12 MB), but I couldn't use it because it was AGP, and my computer only had a PCI bus. (Lol I was such a noob.) I played Half-Life at some horrible resolution below 640x480 on software mode. (I loved every second of it though). In 1999, most games stopped supporting software rendering so I was confused why my games wouldn't run.

Some time in 1999, I went over to my friend Dylan Mitchel's house, his dad had just bought him a new computer. I played TFC on his computer and I was amazed at the graphics and how smooth the game ran.

This was because he had a brand new computer with the following specs:
Pentium III 500 MHZ
128 MB ram
3DFX Voodoo III 16 MB (The main reason this game ran like butter)

I started researching computer hardware online. I stumbled onto a website called Tomshardware.com. I read everything I could find. Soon I was ready to build my own computer. For christmas in 2000 I knew what I wanted. I gave my dad a list of computer components to buy at Fry's, and he did. I built myself the following computer:

Pentium III 800 Mhz
256 MB Ram
Nvidia Geforce 2 GTS 64 mb
30 GB Hard drive (That was pretty good back then lol)
19" CRT Monitor (Huge at the time and 85 Hz @1280x1024)
Windows 98 SE

I LOVED this computer. It ran everything SUPER SMOOTHLY for 2 years. I also was able to get the 64 MB version of the Geforce 2 GTS which was rare at the time, as most people had the 32 MB version at best. I actually kept this computer until 2002. I think the reason I loved this computer so much was because it was such a HUGE leap over my old computer, a powerful Pentium III processor, it had way more ram, and a dedicated video card. The graphics difference between software rendered games to Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament blew my mind. Basically after seeing how amazing PC graphics could be, I could never go back to consoles.

I have built many great systems since then, but I will never forget my Pentium III. The first computer I ever built myself. *Sniff.

I still own my Geforce 2 GTS. The Geforce 8800 GTX pictured next to it here makes it look puny, but it was a beast in it's day.

The Comanche games were awesome, they made 4! It's funny, the system requirements for Comanche 3 just say "fast pentium". lol

The Voodoo 3 provided great frame rates in games at the time of its release but it suffered in 32 bit color mode. But back then 16 bit color was fine.