Posted 05/21/2009 at 03:59:15pm

Although my first PC was based on an AMD 386SX-25, I couldn't do anything with that. It was when I upgraded to a (AMD again) 486DX4-100 that things really got interesting. Managed to overclock it to 120Mhz (a 25% increase - not bad) and it made so much difference. Also had a negative OC experience - my mate's new PC kept on crashing and we worked out it was overheating due to being overclocked by the unscupulous retailer. We took it straight down there and they upgraded the chip in a real hurry!

I was surprised at how many of these chips I've owned over the years. I still own the DX4 and it hold a special place in my heart. I played all my Duke3D and Doom2 deathmatches on that thing. 

Posted 05/21/2009 at 03:35:23pm

Well this feature sure brought back some old memories. I remember the Voodoo being hyped when it came out but was never in a position to own one. I worked in a computer shop and still remember the look of shock and disbelief on some kid's face when I told him a Voodoo card was £250. I hated nothing more than starting up a game that I knew had a 3dfx mode I couldn't use, Carmageddon being the main one. Over the years I've picked up old equipment here and there, building myself what would have been a ninja system in 1995. Presently it's got an Orchid-branded 3dfx card piggybacking a ViRGE VX/DX with the RAM maxed out. Good times.

It also made me remember the first time I played a DirectX game - it was a demo of 'The Hive' on Win95 - at the time the idea of playing games in Windows was still somewhat absurd. Gone were the days of tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys to load as much as possible into upper memory!