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[BAW]

I vaguely remember computers being way more expensive than they are today. I ran shitty clones of Intel CPUs and budget 3D "accelerators" (S3 Virge anyone?) in a futile attempt to not bankrupt myself, until I had enough and turned to consoles.

Anyway, for those of you that persevered, what was your rig? What did it cost you? Could you run contemporary games satisfactorily back then?

Let's discuss and see if it was all worth it in the end.

 

[bionic77]

If you were starting from scratch it was going to cost you more than 2 grand for a PC with a decent monitor and it would have been very easy to go above 3k.

I remember being very happy getting my Dell with a giant 14" monitor for college for less than 2 grand. This was like 1994/1995. It was state of the art with a CD ROM drive. This was before video cards so the idea of gaming PCs was not really complete just yet.

 

[Sothpaw]

Back then I got along fine with my store bought Compaq and Dell. I think they ran about $1-$1.5K?

 

[suikodan]

What was a gaming PC like back then???

I had 512K of VRAM meaning that I could play Links 386 Pro with SVGA graphics!!!!

Then I got a sound card.

I guess I had a killer PC then! (1992)

 

[jaxpunk]

I had to upgrade my video card and buy a cdrom to play 7th Guest.

 

[Zeneric]

Yea my grandma bought a 486 for me in the 90's. It probably cost like 3k CAD.

 

[AEdouard]

$2000 would get you something solid. Accounting for inflation (from 1995), that's over $3,200. Insane.

 

[MizzouRah]

I was too young to build my own gaming PC back then, but I remember playing games like Microprose M1 Tank Platoon and Gunship on the first computer I remember using.

In the mid-90s we got a Packard Bell computer and that introduced me to freeware and Flight Sims. After that we had pretty regular upgrades, but the first one I remember making a huge difference had a Riva TNT2. I had no idea what the settings menu was, and when I realized that you could switch to 3-d rendering instead of software rendering on games like Jane's F-15 and FS98 it blew my mind! It not only ran better, but looked better too.

Sometime around middle school I asked for a custom built gaming PC from ibuypower for Christmas and somehow got it. It had a P4 3.0ghz and a GeForce 4 ti 4600, which were both top of the line then. That was my first official gaming PC and I think it cost around $2400.

 

[Carlius]

my first gming pc had 96mb ram and that was amazing back then. and diablo 2 being 1gb install was just massive and incredible.

 

[Flying Toaster]

I had to upgrade my video card and buy a cdrom to play 7th Guest.

Yep! and they were CD caddys at that time. I had to go to the only Comp USA in Arizona at the time to get one and it was always barren as cd roms were hard to find.

Gaming in the 90's was glorious. Big boxes, awesome manuals and maps and all sorts of additional items.

 

[KingSnake]

My first PC was a 486. The first games I remember playing on PC were Heroes of the Might and Magic, Actua Soccer and Supaplex. Later it was Quake and Age of Empires. By then I think I already had a Pentium II. I don't remember if I had already a Voodoo card though. I built my PCs from scratch since the beginning and I was using second hand components (I remember I got lucky when the company where my father was working sold some PCs or components for cheap in order to replace them and that's how I got some of the components).

 

[bionic77]

What was a gaming PC like back then???

I had 512K of VRAM meaning that I could play Links 386 Pro with SVGA graphics!!!!

Then I got a sound card.

I guess I had a killer PC then! (1992)

Before graphics cards I don't think the concept of gaming PC existed (though we did have a billion magazines about PCs and games on PCs).

You did not really have a 'gaming PC'. You just had a badass PC with a real sound card, top of the line CPU and enough RAM to run shit.

I remember being blown away by someone who had a 15" Sony monitor and I think 16 MB of ram (MB not GB).

 

[kahi]

Store bought, ran stuff fine in 1997. Pentium II probably 200mhz, I think only like 32mb of ram, and of course a Sound Blaster compatible sound card.

Age of Empires, Quake II, Fall Out, oh my!

 

[vsbizarro]

Cost me nothing. I'm was a kid and my father was an Sharp's employer.

He always won some prizes, one of them was a PC. Wasn't so good, but was good enough to play some games, like Time Commando, Doom and some other.

However, I've always used to emulate consoles. I never had an gameboy color (was too expansive in brazil), so i've played pokémon series and a bunch of others.

All that I can say is: Was a Pentium with 133mHz (I just know it cuz shows up in front, beside the power button)

EDIT: OMG, im always forgot
AGE OF EMPIRES!

 

[BriGuy]

Our first PC was a Gateway 2000. It had a 100 MHz Pentium, 8 MB of Ram, and a CD drive (which was a caddy you ejected, put up to three CDs in, and inserted back into the computer). This was 1995 and it cost $3500. It ran Doom.

 

[KainXVIII]

I wish i remember that! Back in the 1994 my dad bought 486DX-2 with some svga card (i think Cirrus Logic), no sound card (only pc speaker) or cd-drive + 14" monitor, AFAIK. But russian price was all over the place, so its even harder to recollect all that info..

 

[Ogni-XR21]

Bought a Pentium 90 MHz with a 4x Speed CD-ROM drive and a high quality soundcard for 4000 DM (appr. 2000 €) together with my brother. Don't know the exact year, but a P90 was still best of the line and the 4x drive had just been released.

 

[Skyr]

$2000 would get you something solid. Accounting for inflation (from 1995), that's over $3,200. Insane.

That was about the price that my dad paid for his pc in 1994.
And that was still far from top of the line.

It was especially crazy considering it became basically useless only 4 years later in 1998 when games started to rely on 3Dfx direct 3d.
What a not so great time to be alive lol.

 

[ISee]

~2000 DM (pre euro, German marks). It was a 486dx33, 100mb hard drive, soundblastet 2.0 and 4mb of ram

 

[kswiston]

My first computer was close to $2k CAD with the monitor in 1995, for what was basically the equivalent of a $400 best buy desktop in today's terms.

I had a 486 DX 66 mHz PC, in an age where 100mHz+ Pentiums were already widely available. It had 8MB of RAM, a 14.4k dial-up modem, and a whopping 640 MB hardrive.

I eventually bought an overclocked 133mHz processor for it, and 24mb of RAM, which allowed me to play things like Diablo.

My first video card was a 6mb first gen Voodoo FX card. I had that in my Pentium MMX 200mHz PC for about 3 years in high scool.

 

[Linkark07]

My father had one, but what its specs were or how much it cost him is something I don't know.

Nevertheless, our computer in 1994 managed to ran games like Doom or Rise of the Triad. Again, I was a kid and as long as it ran was fine for me, so I don't remember if the PC ran them fine or with low FPS.

 

[The End]

The last expensive PC I built was in 2000, designed to play UT99 and Deus Ex. The early unreal engine games positively sung on Voodoo Graphics, so I built a 1Ghz Athlon with (I think) 512mb of RAM and a Voodoo Graphics 5500 card, ran me about $2000 without monitor, kb, mouse, etc.

 

[antitrop]

We got a family PC in 1997 for $2000. It was a Pentium 200MHz with I think 64MB RAM, we eventually put a Voodoo 2 card it in it.

 

[StereoVsn]

I built one of my first PCs (had one built by small shop before then) back around '95, except I used to go to Computer Shows for cheaper parts or use mail catalogs. I think I paid about $1500 for a computer and $800ish for 20" or 21" monitor. It has been a while so memory is hazy.

That one had a Vodoo card which was pretty snazzy.

 

[Mupod]

My 486 was hot shit in 1994. I didn't buy it though, parents did. I think it cost them around 3000?

Saved up all the money from my paper route and got my first PC in 1999 for around 900, monitor included. I didn't build it myself, had no idea where I'd even start with that at the time.

I had to upgrade the RAM, and I used shitty integrated graphics for a few months before I could afford a Voodoo 3. I forget how much that cost, probably around 200? But yeah, it ran games for me very well up to and including Warcraft 3. After that I built my own PCs.

 

[Ravelle]

Not in the 90's but my first "gaming pc" cost me around 2000.

I made a assembled a list in a PC repair/build shop and they put my computer together, took them two weeks and was probably scammed in price. ;p

I remember asking the clerk if the video card I selected could run Half-Life 2 haha.

 

[RS4-]

5k CAD for some bullshit IBM Aptiva, 17" monitor that had built in Bose (!) speakers.

Fucking terrible.

I do remember playing Myth, Blade Runner, etc on it.

And dial up porn.

 

[Fularu]

Before the advent of dedicated 3d accelerators, "gaming pcs" didn't really exist

The most "pc gaming" you would get was if you purchased a Gravis Ultra Sound with its gamepad

 

[mattwhite924]

Before graphics cards I don't think the concept of gaming PC existed (though we did have a billion magazines about PCs and games on PCs).

You did not really have a 'gaming PC'. You just had a badass PC with a real sound card, top of the line CPU and enough RAM to run shit.

I remember being blown away by someone who had a 15" Sony monitor and I think 16 MB of ram (MB not GB).

There were still graphics cards back then, they just weren't quite as important until games like Doom came out. Even then they weren't at all like cards today. They were harder to compare too. I think if you have a VESA Local Bus card then you were generally ok for pretty much everything in the 486 days.

It got interesting when 3D accelerator cards showed up. Especially early ones that couldn't do 2D graphics, so you'd have to have a separate 2D graphics card and have a passthrough cable running between the two cards.

 

[TylerDurden4321]

My most expensive 1990s PC was 3800DM ~$1700 I guess. I was 16, doing all the computer stuff for brothers company, he and my dad bought it for me and did some tax cheating on it (I wasn't an official employee and the company didn't need a gaming PC).
The PC lasted 2 1/2 years, then everything except the HDD was outdated at least compared to what games were doing and how monitor resolutions evolved.

 

[hollams]

2K for first Gaming PC

8086 CPU
512K Memory
20Meg Hard Drive
CGA Monitor/Graphic Card (4 Colors)
Dot Matrix Printer
5 1/4 Floppy
Square Shaped Mouse

 

[PuppetSlave]

My families computer but I put my summer work money in buying graphics cards to make it run the latest games. I went with TNT cards during the 90's.

 

[HyGogg]

My first was a hand-me-down PC-AT clone. 286 10 Mhz, 640K RAM, and EGA graphics. It wasn't much, but it could play Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, and even Catacomb 3D (at an appallingly low framerate that I was somehow able to tolerate). I couldn't conjecture what it cost, but I didn't get it new anyway.

In 1994 I got my first "new" PC. It was a 486 at 66/Mhz, 4MB of RAM, and whatever VESA-compatible video card would have been hot shit at that time. "Multi-media PC" was the big marketing term at the time. I reckon it was around $1300. Cutting-edge titles at the time included Doom, Under a Killing Moon, and Myst.

And, truth-be-told, that was the last time I ever had to buy a completely built new desktop, I just upgraded. At first it was a K6 (AMD's fake Pentium upgrade for 486 motherboards), more RAM, a Voodoo card... I replaced every part of that computer 10 times over again, and here I am today.

Before the advent of dedicated 3d accelerators, "gaming pcs" didn't really exist

Nah, by the time we got to VGA cards, CD-ROM drives, and 32-bit CPUs (around 1993), PCs were comfortably doing stuff that were the envy of consoles at the time.

The most "pc gaming" you would get was if you purchased a Gravis Ultra Sound with its gamepad

Oh yes. Thank you for reminding me. The Gravis UltraSound MAX was one actually the first upgrade I made to my 1994 system. And an OG SoundBlaster was the first upgrade I made to my PC AT.

GUS was a huge upgrade for gaming sound. It made all the difference in MIDI-based games. I absolutely loved that thing.

 

[ChryZ]

My first PC was a 486DX2@66MHz, 8MB RAM, 120MB HDD, some sort of VLB video acceleration card (pre-3D), it was bundled with a shitty 14" VGA monitor. I paid ~1600 for everything, it was a great deal back then.

 

[Fularu]

2K for first Gaming PC

8086 CPU
512K Memory
20Meg Hard Drive
CGA Monitor/Graphic Card (4 Colors)
Dot Matrix Printer
5 1/4 Floppy
Square Shaped Mouse

Not to nitpick but CGA was 16 colors as soon as 1981 (when IBM created the first card)

 

[Soulblighter31]

 

[Randy Monk]

2K for first Gaming PC

8086 CPU
512K Memory
20Meg Hard Drive
CGA Monitor/Graphic Card (4 Colors)
Dot Matrix Printer
5 1/4 Floppy
Square Shaped Mouse

Wow, almost the same as mine except I had an EGA monitor.

 

[strafer]

holy shit, a 3 gb harddrive? That's insane.

 

[bionic77]

There were still graphics cards back then, they just weren't quite as important until games like Doom came out. Even then they weren't at all like cards today. They were harder to compare too. I think if you have a VESA Local Bus card then you were generally ok for pretty much everything in the 486 days.

It got interesting when 3D accelerator cards showed up. Especially early ones that couldn't do 2D graphics, so you'd have to have a separate 2D graphics card and have a passthrough cable running between the two cards.

Did games even take advantage of graphics cards prior to Windows 95?

I know you had to have a certain amount of VRAM to run games but it seemed to be more about the CPU and RAM before the rise of the 3D cards.

 

[ipukespiders]

I'm basically building this right now for retro gaming.

 

[Mihos]

Not to nitpick but CGA was 16 colors as soon as 1981 (when IBM created the first card)

You could select 4 of those 16 at any one time, but it was limited to just 4 on screen at 320x200. It dropped down to only 2 at once if you went higher

No one used it at 160x100 mode, I would use text mode before I did that.

 

[KingV]

My first PX I would truly call a "gaming PC" was a Pentium with a 3dfx Voodoo in 1996.

It was expensive, but that thing was truly a beast compared to an N64 or PSX. Playing quake at 640x480 with bilinear texturing was like the future.

That said, I eventually learned to play at 512x384 with like a 120 field of view.

 

[Rizific]

I dont know what classified as a gaming pc back then, but I did play warcraft/warcraft 2/doom on our family pc. I remember that shit being around $1300 with a monitor.

 

[Bleepey]

Around 1998 I had a PC that was like 133MHZ. It could play Quake., MDK and Alpha 2. It was also a piece of a shit.

 

[bionic77]

I dont know what classified as a gaming pc back then, but I did play warcraft/warcraft 2/doom on our family pc. I remember that shit being around $1300 with a monitor.

Prior to Windows 95 and even for a few years after, part of the joy was just getting the fucking game to run.

I remember when we finally got Warcraft 2 to play over our college internet. It was amazing. Just getting it to work was awesome. It helped that the game was amazingly good.

 

[Christberg]

My first "gaming PC" was a Gateway 386 SX-33. It wasn't a particularly high end computer. I had to beg my parents to let me put a math coprocessor in it and double the amount of cache. I blew the thing up twice putting those damn cache chips in and they got PISSED and rightly so. Those things were easy as hell to damage via ESD.

In the subsequent years I was probably rebuilding my computer annually just to keep up and the expenditure was eye popping since I had to pay for all of it myself.

Computers these days are an order of magnitude easier to work on, far cheaper and last much longer. That's a good thing.

I really miss playing games on an IPX/SPX network with 10Base2 connectors though. Some serious LAN parties, those.

 

[Steejee]

First real PC was a Packard Bell 386SX 16Mhz, 5MB RAM (1MB was default, older brother forked out for the extra 4MB), 82MB Hard Drive. Was not cheap.

We played a lot of Stunts on that machine, could play DOOM only with a special boot file. Not really anything resembling a modern GPU at the time.

Second was a 233Mhz Pentium (or P2?) w/MMX, added a Voodoo Banshee card not too long after getting it. Just a *bit* of an upgrade. It was like seeing God going from software rendering in Quake 2 to OpenGL Glide. Predates the first 'GPU' a bit still (the GeForce) which I remember vividly as PCXL had all the drool inducing screenshots of the GPU demos.

My first PC of my own was the machine I bought for College - 900Mhz Athlon, GeForce2 (I think), probably a good amount of RAM. Many hours of Quake 3 and Counterstrike ensued on that machine. My first real gaming machine. Older brother was surprised I didn't fork over the extra $500 for the 1Ghz Athlon...

Weird to think that just one core on the multi-core CPU I have now is more powerful by several factors than all of those entire systems combined.

 

[JordanKZ]

I suppose they became a thing once Voodoo accelerator cards became a thing? I remember having a Pentium MMX and a Voodoo 2 at some point.

My parents had a computer business in the late 90's/early 00's. Got new, high end stuff all the time. Had to work for it, but it was a great deal for me.

 

[SGRX]

The first PC I gamed on as a kid was a Northgate 33MHz 386 in 1990. It had a 14" monitor, 5.25" & 3.5" floppy drives, one of the best keyboards I've used to this day, 4MBs of RAM, a 200MB hard drive, and ran MS-DOS 4.01. It cost $5,299.

My parents bought it for their business, but it wound up being too complicated for them, and they never used it. I taught myself how to use it, and saved up enough money to buy a sound card by the end of the year. Playing Wing Commander and Ultima VI on that system was life changing. I pretty much spent the rest of my teens working as much as I could to pay for hardware upgrades to fuel my PC gaming addiction.

 

[AaronMT86]

Mainly a 486 up until ~'98. Then I purchased some IBM pre-made, Pentium II 350 MHz and Voodoo 3 2000 PCI for Quake II and Unreal Tournament.