What I want to showcase is enthusiast home builds from this time period. When overclocked video cards were common, big heatpipe coolers and huge fans started being common on high end graphics cards, motherboards started being coloured / decorated, PCI Express had *just* come in, and the cool kids had windows on the side of the case to show off their masterpiece.
To many this may be pointless nonsense - but I think the enthusiasm and dedication to some of these home builds is actually both interesting and fun.
My first build ended up being a bit bland - Athlon 3400 XP with a Radeon 9600 Pro Advantage on a generic Gigabyte motherboard with a VIA chipset. ~2005 date.
The kind of gear I'm after - just examples - might be stuff like:
- Asus A8-SLI - one of the earlier motherboards with dual PCI Express slots specifically designed for running two of the latest graphics cards in tandem
- DFI LanParty nForce 4 - big colourful slots, dedicated design for gamers, lots of features
- Anything with a P4 EE processor or Athlon 64 dual core.
- First gen Core 2 Duo from 2006 (E6000 series) would be interesting as well.
and for video:
- ATI Radeon X800 or X1000 series (PCIE or AGP)
- GeForce 6600 or 6800 series (PCIE or AGP)
- Other options considered, because my best AGP is the 9600 Pro, and I have no spare PCI-E cards handy
Preferably with either big oversized aftermarket coolers, or factory coolers with decorative stickers (I think ATI was putting Dragons on them at that time)
Also interested in other enthusiast parts - aftermarket CPU coolers, specialist power supplies, etc etc.
So if anyone has interesting stuff like this laying around, let me know what you've got
