I was 8 years old when we got our first "personal computer" — a Pentium 3 pre-built from HP known as "Brio". For around seven years, my brother and I squeezed all we could out of that PC, after which we finally convinced our parents to get us a custom PC. While that was the start of my ongoing tryst with PCs, it never reached a point where the younger me could fully experience the best that PC hardware had to offer, at least not until I was already in college.

The PCs I played on from the years 2000 to 2010 were devoid of discrete GPUs, flat-screen monitors, liquid cooling, gaming cabinets, or the best gaming CPUs. These parts were the ones I dreamed about in my childhood years. When I finally got to see them, I was already burdened with higher studies, so the eventual joy was bittersweet.

5 A fancy "gaming" chassis

These cases were kept out of the line of sight

A PC case might not account for much of the performance of the rig, but it's the first thing you see. And as a 12-year-old, I placed way too much importance on how the PC "looked". All the PCs I used from 2000 to 2017 looked like boring black boxes, with only a few silver accents to differentiate them from an office PC case. From the beige cabinet of the HP pre-built to the black Cooler Master case you see in the images, my PC never quite looked the part.

Things like airflow, upgradability, and component clearance never even entered my mind in those years. All I wanted was a PC that looked like those fancy machines we saw in magazines like Digit and Chip. Cases with transparent side panels might not have become too popular by then, but I hoped for at least some sense of personality — something to make my PC stand apart from the rest.

4 An AIO liquid cooler

The pinnacle of PC esthetics

As you can imagine, most of the PCs in the early-to-mid 2000s relied on stock air coolers to keep the CPUs from overheating. Anything more than that required some serious money which I never had in those years. Liquid coolers (I'm not even talking about custom loops) looked out of this world, instantly imparting a high-end esthetic to any PC they adorned.

AIO liquid coolers had started to become popular, but availability and pricing in India were just too crazy for me to ever seriously consider them. So, I did what any budget PC gamer did in those years — ignore the loud struggling noises of the stock air cooler and focus on the game. It's insane to think that the first AIO cooler I ever used in a personal build was in 2022, when I won an $1,800 gaming PC in a competition by Nvidia and WD.

3 A flat-screen LCD monitor

I was sick of the pregnant CRT display

From the moment we got the HP pre-built in 2000 till 2011–2012, the 15-inch CRT monitor was our window into cyberspace. Playing games, watching movies, browsing the web — everything resided on that squared 1024 x 768 screen. I even remember various components messing with the display's magnetic fields or something, causing distorted colors at the edges of the screen. We used to give up trying to fix that damn thing, and carried on with the day.

I wanted to game on a flat-screen monitor so badly, but in our household, we never replace something until it breaks. So, naturally, we were given the go-ahead to buy an LED monitor only when the CRT monitor was on its last legs. We got a 22-inch Dell monitor that seemed unbelievably huge the first time I laid eyes on it, but as I said, it was only when I was well into my college years. My childhood self only remembers the CRT days.

2 An AMD Athlon 64 CPU

These CPUs sounded so cool back then

The CPUs that I spent my early years with were the Intel Pentium III and Intel Core 2 Duo. I used the AMD Bulldozer and later chips when I was way past 20 already. One name that I frequently came across in PC magazines was "AMD Athlon 64". Everyone seemed pretty hyped up about the 64-bit processors from AMD that were delivering stupendous performance, rivaling Intel's Pentium 4 at half the price.

From the Pentium III to the Core 2 Duo, I completely skipped the initial Athlon 64 era, but I never really forgot about it. Consuming hardware reviews was rare for me back then, so the unusual traction that the Athlon 64 chips garnered made them seem like something truly extraordinary. They are indeed some of the best AMD CPUs ever produced, and they were successful in beating Intel before Team Blue hit back with the legendary Core architecture.

1 A dedicated GPU

Ouch!

Not a single one of the PCs I owned till the age of 18 had a discrete graphics card on it. This unfortunate streak ended with the Radeon HD 5670, a mid-range GPU by ATI (later acquired by AMD) with 1GB of VRAM. However, during the years prior, I had to settle for integrated graphics and sometimes, not even that. Getting my hands on an actually powerful graphics card was one of my biggest dreams.

Seeing photos of GPUs like the GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 9800 GT and reading about their unparalleled power was all I could do while struggling to run NFS Carbon on my Core 2 Duo. I wasn't super clued into PC hardware back then, but even I knew what a big deal the GeForce 8800 GTX was. Today, I have an RTX 3080 sitting idle beside me as I write this article, but I don't have the time or the motivation that I did back then, to spend countless hours playing my favorite titles.

It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart

As much as I wish I could have enjoyed high-end gaming PCs as a child, I also believe that I didn't really lose out on making great gaming memories. When I look back at my formative years, I won't remember lacking the greatest hardware, but I'll fondly remember playing and dissecting great titles with my brother and friends. It won't be the 8800 GTXs and the Athlon 64s that will feature in my memories, it will be games like Max Payne, Need for Speed 2, GTA: Vice City, Dead Space, Crysis 2, Assassin's Creed 2, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.