Damn, wish I could walk into a computer shop in spring 1998 and lazily say, "Pack up that $3,500 rig for me, I'll pay in cash."
>>12443913>250 watt power supplyI'm no expert, but isn't that a bit too low for a pc with a graphic card?
>>12443913AW is still selling A51s.
>>12443913Good times - I remember those ads.
>>12443913For me, it was Falcon Northwest
>>12443954Nah, it's fine as graphics card from the 90s weren't that demanding. The crazy power requirements started in the 2000s.
Yes, especially back then. I used to run 1200W just to have a midrange GPU a decade after this ad. They used to be very power hungry so 250W in what I assume is around year 2000 tells me it's probably a piece of shit.
>>12443913I'm in my late 30s and still don't believe that "adjusted for inflation" numbers are as actually meaningful as they like to claim. Sure, $3,500 was more meaningful then than it is today, but not to the extent of it being akin to $7,000, like the calculation would suggest.
>>12444006"Adjusted for inflation" is bullshit because it doesn't take into account the cost of living. Bills/food/gas would take up a smaller percentage of a person's income, meaning that something could very well be more expensive than now comparatively to adjusted inflation, and yet still remain more affordable.
>>12443954>a graphic card?>a (singular)oh kiddo you don't know what you're missing, 2d and 3d were handled by different cards chained together.
>>12443913I'm guessing the top end rig has two sound cards to retain DOS compatibility?
Yeah but everything is too expensive now, right? Fucking babies.
>>12443954PCI cards drew their power from the PCI slot at around 3.3V I think. Also>>12443994>>12443996Dude a 1200W power supply to run a midrange video card in 2008 is overkill
>>12444237Who are (you) talking to, schizo?
>>12443913I wish I could do that too back then. Those prebuilts from Alienware and Falcon NW were full of the brand name top of the line components. I had to settle for cheap inferior alternatives like AMD Athlon XP, ATi junk, and no-name Wav 10 VIA sound at the time. Very few people I knew, practically no one, could afford those brand name items back then so we had to deal with lower settings.
I have a feeling the majority of those who bought $3-4K machines were the same people who kept helping keep Myst at the top of the charts until 2000. While all the rest struggled with Q3 on red-hot overclocked Celeron 300A.
>>12444006Not from the US but I paid 8,000 Finnish Marks back in 1996 for my first PC, I worked whole summer. This would translate to bit over $2,200 if I remember correctly. Pentium 166Mhz + Monitor and some Diamond graphics card.Best thing during those days was that graphics cards didn't kill your budget, even when 3dfx came out. I could just walz in to a store and buy one without thinking about it too much.
>>12443954A top of the line late 90s gaming PC drew somewhere in the region of 100-120W at the wall. The original GeForce was considered a hot and power hungry card at the time and outright required active cooling, unlike the Voodoo 3 which was passively cooled.>>12443996You're just retarded and got scammed. A mid-range card a decade after the OP would be something like a HD 4850, which had a TDP of 110W.
>>12443913And then Dreamcast came in late 1999 and blows it away. One thing I did like is that you could get a bunch of games that run pretty slow and then 2 years later a budget video card would run your games super smooth. I went from Voodoo 2 to Geforce 2 MX and it blew the Voodoo away and was really cheap.I newer really brought pc's after the first family one, you could easily find decent stuff that was being thrown out or sold for about $50 after a couple of years.
>>12443913Holy shit!
>>12443996yeah, no. 2008 would have only needed a damn kilowatt ps for dual card or absolute top of line gaming cards
