Meaningless Tech Specs

Here are some tech specs that used to matter, but you can safely ignore them now.

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[thatsgottahurt]

I remember back in the day with low quality integrated sound (and some cheap add on boards) you could tell when you were about to get a cell phone call. It would buzz a certain way for several seconds before the phone even rang. Any sort of interference was picked up, sometimes you could even get random walkie talkie, other phones, or radio stations coming through your PC speakers. It would freak you out occasionally when you would be in silence then suddenly hear some voices.

[relaxingnature]

"Megapixels" ..there is such a thing as high quality megapixels and low quality megapixels ..its a number that does NOT mean image quality

[Vengir]

The whole i3/i5/i7 is one of the most commonly misunderstood (and exploited) specs. It's useless without at least knowing the generation, as a modern i3 is miles ahead of a very old i7.

[eldibs]

I still have an old Sound Blaster Audigy laying around. Something to note is that back in the day you could get better FPS from a sound card with hardware-accelerated sound, because PCs were much slower and therefore sound processing took up a much larger chunk of your CPUs processing power. That Sound Blaster Audigy got me enough extra FPS that I could bump up from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 in Unreal Tournament 2003.

[Vidar_Odinson]

This was me jumping 10+ years ahead in tech when I did my latest upgrade a couple of years ago, and having to re-educate myself on hardware. "Wha', CPUs just boost themselves now? BIOS has colors and mouse support? What is this newfangled wizardry!"

[JonyLLama]

Would love to hear about some More dead specs!

This was really interesting! I recall, way back when, before building my first pc. 2005 - reading and listening in on some conversations, all about the FSB... Teacher also tried to explain to me all about front side bus, but clearly, this was not something I ever needed to think about, as I never knew what it did or heard of it again after computer studies...

[emonkhan]

And here i thought we would be seeing modern specs which are actually useless

[ecromancer]

The one metric I would like to see in more spec sheets for monitors is pixel density. The higher the density the sharper the image. Instead of just implying the smaller the screen at the same resolution will have a higher pixel density.

[jcnbw]

One of my first jobs was tech support for Dell. I learned so much during our training, including FSB and, at the time, the newly release Pentium 4.

[Flippo___]

meanwhile the specs that actually matter to me are never on the site, I usually have to hope that I can find out in the user manual, but even that is not always guaranteed (even though I have been lucky in the past and it still had what I was looking for)

[UrukKing]

Well, it's not like CPU clockspeeds mean much anymore (except when you compare within one generation of the same CPU line).

[mobykanob]

I remember going crazy nuts when I got my first upgrade from CGA (4 colors) to EGA (16 colors) graphics...it looked SO COOL, as I dreamed of VGA and FORGET SUPER VGA that was way out of price range.

[Pax.YouTube]

0:51 Oh man, that brings back memories.

[ChrisWalshZX]

I really thought CPU Clock Speed was going to be one of them. It definitely should have been prioritised over Graphics Card colours which true is not applicable in (almost) the last 20 years or so.

[henriquetomas]

"For those of you with long memories" lol, thank you very much 😁

[starplatinum]

The frequency response headphone manufacturers claim. Like "10hz - 50khz". It means absolutely nothing.

[kendelion]

ah the old 256 colors :D
I remember when i accidentally replaced the driver for the Voodoo 3dfx to something different and suffered 16colors :D
How we take for granted current pc with just a 1080p monitor when SVGA was all I need to play Red Alert

[GarbanzoBeansFan]

FSB sounds like a certain russian government agency

[Arthur]

I'm old enough to remember being jealous of my neighbor's 16 color graphics (EGA) because my PC could only do 4 colors (CGA)

[ArniesTech]

Today the only important spec seems to be *hashrate* 😭🤣