In this episode of The Full Nerd, Gordon Ung, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, Keith May, and Adam Patrick Murray open up the books and admit worthy hardware into our officially unofficial PC Hall of Fame.

In past years, the Intel 8086/8088 processors, Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics card, IBM Model M keyboard, 3DFX Voodoo graphics card, Raspberry Pi, and MLC NAND (as a stand-in for affordable SSDs) made the cut after a fierce debate. This year, each of us brought three more legendary picks to the table, prepared to plea and cajole as we whittled the original field of 15 nominees down. It starts out full of laughter and trips down memory lane, then the smiles gradually disappear as well-deserving components start getting the axe. Be sure to watch the entire process play out, but in the end, only three products manage to become our 2021 inductees in The Full Nerd’s PC Hardware Hall of Fame:

• AMD’s Athlon K75 CPU, which won the race to 1,000MHz. AMD’s K7-series of CPU marked a turning point for AMD where it had finally beaten its bitter rival.
• Creative Lab’s Sound Blaster 1.0 arguably ushered in mainstream PC audio, which had mostly been a series of beeps before.
• Nvidia’s GeForce 256 also marked a turning point in the graphics cards wars, where Nvidia would largely dominate PC gaming for the next 22 years and counting. This is literally the graphics card that gave GPUs their name.

You can witness it all in the video embedded above. You can also watch The Full Nerd episode 191 on YouTube (subscribe to the channel while you’re there!) or listen to it on Megaphone.fm if you prefer the audio alone. 

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