Best and worst CPUs since 1998

[Iron Woode]

Originally Posted by Abwx

What killed Abit was...Intel...

Strong pressure from Intel retained majors MB manufacturers
from launching officialy Athlon dedicated boards , Abit did even
state that they wouldnt release such boards as they were bidding
instead on the soon to be released Intel i820 chipset that would
take advantage of Rambus Ram for the PIII platform.

Alas for them , after million MBs were sold it became obvious
that the chipset was buggy and millions cards had to be recalled.

Where Intel had enough means to pay for its own MBs , Abit was left
bleeding since they didnt have the growing Slot A market as a saving
grace as was the case for ASUS.

They soon embarked in the slot A bandwaggon , but it was too late.

that has nothing to do with Abit's closure.

the chipset wasn't buggy. They suffered, as did MSI and several others, from bad capacitors.

what really happened:

On December 15, 2004, the Taiwan Stock Exchange downgraded ABIT's stock due to questionable accounting practices. Investigations revealed that the majority of their import/export business was conducted through seven companies, all located at the same address and each of which had a capital of only HK$2. This made it easy to inflate the reported number of motherboards sold. The Hong Kong media also reported that the management was being investigated for embezzling funds from the company.

In June 2005, ABIT partnered with Wan Hai Industries. This container shipping company, also a principal investor in China Airlines, brought the company much needed capital, since the company had financial problems at this time, partly due to a class action lawsuit involving faulty capacitors on their products., but also because of marketing highly technical products to the general public while offering longer-than-average warranties and generous return policies.

On January 25, 2006, ABIT announced that USI intended to purchase ABIT Computer's motherboard business and brand and announced a special shareholders meeting to discuss the sale of ABIT's Neihu building, changing ABIT's company name, the disposition of the company's assets, and the release of the directors from non-competition restrictions. ABIT sold its own office building in Taipei to Deutsche Bank in order to raise money to cut its debt.

[Yuriman]

Originally Posted by ExarKun333

REALLY miss my DFI boards. They were finicky as hell, but it was just a blast to eek every last fsb you could out of them. Huge loss...

I wonder where Oskar Wu works today?


Looking back, I've owned a 486 DX, Cyrix PR150, a Pentium 233MMX, K6-3 400, Duron 950mhz, Athlon XP 1600+ Palomino, 1700+ TB-B, 2500+ Mobile Barton, A64 2800+ Clawhammer, A64 3000+ Winchester, A64 x2 3800+ Manchester, Opteron 165... and then I bought a Q6600 and didn't upgrade my CPU for almost 6 years. Amazing CPU.

The ones I didn't like were the 1600+ Palomino and the 2800+ Clawhammer, they were crappy overclockers and not a lot of fun to play with. I had no issues with the Cyrix, don't really have much to say about it.

[lowrider69]

I'll go with the Core 2 Duo and Quads as some of the best. Particularly the Q9550.

I'll go with the AMD K5 series as some of the worst. I'm not a fan of Celerons either.

I had a K6III 450MHz processor that I liked a lot back in the day. I ran that for a while. I also had a few K7 chips that I ran for a pretty long period.

I still have a PIII 866 rig sitting in my closet collecting dust and it still runs like a champ...the last time I checked.

[Cerb]

Originally Posted by Abwx

They soon embarked in the slot A bandwaggon , but it was too late.

Too late in 1999? So, how did they keep on going for the next 6 years (I'll grant that USI likely marked the end, since USI lacked emotional interest in the company)? It had a rocky road, and there just wasn't room for them, anymore (it could have been another company, too, but Abit was weak). Funny accounting, a little PCI voltage scandal, and getting--unfairly, unless they denied RMAs--sued over bad caps, and there being too much competition in the motherboard market (integration and commoditization lead to different companies' products not having enough to differentiate themselves), all led to them having no way out.

Some of the companies from that time, like Iwill, DFI, and SiS, got out of PCs and retail, but are still around, pumping out products. Epox I'm not sure if anyone really knows enough about, right now--at least that can read and write English.

[SPBHM]

Originally Posted by Abwx

What killed Abit was...Intel...

Strong pressure from Intel retained majors MB manufacturers
from launching officialy Athlon dedicated boards , Abit did even
state that they wouldnt release such boards as they were bidding
instead on the soon to be released Intel i820 chipset that would
take advantage of Rambus Ram for the PIII platform.

Alas for them , after million MBs were sold it became obvious
that the chipset was buggy and millions cards had to be recalled.

Where Intel had enough means to pay for its own MBs , Abit was left
bleeding since they didnt have the growing Slot A market as a saving
grace as was the case for ASUS.

They soon embarked in the slot A bandwaggon , but it was too late.

Abit enjoyed a lot of success with socket A as far as I know... they only started fading during the k8 era, and I still remember buying a Abit NF8 I think for 754 with Nforce 3, it was not so bad, but at the time first DFI was a big problem for them, and later Asus, Gigabyte, ECS and the other big players just dominated everything...

[Abwx]

Originally Posted by Iron Woode

that has nothing to do with Abit's closure.

the chipset wasn't buggy. They suffered, as did MSI and several others, from bad capacitors.

what really happened:

The capacitors issue has impacted many manufacturers although
Abit was badly hurt and wasnt related with the i820 debacle.

Actualy Abit had no replacement for the i820 chipset
that was delayed for many months and when it came it was buggy
while a DDR Intel chipset was yet to come , all they had at hand was
outdated BX chipsets for SDram while having no AMD product
to fill the gap in the waiting , and when they released one
this market was already very competitive.

The financial and marketing positionning they did lost at this time
were never regained , leading them to discutable financial practices
once the capacitors issue gave them the final coup de grace.

[Abwx]

Originally Posted by SPBHM

Abit enjoyed a lot of success with socket A as far as I know... they only started fading during the k8 era, and I still remember buying a Abit NF8 I think for 754 with Nforce 3, it was not so bad, but at the time first DFI was a big problem for them, and later Asus, Gigabyte, ECS and the other big players just dominated everything...

As explained above , with razor margins , they didnt recover
from the said debacle and had to make up continously their
financial reports....

[Iron Woode]

Originally Posted by Abwx

The capacitors issue has impacted many manufacturers although
Abit was badly hurt and wasnt related with the i820 debacle.

Actualy Abit had no replacement for the i820 chipset
that was delayed for many months and when it came it was buggy
while a DDR Intel chipset was yet to come , all they had at hand was
outdated BX chipsets for SDram while having no AMD product
to fill the gap in the waiting , and when they released one
this market was already very competitive.

the memory translator hub had a defect.

That meant I820 boards with Sdram were affected. Rdram boards were fine.

This didn't cause Abit's financial problems. They were caused by other stupid decisions.

[moonbogg]

I seem to remember getting a barton 2400+ with a 9700 pro. Damn was I excited. That was awesome.

I can't say what is best and worst, but my two favorties were my Athlon 64 FX-57 and then E8400, then 2600k....actually screw it. All my rigs have been BOSS. Never purchased a crappy CPU.

[Hugo Drax]

The Pentium 4 line, Worst ever, second worst to the Intel iAPX 432 CPU.

And the insult to injury was the whole Rambus deal. The Pentium 4 era was the darkages of Intel, when Marketing dictated to engineers how do design a CPU, they to design for pure MHZ just to win the Megahertz wars.

Stupid. The best I would say ivy bridge right now. I am still Amazed at how much power in such a small space my Mac Mini powered by Ivy bridge packs.

[Lonbjerg]

Originally Posted by Insert_Nickname

No ones knocking the performance of the Northwood/i850. i850+RD-RAM was just so much more expensive. Don't even get me started on running a P4 on SDR-i845, that was horrible. At the time at least I thought that AMD was much better value... not least due to the venerable nForce2...

Coincidently some of my closer family was running an AthlonXP 1800+ for close to 9(!) years. That's what I call value. Unfortunately the MB died in late 2010...

^
Performance costs...some people will always whine over that...dosn't alter the fact that Northwood with RDRAM PC800 rocked better than anything AMD had to offer at the time (it took a long time for DDR RAM to catch up.)...and I have never cared for price, perf/watt...or the other FOTM metrics...performance(and stabiliity) is the king...the rest is just for consumers...not enthusiasts.

[Arkaign]

Originally Posted by Hugo Drax

The Pentium 4 line, Worst ever, second worst to the Intel iAPX 432 CPU.

And the insult to injury was the whole Rambus deal. The Pentium 4 era was the darkages of Intel, when Marketing dictated to engineers how do design a CPU, they to design for pure MHZ just to win the Megahertz wars.

Stupid. The best I would say ivy bridge right now. I am still Amazed at how much power in such a small space my Mac Mini powered by Ivy bridge packs.

Ugh. P4 was the fastest thing out during the Northwood era, and also had low-cost variants that could overclock up to the fastest retail chips out there.

People with memory problems seem to judge P4 for some rough spots :

Socket 423 / Willamette, waste.
RDRAM, overpriced.
Prescott, hot and slower IPC.
Cedar Mill, way too late to be competitive.

That ignores a long period of time from the 1.6A to the 3.4C of Northwoods kicking butt. The 845 and 865 DDR chipsets also had great stability, overclocking, and AGP/HDD/USB performance.

One can certainly say that they never should have gone down that road to begin with, and I'd agree with that. Tualatin was pretty good, and I'm sure if they put more resources into the development of those successors things would have been better. Even so, it's plain ignorant to say that P4 overall was anywhere near worthy of being mentioned as 'worst ever', particularly when there was a pretty good run of being as fast or faster than anything on the market.

[SPBHM]

Originally Posted by Lonbjerg

^
Performance costs...some people will always whine over that...dosn't alter the fact that Northwood with RDRAM PC800 rocked better than anything AMD had to offer at the time (it took a long time for DDR RAM to catch up.)...and I have never cared for price, perf/watt...or the other FOTM metrics...performance(and stabiliity) is the king...the rest is just for consumers...not enthusiasts.

I think northwood overclocked and RDRAM was pretty good, I remember some guys overclocking PC1066 RDRAM up to 1200... it was pretty fast on memory benchmarks compared to the AMD machines using DDR, but I think northwood really became great later with the 865PE and dual ddr 400, it was fast and more affordable

the problem of RDRAM is that it was quite expensive, to expensive for the gain, and particularly for Pentium 3 and Willamette (with SDRAM it was a lot worse, but willamette as a whole was a bad deal, even using rdram) it was not really worth it.

I actually had a northwood and RDRAM and upgraded to a DDR nforce 2 socket A PC, and at the time I was pretty happy with that, but to be fair I made a poor choice with my s478 MB and I was to limited to overclock, and I needed more memory, so going for socket A was cheaper, and in my case faster.

[Cerb]

Originally Posted by Lonbjerg

^
Performance costs...some people will always whine over that...dosn't alter the fact that Northwood with RDRAM PC800 rocked better than anything AMD had to offer at the time (it took a long time for DDR RAM to catch up.)...and I have never cared for price, perf/watt...or the other FOTM metrics...performance(and stabiliity) is the king...the rest is just for consumers...not enthusiasts.

The most important metric for most buyers within the last 3 decades or more is FOTM? I'm pretty sure we're not even in the same universe, but that AT forums' server just happens to be the same in both...

[Lonbjerg]

Originally Posted by Arkaign

Ugh. P4 was the fastest thing out during the Northwood era, and also had low-cost variants that could overclock up to the fastest retail chips out there.

People with memory problems seem to judge P4 for some rough spots :

Socket 423 / Willamette, waste.
RDRAM, overpriced.
Prescott, hot and slower IPC.
Cedar Mill, way too late to be competitive.

That ignores a long period of time from the 1.6A to the 3.4C of Northwoods kicking butt. The 845 and 865 DDR chipsets also had great stability, overclocking, and AGP/HDD/USB performance.

One can certainly say that they never should have gone down that road to begin with, and I'd agree with that. Tualatin was pretty good, and I'm sure if they put more resources into the development of those successors things would have been better. Even so, it's plain ignorant to say that P4 overall was anywhere near worthy of being mentioned as 'worst ever', particularly when there was a pretty good run of being as fast or faster than anything on the market.

I think you are right, just look in this thread:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2281840

It was a dead end the NetBurst arch...but it had a good run...and it wasn't a string of bad CPU's

[Lonbjerg]

Originally Posted by Cerb

The most important metric for most buyers within the last 3 decades or more is FOTM? I'm pretty sure we're not even in the same universe, but that AT forums' server just happens to be the same in both...

Are people here most "consumers"?

Read again.

[WildW]

Our first family PC was a Pentium 75MHz. It was later given to me with an upgraded IDT Winchip @ 240 MHz. . . it crashed a lot. And I think the original Intel chip was probably faster.

Edit: darn it. A quick look on wikipedia shows that the Winchip C6 I had debuted in 1997, and therefore falls outside the curiously specific thread title. It still sucked.

[Insert_Nickname]

Originally Posted by SPBHM

I think northwood overclocked and RDRAM was pretty good, I remember some guys overclocking PC1066 RDRAM up to 1200... it was pretty fast on memory benchmarks compared to the AMD machines using DDR, but I think northwood really became great later with the 865PE and dual ddr 400, it was fast and more affordable

the problem of RDRAM is that it was quite expensive, to expensive for the gain, and particularly for Pentium 3 and Willamette (with SDRAM it was a lot worse, but willamette as a whole was a bad deal, even using rdram) it was not really worth it.

I actually had a northwood and RDRAM and upgraded to a DDR nforce 2 socket A PC, and at the time I was pretty happy with that, but to be fair I made a poor choice with my s478 MB and I was to limited to overclock, and I needed more memory, so going for socket A was cheaper, and in my case faster.

^^This...

Lonbjerg, did you even try a Northwood Celeron?. Those things where crippled beyond belief. The i845G/GE/GL made them even worse due to both consuming precious memory bandwith (P4 performance was always highly dependent on bandwidth avaliable) and offloading some of the graphics pipeline to the CPU...

[Cerb]

Originally Posted by Lonbjerg

Are people here most "consumers"?

Read again.

Yes. I don't ever recall fabricating chips, installing them into packages, and then soldering those to PCBs. I recall buying parts, and something plugging them into each other.

and I have never cared for price, perf/watt...or the other FOTM metrics

No matter how many times I read it, it looks the same. When there's money that can go towards a computer, there's also money that can go elsewhere. Not caring about price is ridiculous.

[mazeroth]

Best, by far, was my Intel E4300 Core2 Duo. Stock it was a 1.8ghz chip. I had it overclocked to 3.4ghz on the STOCK cooler for about 2 years! That's an 89% overclock!

[gevorg]

I was excited and impressed with Athlon 64 more than any other CPU I used to date. Good times.

[xapo99]

Worst CPU I can think of was just about any P4, be it skt 478 or 775. Some of the Pentium D's were stinkers for the price. However the Pentium D 805 was cheap and one of the earliest dual cores (maybe the first, I can't remember). The Athlon 3800 was way better though and ended up about the same price.

Best CPU's..in context because of price and what else was out at the time, including cpu's from the same 'range' that were not as good value, i'd go with

E6300 Core 2 Duo
Q6600 Core 2 Quad

AMD Llano range because of the value of the IGP.

Core i7 920

Core i7 2500

Some of the Bulldozers ended up pretty good value for gaming.


I had an Intel 486 that was poor value at the time...can't remember the spec, something like sx25.

[xapo99]

Originally Posted by mazeroth

Best, by far, was my Intel E4300 Core2 Duo. Stock it was a 1.8ghz chip. I had it overclocked to 3.4ghz on the STOCK cooler for about 2 years! That's an 89% overclock!

These came out after the 6XXX range didn't they, but ended up being £1 price difference between the e4300 and e6300 in the UK, making the purchase of the 4300 pointless. The expected price difference of about £10-£12 never materialised and would have made the 4300 awesome.

[Arkaign]

Originally Posted by xapo99

Worst CPU I can think of was just about any P4, be it skt 478 or 775. Some of the Pentium D's were stinkers for the price. However the Pentium D 805 was cheap and one of the earliest dual cores (maybe the first, I can't remember). The Athlon 3800 was way better though and ended up about the same price.

Best CPU's..in context because of price and what else was out at the time, including cpu's from the same 'range' that were not as good value, i'd go with

E6300 Core 2 Duo
Q6600 Core 2 Quad

AMD Llano range because of the value of the IGP.

Core i7 920

Core i7 2500

Some of the Bulldozers ended up pretty good value for gaming.


I had an Intel 486 that was poor value at the time...can't remember the spec, something like sx25.

What? Again with the poor memory of P4, I'll repost what I said earlier :

"Ugh. P4 was the fastest thing out during the Northwood era, and also had low-cost variants that could overclock up to the fastest retail chips out there.

People with memory problems seem to judge P4 for some rough spots :

Socket 423 / Willamette, waste.
RDRAM, overpriced.
Prescott, hot and slower IPC.
Cedar Mill, way too late to be competitive.

That ignores a long period of time from the 1.6A to the 3.4C of Northwoods kicking butt. The 845 and 865 DDR chipsets also had great stability, overclocking, and AGP/HDD/USB performance.

One can certainly say that they never should have gone down that road to begin with, and I'd agree with that. Tualatin was pretty good, and I'm sure if they put more resources into the development of those successors things would have been better. Even so, it's plain ignorant to say that P4 overall was anywhere near worthy of being mentioned as 'worst ever', particularly when there was a pretty good run of being as fast or faster than anything on the market."

I refurb PCs for a local charity food bank resale shop, and we get non-profit editions of Windows 7 to put on them. P4 HT models with 2GB of ram actually run Windows 7 fine, which is impressive. Of cource so do the A64 models. But P4 Northwood predated P4, and it was rock solid stuff. P4 had a crap beginning, and a crap ending, but the middle period was actually outstanding for the time.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1117/16

You'll notice the P4 was well over the AXP by the time P4C arrived, and even P4B was easy to clock to 3ghz+ previous to that. I loved my AXPs, particularly my mobile 1700+, but to say that P4 sucked is extremely ignorant as a blanket statement.

[SPBHM]

Originally Posted by xapo99

These came out after the 6XXX range didn't they, but ended up being £1 price difference between the e4300 and e6300 in the UK, making the purchase of the 4300 pointless. The expected price difference of about £10-£12 never materialised and would have made the 4300 awesome.

e4300 = FSB 200, much easier and cheaper to overclock,
e6300 = FSB 266,

so with FSB 266 the e4300 would be running at 2.4GHz, not at 1.8,