Hey guys. So as the title says, going as far back as you can remember, which CPUs have you owned, and as well, when did you get your first Ryzen? (2nd part only applies if you owned a Ryzen processor. If you've never had, at least talk about the processors you've owned in the past). Finally, how did you get into computers?
I'll go first. I'll begin by saying that I'm neither a fan of either company. I just go with the best bang per buck/performance. Going by my history, I can swing either way.
I grew up with a IBM PCjr that we've had in the family. I think I was probably around 5-6 yrs old when I started typing on my first keyboard. Our family weren't rich, but we did that IBM in the house. My mom and dad worked from home, in the tailoring business, sewing clothes from home. Typical Asian family at the time. Many of my friends parents did the same thing. Anyhow, like I said, we had an IBM PC in the house. My dad loved to tinker at the time. I remember going with him to Addison, and he'd pick up random circuit boards, capacitors or what not and make weird gadgets with it.
So, naturally I grew up with computers. I dreamed of being a scientist while growing up, so you might've guessed that Science was my favourite subject in school, next was math. Dad also had lots of computer books in the house, many of them were on programming, and many of them were on QBasic. Besides playing Gorilla on QBasic, I fondly remember writing in example codes verbatim, executing them to see how they ran. I even tried to program a fighting game in QBasic, drawing lines and filling them with color, mimicking Virtua Fighter, a game I was addicted to at the time. But I had a problem at the time I could never overcome - every time I tried to execute the code, I had buffer underruns and my Dad nor I never figured it out at the time.
Anyhow, back to the topic. My CPU history went like this (computer name because pre-built):
- IBM PCjr (Intel 8088)
- Packard Bell (486 SX/25)
- Pentium 133 MMX
- Cyrix 686MX PR233
- AMD K6-2 266
- AMD K6-3 333
- AMD Duron 650
- AMD AthlonXP 1600+
- AMD AthlonXP 1800+
- AMD AthlonXP 2500+
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+
- AMD Athlon 64 3800+
- HP Laptop (Pentium 4 2.4ghz)
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
- Intel Core i7 920
- Intel Core i5 2500K
- Intel Core i7 6700K
- AMD FX-6300
- AMD A8-7600
- Intel Core i5 7600K
- AMD Ryzen 1600
- AMD Ryzen 5800X
- AMD Ryzen 7950X
As I started to advance in computers, I had a fondness for AMD. Simply because they had a nice price/performance to them. Intel was always #1, but they were always the most expensive option. I have lovely fun memories with the 486, simply because it was my first "real" PC, and my first foray into Windows, with 3.1, then WFW 3.11. I remember the 486 just barely ran Doom! I had to start up with a special autoexec.bat file where I had to load straight to DOS, instead of booting to Windows, then exiting to DOS, because otherwise I'd get 640K out of memory errors or something like that. I remember walking to computer stores, just to buy the latest magazine just to get the software disk. I'd even buy shareware disks just to play the latest games, like Commander Keen or F22 Raptor. Always got weird looks from the employees like "What is this kid doing here?". Hehe.
Anyhow, I was there with my dad, watching the announcement of the launch of Windows 95! I was like, "Dad, I want Windows 95!". But Dad was like, "Sorry son, but we can't afford it right now". I was sad, but I really wanted Windows 95. I even went as far as getting a Win95 wallpaper, with the taskbar and start menu on the bottom, and I hid all/most of the icons. I tricked so many people thinking I was running Win95 on a 486! Haha... fun times. Then came the internet. I helped my parents with their tailoring, cutting threads and what not for a basic allowance, and I managed to buy a 14.4k baud modem, s Cirrus Logic video card, and a Adlib sound card to upgrade the computer. Then came Duke Nukem 3D! I helped a friend set up a 1-to-1 connection so we could play together. Mom would pick up the phone to call someone, and she'd get mad like "What's all this static noise!?", and she'd punch buttons into the dial tone and I'd get disconnected. Ah, fun times. Later on there was MP3s, Winamp, BBS, mIRC... ahhhh. Fun times. Later on Dad was able to buy us a new computer with Windows 95! At long last... I got to spec it entirely. 16 MB EDO ram, 6GB (I think?) Quantum HDD, etc.. that was a beast. I remember looking at classified ads to find someone selling a 33.6k modem, and when they came to drop it off, I remember they were so surprised to see a kid open the door and greet them with cash! Hahaha...
Anyway, back to processors. I got to mess around with a whole bunch of processors, like PII's, PIII's, Thunderbirds, Opterons, Phenoms. The list above are just the ones I've personally owned. I'll tell you, the Cyrix sucked! I remember the processor being a mess some time after I owned it. I had to disable the onboard cache just to make it stable! It was barely even sufficient just to keep Winamp running! Oh, and the days where it would take like 30 mins to download one song, or 3-4 hours for a music video, or overnight to download a 150mb ASF movie off some random FTP/Fserve on IRC... I'm going off, haha.
Anyway, back to processors AGAIN, hehe. After the Cyrix, I kinda stuck with AMD for a bit. Did you know I also miss SiS and Via/Nvidia chipsets? I also remember the fiasco with the socket 754/939. Bow I was pissed. I remember getting the A64 x@ 3800+ for $500 CAD! the day it came out as well. That's what happens when there's no competition. We pay an arm and a leg. When I went back to Intel, it was with the Q6600. I didn't buy it on release, but much later when Intel released the G0 stepping and dropped the price to $300. I didn't believe too much into CPU limitation, but boy oh boy, was that a massive upgrade over the X2! Fun days, even overclocking. As soon as I got that chip, I clocked it to 3.3ghz right away and it worked! You don't see AMD overclocking like that, haha. Fun times. I stuck with Intel because, you know, AMD sucked.
I went to a i7 920 later for that Triple Channel goodness, later to a Sandy Bridge for that IPC goodness. But then, that SATA bug happened. I was pissed to have to disassemle my machine, and ship my board back to Newegg for replacement. I also fondly remember when SSDs came out, damn they were expensive, but damn they were FAST! Had a OCZ Vertex, then a X25M-G2 later. I also remember the first AIOs. Had a Corsair H50 too. I had my 2500K overclocked to 4.5GHz, and I stuck with that for a long time. Finally upgraded to a 6700K just for DDR4 and newer platform features. Otherwise, I would've stuck with the 2500K for even longer since IPC increases between generations was minor. I also hated that Intel kept making you switch sockets every other generation. If I could've dropped that 6700K into the 2500K P67 board, I would've, ignoring the DDR4 upgrade. Damn, Intel, what was the 2pin difference between 1150 and 1152 pins!?
I knew FX sucked, but I still built one when they were super cheap just to mess around with. Damn, they were slow as hell. I also bought the A8-7600, since I was curious to see how the IGP performed. I knew reviews said it was slow, but I was curious to see how it performed, and most if not all review sites didn't test the games "I" played. I kept my expectations, but you know what? It was pretty decent. Maybe it could have performed better, if the CPU cores were at least a little more powerful. But tell you what. It was still pretty terrible all around. Even just using Windows 10 by itself was dog-ass slow. I ended up selling it to a neighbour for super cheap just to get rid of it, hehe. It worked for him, all he does is play Facebook games, hehe. Later on I sidegraded to the 7600K, simply because my brother wanted a new computer, so I decided to sell him my old 6700K, so I can play around with a new build, case, etc. Not much to talk about here.
Finally, comes RYZEN!! AMD is BACK, BABY! (sheds tears of joy! hehe). 8 Cores at the top end, baby! Screw you Intel and your stupid 4 cores for whatever how many generations. Take this middle finger.... F off~.... I remember jumping for joy when they announced that 52% IPC increase instead of 40%. Damn, what a jump. I was gonna get the 1700X/1800X but they were a little too pricy for me. I couldn't justify it. So I settled on the 1600. Still 8 more threads than the 7600K, am'I right? Overall, gaming was still slightly slower than the 7600K, but I was doing a lot of AVC encoding at the time, and this chip was a ton faster overall. I kept this system for a quite a while. I really wanted to upgrade to Zen 3, but was disappointed that my board didn't support it, and I didn't want to buy a new board at the time, since I really liked this one. But then AMD changed course, and all of a sudden my board supports Zen 3! I upgraded the BIOS, then bought the 5800X right away - and boy oh boy, was that a MASSIVE upgrade! Just using Windows, was super snappy. The feelings were real.
And here's the end. I know I skipped some chips, like the Bartons and Palominos for example. Like even the pencil trick. But this post has gotten pretty long already, so I'll leave it at that! Maybe another day. And you know, I didn't even talk about GPUs! Of the Voodoo, TNT, 9500 soft mod... damn fun days. Even remember telling my friends not to buy the 1080 Ti, and wait for the Vega chips with HBM, they were gonna destry everything! But, you guys know how that all turned out, huh? Damn I was so embarassed... Damn AMD hype trains, sometimes. These days aren't the same anymore. I just can't really get excited anymore.
And... that's all, folks!
I'll go first. I'll begin by saying that I'm neither a fan of either company. I just go with the best bang per buck/performance. Going by my history, I can swing either way.
I grew up with a IBM PCjr that we've had in the family. I think I was probably around 5-6 yrs old when I started typing on my first keyboard. Our family weren't rich, but we did that IBM in the house. My mom and dad worked from home, in the tailoring business, sewing clothes from home. Typical Asian family at the time. Many of my friends parents did the same thing. Anyhow, like I said, we had an IBM PC in the house. My dad loved to tinker at the time. I remember going with him to Addison, and he'd pick up random circuit boards, capacitors or what not and make weird gadgets with it.
So, naturally I grew up with computers. I dreamed of being a scientist while growing up, so you might've guessed that Science was my favourite subject in school, next was math. Dad also had lots of computer books in the house, many of them were on programming, and many of them were on QBasic. Besides playing Gorilla on QBasic, I fondly remember writing in example codes verbatim, executing them to see how they ran. I even tried to program a fighting game in QBasic, drawing lines and filling them with color, mimicking Virtua Fighter, a game I was addicted to at the time. But I had a problem at the time I could never overcome - every time I tried to execute the code, I had buffer underruns and my Dad nor I never figured it out at the time.
Anyhow, back to the topic. My CPU history went like this (computer name because pre-built):
- IBM PCjr (Intel 8088)
- Packard Bell (486 SX/25)
- Pentium 133 MMX
- Cyrix 686MX PR233
- AMD K6-2 266
- AMD K6-3 333
- AMD Duron 650
- AMD AthlonXP 1600+
- AMD AthlonXP 1800+
- AMD AthlonXP 2500+
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+
- AMD Athlon 64 3800+
- HP Laptop (Pentium 4 2.4ghz)
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
- Intel Core i7 920
- Intel Core i5 2500K
- Intel Core i7 6700K
- AMD FX-6300
- AMD A8-7600
- Intel Core i5 7600K
- AMD Ryzen 1600
- AMD Ryzen 5800X
- AMD Ryzen 7950X
As I started to advance in computers, I had a fondness for AMD. Simply because they had a nice price/performance to them. Intel was always #1, but they were always the most expensive option. I have lovely fun memories with the 486, simply because it was my first "real" PC, and my first foray into Windows, with 3.1, then WFW 3.11. I remember the 486 just barely ran Doom! I had to start up with a special autoexec.bat file where I had to load straight to DOS, instead of booting to Windows, then exiting to DOS, because otherwise I'd get 640K out of memory errors or something like that. I remember walking to computer stores, just to buy the latest magazine just to get the software disk. I'd even buy shareware disks just to play the latest games, like Commander Keen or F22 Raptor. Always got weird looks from the employees like "What is this kid doing here?". Hehe.
Anyhow, I was there with my dad, watching the announcement of the launch of Windows 95! I was like, "Dad, I want Windows 95!". But Dad was like, "Sorry son, but we can't afford it right now". I was sad, but I really wanted Windows 95. I even went as far as getting a Win95 wallpaper, with the taskbar and start menu on the bottom, and I hid all/most of the icons. I tricked so many people thinking I was running Win95 on a 486! Haha... fun times. Then came the internet. I helped my parents with their tailoring, cutting threads and what not for a basic allowance, and I managed to buy a 14.4k baud modem, s Cirrus Logic video card, and a Adlib sound card to upgrade the computer. Then came Duke Nukem 3D! I helped a friend set up a 1-to-1 connection so we could play together. Mom would pick up the phone to call someone, and she'd get mad like "What's all this static noise!?", and she'd punch buttons into the dial tone and I'd get disconnected. Ah, fun times. Later on there was MP3s, Winamp, BBS, mIRC... ahhhh. Fun times. Later on Dad was able to buy us a new computer with Windows 95! At long last... I got to spec it entirely. 16 MB EDO ram, 6GB (I think?) Quantum HDD, etc.. that was a beast. I remember looking at classified ads to find someone selling a 33.6k modem, and when they came to drop it off, I remember they were so surprised to see a kid open the door and greet them with cash! Hahaha...
Anyway, back to processors. I got to mess around with a whole bunch of processors, like PII's, PIII's, Thunderbirds, Opterons, Phenoms. The list above are just the ones I've personally owned. I'll tell you, the Cyrix sucked! I remember the processor being a mess some time after I owned it. I had to disable the onboard cache just to make it stable! It was barely even sufficient just to keep Winamp running! Oh, and the days where it would take like 30 mins to download one song, or 3-4 hours for a music video, or overnight to download a 150mb ASF movie off some random FTP/Fserve on IRC... I'm going off, haha.
Anyway, back to processors AGAIN, hehe. After the Cyrix, I kinda stuck with AMD for a bit. Did you know I also miss SiS and Via/Nvidia chipsets? I also remember the fiasco with the socket 754/939. Bow I was pissed. I remember getting the A64 x@ 3800+ for $500 CAD! the day it came out as well. That's what happens when there's no competition. We pay an arm and a leg. When I went back to Intel, it was with the Q6600. I didn't buy it on release, but much later when Intel released the G0 stepping and dropped the price to $300. I didn't believe too much into CPU limitation, but boy oh boy, was that a massive upgrade over the X2! Fun days, even overclocking. As soon as I got that chip, I clocked it to 3.3ghz right away and it worked! You don't see AMD overclocking like that, haha. Fun times. I stuck with Intel because, you know, AMD sucked.
I went to a i7 920 later for that Triple Channel goodness, later to a Sandy Bridge for that IPC goodness. But then, that SATA bug happened. I was pissed to have to disassemle my machine, and ship my board back to Newegg for replacement. I also fondly remember when SSDs came out, damn they were expensive, but damn they were FAST! Had a OCZ Vertex, then a X25M-G2 later. I also remember the first AIOs. Had a Corsair H50 too. I had my 2500K overclocked to 4.5GHz, and I stuck with that for a long time. Finally upgraded to a 6700K just for DDR4 and newer platform features. Otherwise, I would've stuck with the 2500K for even longer since IPC increases between generations was minor. I also hated that Intel kept making you switch sockets every other generation. If I could've dropped that 6700K into the 2500K P67 board, I would've, ignoring the DDR4 upgrade. Damn, Intel, what was the 2pin difference between 1150 and 1152 pins!?
I knew FX sucked, but I still built one when they were super cheap just to mess around with. Damn, they were slow as hell. I also bought the A8-7600, since I was curious to see how the IGP performed. I knew reviews said it was slow, but I was curious to see how it performed, and most if not all review sites didn't test the games "I" played. I kept my expectations, but you know what? It was pretty decent. Maybe it could have performed better, if the CPU cores were at least a little more powerful. But tell you what. It was still pretty terrible all around. Even just using Windows 10 by itself was dog-ass slow. I ended up selling it to a neighbour for super cheap just to get rid of it, hehe. It worked for him, all he does is play Facebook games, hehe. Later on I sidegraded to the 7600K, simply because my brother wanted a new computer, so I decided to sell him my old 6700K, so I can play around with a new build, case, etc. Not much to talk about here.
Finally, comes RYZEN!! AMD is BACK, BABY! (sheds tears of joy! hehe). 8 Cores at the top end, baby! Screw you Intel and your stupid 4 cores for whatever how many generations. Take this middle finger.... F off~.... I remember jumping for joy when they announced that 52% IPC increase instead of 40%. Damn, what a jump. I was gonna get the 1700X/1800X but they were a little too pricy for me. I couldn't justify it. So I settled on the 1600. Still 8 more threads than the 7600K, am'I right? Overall, gaming was still slightly slower than the 7600K, but I was doing a lot of AVC encoding at the time, and this chip was a ton faster overall. I kept this system for a quite a while. I really wanted to upgrade to Zen 3, but was disappointed that my board didn't support it, and I didn't want to buy a new board at the time, since I really liked this one. But then AMD changed course, and all of a sudden my board supports Zen 3! I upgraded the BIOS, then bought the 5800X right away - and boy oh boy, was that a MASSIVE upgrade! Just using Windows, was super snappy. The feelings were real.
And here's the end. I know I skipped some chips, like the Bartons and Palominos for example. Like even the pencil trick. But this post has gotten pretty long already, so I'll leave it at that! Maybe another day. And you know, I didn't even talk about GPUs! Of the Voodoo, TNT, 9500 soft mod... damn fun days. Even remember telling my friends not to buy the 1080 Ti, and wait for the Vega chips with HBM, they were gonna destry everything! But, you guys know how that all turned out, huh? Damn I was so embarassed... Damn AMD hype trains, sometimes. These days aren't the same anymore. I just can't really get excited anymore.
And... that's all, folks!
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