Best and worst CPUs since 1998

[SPBHM]

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,

 

[wsaenotsock]

Lot of good ones for 'best' crown:

1) Conroe was the best, there hasn't ever been a chip with that much overclock headroom (even without significant voltage) and longetivity. I could be biased, because i'm still using mine. An e6600 that could go to 3.4ghz on air.
2) Athlon 64 is a close second, it was also revolutionary at the time and there was great hardware support from enthusiast hardware vendors like DFI when their quality was high.
3) Zacate was excellent for what it was designed to be, though it couldn't quite achieve 1080p playback while buffering, it was almost perfect and could play from storage fine.

Worst? Probably Prescott for causing so much headache with the thermal issues, and marking the end of an era. Bulldozer too, just for the whole over-hyping thing.

 

[lakedude]

Surprised the Atom isn't mentioned more for worst...

Worst: Cyrix (shudder), any AMD chip before they came out with thermal diodes, that 1.13 GHz Intel chip, early Atom chips used in "netbooks". Bulldozer deserves honorable mention for worst but they are not so bad if you give them the right kind of work to do. They are not buggy, they do not catch on fire and they are not embarrassingly slow, they just are not as fast or efficient as the competition.

Best: Cel 300A, most all Intel chips since C2D including Ivy Bridge. IB low power is great for 24/7 crunching.

IMO the P4 is getting a raw deal on this thread. At the time the p4 was the best for video encoding. My 1.3GHz worked good, no problems, in fact it still runs to this day. Certainly not the best but not the worst for sure.

 

[Centauri]

^If the P4 has to be laid off of because it was good for video encoding, then all must admit that Bulldozer should have never been laid into in the first place.

 

[lakedude]

^If the P4 has to be laid off of because it was good for video encoding, then all must admit that Bulldozer should have never been laid into in the first place.

Yeah, I agree that the Bulldozer is no where near the worst but it was still a bit disappointing.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

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.

The P4C didn't suck, especially when paired with a i865/875 board. The P4 architecture was also very good at video encoding. But the P4 architecture also had a couple of fundamental flaws...

 

[pantsaregood]

Pentium 4 can't rightfully be called "worst" by any metric. Prescott didn't have issues with overheating, either. It definitely used a load of power, but it didn't break thermal limits any more than other CPUs.

Prescott wasn't an awful performer, either. It was sometimes slightly faster than Northwood, sometimes slightly slower. It introduced EM64T, VT-X, and SSE3; it also brought EIST to the desktop market later in its life. Pentium 4 was overshadowed by Pentium III early in its life, in a close competition with Athlon XP by the time Northwood was released, and ultimately fell far behind when Athlon 64 was released. Despite this, it wasn't a broken CPU.

The 1.13 GHz Coppermine, for example, was a broken CPU. It was rushed to market because AMD just humiliated Intel by getting a 1.0 GHz CPU to market first. Some 1.13 GHz Coppermines actually made it to market before being recalled, apparently. The review units were generally extremely unstable.

The initial revision of Agena had to deal with the TLB bug. It wasn't as serious as the Coppermine issue, but it didn't get recalled. It was replaced relatively quickly.

Honestly, I'd consider the "Emergency Edition" Gallatin Pentium 4s "worse" processors than the Prescott line. They were announced as an "oshi" reaction to the impending release of K8. They were Northwood cores with 2 MB of L3 cache taped on, and nothing more; they completely failed to compete with the FX-51, and they generally didn't outperform Northwood/Prescott.

 

[tynopik]

Yeah, I agree that the Bulldozer is no where near the worst but it was still a bit disappointing.

In terms of 'impact on company' it could be the worst

The huge investment and massive delays followed by the disappointing performance and high power consumption have basically destroyed the company.

If Bulldozer kills AMD, then I think we can safely say it was the worst of all time.

 

[JBT]

considering pricing and life of the platform I think Pentium 4 Willamette s423 deserves to be called the worst...

best? Core 2 Duo maybe...

I pretty much agree with this statement. I might go ahead and say the Core 2 Quad isthe best. It still sticks with the big boys of today pretty well, while I wouldn't want a Core 2 Duo anymore.

 

[zCypher]

Worst has to be the Cyrix. We had a "166" that I was able to overclock to 183MHz, but it was overheating at that point. Even at that speed it was slower than a friend's Pentium 133. Before then we had a 486 DX2/66, but I don't recall if that was actually a Cyrix. It ran fine, and it was awesome because it had "TURBO" mode (would run at 33MHz with turbo disabled). That 486 was boss at playing nibbles and gorillas! GOOD TIMES.

As for best, that's a bit more difficult. I've had a couple AMDs that lasted many years, 1800+ and 2600+ I believe, but I could be mistaken. No issues with either one they still work fine to this day. The crappy old hard drives were always the biggest bottlenecks in those systems. One of them still has an 8.4GB Quantum Fireball.

Then I built my E5200 system which was pretty good until I upgraded to my current Thuban. Sadly I have not been able to get to 4GHz stable, but I've not been disappointed by its performance at stock.

 

[Arkaign]

^If the P4 has to be laid off of because it was good for video encoding, then all must admit that Bulldozer should have never been laid into in the first place.

P4 wasn't just good at video encoding, during much of its era it won the majority of the benchmarks, and at the high end of northwood, won basically everything.

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

This is a pretty huge contrast to BD. If BD won basically every bench, people would have a pretty different opinion about it, even if it was still a massive power eater / heater at higher clocks.

 

[artvscommerce]

I probably got the biggest overclocking performance gains (relatively speaking) from my 800MHz AMD Duron. That was also the first CPU I ever put on water. It was built on an ultra low budget but that was probably my favorite system from my past. AMD was so awesome before Core2 came along.

 

[Arkaign]

I probably got the biggest overclocking performance gains (relatively speaking) from my 800MHz AMD Duron. That was also the first CPU I ever put on water. It was built on an ultra low budget but that was probably my favorite system from my past. AMD was so awesome before Core2 came along.

Truth, aside from being fragile, and with some questionable chipset options, I loved Socket A/462 stuff for the most part. Who couldn't love taking a cheap Duron, overclocking the crap out of it, and having something at least as fast or faster than a $1k P4 S423 build.

 

[Centauri]

My first ever build was an 800MHz Duron on an FIC AZ11E board. I couldn't yet comprehend overclock at that point in my nerd-develoment so I never realized the chip's potential. All the better, probably, since that system was the most unstable computer I've ever been near, even at stock speeds. Not sure how much of that was FIC or Windows 98...

 

[artvscommerce]

i just remembered I had to draw on the chip with a pencil in order to unlock it. man those were the days.

 

[MrK6]

Starting with a P3 333MHz, I've had some lackluster CPU's, but none that were terrible. P4 Williamette 1.9GHz probably takes the cake as the worst (was in a Dell box, couldn't overclock), but it was still fine for the time. My current 2500K is without a doubt the best though. A 3.3GHz chip @ 5.25GHz is just a monster and makes the enthusiast in me all giddy.

 

[Sheep221]

Best Pre-2011: Athlon XP, Athlon 64, Q6600
Worst Pre-2011: Via C3 Nehemiah - seriously the worst desktop CPU that ever existed
Best 2011+: i5-2500K - the undisputed legend of 2010s
Worst 2011+: FX-8150

 

[Arkaign]

Starting with a P3 333MHz, I've had some lackluster CPU's, but none that were terrible. P4 Williamette 1.9GHz probably takes the cake as the worst (was in a Dell box, couldn't overclock), but it was still fine for the time. My current 2500K is without a doubt the best though. A 3.3GHz chip @ 5.25GHz is just a monster and makes the enthusiast in me all giddy.

Hah, I bet that P4 willy was an RDRAM model, or it's slightly possible that it was on an SDRAM chipset. The SDRAM model would be horribly slow, but I also remember Dell (and probably some other OEMs) gimping the RDRAM in order to save money. I can't blame them, RDRAM prices were retardulous. But I can't tell you how often I saw PC600 RDRAM instead of PC800, and to add insult to injury, often only 256MB at most, and you absolutely had to install in pairs.

 

[nforce4max]

The worst for me was Cyrix M1 and M2 while in second place was the NetBurst Celerons with 128kb cache.

The best is hard to say but I honestly enjoyed the Phenom 1/2 line due to good i/o performance that was constant compared to 775. Core2 was great but like everything before there was Always something that held the cpu back in one way or another and rarely was there times that wasn't true.

 

[joutlaw]

My worst - P4 @ 1.8Ghz that required RDRAM. Stupid expensive for memory upgrades
After that I went to an AMD64 3500+ . What a great proc that was.
I still have my Intel C2D E4300 that has been running at 3.0Ghz for almost 6 years. Great bang for the buck proc.
The i3-2100 in my HTPC has been solid. I was pretty shocked by the Celeron G530 in WHS box too. Great performance for the money.

 

[Smartazz]

Why all the hate for Pentium 4? I had a Prescott Pentium 4 at 3GHz and it wasn't that bad. I got a good deal on it and it was pretty fast.

 

[Idontcare]

Why all the hate for Pentium 4? I had a Prescott Pentium 4 at 3GHz and it wasn't that bad. I got a good deal on it and it was pretty fast.

The hate is because we all tend to look at performance in a relative sense, meaning the performance in comparison to something else that was available at the same time.

My Cyrix chip was a hell of a lot faster than my 386 SX chip, but at the time when I owned my Cyrix chip it sucked compared to Intel's pentium offerings.

I think bulldozer/piledriver suffers the same relativity effect. Compared to today's offerings it is difficult to justify buying bulldozer versus its competitors. But bulldozer/piledriver are leaps and bounds better than the 90nm Athlon X2 from years ago, and yet the 90nm Athlon X2 is venerated as a super awesome chip for its time.

I suspect prescott suffers the same relativity effect, it sucked only in comparison to the chronologically local competition. But from an absolute performance perspective, at the time it was impressive, just not as impressive as the 90nm Athlon X2.

 

[FalseChristian]

The best: a 1.0GHz Tualitan Celeron witch 256KB of L2 cache (130 NM). It easily overclocked to 1.5GHz.

The worst: Intel Core2Duo EZ8400 (wolfdale 45nm). The thing was unstable even at stock let alone a mild overclock.

 

[CraigRT]

My picks just from experiences..

Garbage:
Willamette P4
Prescott P4
First K7 (Although most of its problems were with chipsets at the time, like VIA)

Great:
PIII Coppermine (I had a 700E @ 980MHz)
P4 Northwood.
Thunderbird Athlon (despite being hot, they were fast for their time)
AMD64 - I had many of these, although my favorite was my Opteron 170.
Core i series, including the earlier models. I have had both a Lynnfield and a Sandy Bridge and they are both great.

 

[Concillian]

As Ryan likes saying for GPUs, there are no bad CPUs, just bad prices. From the standpoint of what it offered vs. performance, some of the P4s were "bad" compared to the A64s.

Once you get to the age of multi-core CPUs it gets even more difficult to find a "bad" CPU, just because there become niches that even some of the poor fits perform well in at a given price.

As far as solid performers? i3-530 has to get a mention, it's been the best budget CPU for those willing to OC for years. Only just now that many games are getting multithread capable and AMD is starting to get back it's single threaded performance and ramp clock speeds with Piledriver is it looking to get outperformed. That's a LONG time to be the best gaming CPU <$120.