Best and worst CPUs since 1998

[Shlong]

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.

Yeah I remember getting the Barton 2400 overclocking to 3200 speeds and buying some variant of Radeon 9500 where you could flash it and it performed similar to the much pricier 9700.

My best CPU was Celeron 300A, just changed a jumper on motherboard from 66mhz to 100mhz and you had near or better than P2 450 performance for a quarter of the price.

P4 Northwood 2.4C @ 3.4 ghz was also a good cpu for me.

Q6600 (G0 SLACR) @ 3.8 ghz, bought it 6 years ago, not my main desktop (guests who come over will use this computer) but it still runs like a champ.

My main rig is an i7 2600K @ 4.5 ghz that I bought around 16 months ago and I'm really happy with it.

 

[EXman]

I actually had one of those. Never had any stability issues but it was slow as ****.

Wow you could afford that all i had was the Cyrix p133+ yea a POS

Celery 300a Best IMO.

 

[spikespiegal]

Looks like most of these responses are based on the limited world of gaming, over-clocking and not real business use.

Anybody badmouthing the p3 Tualatin never used one in a dedicated application server role. My >1.26 ghz dual processor P3 tualatin Citrix and Terminal Servers were absolute beasts. They could run 30-40 full desktops at a time like a scalded dog and outclassed later gen P4 Xeons until they hit 2.8ghz. I have application behchmarks to prove it. Those dual P3 1.26's ran production apps for a half decade on NT 4, and did so marvelously. Then you upgraded to 2.4ghz Xeons and took a 30% application performance hit.

Same with the P-Pro 200. I ran these in dual and quad configs and made for very strong production servers.

Later gen dual core P4 Xeons were also junk. Opterons would spank them on application benchmarks running on servers that cost half the price , consumed half the power and ran SQL benchmarks 50-75% faster. Intel's response was to crowd out vendors selling Opterons because they had a glut of P4 Xeons. Core technology, essentially based off the earlier P3 was held out of server market for at least 18months while Intel dumped P4's on the market at inflated prices. The 'D' in P4D stands for 'duct tape'. That's was used to tie the cores together.

Early P60's and 90's were mounted on old gen 486 local bus technology and took a massive performance hit. By the time the P100 hit the market motherboard tech had caught up.

Worst chip I ever used was the 486SX. P-O-S couldn't even run Win 3.11 worth a darn.

 

[mindless1]

Worst since '98, if we go by when sold instead of introduction then right up there would be the AMD K6-2, I mean specifically the arguably-defective ones which couldn't run stable on a 100MHz bus so AMD spec'd them for 66MHz bus instead, which with no L3 cache and small L2, meant they were always waiting for the memory.

A few years later, the pre-XP Athlons were pretty bad but mostly due to poor motherboard chipset performance. Via and Sis, were years behind Intel at this point. Via caught up a little, for a little while at least, but Sis never did.

Gen-2 P4 Prescott was bad for the amount of heat at a point before the industry switched to heatpipe 'sinks. Athlon XP was a problem then too, but also because so many boards still ran the CPU VRM off the 5V power rail so the current state changes were so high that they disabled power management so the CPU was wasting dozens of watts of power even doing nothing. Both were causing the junk Chinese capacitors of the era on motherboards and in PSUs, to fail that much faster.

The first gen Intel Atom was pretty craptacular too, performance so low you hated yourself for having a netbook with one in it.

 

[Headfoot]

this thread is 6 years old...

 

[Markfw]

this thread is 6 years old...

Yes, quit replying to it and let it die.

 

[ipown1337]

Best CPU's i've had have been the Athlon X2 4400+ (toledo core), ran until 2016 (was handed down a few times). And a core 2 e6300, chip was overclocked to 3.2 ghz from 1866 (iirc), for years with no issues. Honorable mention q6600, still being used today by my brother in law.

Currently I rock a piledriver 8320, the chip is not bad, does everything i need it to do, and I am hope to ride on a little longer in the age of multithreaded apps. My next upgrade will be Ryzen 3000 series (maybe), chip is hooked up to a AMD RX480.

 

[dark zero]

Yes, quit replying to it and let it die.

Or let it flow with newer CPUs?

Since 6 years passed and some infamous CPUs appeared, even ARM ones....

On the Best side, we have the Intel Core i5 2500K and even the 2400. Both are beasts and last way longer than expecting. Then there are the Raven Ridge AMD CPUs. Pretty much a complete APU for the people.

Worst side is the AMD E1 2100... heck, even a VIA C3 is faster than that.....

 

[lakedude]

VIA, ugggg!

 

[NTMBK]

My fondest CPU was probably my Phenom II 960T. That was the one that I put in my cobbled together PC after university, that got me into so many great games.

 

[dark zero]

My fondest CPU was probably my Phenom II 960T. That was the one that I put in my cobbled together PC after university, that got me into so many great games.

Those Phenom II got finally a successor on Ryzen after all that suffering. Glad that AMD put on their correct sides allowing Intel to stop being idiotic too and allowing to VIA to get an unexpected revival (if that is true, VIA would be a real competitor after near 10 years)

 

[french toast]

Usual candidates for me..
1)Bulldozer.
2)Pentium 4.
3)Atom 1/salt well....worst I have ever used.. truly aweful.
4)Cortex A57.
5)Qualcomm Kyro gen 1.
6)AMD Phenom 1/Barcelona.
7)Cannonlake...(could be much higher).

 

[dainthomas]

T-bred 2100+ was insane for the price. OC'd like a beast. Probably never see one like that again.

The worst for me was the PIII (Coppermine I believe). Thing was on an 840 board with PC800 rambus. What a slug.

 

[PingSpike]

T-bred 2100+ was insane for the price. OC'd like a beast. Probably never see one like that again.

The worst for me was the PIII (Coppermine I believe). Thing was on an 840 board with PC800 rambus. What a slug.

Couldn't you run the coppermine p3s in the 440BX boards though? 840/rambus was an overpriced turd but that wasn't a fault of the CPU since memory controllers were the domain of the northbridge back then.

 

[dainthomas]

Couldn't you run the coppermine p3s in the 440BX boards though? 840/rambus was an overpriced turd but that wasn't a fault of the CPU since memory controllers were the domain of the northbridge back then.

Ah, didn't realize that. I didn't even buy it, though. The VA got it for me when I was in voc rehab going to college. I'd rather they'd given me the cash so I could get my own parts.

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

not sure when it came out but i had an IDT winchip 200. it was supposed to compete with the Pentium 75. but it was barely better than the AMD 5x86 DX4 it replaced that was overclocked to 160 Mhz. i grabbed it for gl quake. very disappointing.

 

[Shmee]

Xeon X5660 still a great chip for $20. A must for getting an X58 board up and running.

 

[epsilon84]

Nothing will ever better the Celeron 300A in my books - long gone are the days when you can overclock a budget CPU and have it outperform a flagship one.

 

[Markfw]

I think the "core" 6300 was the best I can remember. I am pretty sure stock was like 1.86 ghz, and Duvie and I got each of ours to 3.5 ghz. almost 100% OC, and on a fairly small HSF.

This was 2006

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think the "core" 6300 was the best I can remember. I am pretty sure stock was like 1.86 ghz, and Duvie and I got each of ours to 3.5 ghz. almost 100% OC, and on a fairly small HSF.

Yeah, I had some Gigabyte P35 boards, and some E2140 CPUs, 1.6Ghz stock, but OCed to 400FSB, they ran at 3.2Ghz. Unfortunately, one of them wasn't stable enough for DC. It would pass 24hr stress tests, but would reboot, sometime within the month, running Prime95 or SoB. So it literally took a month of 24/7 testing, or up to that, when I changed or tweaked a setting.

 

[Shmee]

I think the "core" 6300 was the best I can remember. I am pretty sure stock was like 1.86 ghz, and Duvie and I got each of ours to 3.5 ghz. almost 100% OC, and on a fairly small HSF.

This was 2006

I had an E6320, same core 2 chip but with double cache. Later upgraded it to a Q6600.

 

[ElFenix]

i had a conroe pentium that i didn't even think to overclock. sold it on FS/FT without having any idea that it probably would have destroyed my opteron. kept the opty and started buying c2qs.

those were the tail end of the fry's chip and board specials.

 

[TeknoBug]

Best CPUs? Hmmm Pentium Pro (I had a dual PPro system run for 12+ years uptime), Celeron 333Hz (OC'd to 1.2GHz), and AMD K6-3 450Hz, the AMD Thunderbird and Barton were great for the price at the time too and of course AMD set the motion forward with the first dual core chip.

Worst, probably the AMD Duron and the Bulldozer lines, and for a short time the hot and inefficient Pentium 4.

 

[Thunder 57]

Best CPUs? Hmmm Pentium Pro (I had a dual PPro system run for 12+ years uptime), Celeron 333Hz (OC'd to 1.2GHz), and AMD K6-3 450Hz, the AMD Thunderbird and Barton were great for the price at the time too and of course AMD set the motion forward with the first dual core chip.

Worst, probably the AMD Duron and the Bulldozer lines, and for a short time the hot and inefficient Pentium 4.

Duron? You're kidding? I never had one but I heard nothing but good things. Fun little fact, it's the only CPU (that I am aware of) that had a smaller L2 than L1 cache.

 

[Fir]

Pentium Pro was a wee bit before '98. I had workstations with them, great CPUs. Horrid 16bit performance but running DOS and Windows 9x on an SMP system wasn't actually smart.

I remember 1998. Pentium II 450 that was almost $600 or a Celeron 300A that was $180. All of mine ran solid at 464. They'd post at 504 but lock up when loading Windows. But those chips were bulletproof. At stock they could run naked, with no heatsink!

The P4 was a disaster. And Rambust.

Around 2000 I had my first Athlon slot one system. Soldered tiny resistors on the pcb making a 700MHz chip run at 1GHz. Cooled by a HUGE Alpha heatsink. Remember those?

And the socket A chips with naked dies came out. I remember using window defogger repair kits to lay conductive paths over dots on the chip to OC them! Some used pencils too.

AMD had it going on, even had MP systems with socket 462 that were great.

Then Intel changed the CPU landscape forever in 2006 with Core.

Now look where we are.

Interesting times, right?