Ever felt buyer's remorse on your CPU?

[Nec_V20]

Nope. The reason why? I never cheaped out or bought the ridic top top top chip.

I agree with you wholeheartedly.

I usually build my machines from the still top-notch but not the latest and greatest CPUs and then they run 24/7 for years until they become too slow for me to run the stuff that I want to run, then I upgrade.

For my main machine I originally picked up an i7-965x cheap. Then I saw an offer for an i7-990x. I recouped the money on the 965 and so the 990x ended up costing me just under $200 more.

 

[Ventanni]

My only buyer's remorse; purchasing an Nvidia 650i Ultra motherboard for my Core 2 Duo setup rather than an Intel P35 chipset, as I would later come to find out that my motherboard only supports 45nm dual cores, not 45 quad cores. The BFGTech 650i Ultra board I have has proven itself to be an amazingly durable and stable overclocker, but its lack of 45nm quadcore support severely limited my upgrade options.

Other than that though, I've been happy with my upgrades.

 

[popobearr]

I had this same thought back when I build my rig in April.
Bought a FX 8320, but reading haswell previews really made me sad about performance. I was able to sell my fx and get a i5 4670k. THEN, I started to look in to the i7. The price difference at microcenter meant I would have to give up my recently purchased SSD so I returned my ssd and got a i7.

I am far from maxing it out. I dont really do anything heavy, but at the same time I "happy" knowing that I have a capable rig.

 

[nemesismk2]

I bought a cheap Cyrix 2 233 for socket 7 but wished i had bought something from intel or amd yes that was a long long long time ago

 

[TuxDave]

Maybe not a CPU but a system. I had to give my system (3200+) and figured since it was good for gaming I would build the same one. Problem was that it would run vista instead of xp. Maybe it was the CPU maybe it was the ram but it was a dog on the new os.

Thank god the days of slow builds are behind me.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've been pretty happy with my CPU purchases.

386DX-40
486-something
AMD 5x86-133 (with a failed overclock to 160)
Pentium 166MMX (200Mhz easy, might have even gotten 233 at one point)
Pentium II-300 (SL2W8, easy OC to 450)
Pentium III Tualatin (failed slotket hack upgrade, fried my board)
Athlon XP 1800+ (overclocked one step up. Could have overclocked further, but my MSI motherboard only allowed a single voltage step up, even though it supported higher voltages for faster chips on "AUTO" setting. Very disappointed in MSI BIOS.)

Then I started overbuying PCs. I had Core2Duo/Pentium Dual-cores, and I think I bought some A64 chips too, just for the heck of it. Then I bought a motherboard, for a mobile P4 CPU that someone had given me.)

I think that the only regret I have buying CPUs, is getting a P4 3.2Ghz Northwood, that I planned to upgrade someone's PC with, and instead, did a whole platform upgrade for them. I still have that CPU somewhere.

 

[Subyman]

Yup, FX8350. Sold it a week later.

 

[Sheep221]

I never felt actual buyer's remorse on anything beside cheap music player I got for $50, it was so crap that I thrown it away despite it was still operational.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Not really. I got my 3770K for $105 and my 1100T for $60.

What I did have buyer's remorse on, however, was a Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 that I bought last year. Card had some problems with caps being out-of-spec and it caused heavy artifacting and the system to completely crash when doing something as watching YouTube videos. I sent it to them, and they sent me a refurbished card that developed the same problems two weeks prior.

So I guess I lost $220 there.

 

[Engineer]

Not really. I got my 3770K for $105 and my 1100T for $60.

What I did have buyer's remorse on, however, was a Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 that I bought last year. Card had some problems with caps being out-of-spec and it caused heavy artifacting and the system to completely crash when doing something as watching YouTube videos. I sent it to them, and they sent me a refurbished card that developed the same problems two weeks prior.

So I guess I lost $220 there.

Wow, great prices on the CPU's. You buy them new or gently used?

I've not got that good of deals but I generally buy middle of the road, never low end or high end. The most I've spent is $500 for a 1GHz TBird chip but I wanted to be the first kid on the block (maybe state, lol) to get a 1GHz chip.

Ah hell, who am I kidding. I have buyers remorse on EVERY purchase I make on anything because I'm a cheap bastard. No getting around that, lol!

 

[bgt]

Remorse....why should I? I just love buying hardware

 

[mindbomb]

not really. i like all my processors, including the ones with a bad rep, like my pentium d 820.
The more serious buyers remorse is probably reserved for early adopters of SSDs and ddr3.

 

[escrow4]

Not really. Built an i7 3770 + 680 box this year, got bored, built a 3930K + Titan box, get bored, built a 6300 + 7870 box that I'm currently fun (hey, why not?) and its lasted the longest so far.

Another box I built an i5 3570 box, then downsized to a G1610. Just because I could.

 

[krumme]

Hated my Atom netbook so much i am still angry.
But remorse. For a cpu? No way. The loveliest of creatures. I love them all. Except the one i also hated.....


<edited out profanity>


No profanity in the tech forums
Markfw900
Anandtech Moderator

 

[ehume]

not really. i like all my processors, including the ones with a bad rep, like my pentium d 820.
The more serious buyers remorse is probably reserved for early adopters of SSDs and ddr3.

Nah. I spent $200 on a 64GB Kingston SATA2 SSD. It was worth every penny. Since then I've spent less for more, but getting out from under HD performance for your OS and apps drive is priceless.

 

[piasabird]

I purchased an FIX Via Chipset motherboard and I never got that motherboard to work properly. As soon as you played a game it would start to give up. It was AMD based and I replaced it with one of the last versions of the celeron PIII based processor and the TUSL2-C motherboard. That combination ran fine for about 10 years. It still worked when I turned it in at one of those technology turn-in events.

I never purchased another VIA chipset motherboard.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Only once back in the day when I got a shiny new PII 400 (can't believe I paid $1K+ for it )
Should have saved some dough and gotten the PII 333 instead.

To add insult to injury, the Celeron 300A came out a few months after /facepalm.

 

[Rickyyy369]

Never buyers remorse for a CPU, but definitely buyers remorse for this motherboard im using currently.

Its about as stable as the Golden Gate Bridge being held up by a toothpick on anything past stock settings. Could have gotten a gigabyte motherboard for $10 more with proper 8+2 phase power and been a much happier individual overall.

I never regretted getting the 6100. At the time, it truly was the best thing I could have gotten for my needs and for the amount of money I had to spend. The only thing intel had at the same price bracket was the i3 2120 which would have choked under the amount of encoding I do. The only thing disappointing about it is that it has to be kept at stock speeds because of this mediocre motherboard.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Wow, great prices on the CPU's. You buy them new or gently used?

I've not got that good of deals but I generally buy middle of the road, never low end or high end. The most I've spent is $500 for a 1GHz TBird chip but I wanted to be the first kid on the block (maybe state, lol) to get a 1GHz chip.

Ah hell, who am I kidding. I have buyers remorse on EVERY purchase I make on anything because I'm a cheap bastard. No getting around that, lol!

The 3770K new. Bought it directly from Intel on their Holiday deal.

The 1100T I bought from a customer that offered it because he insisted on ''upgrading'' to an FX-8150. He had the CPU for a year, it came with the box and heatsink. He didn't know how to overclock either so it was run stock. I have it running now at a slight 3.6GHz overclock.

Both were great deals.

 

[sandorski]

Nope. A couple Video cards and a sound card, but that's about it.

 

[krumme]

Only once back in the day when I got a shiny new PII 400 (can't believe I paid $1K+ for it )
Should have saved some dough and gotten the PII 333 instead.

To add insult to injury, the Celeron 300A came out a few months after /facepalm.

Rofl. Man...sorry for that but the p2 400 was a nice cpu. But never buy the most expensive cpu. If you do dont wait then use it NOW

 

[Jacky60]

Never with a CPU but my Nvidia 7800GTX 512MB bought instead of cancelled Radeon 1800XT was a decision I regret simply because the 1900/1950XT came out a month later and stomped it completely. Saving a few quid/dollars (10-20% of total cost) for half the cores or memory always strikes me as a bad idea.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Celeron 500mhz (just complete crap)

First was a celeron, 600mhz I think, and windows ME.

What? Neither the Mendocino nor Coppermine Celerons were crap. The bus started to bottleneck them compared to the Pentiums at those speeds, but overclocking fixed that. They were great budget processors.

Since I don't think anybody ever bought ME (which itself was crap), let me guess: what you're both saying is, "I regret buying a Compaq." I used one of their Celeron machines and it was agonizingly slow compared to my build. No exaggeration that things took 10 times longer. But the problem was not in the processor, it was the hard drive they put in those systems. They were utter crap. Yes, it takes 30 seconds to do anything when you're reading off something that can only pull 5MB/s and has stratospheric seek times.

Don't blame the processor when the fault lies elsewhere.

 

[blackened23]

Celeron's are an oddity. There were some celerons in prior years that were fantastic, while they now seem to be bottom of the barrel. I still think the 300A celeron is one of the best CPUs of all time - definitely deserves a spot in the CPU hall of fame.

Shovel and bloatware was a real issue back in old days (and perhaps still is) with prebuilt systems, system performance could fall off an analogous cliff simply because the OEM put a ton of garbage on their system. Subsystem performance was a lot more important back in those days as well, so I would agree with the above poster on that sentiment.

 

[Idontcare]

That was me when I built my i7 920 rig with some 1866MHz Elpida Hyper IC memory. Thankfully it hasn't failed on me yet.

As to the original question about regretting a CPU purchase I raise my hand and admit. I think it was the FX 60, when an opteron 170 was able to reach the same overclocks. Thankfully I sold the chip a few yrs later for ~ 315$ on eBay.

So far my recent favorite CPU purchase was this little Xeon L5639 1366 socket, 32nm, 6 core, 60w chip for my daily cruiser rig. : )

This mirrors my thoughts. Did you buy Rambus RAM, by chance? I did as well and in hindsight....I loved my P4 system at the time but why oh why did I pay the Rambus RDRAM premium.

Nah I dodged the rambus bullet!

It was some DDR2-1200 mushkin redline ram, cost me something $800 or $1000 for four 2GB stick ($8GB total).

The ram ran as rated, and mushkin even replaced all 4 sticks when they died a premature death (great service, can't complain).

The remorse was in realizing the fastest ram in the world still only means your performance is maybe 2% better...I could have bought a pretty bad-ass video card for the $700 extra bucks I spent on that ram over slower ram I could have bought for $300 at the time. That was my regret, a spendy one.