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Fave CPU's you've owned of all time?

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Bad- Celeron @ 2.8ghz cant remeber name, but ran hot and could litterally fry eggs on case

Good-

E6300- stable for 1.5years and going strong
E5200- only bought this recently, but runs well from what i can see.
 
Pentium 90... made Doom II memorable.

Celeron 300a... 450 MHZ with no effort, cheap, and blew the AMD K6-2 out of the water.

Athlon XP 2600-M... cheap and fast.

AMD A64 San Diego 4000+... cheap and fast.

C2D E6600... Fast at any speed, with surprising overclock potential, even for Intel.

Edited to change "Doom III" to "Doom II". Never type when sleepy!
 
Good

AMD 64 3800+ (4 years before I disassembled it), can't get it to work again lol
E8400
E7200 (was okay)
 
good:

P2 266Mhz with MMX
p3 733Mhz OCed to 1.06Ghz
p4 2.4C @ 3.4Ghz
Q9450 @ 3.6Ghz

whoops, read OP too fast, didnt realize there was a bad cpu part...

bad:

duron 650Mhz (that chip could OC worth a penny)
opteron 170 (expensive when i bought it, didnt feel faster than my p4 2.4C)
 
Favourite: 486 DX2 66MHz (was the sh!t back in the day 🙂)...played so many games like Dune (my favourite RTS), Prince of Persia, and Xenobots on it, and it lasted me 4 years.

Didn't like that much: P4 1.4GHz with RDRAM...it was an okay system but it was too expensive (relatively speaking of course for the time...the 486 system cost $2500).
 
Faves of all time:

  • AMD 80286-20MHz! - an incredible chip. Massive boost from the old 286-12.
    AMD Toledo X2 4800+ still my stalwart
    AMD 486DX4-100 which STILL used my old 286 system 80ns RAM to run NetWare
    Motorola 68000-16 MHz chip as an upgrade on my old Amiga.
    My E8600 is just a peach. Absolutely makes Vista64 fly. No regrets there. Definitely in the pantheon.
    The dual Pentium MMX-200 chips I had in a server. Man, that was sweet.

Closest I came to a dud was a hideously overpriced 80386-33 and motherboard - each cost me over $700 at the time. Still don't know what I was thinking. At least it used my old RAM form the 286-20 and no OS reinstall was necessary.

Never really had a dud in general, since I avoided NetBurst. Never in fact wasted my money on a P4 (thank you AMD!) Someday I will have to sit down and list all the CPUs I've had.

I keep going back to edit this message and adding other chips I used that I remember fondly.
 
Good ----> Celeron 800, Intel P4 3.0 HT 800MHZ , AMD 6000+(OC to 3.2)
Bad ----> AMD 3400+ (Socket 754), Celeron 1.6(Socket 478)

The Intel really stood out for me and at the time Far Cry was out as well and it could push it no prob 🙂 And really enjoed the power of that processor, could run Winamp, DC++, host CS+31 bots 😉 The most powerful thing i ever had, and it was on a Bayfield Mobo so that was a dream and had GB ethernet *at the time was WOW, in my eyes atleast* It was a LUCKY chip and nothing could compare to that hey
 
Celeron 300A socket that did 504
Celeron 600 (first .13u celerons I believe) @ 1050
Athlon XP Barton 2500+ @ 2.2GHz
Athlon XP-M 2400+ @ 2.5GHz (good lord these were MONSTERS)

those are my favorite CPU's of all time. I've owned all sorts of CPU's under, inbetween, and over those chips. From shittacular cyrix chips, to craptacular pentium 2's with bunk cache and the ill fated P4 prescott series. Owned a couple of Pentium 3 CPU's that were pretty decent but the Athlon generation just overshadowed them too much to give them top spots.
 
- Present Q9300 - runs cool and fast
- Opty 165 - legendary overclockability
- 486-DX4 100 - Old school
- Pentium Pro 100 - First iteration
- 286-10 - My first computer 😉

Bad:
- Intel CopperMines - wtf with card slots!
- Cyrix chips - self explanatory
- AMD AM2 - because Athlon 64 was THAT good so the follow on was sooooo disappointing.
 
P54C 200 MHz - Muuuuuuch better than the AMD 133 I had before
300a - Yeah 🙂
XP 2800 - It was unlocked! I think I still have it somewhere...
Opteron 146 - 1GHz OC on air.
E7200 - 1.1GHZ OC on air.... damn it's fast!

 
Opteron 165 - the best oc I've ever had
Q6600 - its doing pretty good except for a couple hiccups here and there
E6600 - still running after everything I'm throwing at it
Athlon 64 2800+ - worst oc I've ever had and it ran too damn hot
 
1st PC 133mhz
It played Starcraft 🙂 cost like 5k at the time,CRAZY
AMD 350mhz my 1st real build, a but over 1k Creative Technology 3D Blaster Banshee 16MB video card, THOUGHT that was the shit
Upgraded the K3 450 it played Half Life, and CS when it 1st game out
Upgraded to my Alineware AMD1600 WOW i had the best of the best for 1 week, couldn't beat it, spend over 3k on it
Ran Quake 3 like a dream
Upgraded to a AMD 2400 new board in the old case, got a g-force card, so many driver problems
Upgraded to a E6400 the second weak they came out, 2.88ghz overclocking on air 🙂 Now it's my parents computer
Upgraded to a E8500 @ 4.15ghz I LOVE IT! Water cooled as well, my 1st water cooled setup. All customer, Next step is to go TEC cooling 🙂

I loved all of my PC's
I had alot of problems with my K3, and my E6400 gigabyte board blew out after under 2 years of use
 
First was something that a technical document I found calls a "608610 microprocessor". I can find no other information about that CPU though. Whatever it was called, it was basically an 8088. Seemed awesome to me.

Then a 386DX-25MHz. Going from the XT clone to the 386 has to be my favorite upgrade ever. Absolutely amazing.

Then a Pentium at 75MHz. This was pretty awesome too, though more for other reasons than the CPU. (First PC with a real sound card!) Later this got upgraded with one of those Intel "Overdrive" chips to run at 150MHz with MMX. I was still using this machine for server duty (running FreeBSD) as recently as 2-3 years ago.

Then a Pentium III at 450 MHz.

The only "bad" I can think of is the Athlon 1333 MHz. I suppose the problem might have been the motherboard instead, but either way that system was never stable.

Current desktop until next week is an Athlon 64 3200+. It's been good to me, I have no complaints.

Have a Core 2 Duo E8400 sealed in a box at home ready for my new machine, once I get the motherboard in the mail from Newegg.

I also ran a Celeron 500(?) for a bit as a server (replacing the Pentium 150); it was my wife's old desktop that I, um, appropriated. The main virtue was that it, unlike the P-150, could recompile the FreeBSD world in less than 3 days. :thumbsup:

The Celery has been replaced with a Via C7 running at 1.2 GHz. I love it, because it is passively cooled and completely silent.
 
Honestly it is hard to look back on any old CPU fondly as they are all dogs compared to what anyone is currently using. But if I had to think of the best upgrade chips I'd have to rank them as follows.

1. P4 3.06 to C2D 2.16 o/c to 3.2 - Wow. With applications that use all the cores I saw nearly a 4 times increase in performance. I'm talking about video editing tasks here.

2. P5-90 to Celeron 300a overclocked to 450. Video editing started to look like a reality and all of my "normal" applications ran with a little snap to them.

3. 486SX25 to P5-90. Basically everything became useable and not painful. But the one I remember most was CorelDraw 3. It was absolute agony to use this application with the 486.

 
I loved my 2.4C. It overclocked great, and was the first cpu with "plenty of power".

I think the x2 3800+ was also a great chip. Still have one at 2.6 and it runs windows like a modern cpu.

 
Favourites:

-300aMHz Celeron overclocked to 450MHz. It ran like a 400MHz Pentium2 for alot less money!
-566MHz Coppermine (.18m) Celeron overclocked to 876MHz. A 53% overclock. I haven't gotten close since.

Worst:

-Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2.4GHzx2). It would only overclock to 2.5GHz.

-My present CPU (E8400 with the lousy C0 stepping). Can only get to 3.6GHz and that's using 1.375v!:thumbsdown:
 
Favourites:

Current E4500 (@3.2)
XP-M 2500 (@2.4 for years) - 'kin luvved this chip (still using it undervolted/clocked in our 2nd PC). Writing this is tempting me to fire her up with 1.9V and see what she'll do 🙂 (never had the balls to really juice her when she was on front line duties). Should probably put the fan back on before I try tho...

The forgetables:

XP 2800 (@2.1)
P1 100
386 DX 66 (Doom days machine)
 
Celeron 300A @ 450Mhz was my first OC'd CPU and it was faster than a PII costing much much [much] more

...
.. recently:
e4300 (1.8G) @ 3.33Ghz

. . . e8600(3.33G) @ 3.99Ghz

.. honorable mention:
P4 2.80c @ 3.31Ghz
. . . and P4 EE @ 3.74Ghz
.. Coppermine PIII 600 @ 800Mhz

even my Tualatin Celeron 1.2Ghz @ 1.6Ghz was a decent performer

i don't see AMD mentioned anywhere in my list :Q

i never owned one
rose.gif
 
1. pentium centrino 1.8GHz. This was my first upgrade from my AMD k6-2 550MHz. Hugh difference in speed!

AMD k6-2 550MHz is the cpu I had most of my memories on. Crashed a lot when I first got it. Then figured out that it was heat and de-capped it (this processor has a heat cap over the core that prevents the heatsink from touching it). Learned all my linux on it, and lots of programming. It compiled a kernel in 5 hours! Had this processor from my sophmore year in high school till 2nd year of college. Bought the system (custom build) back in the day for $850. Saved a long time for that.

 
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