Name your favorite desktop x86 cpus

[Soulkeeper]

Anything socket A t-bred, barton
Intel yorkfields Q9450 was a beast cause of the 12MB of fast cache
also some of the core2 duo models were a killer deal e4300 sticks out for it's near 2x overclock.

 

[VirtualLarry]

AMD 5x86-133 - I overclocked this 200MHz and felt like king of the world... briefly...

You must have had a better motherboard than I did. I overclocked mine to 160Mhz, and it promptly corrupted my boot sectors. (Since the Windows' of the time constantly re-wrote the boot sector with a last-accessed filesystem timestamp.)

Had to use Norton Disk Editor, to re-build my boot sector and partition table manually. Bleh. At least I had enough low-level knowledge in HS to do that sort of thing.

 

[AtenRa]

The Intel 386SL was a Mobile chip, the 386DX for desktop didnt have a Integrated memory controller. I dont remember any other Intel Desktop CPUs with IMCs prior to Nehalem.

 

[Arg Clin]

The original K7 slot A Athlon.

That beast sure turned some heads in a world of mediocre and overpriced PII's 😀 Good times...

 

[poofyhairguy]

All time favorite was the AMD*Athlon 64*X2*3800+. First time I felt I had "enough" CPU power for non-gaming tasks. Used that CPU for almost a decade before retiring it this year.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Best bang for buck was probably the Q6600, I had that a long time and it performed very well. Hell, it would still perform ok today.

THe first CPU I ever bought for myself was a Pentium 2-350 which was a huge boost from my fathers Pentium 133. It also came with a Voodoo 2 for some serious gaming. So that PC will always be my favorite since it was my first.