What was your most significant CPU upgrade?

[Eug]

Pentium 133 to 600
but the best thing about it was leaving the trident 1MB behind and finally having D3D and OGL support, oh, also going from 16 to 128mb of memory.

I still have my Trident 1 MB sitting in my closet. Dunno why I haven't thrown it away yet.

 

[Sable]

486SX 25mhz to AMD K6 233mhz to PIII 800mhz.

Agreed. You sound like you followed my upgrade path.

But I overspent on an 83hmz Pentium overdrive chip first. But at least it let me turn on fancy graphics for magic carpet and some other game whose name escapes me.

 

[TeknoBug]

At the time, I couldn't afford building a new PC as my K6-3+ 450 PC died, I went back to the 486SX/33 for a while and I then came across a dual slot 1 system for free from an office and was given two Pentium II 333's to put in. Most of the time I ran Linux on it.

That held me til I built a dual Celeron and an AMD Thunderbird PC.

 

[Gikaseixas]

Many but honorable mention to 4 upgrades

Cirix 100mhz to Intel Pentium III 450
Intel Pentium III 450 to Duron 1.0ghz
Athlon 3700+ to Athlon X2 4400+
Phenom II 940 to i7 860

 

[Arachnotronic]

Pentium D 930 -> Core 2 Quad Q6600.

 

[dazelord]

I rate these more or less equal...

486 DX4-100 to Cyrix 6x86 166+

K6-2 300 to Celeron 300A @ 462Mhz

Celeron 800A to Pentium4 1.6A @ 2400Mhz

Pentium4 1.6A to Core2duo 6300

Core2duo 6300 to i5 2500K

 

[happy medium]

pent 4 ,3.06 to a overclocked e5200. or mabe a pent 2 , 233 to a pent 3 677 I think?

 

[SimianR]

I went from a K6-2 400 to a Duron 800 and that was mind blowing, I remember actually being able to get a decent framerate in some of the games that were basically unplayable before. Athlon XP 1800+ to a Core 2 Duo E8400 was a huge jump too.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Celeron D 352 to Q6600.

 

[john3850]

Went from p-5 overdrive 198GHz to a p3 500e at 800GHz to a Athlon 64 3000.
Both the P3 and Athlon 64 were the best I experienced in a new build.

 

[Omar F1]

The huge jump from i486SX 25MHz into PIII 450MHz platform.

Few years later, my father bought us a P4 1.5Ghz, and what a difference.

Last noticeable upgrade was from that PC to an Athlon XP 2400+.


The days of reformatting Win98 in each and every month; either for necessity, or for the fun of it.

 

[aigomorla]

My biggest jump...

486DX2 66 -> Celeron 300A oc'd to 450 on a DFI board, all it took is 1 jumper... no messing in bios... no voltage... nothing.. just 1 jumper..
And i loved watching that celeron 300A beat pentium 450's due to the much faster cache it had when overclocked...

NOW THAT WAS FAST!!!!


now the most memorable PC upgrade i had:

1. Sound Baster AWE32.... OMG!!! if u recall those days where onboard sound was not available... Sound Baster PC's were Ownage especially in wing commander.
2. 3dfx Voodoo ..... Yes i was an early adopter of SLI... this is why i cant get myself off SLI even tho it is plagued with problems like micro shutter, and drivers.
But my systems have always looked simular to this.. XD

 

[lehtv]

From a laptop Core 2 Duo to i7-920

 

[shady28]

4.77mhz 8088 & dual floppies -> custom 16Mhz 286 w/20 MB HDD

 

[Ajay]

Probably a Mac LC with a 16MHz 68020 (32-bit CPU crippled with a 16-bit data bus), to a Pentium 150.

Wow, what are the odds of this. I made almost the same move except it was to a Pentium 120 :awe:

 

[bigboxes]

Athlon 3200+ to Athlon X2 4200+ bar none. Going from single to dual core was the biggest jump I'd ever seen.

I upgraded from an Athlon 3200+ Winchester to an Athlon 4400+ Toledo and it was really good upgrade. However, my best jump in CPU upgrade was when I made the leap from an Intel 200 MMX to an Athlon 1.2Ghz Thunderbird. That thing smoked everything. Web pages loaded almost instantly. I was giddy for at least a year.

 

[Hulk]

Seems like most of our significant upgrades involved not only skipping a few generations of architecture but also a speed increase of 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, or even more.

I think we will remember the 80's and 90's as the golden age of processors.

 

[Spydermag68]

The biggest jump I went from an 186 XT to 486 DX 33 with 4 Meg's of memory.

Now I am jumping from AMD 965 to an Intel i7-6700k. From bench marks I have seen, my new system will be twice as fast the old one.

 

[computergod]

Pentium 4 ht Prescott to Core 2 quad q8300

 

[VirtualLarry]

Seems like most of our significant upgrades involved not only skipping a few generations of architecture but also a speed increase of 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, or even more.

I think we will remember the 80's and 90's as the golden age of processors.

Even 2015 could be a "golden age of microprocessors", if Intel wasn't so stingy with silicon area / cores. There's no good reason, other than boosting their gross margins, that Intel couldn't have seen fit to give us 6x CPU cores on 22nm for mainstream, and 8x CPU cores for mainstream on 14nm. None whatsoever, except for their profit margins.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Hmm. Probably jumping from a borrowed K6-2 350 to a 1.4 GHz Thunderbird. And getting away from that Rage Fury MAXX card too, ugh. I got into a GeForce2 Ti somethinorother and it was light night and day.

 

[jimwho]

Core duo to 4th gen i7 4710 @ 2.50 GHZ

 

[SinxarKnights]

From an AMD Phenom II X4 820 (OC to 3.1) to an Intel i7-4790k.

In second place is the switch from an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (OC to 3.1) to the AMD Phenom II X4 820 (also OC to 3.1). Surprisingly huge performance increase and very noticeable. The Phenom to i7 is technically the larger jump but it is really only noticeable when doing certain tasks, such as rendering. I think it was so noticeable because I went from a dual-core to quad-core and suddenly everything was able to work without too much competition for CPU time.

 

[hawtdawg]

386 SX 25 to a pentium 166

 

[wasabiman123]

Pentium 4 HT to an i7 920.
gawdam good times (not to mention the spurious jump from that to a 980X haha)