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What was your most significant CPU upgrade?

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P166 overclocked to 200 mhz to a Celeron 266 overclocked to 448 mhz. Came out before the 300a celerons did and was insanely fast. I had 16 MB of memory rocking that build and could play diablo online and quake stupidly fast.
 
I wasn't PC gaming in "the olden" days.

First CPU: Socket A Sempron 2400+
Second CPU: Socket 754 Athlon 64 3400+

Framerate in WoW quadrupled. 🙂 (1 gb ddr ram/Radeon 9600xt gpu) Clearly a processor bottleneck.

Although I will say the Core 2 Duo E6750 I upgraded to from the Athlon 64 single core was a pretty snazzy upgrade unto itself.
 
I'd love to say that it was my 2600k @ 4.8ghz build with 16gb ram in 2011. but that's a best LONG LIVED build.

What was the most significant bump was going from a P166 with 80mb EDO memory, S3 virge 2d, Voodoo 2 8mb 3d box I used from 1996 to 2001., 1.2gb HDD with 15" 1024x768 CRT

THEN:

My dad got a new job and knew how much I loved computing, he said go build your perfect PC and That your Christmas!

I went to m-wave and built out an AMD t-bird 1.4ghz (fastest cpu you could buy). 512mb DDR (or was it SDRAM?), two WD 100GB HDD's in raid 0 (bad idea 6 months later lol), and I believe an ATI 8500 (first tesselation in RTCW). And the most expensive part was the $850 Sony 21" CRT trinitron. I used that sucker until 2009.

I also got upgraded from 48.8k dialup to 1Mbit/s cable internet.


Talk about a huge jump in computing. Everything was amazing exponential. My dad made my YEARS.
 
Without consulting benchmark scores to verify, off the top of my head, I'd say:

#1. Pentium 2 233mhz MMX --> Athlon XP 1600+ 1.4Ghz overclocked to 1.6Ghz (~Athlon XP 1900+ speeds).

#2. Pentium 4 "C" 2.6Ghz @ 3.2Ghz --> Core 2 Duo E6400 @ 3.4Ghz

#3. Athlon XP 1600+ 1.4Ghz @ 1.6Ghz (~Athlon XP 1900+ speeds) --> Pentium 4 "C" 2.6Ghz @ 3.2Ghz.

#4. Core 2 Duo E6400 @ 3.4Ghz --> Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.4Ghz*** (some programs I used benefited from 2 more cores which gave a huge performance boost)

My next upgrade should be pretty big though as I waited a long time on SB.
 
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PIII at 1.2Ghz to 6750 at 3.2Ghz was a pretty good leap.

Planning to upgrade to 6700k in a few months. To make it have the proper impact tho, means I have to pull that 6750 rig out of the closet, fire it up and use for a few months - which will be painful - 320GB of spindle booting molasses. The 860 to X5675 was pretty stunning - at least for the render stuff I do.
 
Except my newest, all were huge leaps of extra performace.
386sx 25
P-75
PII-300
Athlon 2500+
X2-3800+
I5-750
I7-5820k
 
My Q6600 build was my most impressive jump but my sandy bridge build for the HTPC built in early 2011 is not far behind.

I don't have any plans to replace both my sandy builds any time soon.

I don't remember specifics about my previous builds other than I had a dual core opteron, a dual core E6600, a pentium 4 of some sort, and a pendium 3 running at 600 mhz.
 
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Pentium 1 MMX 200 mhz (upgraded from some cyrix cpu) to AMD palomino 1.73ghz. I wish I had gotten a tbred, though, as the palominos were terrible overclockers (older node). Had to save up money doing chores for years.
 
I have fond memories of my Thoroughbred Athlon XP 1700+ @ 2400MHz going to an Opteron 165 (first AMD dual core) @ 2.7GHz but I think my later move from the Q6600 @ 3.6GHz to a 4670k @ 4.6GHz was pretty mind blowing. Perhaps the single biggest jump for me was a Celeron 300A @ 454MHz to the Pentium 3 700E @ 1GHz. Game scores jumped higher than any percentage of any upgrade I'd ever seen.
 
Ah, is this what we're reduced to in the current slump? Reminiscing about which was best our upgrade? Certainly hasn't been anything worth noting since Sandy bridge days! If ure on a laptop....then the jump to Core M for battery life would probably be the biggest jump in terms of power efficiency!
 
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poohbear said:
Ah, is this what we're reduced to in the current slump? Reminiscing about which was our upgrade? Certainly hasn't been anything worth noting since Sandy bridge days! If ure on a laptop....then the jump to Core M for battery life would probably be the biggest jump in terms of power efficiency!
Click to expand...
Pretty much. I mean the newer gens are exciting from a "higher perf + more batt life at stock clocks" perspective (mainly for portables), but that's about it.

Frankly, I was more stoked when I snagged a couple of Dell T5500s for cheap and stuffed them with X5660s 🙂
 
Unoid said:
I'd love to say that it was my 2600k @ 4.8ghz build with 16gb ram in 2011. but that's a best LONG LIVED build.

What was the most significant bump was going from a P166 with 80mb EDO memory, S3 virge 2d, Voodoo 2 8mb 3d box I used from 1996 to 2001., 1.2gb HDD with 15" 1024x768 CRT

THEN:

My dad got a new job and knew how much I loved computing, he said go build your perfect PC and That your Christmas!

I went to m-wave and built out an AMD t-bird 1.4ghz (fastest cpu you could buy). 512mb DDR (or was it SDRAM?), two WD 100GB HDD's in raid 0 (bad idea 6 months later lol), and I believe an ATI 8500 (first tesselation in RTCW). And the most expensive part was the $850 Sony 21" CRT trinitron. I used that sucker until 2009.

I also got upgraded from 48.8k dialup to 1Mbit/s cable internet.


Talk about a huge jump in computing. Everything was amazing exponential. My dad made my YEARS.
Click to expand...

Wish I had a dad like that. 🙁
 
Went from MSM7227 (600 MHz ARM v6) to Exynos 4210 (1.2 GHz Cortex A9). Performance difference was night and day.
 
K6 233 to Celeron 300@464 on bh6 felt like the biggest most intense and needed jump. Games like Half Life and Total Annihilation Core Contingency ran like a dream on the celeron, and functioned poorly.

Overclocked Baron 2500+ Socket A to Socket 754 Athlon 64 3200
Socket 754 to Socket 939 Athlon X2 3800+
Athlon X2 3800+ to 1st gen Phenom

I upgraded my phenom to phenom 2, then moved it to the basement when I upgraded to i5 2400.

Not too long ago picked up an i5 4690k, its better than the 2400, but not as big of a jump...

Intermediatly between the celeron 300 and barton, I ran on my primary box celermine 533 @ 896, durons & socket athlons

In other boxes, I have also run slot Athlons, a netburst based cheap server box (started with 1.8 celly, finished with 2.0 something 533 FSB), and various PPro boxes and even a power pc based laptop.
 
My CPU history:

Pentium 75MHz
Pentium MMX 133MHz
Pentium III 450MHz
Pentium 4A 1.6GHz
Pentium 4C 2.7GHz (my Intel motherboard had a very mild overclock feature :awe🙂
Turion 64 1.8GHz
Core 2 Duo (Merom) 2.0GHz
Core 2 Duo (Penryn) 2.66GHz
Core i7 920 2.66GHz
Core i7 5820K 3.6GHz (with multi-core enhancer enabled)

Though the biggest leap was probably the one from the Pentium MMX to the Pentium III, it was diluted by the fact that it was also when I got an actual 3D accelerator card, which made a far bigger difference to what I could do with my computer. So, the leap that felt the biggest to me would probably have been the leap from the Pentium III to the Northwood-A, closely followed by the two i7 upgrades.
 
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