Question What's the slowest CPU you have tortured in your history of personal computing?

[igor_kavinski]

I was thinking of Det0x when this question popped up in my head. I was kinda realizing that Det0x gets to experience performance of a low end CPU at least 10 years before they are released to the general public, by tuning his current high end CPU to the extreme. Maybe even 15 years ahead of time? Maybe Det0x can provide more data on that with previous benchmarks (but not sure if he has ever had a low end CPU to play with).

So my question is, what's the slowest CPU you have tweaked/overclocked to get the best performance out of and how satisfied were you with it? Mine was Celeron 700 OCed to about 1 GHz. It was enough to let me enjoy Doom 3 without having to buy a new CPU so that was great but it sure ran hot running that game!

 

[kschendel]

I never got into overclocking, so can't contribute to that part. I do have a candidate for "slowest in context of the times", though: the WE 32000 that was in the AT&T / Western Electric 3B2/300 computer. Molasses in January was like lightning compared to those things.

 

[solidsnake1298]

I can't remember specific models. I worked for the Geek Squad in the mid 00's driving out to people's homes. I remember that any time I saw "Intel Celeron" on their PC that my appoints ran waaay over. 10-15 minutes to boot into Windows. Just opening file explorer took a minute or two. Perhaps not exclusively the CPU's fault. At that time Celerons only got put into very low end systems with criminally low amounts of RAM.

 

[Motostu]

First was a 486DX/33, but bought a new chip for it versus actually overclocking. I got a DX4 (100 I think?). Between that and making a RAM drive, I could just barely run Duke Nukem 3D on it.

Favorite was along the line of what's already been mentioned (celeron 300A), BUT I was late to the game and they were almost impossible to find at the time. I bought a 333A to tide me over while waiting, but found that this was a good chip and OC'd to 500 easily. I bought a good cooler for it and ran it ~515MHz with just a slight voltage bump.

When Intel went to socket 370, I grabbed a couple of 366 celerons and ran them at 550MHz on an Abit dual celeron board (BP6 I think?). Unfortunately, the only dual processor Windows OS at the time were NT and 2000 (I had the beta), so not really terribly useful for me in the end, but was fun to tinker with.

 

[aigomorla]

Between that and making a RAM drive,

how the heck did you afford a ram drive back in 486 era.
I remember drooling at the multi player window in 97' @ Total Annihilation when rich rich people were in the lobby with 256MB of ram and i thought i was a badboy with 128MB.

 

[A///]

Almost forgot. I built my dad a Intel E6300 Core2 Duo 1.83hz stock in 2006/07. He used that computer for 10 years until I forced him to retire it. From day 1 it ran flawlessly OC'd from 1.8ghz to 3.2ghz. That was when I realized AMD was doomed. And they were for more than 10 years. That computer had a Thermalright Ultra 120mm cooler on it. I think I bumped the voltage on it once or twice in 10 years. Silicon degradation only needs a quarter of a volt bump. If it was 1.35v it went up to 1.375v.

That first era of c2d had ridiculous oc head room. Your dad's processor could have been pushed more if it was a better bin. that gen and the following years later sandy bridge were excellent overclockers with little overhead in heat and voltages compared to much later. On the higher end of the spectrum the e6700 was an overpriced whopper dump with the model below it the e6500 or e6600 being the better buy because it was the same chip but could be clocked higher than whatever the 700 could.

 

[A///]

how the heck did you afford a ram drive back in 486 era.

His name is Anthony Montana, alleged son of Tony Montana. Put 2 and 2 together and you'll find how he afforded it. No really no idea but some people were doing well when 486 was relevant and could afford nice things all the time.

I used to build more often in the old days when it made sense to upgrade almost every years or close to it due to the advancements in processor design and power. It wasn't uncommon for me to drop 1.5-3K on parts. In those days you'd see more green thumbed kids working as sales people and I'd grab the most junior one and tell him I didn't need his help but wanted him to make the sale to get the commission. He'd follow me like a lost puppy and we'd chat about then gaming and computers.

 

[aigomorla]

All i know is i felt like a baller the first time i built a voodoo2 SLI system with a sound blaster awe32 and played games on it.

I was super sad when i realized it wasn't my machine tho.

 

[A///]

All i know is i felt like a baller the first time i built a voodoo2 SLI system with a sound blaster awe32 and played games on it.

I was super sad when i realized it wasn't my machine tho.

I had to wtf at your post. I'd forgotten SLI was a 3dfx tech nvidia incorporated post purchase. I had a few of those voodoo cards. They were excellent. The only games I remember playing near the end of the 90s was a motorcycle racing game on serial controller, a motogp game that had stunning visuals for the time and a slick menu system that felt reminiscent of the original gray plastic gameboys, doom of course, and some cyberpunk like game that had an opening video of a leather outfit clad redhead with crotchless pants. It was a lurid game and don't remember playing much of it or the name now that I think about it. At the time I was surprised how that was okay but gray matter's life of crime game was a massive problem in the news.

 

[aigomorla]

OMG you missed out if you never got to play tomb raider with voodoo2 and a Sound Blaster awe 32.
*crys in desperation*

I literally thought so this is the feeling cavemen had when they saw fire for first time. In terms of gaming.

 

[misuspita]

286. And a 40Mb harddisk. I remember there was no space for Dune2 to stay installed permanently so to play it I had to unzip it (I think I used arj?) to/from 12 floppy disks. Played the game, keep the saved games, delete it. It took about 30-40 minutes to unzip the game and played card games in the mean time ) Oh, and always had to unload stuff from the ram cause you didn't have enough of the damn needed kilobytes... Kids these days

 

[aigomorla]

286. And a 40Mb harddisk. I remember there was no space for Dune2 to stay installed permanently so to play it I had to unzip it (I think I used arj?) to/from 12 floppy disks. Played the game, keep the saved games, delete it. It took about 30-40 minutes to unzip the game and played card games in the mean time ) Oh, and always had to unload stuff from the ram cause you didn't have enough of the damn needed kilobytes... Kids these days

LMAO! pkunzip

I remember when doing bad stuff like copywriting games was as simple as ziping up all the files on floppy and taking them to your PC. The DRM was not trying to get those 5 1/4 inch floppys to bend and ruin the disk entirely.

But then those hard 3 1/2 inches came out, and i also remember soldering ironing one side of them to make them double sided, because vendors would lock the DS out by not putting that tab on the plastic.

 

[igor_kavinski]

(I think I used arj?)

ARJ was the RAR of those days. I loved watching it work on a file(s), squeezing it, with the onscreen cursor spinning through ASCII characters and slowing down every so often, like it was struggling and doing its best to cram data into as few bytes as possible.

 

[igor_kavinski]

OMG you missed out if you never got to play tomb raider with voodoo2 and a Sound Blaster awe 32.
*crys in desperation*

Never was able to acquire that card when I was a kid. Borrowed an AWE64 from a friend once but it was I think the Value edition so didn't work in AWE32 mode in DOS games. Made me utterly sad

 

[aigomorla]

Well i know floppy's were the bane of people and how millions also got infected with the infamous Michelangelo virus.
LOL... it was a real definition of STD for PC's as it was sharing the floppy from one machine to another.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I would LISTEN to the way the floppy drives and HDDs made sounds, kind of like a doctor checking the heart of the patient with a stethoscope. It was soothing and unnerving at the same time, fearing the worst. What if it started clicking????!!!!

 

[aigomorla]

I would LISTEN to the way the floppy drives and HDDs made sounds, kind of like a doctor checking the heart of the patient with a stethoscope. It was soothing and unnerving at the same time, fearing the worst. What if it started clicking????!!!!

Nah if its clicking it was the Hard drive, then you knew you were going to have a bad day especially when you looked inside and saw it was a Quantium BIGFOOT drive.

 

[Motostu]

how the heck did you afford a ram drive back in 486 era.
I remember drooling at the multi player window in 97' @ Total Annihilation when rich rich people were in the lobby with 256MB of ram and i thought i was a badboy with 128MB.

I probably used the wrong term. Best I can recall I had enough RAM (16 or 20MB?) that I could make a virtual drive (maybe that's the right term?) in RAM, and copy the game to it and play it from there. Playing it from the hard drive was too laggy.

 

[aigomorla]

I probably used the wrong term. Best I can recall I had enough RAM (16 or 20MB?) that I could make a virtual drive (maybe that's the right term?) in RAM, and copy the game to it and play it from there. Playing it from the hard drive was too laggy.

HIMEM.SYS is not a ramdrive!!!
Even if you set it in your config.sys file for a set value.

When someone talks about ram drive, i think of something like this Imdisk.

ImDisk Toolkit

Download ImDisk Toolkit for free. Ramdisk for Windows and mounting of image files. This tool will let you mount image files of hard drive, cd-rom or floppy, and create one or several ramdisks with various parameters. This all-in-one package includes the ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver (2.1.1), the...

sourceforge.net

Or this badboy.

which i believe there was ISA versions of but was obnoxiously expensive.

 

[Motostu]

HIMEM.SYS is not a ramdrive!!!
Even if you set it in your config.sys file for a set value.

When someone talks about ram drive, i think of something like this Imdisk.

ImDisk Toolkit

Download ImDisk Toolkit for free. Ramdisk for Windows and mounting of image files. This tool will let you mount image files of hard drive, cd-rom or floppy, and create one or several ramdisks with various parameters. This all-in-one package includes the ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver (2.1.1), the...

sourceforge.net

Or this badboy.
View attachment 77389
which i believe there was ISA versions of but was obnoxiously expensive.

It was over 25 years ago, I've slept since then



Edit: Okay, did a quick little bit of digging. I think I used ramdrive.sys to create it; that might be why I remembered that term.

 

[Joe NYC]

The legendary Celeron 300A.

The top-end Intel CPUs of the time were Pentium II 450MHz, with 100MHz FSB and 512kB external ½-rate L2 cache. Alongside the top-end model, Intel introduced a "low-end" model on a separate die that had 128kB of full-rate L2 cache included on die, fixed clock multiplier of 4.5, and FSB of 66MHz. These CPUs were made on the same process and had the same core architecture as the proper P2:s, they were just artificially clocked lower for market segmentation. Almost immediately after release, people realized that if you just took a 300A and plugged it into a 100MHz FSB board, it would run at 450MHz.

And it was in many loads actually faster than the much more expensive top-end model. The difference being that the included 128kB cache wasn't just double the throughput, but also significantly lower latency, as it was on-die.

I think I ran that thing until I got an Athlon Thunderbird two years later.

Now, put those 2 of those overclocked Celeron 300A into an Abit BP6 motherboard and you have a top end server computer (which is what I had), with 2(!!!) CPU cores. For a few 100 dollars.

That's what I had before switching to Athlon.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I can't remember specific models. I worked for the Geek Squad in the mid 00's driving out to people's homes. I remember that any time I saw "Intel Celeron" on their PC that my appoints ran waaay over. 10-15 minutes to boot into Windows. Just opening file explorer took a minute or two. Perhaps not exclusively the CPU's fault. At that time Celerons only got put into very low end systems with criminally low amounts of RAM.

Oh, </deity>. Netburst Celerons. Waaaugh. Bad memories...

On the more serious note, what usually hurt was a combination of no RAM* and an el cheapo (usually 5400RPM or worse, with no cache) HDD. Combined with almost no L2 cache on the Celeron itself, you had a recipe for atrocious performance.

Something similar happened with AMDs Bobcat core. They aren't that slow, you just need to be careful what software you run on them*2. But if you stuff them in a laptop with a 5400RPM drive, and only 2GB worth of RAM, and then force them to run a full x64 OS/program, you can make plenty of coffee while you wait for them to do anything worthwhile.

* I saw systems sold with 64-128MB. Barely enough to run XP well. You could drop to Win2k, which had slightly lower memory requirements, but especially 64MB is just too little if you want to run something else then the OS.
*2 Bobcats dirty little secret was that while it did support x64, it did so by doing two passes on x64 instructions. Combined with low frequency, it wasn't exactly fast doing that.

OMG you missed out if you never got to play tomb raider with voodoo2 and a Sound Blaster awe 32.
*crys in desperation*

I literally thought so this is the feeling cavemen had when they saw fire for first time. In terms of gaming.

For me, it was on a Voodoo Banshee. But I bet the feeling was similar.

Nah if its clicking it was the Hard drive, then you knew you were going to have a bad day especially when you looked inside and saw it was a Quantium BIGFOOT drive.

Or an IBM DeathStar...

 

[misuspita]

Nah if its clicking it was the Hard drive, then you knew you were going to have a bad day especially when you looked inside and saw it was a Quantium BIGFOOT drive.

Nooo, the 3,5 floppies would click also. That was a baaaad sign.... Especially if you had something archived on more then one...

 

[burninatortech4]

My parents weren't super well off as a kid and they spent (in hindsight) far too much on a Dell Northwood Pentium 4 (745) w/ 2GB RAM and a Geforce FX 5200. Our brand new computer couldn't run the PC port of Halo on launch day. That was a bad feeling. I put a BFG Geforce FX 5600 in later which helped.

More recently (2014?) I had an Athlon 5350 for a bit as my first experience with HTPC and NAS. I wanted to like that chip but it was dog slow and I had to ditch it soon after.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Dell Northwood Pentium 4 (745) w/ 2GB RAM and a Geforce FX 5200.

Northwood wasn't as bad as Prescott. It was the darn Geforce FX that gave you the bad experience.

 

[In2Photos]

My dad was a programmer and we had computers in our house from the time I was probably 3 or something. The first PC that I owned myself was a Compaq 233MHz when I worked at Best Buy in high school. That is the only pre-built desktop that I have owned, I built everything else after that. But I never really got into overclocking, probably because PCs for me back then weren't for gaming, they were just for school work, downloading music, and browsing websites about cars and sound systems. I actually didn't get into PC gaming until a few years ago when my kids starting playing. So my first PC that I overclocked was my i7-920. Running it at 3.6GHz it runs folding at home 24/7 since Covid hit.