What's your main rig's CPU history?

[Assimilator1]

I could've sworn we've done this before (but couldn't find it), although I think it was a long time ago anyway.

Anyhow, after talking to Voodoo5_6k via Rosetta PMs (he's not active here AFAIK), we started talking about old hardware and I listed my old CPUs.
Thought it would be fun to start a thread here about it.

So limiting it to your main rig (for those who have large collectives! lol), what's your CPU history?
Here's mine from starting in 1998 to current :-
Pentium 166MMX, Pentium 200MMX@225, K6-2 350 @400, Cel 366@578 (My 1st DC cruncher, still got the CPU!), PIII 650@820, Athlon XP1500 @1.52GHz, XP1600 @?, XP1700 @2.04GHz, XP2400 @2.22GHz, XPM2500 @2.52GHz, Core 2 E6420 @3.2GHz, Q6600 @3.34GHz, Q9550 @3.6GHz, Core i7 4820K @3.9GHz, i7 4930k @4.1GHz, Ryzen 5 3600 (stock!).

I think I downclocked the Q6600 a little after a short while, and I definitely dropped the Q9550 a little, to 3.55GHz IIRC.
Not going to bother overlocking the Ryzen as they effectively o/c CPUs now anyway with turbo boosting, in fact technically I have underclocked it slightly via lowering PPT.
Btw, I couldn't remember many of the mid term CPUs I had, but I discovered I had an old SETI WU times and collective file I had with many rigs in their, and ebay feedback history helped too

 

[Endgame124]

If we’re starting with main systems that did distributed computing only, I have to skip the early pentium days and go to my college rig:

dual pentium 2 400 on Tyan Tiger board with a b100 chipset. Storage was ultra wide scsi 15000rpm Seagate Cheetah drives. Started running seti@home when I saw someone running it in there dorms.

probably 2 years later, I mailed in the Tyan motherboard for a free upgrade to the chipset to support pentium 3s on a 133 fsb. I bought 2x p3 700s, set the fsb to 133, which got me about 950mhz out of them.

from there the systems get less interesting - 1.4ghz athlon TBird overclocked w/ danger den water block. Core 2 duo, don’t remember the model, because I quickly upgraded to a core 2 quad 9650. Then an i5 ivy bridge overclocked just a hair under 5ghz, which got 3 generations of video cards (670, 980, 1080ti). That brings me to my current system which is a 2700x I have been trying to replace since zen3 was released.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

K6-2 400Mhz, P4 Northwood 2.53Ghz, then college life and getting started in life life kept me on Laptops only for several years before I got room to build a homelab again. From there Xeon E5-2650, Ryzen 1700X @ 3.8Ghz All Core.

 

[Assimilator1]

I'd actually included rigs which were before I ran DC (SETI), my 1st DC rig was the Celeron 366 @578 (which I think I later dropped to 550 MHz).

Nice scsi drives you had on that dual PII rig! I bet they weren't quiet!

 

[Markfw]

I have had so many, and changed so often and had multiple Main" rigs. Just include every CPU made that were in the top 20% at the time (no celerons)

 

[Assimilator1]

Ok, what was your 1st rig and 1st cruncher then?

 

[Markfw]

First rig was 8088 , 5 1/4 floppy and monochrone display, 512k ram. First cruncher was dual 242 Opterons with a 1 gig SCSI drive.

 

[Endgame124]

I'd actually included rigs which were before I ran DC (SETI), my 1st DC rig was the Celeron 366 @578 (which I think I later dropped to 550 MHz).

Nice scsi drives you had on that dual PII rig! I bet they weren't quiet!

They were loud, but no worse than the 60mm cooling fans on the rig either. For years I went crazy with storage configs - those 2 15k drives really made the system seem fast compared to the typical like 4800 rpm ide drives at the time.

i eventually moved to a 4 drive raid 0 of 36 western digital raptors, then a 6 drive Matrix raid 0 / 1 array of 300gb WD velociraptors, then onto the Intel SSDs.

Now things are pretty boring - 2x nvme drives and your set.

 

[Motostu]

Going with the CPUs only:

486 DX33, later upgraded to a 486 DX4 100
Pentium 200MMX
Celeron 333a @~520MHz
AMD Duron 600 @900+MHz
AMD Thunderbird 1.4GHz
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
Athlon 64 X2 4200, later upgraded to an X2 5400
Phenom II X4 955 Black edition
Core i7 6700k (current)

I had some other rigs, but these were my main machines.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

I'd actually included rigs which were before I ran DC (SETI), my 1st DC rig was the Celeron 366 @578 (which I think I later dropped to 550 MHz).

Nice scsi drives you had on that dual PII rig! I bet they weren't quiet!

When I first started crunching, the Northwood was well into use as our family computer (I wanna say I was only about 13 or so at the time). From there, we started crunching by using systems like that K6-2 400. We'd take anything from the old systems in our community, just to see if we could get crunching to work on them. Our parents encouraged us without hesitation, even though no doubt most of those systems weren't doing much good! I think at peak we had 4-5 old 300Mhz - 1Ghz machines crunching. Back then systems didn't take all that much power. We didn't know anything then about living in a 70's mobile home with aluminum wiring. It was actually the cost of cooling a home in the swamps of Georgia in the summer that had our parents start realizing we needed to reel back how many systems we had running. But they let us do it for a looong time. I think we were around 16-17 when we retired all the old machines and just used the old P4 Northwood to crunch, since it had also since been replaced by another family computer. When we went to college just before we turned 18, we shut it all down and moved on to laptops.

I guess that was a long winded way of saying by the first time I got into crunching, BOINC had already been out a year or so, so that's been my first and primary cruncher.

 

[salvorhardin]

CPUs:
1998 Pentium II @300MHz
2003 Athlon XP 2500+
2006 Athlon 64 3400+
2009 Core 2 Quad Q9400
2012 Core i7 3770k
2019 Ryzen 7 3800X

GPUs:
1998 ATI Rage Pro
2003 Radeon 9600
2009 Radeon HD 4830
2011Radeon HD 5850
2013 Radeon HD 7950
2015 Radeon R9 390

First one that I started crunching with was the athlon xp. Nowadays I think our main GPU lists are longer than our CPU.

 

[StefanR5R]

So limiting it to your main rig (for those who have large collectives! lol), what's your CPU history?

I am the n00b around here with a DC history of mere 4 years. And due to circumstances, my main rig for general use never was my main rig for DC. In addition, I always had computers with strong CPU and no GPU; and the computers which had GPUs soon developed from ones with strong CPU to ones with comparably little CPUs, to be dedicated to GPU projects only.

CPUs of main computers for CPU projects:
2016 — E5-2690 v4
2017 — E5-2696 v4
2020 — 7452

CPUs of main computers for GPU projects:
2016 — i7-6950X
2017 — i7-7700K

CPU of main computer outside of DC:
E3-1245 v3

 

[Endgame124]

I am the n00b around here with a DC history of mere 4 years. And due to circumstances, my main rig for general use never was my main rig for DC. In addition, I always had computers with strong CPU and no GPU; and the computers which had GPUs soon developed from ones with strong CPU to ones with comparably little CPUs, to be dedicated to GPU projects only.

CPUs of main computers for CPU projects:
2016 — E5-2690 v4
2017 — E5-2696 v4
2020 — 7452

CPUs of main computers for GPU projects:
2016 — i7-6950X
2017 — i7-7700K

CPU of main computer outside of DC:
E3-1245 v3

When you said little CPUs for GPU projects I was expecting i3s or Celerons, 😂

 

[lane42]

Your computers (berkeley.edu)
Some of my computer's from over the years.

 

[Assimilator1]

Ah yea I forgot about that, although mine at least shows a lot of other people's rigs I'd assimilated, ah the good ole days! I don't have a single remote cruncher now...

Btw guys feel free to post your pre-cruncher rigs too

salvorhardin
For many yrs your GPU history matches mine! , let's see if I can remember mine.....

1998 S3 Verge DX (I think) + Orchid Voodoo1
Voodoo 2
TNT2 128 MB
GF2 MX 400
GF3
GF4 Ti4200
Radeon 9700 Pro
Radeon 9800 Pro
2005 X800 GTO2 (1st new card since the MX)
X1950 Pro (1st cruncher, F@H. Died during warrantee!)
HD 4830
HD 4870
HD 5850
HD 7950
HD 7970
2018 RX 580 (1st new card since the 4830!)

I think that's right, I was going to at least confirm the earlier crunchers with my 1st Milkyway benchmark thread, but it's disappeared

 

[TennesseeTony]

I had a fair amount of experience with other peoples computers before I actually acquired my own. specifically a 486 of some sort, and a PII-266.

My first daily driver was a Pentium 4, entry level model, that I overclocked to about 2.8GHz on a sad little AIO water cooler system. I think I had it up to 512MB of RAM before I retired it.

That served me well for many years, until Windows XP came out, then it was kind of, uhm, SLOW.

I had several systems in the interim, but not daily drivers. My DC Project of choice then was United Devices, cancer research sponsored by...Oxford? Cambridge if not Oxford. I built and sold many a system using Athlon 3000-ish chips, at my cost, with the agreement to run United Devices on the spare cycles. My favorite system of that time frame was the AMD Duron 600, that easy-peasy OC'd to 900.

I do not recall any system between my P4, and my i7 Nehalem (1st gen). What an upgrade!!!! It was after the divorce, convincing a spouse of the need to frequently upgrade is hard work. The i7-920 OC'd easily, using my first-ever Noctua cooler. DDR3 was new, so I started with a mere 3GB of RAM, but quickly installed 12 GB using 6 sticks (triple channel) once the DDR3 adoption rate increased.

This system lasted me a good long while, until the PSU died. The used replacement from ebay was from a miner, who included the wrong set of cables, which fried many of my components, most importantly, my dual Intel 120GB SSD's.

I built a rather weak system to replace it, AMD's FX-8350. I realized the error of my ways shortly, and purchased my current daily driver, Intel i7 5820K, with an amazing 6 cores/12 threads. And 16 giggly bits of RAM.

I am TRYING to move to a Ryzen 3900X/5900X (if it ever ships), but there is just sooooooo much to tinker with, programs, settings, stored passwords to remember, etc etc etc etc etc.

 

[Assimilator1]

Man that sucks about the PSU wiring!
I remember eyeing up the 5820ks when you got one , but it would've meant a complete upgrade which I'd not long done, for only a modest gain. Is yours overclocked?

 

[Pokey]

I don't see how you all remember these details.
My first PC was similar to Mark's I think. It only did some word processing. (w/dot matrix printer) I wrote a basic routine that enabled the computer to draw a compound curve on the screen ..........very slowly. First computers at the office were for CAD and 386's. Excruciatingly slow when refreshing images.

My first crunchers came later and ran seti so I took a cue from Lane42 and looked up those details. Awesome idea by the way. Brought back a ton of memories I had forgotten.

Seti computers (Dolly was a dual processor by the way)

Nice trip down memory lane.

 

[lane42]

Like yours pokey, mine only go up to 2004.
What about 1999-2003 ?

 

[Assimilator1]

Go from 2004
Prior to that was SETI classic.

I don't see how you all remember these details.
My first PC was similar to Mark's I think. It only did some word processing. (w/dot matrix printer) I wrote a basic routine that enabled the computer to draw a compound curve on the screen ..........very slowly. First computers at the office were for CAD and 386's. Excruciatingly slow when refreshing images.

My first crunchers came later and ran seti so I took a cue from Lane42 and looked up those details. Awesome idea by the way. Brought back a ton of memories I had forgotten.

Seti computers (Dolly was a dual processor by the way)

Nice trip down memory lane.

Although I do remember very early rigs and recent rigs, a lot of the in between rigs I pieced together from ebay feedback history and an old SETI WU times and collective txt file I compiled.
But it's not perfect as I'd forgotten that I'd put a 1GHz Tualatin Celeron (@1.46 GHz) in my Slot 1 rig after the PIII 650. I thought their was a gap! Going to add that now....hmm, or was that for when it was my 2nd rig?? [edit] Yep, think it was, looking at old threads I went from PIII 650 to XP1500.

 

[Pokey]

Like yours pokey, mine only go up to 2004.
What about 1999-2003 ?

I honestly don't recall. I may not have been doing DC in that time period. What dates were seti classic? My first DC exposure seti was still classic.

 

[Assimilator1]

SETI classic ran from 1999 to about 2005, their was some overlap.

Btw, I found some old threads can be useful too . It's weird which ones are still about, and which ones are missing (like my 1st MW benchmark thread). XP1500 thread still there!

 

[lane42]

Sorry pokey, i thought you started much earlier

SETI@home member since

4 Jan 2004

 

[Ken g6]

My CPUs are similar to @salvorhardin's

CPUs:
1996 Cyrix 6x86 P150+ @120MHz (I started crunching primes in 1997!)
1999 Pentium II @400MHz
2003 Athlon XP 2200+
2009 Core 2 Quad Q9400
2016 Core i3 6100 (Still in my HTPC, but soon replaced in my main rig by...)
2017 Core i7 6700

GPUs: (I didn't have one for many years!)
2010 MSI GTX 460
2014 EVGA GTX 750 Ti (similar results, less power, just went back in my main rig!)
2016 EVGA GTX 1060

I'm a little behind on getting a new GPU, aren't I? But, then, the GPU companies are a little behind on producing them.

 

[Assimilator1]

Your and my current GPU are of similar performance (in games). How many ppd does it do in Folding?

I remember my dad had a Cyrix from a similar time, in my early days of overclocking I tried over clocking that seeing as it had gone well for me Pentium 200MMX, his CPU died that evening!! Luckily I had a spare Pentium 90 floating about until I got him a decent replacement (Pentium 166MMX IIRC).