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Your favorite CPUs?

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Wow, I'm the first to mention the Celeron 300a? I never even had one.

I'd vote for my Pentium III 550e.

Core 2 Duo gets a second vote - they are still decent machines 5 years in. Used to be that 5 years in the computer was better as a door weight.
 
NAC said:
Wow, I'm the first to mention the Celeron 300a? I never even had one.

I'd vote for my Pentium III 550e.

Core 2 Duo gets a second vote - they are still decent machines 5 years in. Used to be that 5 years in the computer was better as a door weight.
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I'd also vote for my 550E Pentium 3 (overclocked to 733) I went from a P2 based Celeron and that was the most noticible CPU upgrade I've ever done.

Honorable mention goes to my Socket 939 4400+ at 2.8ghz and still working fine to this day in a DFI NF4 SLI-DR, when I got it at 2.8 it was faster than the fastest stock cpu money could buy and even after all these years it's still fine as an office machine.
 
My i7-2600k is my favorite CPU at the moment, but the K6 233MHz was probably the best value processor I had. 1/3 the price of a Pentium Pro, yet faster than it in the 16b programs of the day.
 
Q9550. Running at 3.4 GHz slightly below stock voltage for the last 3.5 years without any complaints.
 
Exynos 4210. It's the only processor that is used daily. I have faster processors, but I don't use them daily.
 
My q8200 probably. A 25% overclock and seemingly still quite fast for every game I throw at it, I'm a fan. It's had several gpu's in it since I bought it. 3850, 8800gts 320mb, 4830 512mb and now the 6870.

My old s939 x2 4200+ was a beast for its time. I paired it with the 3850 and man, once source engine went multithreaded it became a gaming machine in my eyes. This was coming from a p4 2.8NW and a radeon 9550se 32mb on a 1680x1050 monitor!
 
ZipSpeed said:
Q9550. Running at 3.4 GHz slightly below stock voltage for the last 3.5 years without any complaints.
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I should have kept my two Gigabyte X48-DS5 boards and my two Q9550 CPUs. I could have been sitting pretty for quite some time on those.

I still have my two GA-P35-DS3R v1.0 boards, which I upgraded from E2140 CPUs to Q9300 CPUs. Unfortunately, these boards don't have much headroom above 400MHz FSB, so my Q9300 CPUs are limited to 3.0Ghz.

I also purchased, between these two, two DFI X48 boards and Q6600 CPUs.

I sold one of the X48-DS5/Q9550 combos for a slight profit on Craigslist, and then I used the other one to build a gaming rig for my BIL with two HD6870 cards.

I could have been rocking 3.6 Q9550 chips for a while. Sigh.

I did also purchase an X6 1045T at MC in a combo with an ASRock 990FX Extreme4 board. That rig was also very nice, especially for DC, but the power consumption was pretty high. So that combo is for sale in my FS thread.
 
Athlon 64 3000 or something.
Opteron 180 or something like that.
E6600 this was when Intel finally began to step up.
Q6600 like the E6600 but with 2 more cores, couldn't ask for much more at that time.
i7 920 wow
FX-8120 this thing was an absolute beast at multitasking and multithreaded apps. My system had never been so responsive. I really miss it.
 
My lowly 2.66GHz Pentium D 805 @ 3.8GHz. At the time, spent $119.99 (sale price for the CPU) and $50 on a Thermalright XP-120 plus LGA775 mounting kit to get the equivalent performance of an Intel Extreme Edition 955 in games - $830 saved!
 
Conroe E6420 @ 3.2 GHz on stock volts. Due to lack of funds it is still in service in my main PC. Wish I had a quad but I plan on waiting until everyone upgrades to haswell then buying a sandy/ivy @ a hopefully sweet price.
 
I'm an AMD fanboy through and through, but in order to answer this question I'm going to judge by longevity; I've had a MacBook with a 2GHz C2D P7350 for going on 4 years, and in addition to the fact that this is the longest I've ever owned any one computer as my main rig, I also still find the CPU plenty capable after having upgraded to an SSD recently.
 
I was quite happy with my overclocked Q6600, having run at a constant 3.5 GHz for years.

I now use a i7 2700k at 1.6-4.0 GHz on a new mainboard, experimenting with a single fan running at 300rpm idle, to try minimize the audible noise from my computer case. Most noise now come from a refridgerator in my kitchen.
 
I really enjoyed my Barton 2500+ that was factory unlocked, as well as my X2 4200+ Toledo that did 2.8GHz easily. Nowadays, I enjoy my i7 2600K because it pretty much eats whatever I run on it.
 
That would have to be my Q6600. Went 4 years as my primary machine and handled everything I threw at it nicely. I've never kept a CPU that long much less still have it still handle everything well. It's not my main box anymore but still going strong as a secondary gaming system paired with a 5870.
 
Intel Celeron G530. The ultimate CPU of the secondth/third world countries and budget setups. Cheap and fast, good enough for any game.
 
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2500k - First processor I've had which makes video and multitrack audio work enjoyable instead of painful.
Last time I had such a big boost in performance was in moving from a 486 SX25 to a Pentium.
 
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