your least favorite cpu of all time?

[Matthiasa]

my least favorite was probably the one I had to design for a class...
If I never have to use machine code again it will be to soon.

Oh wait you meant ones actually purchased?

 

[LoneNinja]

I hated almost every P4 computer I've ever used, and that was back when I had an Athlon 64, they just felt slow to me. So Pentium 4, regardless of model, is my least favorite cpu of all time.

Worst I have ever owned would probably be an Athlon X2 7750 since it simply refused to overclock. Couldn't even get 3.0Ghz stable.

 

[Gikaseixas]

My top 2

1 - Pentium 4 3.0 HT, SUCKED BAD
2 - AMD Athlon XP 3200, would not overclock more than 100 mhz, had no headroom at all and was expensive at launch.

 

[drizek]

2 - AMD Athlon XP 3200, would not overclock more than 100 mhz, had no headroom at all and was expensive at launch.

The whole idea with Barton was that you would buy the 2500+ and OC it to a 3200+. If you did that, you got a nice chip for under a hundred dollars. I don't think the higher speed chips had much extra OCing headroom comapred to the 2500.

My 2800 wouldn't go past 3200+ speeds using just FSB OCing.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Celeron 300A the first cpu that blew me away because of it's OC ability.

That was your least favourite CPU!?

 

[jiffylube1024]

My least favourite:
-Pentium 4 1.4 GHz (Williamette - Socket 423). Didn't buy it when it came out, thank god - I got it second hand for much less $$. That CPU pretty much equaled a 1 GHz Coppermine Pentium 3. It also used RDRAM, which was expensive, hot, and not really better than DDR.

Other notable "bad" CPU's I've owned/dealt with in the past:
-AMD Athlon XP "Thoroughbred rev. A" 2000+ CPU
>>> it couldn't overclock for sh*t even though it was the 130nm die shrink of the Original Athlon XP. I remember people started jokingly calling them "thoroughbad". They fixed the clockspeed/heat issues with T-Bred rev. B at least.

-Pretty much the entire Intel Pentium 4 6xx series. The infamous "Prescott" chips. I fixed a few computers people had bought with these chips in them. They were vastly inferior to competing Athlon64 and X2 chips at the time.
-The original AMD Phenom series. Low clockspeeds and slower than Core 2 Quads that came out way earlier.

 

[Tsavo]

I had a K6-233 that seemed like Bruce Banner next to my Hulk Pentium Pro's.

 

[DigDog]

Pentium 100Mz

Before we had a Pentium 33Mhz, and i could play mechwarrior fine. but it was cpu-locked, and the 100Mhz made it go so fast it was unplayable.
and it was my favourite game

of course all of this is prehistory

 

[slag]

Had a cacheless Celeron in a work system, that sucked. Pentium I MMX was faster, lol.

I guess that's about it.

Not true. A pentium 233 was not as fast as a cacheless celeron 266. It just wasn't so.
http://www.reocities.com/siliconvalley/3686/celeron.html
"Not having the L2 cache slows the Celeron by about 15% in standard Windows desktop applications such as Word, Excel, etc. However, the Floating-Point Unit (FPU) is exactly the same as the Pentium II. This is the reason the Celeron is marginally faster than a P55C-233 MMX and slower than K6-266 in Windows standard office performance."

 

[slag]

Hmm you must be rather young. There were some great celerons back in the day.

Ditto. There are a lot of celeron haters out there who just didn't have a clue. Some celerons weren't great, but there were several that were great overclockers and ran games extremely well.

 

[john3850]

My P-3 slot 1 800 had to be the worst oc chip I ever owned.
My firsrt p-3 500 would oc to 158x5 which was the maxium my memory went.

 

[Cerb]

Ditto. There are a lot of celeron haters out there who just didn't have a clue. Some celerons weren't great, but there were several that were great overclockers and ran games extremely well.

The problem is that like the P4s with SDR SDAM, benchmarks didn't capture how slow starting anything was, or trying to multitask. In fact, we didn't get good benchmarks to measure such things until the Athlon64 X2 was aging. It also wasn't until they were old history that we started seeing minimum FPS measurements for games.

IMO, this is the most fair representation of them:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/237/7

Medocino (300A) and up were rather good chips. While the early P4 ones did kind of suck, it was that big vendors almost always paired them with the 845 that really got them their abysmal reputation. There weren't so bad with 865, 875, 848, etc., but I imagine Intel was offering very good prices on the chipsets nobody in their right mind would want.

Oh, another random blast from the past:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/rise-mp6.html

 

[nemesismk2]

Another vote for Cyrix. I can't remember which model I had.

I had my fair share of Cyrix cpus such as the Cyrix 166, Cyrix II 233 and Cyrix II 333. Then went onto my AMD crusade buying nothing but AMD cpus lol.

 

[jlee1]

Any older Celeron lol

 

[sm625]

New entry: Xeon X3430. I'm basically stuck with it because I do not want to spend $200 on a replacement server board, nor do I want to spend over $100 on boards that are obsolete and / or have questionable cpu support. (On newegg I could find not one single comment in the 1156 motherboard review section about how well these overclock.) I'm not even usre what I'm going to do with the chip now. I replaced it with a llano. This cpu will rarely if ever use more than one thread. The person who bought it clearly overbought.

 

[gmaster456]

Hmm you must be rather young. There were some great celerons back in the day.

I was referring to the pentium 4 era celerons. Yes I agree, some of them were decent. maybe I should have been more specific.

 

[soccerballtux]

Had a cacheless Celeron in a work system

I am truly sorry

 

[soccerballtux]

I still have a Trash-80. It was awesome, way back when.

I'm going to say the Convington Celeron. Willamette and Northwood were bad, especially paired with SDR SDRAM, but nothing came close to the craptasticness of the Celerons before Medocino.

The K6-II never went to 600MHz. According to Wikipedia, the K6-III didn't even make it that high. I was rather fond of my K6-II 350.

400mhz. I think I confused the 6 in there somewhere.

 

[blackphoenix]

Oh yea, don't get me started on all the Celerons with 128mb of ram running xp we had to use in high school

Senior year of high school (1998) our school upgraded their computer labs.
Brand new Gateway PII 300s and some 266s, I think they had 128mb of ram.

The worse part, they were running Windows 3.11 and Novell...

 

[IlllI]

Cyrix MediaGX

or Transmeta Crusoe

both were interesting concepts but ultimately failed due to anemic performance

 

[ther00kie16]

Senior year of high school (1998) our school upgraded their computer labs.
Brand new Gateway PII 300s and some 266s, I think they had 128mb of ram.

The worse part, they were running Windows 3.11 and Novell...

Interesting, I take that back. I remember even further back. In elementary school (mid 90s), we had macs that were okay then. But in the late 90s in middle school, some of those Mac IIs were still around and were impossible to use.

 

[xylem]

P4 Celerons (pre-Prescott).. the ones with 128K cache. That line of CPUs was a cruel, cruel joke at the expense of consumers, since Intel could have chosen to cut the cache to 256K and provided adequate performance. Of course, the abysmally-lacking amounts of RAM with which they were almost always paired (128MB?) in pre-built systems was icing on the cake.

 

[wahdangun]

it was Pentium D, that think is useless piece crap, it even idle @ 65 degree Celsius, and always throttling.

 

[nenforcer]

We all know why this thread was created.

 

[amenx]

It definitely wasn't my least favorite CPU (that ignobility is reserved for any P4 era Celeron I had the displeasure of using), my most disappointing purchase was an E6600. Coming from a socket 939 X2 3800+, it totally was not worth the cost.

I think there are many people who buy superior CPUs to what they had before and cant tell the difference depending on that they do. But I think the vast majority of those who went from sckt 939 to C2D were quite satisfied with their decision.