your least favorite cpu of all time?

[jhu]

I bought a P4@2.53Ghz

/facepalm Why oh why.

Marketing got to you

 

[Ferzerp]

Marketing got to you

I think it was more that I was poor at the time, and the AMD chips cost more (memory could be flawed here). Probably should have spent the extra for the AMD part.

I think that was the last computer I built that I traded performance for price.

 

[QuantumPion]

I believe I had a Cyrix at some point which couldn't run x86 executables in protected mode. That thing was cheap but crap.

 

[hhhd1]

p4 @1.8 ghz, 400 fsb

always overheating, and can not be overclocked even by 1%.

 

[nemesismk2]

I believe I had a Cyrix at some point which couldn't run x86 executables in protected mode. That thing was cheap but crap.

I had some Cyrix processors too such as the:-

cyrix 166mhz and cyrix m2 233mhz

The only good point was they were cheap 🙂

 

[JAG87]

For me, it has to be either the P2 400, or the P3 1Ghz. I can't really draw a line as to which was slower for it's time, but they were both slow as molasses after a year of owning them.

After that, I used an Athlon XP 2500+ Barton core overclocked to 3200+, (amazing chip that lasted a good 3 years and still had steam), then it was X6800, QX6700, QX9650, i7 920, and i7 3770K. All excellent chips (despite the prices), but the one I like the best is the 3770K for both price/performance and power/performance. So far though nothing beats the 920 when it comes to longevity, we'll see how the 3770K fares.

 

[Durvelle27]

pentium III 600MHz

 

[Rvenger]

I think it was more that I was poor at the time, and the AMD chips cost more (memory could be flawed here). Probably should have spent the extra for the AMD part.

I think that was the last computer I built that I traded performance for price.

AMD chips costed less at the time.

 

[Ferzerp]

Are you sure about that? I seem to remember in the P4 era when AMD had the performance crown, they had the price to match.

 

[skipsneeky2]

p4 @1.8 ghz, 400 fsb

always overheating, and can not be overclocked even by 1%.

The williamette chips were always terrible for plenty of people,i am working on a sony vaio today with that same exact chip.

God i hope for my friends sake it can accept a northwood cause at least those are somewhat usable still and i got a few laying around cause that sony is super SLOW just doing anything.

Williamette socket 423 is my second choice for the worst cpus of all time,with a short life span and god awful rambus prices.

 

[kernelc]

My worse CPU was a P4-Celeron w/128 L2 cache @ 2.0 GHz.

The P4 uarch, means that any workload exceeding L2 cache is going to be very slow, and with only 128 KB L2 cache many workloads are slow on this kind of celeron.

For example, with many website that make decent/heavy use of Javascript, it is extremely slow.

Regards.

 

[Smartazz]

I never had a CPU that I hated, but my least favorite was my Pentium 4 3GHz with HT. It was pretty fast at the time, but it generated a lot of heat. I would have gotten an Athlon 64, but I got a really good deal on the Intel chip.

 

[Barfo]

Prescott Pentium 4 @ 3.2 GHZ. It performed well for what I used it for, but it made my room much hotter than the rest of the house, and I mean profusely sweating hotter.

 

[exar333]

Are you sure about that? I seem to remember in the P4 era when AMD had the performance crown, they had the price to match.

That was more when the X2s hit the market. Before that, you could get a $150 A64 Venice 3000+ that you could hit 2.5-2.6ghz pretty easily.

When dual-core came aboard, A64 prices were sky-high until Core was released.

 

[Rvenger]

Yes and I also remember that the original FX chips were over priced. The great thing is that there was always a work around for the pricier AMD chips if you were willing to overclock a little, it was the opteron series 🙂

 

[PingSpike]

Its funny so many people complain about celeron. The 300A was an overclocking classic. But even during that era the brand was completely tainted among PC users I spoke with because the first cacheless celerons were so bad. Releasing those was just a horrible idea. I know the later ones were great until the recent sandybridge based offerings. I bought a 500mhz celeron in that era before I knew what I was doing that was probably a waste of money, but I can't say I hated it. It did the job. I had a K6-233 that I also probably should have skipped but it wasn't to bad. I've avoided other bad products like the Pentium D, Phenom I and unfortunately new AMD offerings are not compelling.

A lot of people's experiences seem to be colored by using dated hardware. I had my own, Compaq all in one boxes rocking 486sx cpus that were just pigs in high school...just way to slow to be running what they were running. But that is more of a cheap school PC kind of thing than a knock against those particular processors.

Some bad ideas and eras I remember:

Slot Pentium IIs and the ill advised copying of this by early Athlons. The chips themselves were fine but the package was just a fucking pain in the ass to physically deal with.

Rambus ram. It cost a fortune and the extra bandwidth was useless for most users compared to cheaper SDRAM. It made AMD a much better choice until those Via chipset boards supporting Intel and SDRAM showed up. This one seemed to have a lot of people fooled because up until then Intel came off as the expensive but do no wrong company.

Expensive RAM era. I think Samsung and others were found guilty of price collusion during this time. It was right around/after rambus. RAM was really expensive but Windows 2000/XP had just come out and boosted base requirements for the OS as well as natural application bloat marching on. I remember tons of ads for machines rocking 3ghz P4s paired with 128MB of ram or less. Lots of people were buying the fastest processor around and getting a turd of a machine because an extra 128MB of ram would have been a much bigger performance improvement than 1ghz of CPU power. 128MB of ram on XP should be illegal, it runs like a pig with one application open and is constantly swapping.

 

[Charlie98]

For someone who wants to relive the good ol days...

In the freebies section I have a pulled P4 Northwood 2.2GHz out of an old (HUGE) Compac lappy... it had the biggest heatsink I've ever seen!

Performance-wise, the worst processor I can recall would be my Dell laptop with a Prescott 740 1.73GHz CPU, if you were doing just one thing, it was fine... but you start to throw some video at it and you were asking for trouble. The miniscule 512GB total RAM didn't help either.

 

[HeXen]

whatever the TRS-80 computer had in it.

 

[TheVrolok]

Pentium Pro 200... Who am I kidding, I loved that thing.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

Much less than that. Often as low as 10%, but rarely above 30%. AMD couldn't touch it, because Intel could also beat them in clocks and power consumption, while forcing down AMD's prices, but it wasn't such a night and day difference.

An upgrade from a 3800+, assuming 2GB or more of DDR2, would likely have been $400-600, when the E6600 was fairly new. It should have been nothing to scoff at, coming from a slow A64 X2, but I can easily see it not being worth the money, especially if Gigantopithecus didn't, or couldn't (RAM speed, mobo), overclock.

You got it. I had my X2 3800+ at 2.5GHz and couldn't get my E6600 over 2.6GHz. I spent $500 to see a ~20% increase in CPU muscle. That was a very poor investment.

 

[nenforcer]

Transmeta Crusoe

Way overhyped and totally underwhelming.

Although its follow up, the Efficeon, seemed decent enough.

 

[Red Hawk]

I have an AMD Athlon 3000+ 1.8 Ghz w/ 1 gig of RAM and it is absolutely useable. Full boots in about 20 seconds on a 12ms Seagate drive. Same OS w/ SP3.

I will agree, however... that working with a slower machine requires experience and know-how. Because lots of todays tech (like Flash, for example) can easily make it unusable. There are tricks to work-around that, though.

Of course, a modern dual-core cpu will get you a tangible user experience improvement, no question about that. But for certain tasks (where CPU isn't constantly pegged at 100%) old computers can still serve a purpose.

2) In my experience, legacy geforce (6+) cards tend to work faster in Windows XP. Geforce 520 is an excellent upgrade for the older computers. In particularly, if one is used for video playback.

I am still using a Geforce 6200, though. Excellent card for office use (costs nothing these days). But only get it, if your CPU is powerful enough (Conroe class and above) for video playback or if video isn't required.

The 1300 Pro should help accelerate stuff like Flash playback, since the legacy Catalyst 10.2 drivers it runs came after Flash got acceleration support...but I'm not sure if the pre-DX10 card supports the feature even with the drivers.

 

[PCTC2]

My work bought me a Pentium 4 1.5GHz S423 w/ 512MB RAMBUS RAM back in the day and upgraded it to 768MB at some point. Now, it was not my least favorite of all time, but I really hated my coworker who tried to overclock it without my knowledge, pushed it so the RAMBUS ran at 818 over the stock 800 and killed the RAMBUS. It was impossible to fund replacement RAMBUS. 😛. Not the CPUs fault.

But I'd have to say my least favorite CPU of all time is my old Pentium 4 HT 3.06 in what would be equivalent to a miniITX chassis (proprietary form-factor though). It was a space-heater and forced my HDD to run at 70C (it sat directly on top of the CPU).

And I have used everything from Pentium 133MHz to now, Atoms included. I liked my old Pentium 133, and I like Atoms for their power envelope and they run Linux just fine. I even liked my old Celeron from the Netburst era. And I haven't disliked any CPU since I bought my E6400 in 2007 (and look at what I still own! I have a few Atom Linux boxes not included in my sig though. An Atom 330 and an Atom D525).

Oh look at you, with your 128MB of ram. Real fancy.

We had Windows 2000 running on 64MB of RAM. For a graphic design class. Running Photoshop 7.

And the web design class was running Dreamweaver/ Flash on these things. They were insanely bad.

I worked at a school back in 2007 that was still running P3 and P4. In 2006 they had received a huge grant and bought Pentium Ds after Core2 had been released and in the wild. After spending days imaging and setting up 600+ Dell Pentium D Optiplexes for the faculty, I was tasked at upgrading all of the P3 and P4 to Windows 2000 and XP over Windows 98/2000 respectively, and scavenging as much RAM as possible to bump all of them to 128MB, though some still stayed at 64MB. It was a PITA. I think the students got 12 "new" Pentium D Optiplexes in the library running XP. In. A. Library. 😛

 

[ShreddedWheat]

Duron 1000mhz overclocked horribly, My duron 700mhz oced to 900 which was ok. Upgraded to Thunderbird 1400 which I loved.

 

[tynopik]

Slot Pentium IIs and the ill advised copying of this by early Athlons. The chips themselves were fine but the package was just a fucking pain in the ass to physically deal with.

say what?

slot 1 was by far the easiest interface to deal with of all time

clip on the heatsink, plug in the cpu, done

very robust, very easy to install and remove