your least favorite cpu of all time?

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pantsaregood

Senior member
Feb 13, 2011
993
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I think it was the 2.8GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 mobile processor in a Dell laptop. This laptop had about a 45 minute battery life and would run so hot that you couldnt have it on your lap a minute after you turned it on because you would burn yourself. I think my favorite processor is the Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 that I got in my 14" Toshiba E105 laptop. That processor was a beast and still gives me great battery life. I am looking to replace it next year.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

Even Intel acknowledges what a joke Netburst was.
 

darkfoon

Member
Jun 14, 2006
49
0
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Reminiscent of the "Demon Core", I inherited a (dead) computer with a P4 3.2GHz HT Prescott. The motherboard around the CPU socket was warped from heat as a result of the wrong heatsink/fan providing insufficient cooling.
When a friend came along with a motherboard that supported this chip and a need for an upgrade, I gladly gave it to him and helped him install it (with a proper heatsink/fan giving enough cooling). That motherboard never worked right again. Even when we put the old CPU back into it.
 

Emo

Senior member
Oct 9, 1999
349
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I'm showing my age but I've owned almost everything since Commodore 64 and later 386SX20. For some I've had bad luck with every AMD processor I've owned: K6-2 300, XP1600+, Athlon 64 3200+. None of them were even half-way decent overclockers. I skipped P4 altogether. The best overclockers for me have been Core2 Duo E6400 (2.13Ghz) @3.4 and E8400@4.2Ghz.
 

Rvenger

Elite Member <br> Super Moderator <br> Video Cards
Apr 6, 2004
6,283
5
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AMD A6-3650

2 bad CPUs in a row, dual graphics never worked right, it was slow and didn't overclock worth a damn.
 

Tempered81

Diamond Member
Jan 29, 2007
6,374
1
81
celrons, durons, prescott p4, phenom 1, bulldozer, ivy K's, p3's,

compared to:

pentium pros, athlons, bartons, dothans, wolfdales, conroes, nehalem, sandy
 

Red Hawk

Diamond Member
Jan 1, 2011
3,266
169
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I'd have to go with the Athlon 64 3800+ 2.4 GHz currently sitting in my mom's desktop PC, not because the CPU was bad when it came out but just because it's soooooo slow now. I loathe every time I have to use that PC because it's so slow.
 
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borisvodofsky

Diamond Member
Feb 12, 2010
3,606
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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.

Are you kidding me?? E6600 runs miles around anything s939, anything core2 was almost twice as fast as clock for clock vs s939.. :colbert:
 

Magic Carpet

Diamond Member
Oct 2, 2011
3,477
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Are you kidding me?? E6600 runs miles around anything s939, anything core2 was almost twice as fast as clock for clock vs s939.. :colbert:
Wrong. S939 is inferior, but not twice as bad as you make it. Dual vs Dual, speaking of.

I'd have to go with the Athlon 64 3800+ 2.4 GHz currently sitting in my mom's desktop CPU, not because the CPU was bad when it came out but just because it's soooooo slow now. I loathe every time I have to use that PC because it's so slow.
It's slow because you're running modern apps on it. Try to use software that was around the time of its release ;-)

The trick of using old/slow computers is to use the right software. It's not easy, but doable. I have a Pentium 3 1.4 Ghz on SSD and it runs fast for what I do on it :)

As for the subject, I have no favorites... they all have served me some purpose.
 
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Shmee

Memory & Storage, Graphics Cards Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 13, 2008
7,382
2,419
146
probably netburst for me as well. Had a P4 3.4 GHz prescott with HT for a while as my main rig, upgraded to a conroe E6320 as the next build.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
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Are you kidding me?? E6600 runs miles around anything s939, anything core2 was almost twice as fast as clock for clock vs s939.. :colbert:
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.
 

Red Hawk

Diamond Member
Jan 1, 2011
3,266
169
106
It's slow because you're running modern apps on it. Try to use software that was around the time of its release ;-)

The trick of using old/slow computers is to use the right software. It's not easy, but doable. I have a Pentium 3 1.4 Ghz on SSD and it runs fast for what I do on it :)

The only things I ever use on that PC are web browsers, basically. And it's still a Win XP machine. Just using web browsers is frickin' slow, and booting it up takes forever. It does have 3 GB of DDR RAM supplementing it now (came with just 1 GB). Also originally just had a Nvidia 6100 SE IGP, but I upgraded it with a spare Radeon X1300 Pro a while back. Still unbearable performance compared to the quad and dual core CPUs I'm used to now.
 
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Arcanedeath

Platinum Member
Jan 29, 2000
2,822
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I'd say my least favorite CPU was a K6-2 400 with a Fic 503+ that combo was such a pain it was never worth it, and to top it off the Fic 503+ was one of the best super 7 boards, I ended up getting a BX based celron 433 overclocked to 525 or something like that to replace it and was much much happier.
 

theevilsharpie

Platinum Member
Nov 2, 2009
2,322
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I don't think I've ever had a CPU that outright sucked, but I was somewhat disappointed with pre-Phenom Athlon 64 X2's. Sure, the performance was good for their time, but the lack of clock synchronization between cores led to some quirky behavior when running multithreaded applications.
 

Magic Carpet

Diamond Member
Oct 2, 2011
3,477
231
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The only things I ever use on that PC are web browsers, basically. And it's still a Win XP machine. Just using web browsers is frickin' slow, and booting it up takes forever. It does have 3 GB of DDR RAM supplementing it now (came with just 1 GB). Also originally just had a Nvidia 6100 SE IGP, but I upgraded it with a spare Radeon X1300 Pro a while back. Still unbearable performance compared to the quad and dual core CPUs I'm used to now.
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.
 
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ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
145
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Pentium Pro was my favourite. Had a 200Mhz that ran in circles around everythign at the time when using 32bit. Plus the huge package with 2 dies was just awesome at the time.
 

blastingcap

Diamond Member
Sep 16, 2010
6,654
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Mobile Pentium III 1GHz. It wasn't fast even when new, and after 2 years I just couldn't stand it anymore and replaced it with a Pentium M.
 
Jun 2, 2012
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Doesn't sound like the CPU's problem... unless you found a way to overclock it.

no it was the cpu i would always get the same error messages as you you do when you push the cpu too far the cpu would get to hot and crash even after the cpu fan got cleaned i got BSODs and it was very hot i got a minor burn from it once