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20 years ago today....

I remember seeing a billboard in London advertising that AMD had broken the 1GHz barrier and thinking at the time "wow"!

I bought my first PC in 2000, a Pentium III from PC World, it was terrible.

So in 2001 I opened an account with OCUK and bought an Abit NF-2 mobo and Athlon Thunderbird and a copper heatsink where the fins were skived (or scarfed) from the block so it was one solid piece of copper. (If you want to read more, google scarfing).
Then followed an Athlon XP, then a Thoroughbred and then finally 2 x Barton 2500+ mobile chips which IIRC overclocked from 1.8 to 2.2/2.3 GHz and these chips were just great.
I was flipping though CPUs as I was building PCs for friends using some of my parts while not losing too much money in the process (and hanging onto the NF-2 for some time).

I then missed out on A64 entirely as I had jumped over to Intel when Core2Duo was released and stayed with Intel for many years, throughout a couple of C2D chips, then various quad cores and finally (one of my best ever purchases) my 2500K which is still running Win10 perfectly in my HTPC.

In 2017 I jumped back to AMD with an ASUS CH-6 mobo and 1800X, then replaced with a 3900X which I then sold a couple of months back when I fitted a 5800X3D.
I've really appreciated being able to do 3 significant CPU upgrades with the same mobo. One reason for wanting to stay with it for now is that when I first got the 1800x I bought the 8-Pack approved Teamgroup 3600 RAM (now 32GB). This felt like a good (and rare) piece of foresight when I was finally able to run the RAM at full speed when I got the 3900X.
 
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Good trip down memory lane, I remember my good old Cyrix processor a little time before this came out.
I think that was my first CPU, a Cyrix 686 120. Ah those were the days. You knew it was a beefy CPU as the (tiny) heatsink had a (tiny) fan on it!

I remember seeing a billboard in London advertising that AMD had broken the 1GHz barrier and thinking at the time "wow"!
I'm sure I remember rumours at the time that CPUs running at 1GHz would cause men to go sterile.
 
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