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Your fave/least fave CPU range/architecture in history
- Thread starter Pawnless Endgame
- Start date
Best:
Intel Core.
They're all great, even the cheap ones.
Scorpion/Krait.
The first 1GHz ARMv7 compatible chip. Beat ARMs own cortex A8/A9 with a 128 bit wide SIMD, partial OoO and fully pipelined FPU. This enabled stuff like smooth 360/480p flash playback when others struggled.
Later 40nm versions can be overclocked to 2Ghz! Made Atom look like poo too.
Worst:
Cyrix MediaGX. Cheap but it was slow and unreliable.
Intel Pentium 4 (NetBurst) Terrible...
Intel Core.
They're all great, even the cheap ones.
Scorpion/Krait.
The first 1GHz ARMv7 compatible chip. Beat ARMs own cortex A8/A9 with a 128 bit wide SIMD, partial OoO and fully pipelined FPU. This enabled stuff like smooth 360/480p flash playback when others struggled.
Later 40nm versions can be overclocked to 2Ghz! Made Atom look like poo too.
Worst:
Cyrix MediaGX. Cheap but it was slow and unreliable.
Intel Pentium 4 (NetBurst) Terrible...
Socket A Athlon XP 3200+, star performer for the price and went right into my motherboard as an upgrade to a Duron 700MHz (clocked to 1.2GHz iirc). Lasted ages
Soldato
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Yea i don't get it either. Going by what he has i don't think hes even owned an Athlon XP or a Sandybridge cpu lol. I certainly have very good memories of my XPs.
Favourite CPU: Celeron Mendicino. Brought overclocking to the masses, my £65 Celeron 300A when overclocked was faster than the quickest stock cpu you could buy (P2 450) at a fraction of the cost.
Least favourite CPU: Socket 7 Cyrix. I had a PR200+, actual clock speed 150mhz, actual gaming performance, roughly P133
. Ran very hot and eventually burnt out... probably not helped by a cpu fan that stopped and my early overclocking exploits.
I'll also introduce a new category:
The ones that got away: This section is for cpus that you wish you'd been in on the act for. For me, there are two clear standout candidates:
1) Q6600. Was available for around £110 fairly soon after release, absolute bargain for quadcore, the price actually ROSE up to around £150-160 after that and it took new architecture to finally kill it off. I missed out because I went for a more budget option, the E4300. Anyone who picked up one of these in 2007 was laughing for years, basically setting the scene for an upgrade to.....
2) 2500K. Yep another very good value chip, seems to have been priced around £160 for ever, and still hasn't been ousted some 18 months later in terms of better performance for less money. I missed the boat on this one as well because I upgraded to I5-750 in 2009 and couldn't justify the move to SB.
edit: I'm actually still on my I5-750... waiting for something outstanding to crop up but the cpu market really seems to have stagnated of late. I need something groundbreaking to come along that blows Ivybridge out of the water in the sub-£200 market.
Least favourite CPU: Socket 7 Cyrix. I had a PR200+, actual clock speed 150mhz, actual gaming performance, roughly P133
. Ran very hot and eventually burnt out... probably not helped by a cpu fan that stopped and my early overclocking exploits.I'll also introduce a new category:
The ones that got away: This section is for cpus that you wish you'd been in on the act for. For me, there are two clear standout candidates:
1) Q6600. Was available for around £110 fairly soon after release, absolute bargain for quadcore, the price actually ROSE up to around £150-160 after that and it took new architecture to finally kill it off. I missed out because I went for a more budget option, the E4300. Anyone who picked up one of these in 2007 was laughing for years, basically setting the scene for an upgrade to.....
2) 2500K. Yep another very good value chip, seems to have been priced around £160 for ever, and still hasn't been ousted some 18 months later in terms of better performance for less money. I missed the boat on this one as well because I upgraded to I5-750 in 2009 and couldn't justify the move to SB.
edit: I'm actually still on my I5-750... waiting for something outstanding to crop up but the cpu market really seems to have stagnated of late. I need something groundbreaking to come along that blows Ivybridge out of the water in the sub-£200 market.
Last edited:
Caporegime
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AMD Barton 2500+
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fav has to be my trusty phenom 555. basically for the same reasons mentioned above.
runner up probably has to be the 850mhz slot A athlon (the big cartlidge ones) sitting in the attic. was stripped out of a working packard bell machine only a couple of years ago. When i first got that machine, I wiped it and put a fresh install of XP on it and i was amazed that from pressing the power switch to fully usable desktop was ~10 secs. From a 1998 PC. Solid state drives, scratch that, DVD's weren't even heard of back then. Even my current desktop (with an ssd) wouldnt boot from cold that quickly after a fresh install. When the time came to get rid of it, i had to keep that little black box of voodoo magic.
least fav- non tbh. perhaps the prescott p4 in rarely used family desktop should get an honourable mention, but even that mostly gets the job its required to do done fairly well.
runner up probably has to be the 850mhz slot A athlon (the big cartlidge ones) sitting in the attic. was stripped out of a working packard bell machine only a couple of years ago. When i first got that machine, I wiped it and put a fresh install of XP on it and i was amazed that from pressing the power switch to fully usable desktop was ~10 secs. From a 1998 PC. Solid state drives, scratch that, DVD's weren't even heard of back then. Even my current desktop (with an ssd) wouldnt boot from cold that quickly after a fresh install. When the time came to get rid of it, i had to keep that little black box of voodoo magic.
least fav- non tbh. perhaps the prescott p4 in rarely used family desktop should get an honourable mention, but even that mostly gets the job its required to do done fairly well.
Soldato
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You're two years out
Pretty sure i didn't get an availability on 850Mhz Slot As until mid to late 2000, i think the first Athlons came about in 99 as well.
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best - Athlon XP-M 2500+ (great fun overclocking it)
Worst - Athlon64 3500+ (probably due to my horrible MSI motherboard choices)
Worst - Athlon64 3500+ (probably due to my horrible MSI motherboard choices)
intel p120 clocked to 166 with a abit mobo with a buss speed of 83x2
i forgot my Pentium 166 with mmx, first cpu I ever overclocked before I even knew what I was doing, got it 200 MHz but wouldn't do 233. cut my teeth on that with 3d rendering on lightwave 5.6m 95/NT dual boot, had an ati fire pro (3dlabs) and a 3dfx board, so I suppose it has special memory's!
Last edited:
Soldato
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The one that got away
Socket 775 also - E6600, Q6600 and the older 805D
Some brilliant chips with masses of overclocking potential. I did have my hand in overclocking and tweaking them all, But never owned one. So never managed to give them the time they deserved, Never got max potential out of any of them.
Unfortunately when building for other people, You dont really push boundaries too far. Where as when its for yourself, You dont mind the odd fried chip
Socket 775 also - E6600, Q6600 and the older 805D
Some brilliant chips with masses of overclocking potential. I did have my hand in overclocking and tweaking them all, But never owned one. So never managed to give them the time they deserved, Never got max potential out of any of them.
Unfortunately when building for other people, You dont really push boundaries too far. Where as when its for yourself, You dont mind the odd fried chip
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You're two years out
oo, err maybe it was 1999 then. Its was definitely 199-something (I remember using it 1999 NYE). It originally ran win98. perhaps thats whats getting me muddled up
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Scorpion/Krait.
The first 1GHz ARMv7 compatible chip. Beat ARMs own cortex A8/A9 with a 128 bit wide SIMD, partial OoO and fully pipelined FPU. This enabled stuff like smooth 360/480p flash playback when others struggled.
Later 40nm versions can be overclocked to 2Ghz! Made Atom look like poo too.
Scorpion is faster than A8, but quite a bit slower than A9. Check out the benchmarks, eg the 1.2ghz Scorpion vs dual core A9 1.2ghz (eg, HTC Sensation VS Galaxy S2). Unfortunately it's still being used today too, even though it's based on a very old chip ¬_¬
I used to have a Desire Z when it was fairly new though. The single core Scorpion in that flew! Overclocked it to 1.6ghz at times xD (from 800mhz)
Krait is based on A15, and it's a different kettle of fish all together. We're yet to see how fast it is compared to a real A15
But hats off for mentioning a mobile processor! I'm amazed and very happy keeping up to date with mobile processors, too
My favourite is probably Sandy Bridge too (even though I've never owned one). Power usage was insane, single threaded performance insane too! Per mhz performance was just such a great jump from the first gen i5/i7 range.
I really dislike the 45nm Q8xxx/Q9xxx range. Intel seemed to go out of their way to make the cheaper ones overclock like poo, so you had to spend a lot of money to get a decent one. I had an E7500 at the time, and it was cheaper to buy a new mobo and get a cheap i5 750 than a decent Q9xxx...
Most notable chips for me have been the Conroe series E chips, the 6600 in particular. The E2140 I got for my brother ran on a 100% OC, rock solid stable. The E8400s were also well worthy of a mention.
X3 720 was a great chip too, unlocked to a quad and clocked up to 3.6 too.
The i7 2660s in my iMac is the fastest Intel CPU I've had to date, but like all iMacs on mechanical storage it just feels sluggish. SSD on the horizon methinks...
X3 720 was a great chip too, unlocked to a quad and clocked up to 3.6 too.
The i7 2660s in my iMac is the fastest Intel CPU I've had to date, but like all iMacs on mechanical storage it just feels sluggish. SSD on the horizon methinks...