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Another vote for the Celeron 300A @450Mhz. Glorious 50% overclock with no voltage bumps required....all the way back in 1998.

All hail the taped B21 pin!

Lots of water under the bridge since the Slot-A Athlon 600, but that's still my favorite. Got it from a friend with the giant Alpha heatsink permanently mounted and a GoldenFingers Device for overclocking. It was hot, it was loud, and since I was upgrading from a string of K6 and K6-2 processors, I had never seen Source-engine TeamFortress play so smoothly on any machine I owned.

I also got it the summer I was doing my mandatory 6-week "field session" course, so I was living on campus with ethernet traffic at only about 25% of normal volume. I doubt I'll see pings like that ever again.

pikaporeon wrote:

This seems a bit gimmicky, but at the same time, I knew my answer right away - my Socket 939 AMD Athlon64 3800 X2.
It was my third chip that was mine and not my familys, and it was really my first jump into the enthusiast world. I'd carefully selected it based on price and TR reviews, and it stuck with me for ages. I sold it a few years a go to a girl I liked, and I know its still going strong and not really being a bottleneck in the games she's playing.

The fact I overclocked it to 2800 mhz (from base 2ghz) didnt hurt.

My chip before it was a blast too (AMD Athlon 1700+) for the unlocked multiplier, but I was too young to afford toys like a good GPU or a good cooler to go with it.

While I'm far from young anymore I am young in so far as computers go though, I got into them about a year or so before this chip became available.

Even when it did come out and I read about it, I still could not afford it at the time, well I could have if the kids did not eat,lol, but when I did get it, boy oh boy was I a happy camper.

chrissodey wrote:

I would have to choose my old Core 2 Duo E6750. The jump from a Pentium D 945 was amazing. This chip was super easy to overclock and I ran 3.6Ghz (up from 2.66) all day on air. This also helped me get over the 15k mark in 3dmark06.

My youngest son still has this one, very good one, the older son I just upgraded from the aforementioned 3800+.......................he claimed to me that the 3800 was fine, this was after we got him arm2 and of course dayz which he wanted.

When I got finished and he had his new Phenom 2-965.................he certainly noticed the difference, he says, dad, its like a whole new game and I said, I'll bet it is.

Plus I also took that time to explain to him not to say the cpu you have is fine in front of your mother as it makes my life much more difficult,lol, just trust me I said:)

Although I said I7 920 I do remember I had a Celeron 333 that OC'd to 667 on a slocket. I guess if you go for best bang for your buck that would have to be it.

Some of you guys suck at picking a favourite CPU; You can't just list off all the CPU's you liked, you have to pick the ONE you like the MOST.
That is what favourite means.

I could have named the unlocked Athlon XP-M Barton cores too, because they were unusually awesome but I omitted them because I chose the Celeron300A instead.

Chrispy_ wrote:

Some of you guys suck at picking a favourite CPU; You can't just list off all the CPU's you liked, you have to pick the ONE you like the MOST.
That is what favourite means.

I could have named the unlocked Athlon XP-M Barton cores too, because they were unusually awesome but I omitted them because I chose the Celeron300A instead.

He He He, very true, he has a point..........it should be as easy as picking your favorite girlfriend, or should we say wife:)

My first, of course, the IBM 1401. OK, not a chip, and it belonged to the Marine Corps and not me, but it was loaded with a massive 16K of memory - 4 fan fold sheets when dumped to the printer. There were compilers but everyone wrote in Assembler because compiles took hours and assembler coding tricks could produce tighter code. Fun times.

OK, back to the real question. My Intel Q9550 still does everything I need it to do, fast enough. (I am not a gamer.) It has been reliable. It's very quiet with an aftermarket cooler. It was under 200 bucks at Micro Center. Is it perfect? No. If I remember correctly, it had integrated graphics that were bad enough to get me to buy the Radeon 4770. It will be a while before I replace this one - I just don't need anything better.

Hands down the original Duron. I had two Socket A Duron systems with stock 600Mhz CPUs that did 1GHz with the pencil trick, a minor voltage bump and a nice big cooler. Thunderbird who? Palomino what?

SonicSilicon wrote:

I'm amazed the 6502 wasn't mentioned earlier. There's a chip that was used extensively and spawned many other widely used MPs.

That chip and the Z80 are the ones I learned on (when they were new tech). Honorable mention should go to the 8051. Those three (6502, Z80, 8051) are still widely used in millions of embedded applications every year.

Back in the day probably my Athlon T-bird that was eventually replaced with a Barton 2500. Presently it's my 2500K and 4.2ghz. Sweet sweet OC with low voltages and minimal cooling. Just a dreamy chip man.

Cyrix DLC40. My first computer with a floating point unit.
The DX4-100 I took to college.
The Pentium 166 I played Quake on and listened to MP2s.
The Duron600 I bought at launch and overclocked to 800 with the pencil trick.
The Athlon XP that was making the Pentium 4 look bad.
Since then, all Core stuff. Hasn't been the same since AMD stopped being competitive...

If I had to choose, though, the Pentium 200 was Intel's processor back when the Internet was starting to take off. Everyone was getting one. Not a bad overclocker either. I bought a bunch of used ones for a song because of the glut, and had a nice little Linux network going on. That was back before ISPs had warmed up to people having multiple computers on the same internet bill.

Would have to be the Celeron 300a. Damn thing gave you a 50% overclock with a FSB bump, and without breaking a sweat. Honorable mention to the Celeron 366 Socket 370, many of which overlocked to 500mhz just as easily.

Jason181 wrote:

Long live the Celeron 300a! They all overclocked to 450 for less than 1/2 the price of a real 450. In addition, their 128k L2 ran at cpu speed, which was screamin in those days

This one is mine. Also like the Tualatin's and the single core A64's

I suppose I'll be the only one with the AMD A8 3850?

First CPU I built a system around, and it OC's from 2.9 to 3.6 GHz on air, and still only runs at 70 degrees F. Thing is great

PGleo86 wrote:

I suppose I'll be the only one with the AMD A8 3850?

Well, it's a very niche product, dangerously close in price to superior CPU + discrete GPU territory.

However, it turned the laptop world upside down. We can thank Llano for being the catalyst that banished awful IGPs from the world of copmuting. For that I will be forever grateful.

I think it'd have to be a tossup between my old Celeron 333 (which hit 504 MHz overclock on a BX6) or my old Opteron 165, which was my first dualcore CPU, and which hit 3.0 GHz from a stock speed of 1.8 GHz.

Just saw this thread... great idea!

I'd have to give it a tie between two CPUs, the first being the Athlon XP 2400+ that I used to do my Master's Thesis project. I can't remember exactly but I think it had 512MB of RAM (maybe 1 GB?), probably a 40 GB hard drive, and some ancient GeForce variant. I abused the ever-loving crap out of that thing because my thesis project involved hacking the Linux kernel. In the process I caused a rather massive number of kernel panics before I got everything working right, and this thing worked great during virtualization in the first phase, and then later on it ran my whole project bare-metal and I even gave my Thesis presentation using that very machine live. You have to have respect a machine that bears with you through those long nights at 2 AM! All of this was running on Gentoo back when Gentoo was this brand new project that seemed to be the future of Linux

The second one is the one I'm using right now It's my Core 2 E8400 that I overclocked to 3.6Ghz and has been rock-solid for 4.5 years. I got it in 2008 and by the time I retire it as my main machine next year it will have seen me through a whole lot of changes in my life and some really cool software projects. This is the machine that I got when KDE 4.0 was barely out the door and still over a year from being functional. I have to say that paired with a GT-8800, this machine has made using Linux a complete joy for 4.5 years and counting. I'm going to miss it when I upgrade next year... but it will live a long and happy life as a server at my office, although I'll probably get rid of the overclock and the GT-8800 is probably not the best card for a server...

Mine would have to be the C2D E6320 that I'm currently running for lack of money for an upgrade. I've got it overclocked from 1.86 to 2.94 only limited by my RAM speed, and I've heard of people getting it to 3.6.

It's a great chip for the $35 that I got it for.

My pick goes with the times. First it was the Q6600, then my I7 920, and now it's the 2500K that I'm using right now.

Amazing chips and amazing values.

Definitely the Athlon XP 2500+

First computer I build myself, in highschool. Replaced the Athlon 600 I had, and lasted me until I had enough money for a Core 2 Duo!

Also, my first experience overclocking, I think I got it to the equivalent of a 3000+ or 3200+. Fun times had.

It's still kicking too, I'm in the process of getting a media center PC running on it.

Who necro'd the thread?

Anyways another for 300a + 440BX, not only did you get a guaranteed 50% boost to 450 (or more on any board that was worth buying), your ram was boosted the same from 66 to 100. I never heard of or saw one that couldn't do 450 once you removed a crappy motherboard or user error from the equation. ("why won't my 440LX work")

440BX stuck around for awhile, a real workhorse...though intel trying to saddle everyone with rambust let it last that much longer. If you run VMs a lot of configurations use it as a reference, so it will probably be "supported" for a loooooooooooong time

If your program was not a cache hog (iirc most games then were not) your cheap celeron with 1:1 L2 cleaned the clock of the most expensive pentiums.

I`ll go with the Pentium III Coppermine 1.1 GHZ. I have fond memories of that particular PC.

My Favorite was the PPro 200Mhz w/256k cache. I had one from an old dead server at work, my brother turned it into a linux dial-up server (using a Winmodem and NAT, when NAT was still experimental!) that would check every 5 minutes to see if the connection was up. If not, it would redial. Every 8 hours the ISP disconnected us, every 8 hour phone call only cost 5 cents. The power supply fan went bad so we just stuck it in the closet and... forgot about it for over 2 years.

Runners up include the Celeron 300A (Malaysia) running at 450Mhz in a BH6 board, and my 2400XP-M in my Asus A7n8x Deluxe board. The Celeron was retired due to age, the XP-M got hit by lightning the week after I recieved its replacement.


The Pentium Pro holds a special place in my heart due to the sheer longevity of the P6 core. That sucker started at 150Mhz and (with some achitecture tweaks) got all the way up to 1.4Ghz! The little 32bit core that started it all...

AMD athlon 800MHZ slot A :hail:

best cpu i've ever had. now running a i3450, my second intel cpu. i miss the old amd.

The first Pentiums were pretty cool and quite powerful compared to the original x86 cpu's.

The Pentium 3 was powerhouse that lasted me a long, long time and even outdid the Pentium 4 in many areas.

Then the Athlon XP of course on the 939 socket - a real beast at the time and took intel with suprise.

The Athlon X2 was the first dual core cpu and that is pretty damn significant when you look back at it - but strangely enough it wasn't that big of a deal back then since the software at the time didn't really know what to do with all of TWO cores.

The core 2 series I still think is a good solid basic procesor - still viable in a basic win7 build and that's saying something considering it was introduced in 2006.

Today the IVY-bridge with 22nm is just a complete beast - even the humble i3 will be more than enough for 95% of the users out there. Not to mention the 6 core i7.... it's the cpu equvivalent of a bugatti veyron - so fast it's almost pointless but damn is it impressive.