Favourite Cpu of all times

[LoneWolf15]

I've got three:
*My 486DX with the Turbo button. I loved playing the DOS version of Megaman with the Turbo button on.

I remember playing that. The system I ran it on was so old, I had a CGA monitor at the time.

Megaman didn't look so good in only four colors.

[luisnhamue]

I posted that mines was d Pentium dual core E2160, but I just bought I new rig, last saturday.
I definitively believe that my new Core i5 2500K will overwrite that great memories dat I have. lol

[Klanky]

I'd have to say my first real computer, a C64 that my Grandfather gave me (he was a huge tech nut in the 80s and 90s) in the early 90s. I played that thing like crazy - he had so many games for it.

And the CPU from my first build, AMD Athlon 1800, on a Soyo K7V Dragon Plus board...that board was awesome back then....

[Rakhmaninov3]

Probably my AthlonXP 2100+ that I got when it was the top of the top for a grad present back in 2002. That thing was badass at the time. Couldn't contain the epeen.

I like my current Q6600 also just because my computer still never slows down no matter what I'm doing on it and I can still play decent-looking games even though it's nearly 4 years old now. Hoping Old Faithful keeps chugging for awhile; I think my next upgrade (whenever that happens) will be to an SSD cuz I hear that's some of the best upgrade bang/buck in terms of everyday perf.

[Nutmeg]

I used to like picking apart tractor feed paper. Perforated edges are just made to pulled apart by kids. The edges made good hamster bedding too.

[P4Power]

Seems like I am going to be the only person listing a Pentium 4 as my favorite. It was 1.60GHz Pentium 4 with the Willamette core. I picked this one because it brought me in to world of geekdom. It made me want to learn about computers rather than just use them and the rest is history.

Runner ups:
200MHz Pentium Pro 512KB L2: It was my SmoothWall firewall for years until I moved to an Atom unit for noise reasons. Never EVER needed a reboot.
1.50GHz Itanium 2 Madison-6M: my truly special computer.
3.40C GHz Pentium 4 HT Northwood: It powered my main gaming machine until I finally built my Q6600 @ 3.0 machine.
2.166GHz Core Duo T2600: My very first dual-core processor, in my notebook no less.
1.60GHz Atom HT 230: It powered the smallest computer I ever built. Contrary to what most people believe, I think it had "enough" power for what it was targeted at.
3.50GHz Core 2 Duo E8700: Rare and according to Intel, never existed.

[Walkintarget]

I was going to say my current Q6700@3.5ghz, then thought about my 2500k thats on its way from Newgg, but I eventually gave the nod to the Celeron 300a since I had to do the electrical tape on the B21 pin on the SECC to achieve the overclock. These days where you bump a multi or change FSB have us spoiled.

[k00k]

No love for AMD Tbirds around here? Hell, they consumed lots of power and required screaming (literally, at least for 60mm fans ) cooling once past 1GHz, but boy, were they great. A lead pencil ensured even more crazy fun. Ran mine at 1.2GHz (from 1Ghz) with a delta fan-equipped Globalwin HSF, and it was noisy! That was my first machine after graduating from a Pentium MMX 166 (which I ran at 188Mhz, 200 was a too far a shot)

Sanity returned after I picked up an Athlon XP 1800+ Thoroughbred paired with a larger Thermalright, which, of course, I overclocked too to 2400+ levels (2.0GHz, I think) on an Asus nForce2 board and some value DDR333 sticks.

Those were good times. Dabbled with an Athlon64 x2 5000+ BE for a while, but I never got the most out of that, not much time for tweaking anymore :c My current Phenom II 720BE will probably go down as one of my faves after it leaves my main machine.

[End User]

68030

[Fighterpilot]

The original Conroe E6600.
It overclocked like a champ,ran cool and lasted 4 years at 3.3GHz.
Pretty much the biggest comeback CPU since Lazarus played fullback for Jerusalem.

[paulWTAMU]

This seems a bit gimmicky, but at the same time, I knew my answer right away - my Socket 939 AMD Athlon64 3800 X2.

ditto. Granted I haven't been doing this as long as most of ya'll. But that chip replaced an old single core AMD 3200+ that I'd paid bupkiss for and MAN what a difference. I only upgraded like last year.

[Flatland_Spider]

AMD Duron 1.3

It was part of the first build I did with my own money back in 2001. That build was my main desktop until a couple of years ago. It ran XP really well with 1.5GB of RAM, but it took days to compile bigger ports under FreeBSD. It would probably be still kicking if it weren't for the crappy RocketRAID IDE controller in it. Right now, it's sitting by my desk waiting for me to resurrect it. This reminds me I need to pull the data off of that box.

AMD K6-2

This was the CPU I had before the Duron. It was decent chip at that time, but by 2001 it needed to be replaced, which happened after it died on me.

[Waco]

I have a tie between my Opteron 165 and my Q6600. Close runner-up is my 1700+ DLT3C that would do 2.4 GHz with a 17x multiplier (cut the bridges for that).

The 165 I delidded and modified a Thermalright XP-120 to fit it. Never had such a cool-running chip especially after that mod.

The Q6600 ran at 3.2 GHz for most of it's life until I put it under water where I pushed it to 3.5 GHz. It beat the pants off of everything at the time...till my board couldn't handle the power draw and blew a hole through itself. Poor DFI board. I still loved that CPU though.

[Trellot]

I'm in the minority group that has seen and lived through those horrid days!

You'd be astounded by how much of the financial world still relies on tractor-feed line-printed green-bar.

I still have a box of tractor-feed paper. It doesn't have any green bars on it though...

I can relate to that having worked at First American Title at one time...some things never change.

~ Trellot

[ALiLPinkMonster]

The first pc I built (and the only one that was to be mine) had an Intel P4-670. I had a water cooler on it with a massive radiator. Overclocked that mother to about 4.5 GHz stable. Also had a Radeon x1950 pro and 2GB of memory. Built it in an old ass case that was enormous. I had my dad drill holes so that I could mount the radiator inside. Played BF2 like nobody's business. I miss that monstrosity lol.

[Chaseme]

I still have a soft spot for my 1Ghz Athlon Slot A. I keep it on my desk under my monitor to this day. Love/hate relationshop with my Tbird with the pencil trick too, hated the raised design though as I broke more than 1 taking on/off heatsinks.

Found a an invoice 2 days ago for my K6-II 450Mhz for $249. Back then I was hunting down all kinds of K6 CPUs and have most in a display case now, kinda lame I know...was a fanboy back in the day.

[mac_h8r1]

Hands down for me was the P4 2.4C Ghz (OMG HyperThreading!!). OC'ed the hell out of it with PC4000 DDR on the DFI LanParty875P. Absolutely rock solid for me. It took me through college and then some.

[ImSpartacus]

G0 Q6600 The first affordable quad core CPU. That 65nm workhorse stayed relevant a lot longer than it should've just because of those four cores.

[DLHM]

486DX4/120

I started with
Tandy TRS-80 8080
Hyundai Super 286AT with 8/12Mhz Turbo button
Packard Bell 486sx/25
486DX2/66
486DX4/120
(during the next few years I found out about women and don't remember what Processors I had..)

Now I have Core I7-950 @ 3.07 -8GB RAM -G-Force GTX460- 120 GB SSD

[crshbndct]

Hey
I saw this thread after getting a link to it and i had to Sign up to post some of mine:

Cyrix 5x86 100MHz.
An utter piece of crap. slower than pretty much every comparable CPU out at the time. But it got me into PC's and I have been hooked ever since.
From there I upgraded to a very very late model 300a. Fastest I got it to run was 612mhz at some subzero temp. I loved that processor, and it still runs at 450mhz as my pfsense box with a 4gb hdd and 256mb ram. its awesome.
edit: 612mhz, not 618

[ClickClick5]

i486, 33mhz turbo.

Loooooooved that proc.

[pedro]

Mine's very boring, but the Intel E8200 Core 2 Duo running @ 2.66 GHz was, and still is, sufficient for my needs. It's the benchmark. It was the first CPU I got where I thought, whoa, this thing is *way* faster than what I had previously. Still does the biz today. Great CPU.

[johnrreagan]

Gack! You kids are young.

I wrote assembly code for a CDC6500 on punch cards back in the late 70s. My favorite was the VAX of course as my first real computer job was with DEC. The first VAX-11/780 I used had 1MB of RAM and the "CPU" was at least 10 circuit boards about 20" by 15" each. You can still find old photos online and docs over at bitsavers.org.

I also built a Heathkit H89 with 3 5.25" floppy disks and the 2 optional 8" floppies as well.

And yes, I've seen paper fly out a DEC LP27 and LP29 line printer with Fortran carriage control digits in column 1.

[travbrad]

Athlon 64 X2 3800+ probably.

The transition to dual-cores was a huge step forward in general system responsiveness and multi-tasking. It wasn't an amazing overclocker, but it didn't need to be, because it already had incredible performance at stock speeds.

At launch, the $350 AMD part outperformed Intel's $850 CPU in most applications (including gaming). That's something unprecedented and I doubt we'll ever see again. It's one thing to make a really fast CPU, it's quite another to deliver it at a fraction of the competitor's cost.

I have some fond memories of older CPUs (386, 400mhz celeron, etc), since that's how I got started, but I also have memories of them being really slow.

[bcronce]

Celeron 300a. Had a 100mhz bus, but the BX chipset was crazy stable and could OC to 133mhz. Insta 450mhz cpu when they were expensive. Also, it had on-die cache, even though less, so many times i twas faster than the 450mhz sibling that had more, but 1/2 speed off-die L2.

[srg86]

Wow I love these threads (give me old procs over a tablet or smartphone anyday!)

I'm assuming that you don't have to have owned them to make it on the list, but here's my picks:

Zilog Z80: Very capable little processor, started playing around with them, nicer than the 6502 imho.
Motorola 68030: A personal favorite, I had one of these as an expansion to my Amiga, mine ran at 50MHz and was noticeably faster.
Intel 80386: A land mark CPU, at least in the PC space. The first x86 CPU in which is was possible to move away from the horrid segmentation and into a relatively clean 32-bit paged environment. Sadly the 386 was obsolete by the time proper operating systems were available for that environment.
Motorola 68060: The first processor I really wanted, but could never afford, the top end processor in Amiga accelerators at the time. I now have one in my current A1200 (again at 50MHz) and it feels very fast.
Alpha 21264: Never owned one of course but in its day it was the one to beat afaik. I do have a 21164PC to play around with though.
Athlon Classic: The first CPU to seriously content with Intel's offerings in a decisive way, with the competition started here, we're paying decent prices for Intel CPUs here, a landmark moment.
Athlon64: Another landmark, pushing PCs to 64-bits.

If I had to pick a favorite, it would be the Athlon Classic.

BTW Interesting that the Cyrix 6x86 hadn't been mentioned, Red Hill rave about it.

[Starfalcon]

Celeron 300a. Had a 100mhz bus, but the BX chipset was crazy stable and could OC to 133mhz. Insta 450mhz cpu when they were expensive. Also, it had on-die cache, even though less, so many times i twas faster than the 450mhz sibling that had more, but 1/2 speed off-die L2.

Actually the 300A had a 66 mhz bus and Oced to 100 FSB.

[Captain Ned]

Actually the 300A had a 66 mhz bus and Oced to 100 FSB.

And could be tweaked a bit faster with the proper board, like an Asus BH6. Running a 300A at 504MHz was everyone's dream back then.

[JustAnEngineer]

While everyone else was excited about overclocking the Celery 300A, I bought one of the first Slot-A Athlon 600 systems on the market.

[just brew it!]

While everyone else was excited about overclocking the Celery 300A, I bought one of the first Slot-A Athlon 600 systems on the market.

Yeah, I built two Slot A systems. First one was my primary desktop for a couple of years until the capacitors on the mobo exploded; after a recap job it was resurrected as my home file server, where it served ably until just a couple of years ago. It could've kept going, but all the disk drives needed replacing (it had a pile of small-ish PATA drives in it), and the mobo had no SATA ports, so I decided it was time for an upgrade. The other Slot A system was my oldest daughter's computer all through high school and most of college.

I also should've given honorable mention to the K6-III+. Not many people even knew about this chip, since it was ostensibly only for the mobile market. A few of them trickled into the DIY channel, and some desktop Super 7 boards could use them if you flashed a beta/hacked BIOS (limting factor was typically whether the mobo's VCore regulators could be set low enough). They were essentially a die-shrunk K6-III, and were K6-III finally "done right" -- ran really cool (I *accidentally* discovered that they ran just fine fanless... heh), and overclocked quite well. Prior to the Slot A system, my home desktop was an overclocked K6-III+.