favorite CPU in all time?

[LoneNinja]

I would probably say my Phenom X4 9850. I know it's gotten more use than any other processor I've ever owned, still use it almost every day. The Athlon X2s I owned when I bought it were plenty fast for most of my needs, but I was heavy into 3ds max at the time and just loved the increase in rendering performance. Best part is that clocked at 3.0Ghz it's still fast enough for anything I do on a computer, would probably still game fine if I bothered to put a dedicated card back into this computer.

 

[Zor Prime]

Another vote for the AMD K6-III+.

Was just cool running a mobile chip on an ATX board and the motherboard was using a beta BIOS. (FIC VA-503+ board)

If I may add a 2nd place CPU it would have to be my 1GHz AMD Athlon (Thunderbird). Did the "pencil trick" and ran at 1.4 GHz. 40% OC. I use a GlobalWin FOP38 heatsink on that thing with the notorious Black Label Delta fan that would burn out motherboard fan headers.

I had the box in the basement. You could go upstairs to the 2nd floor and still hear the fan whirring. I still have it for sentimental value.

 

[Rubycon]

Pentium Pro without a doubt. If you owned one you were the envy of everyone that didn't. And those were mere amateurs. (or 16 bit users!) :biggrin:

 

[JBT]

XP1700+ Thoroughbred B OCed her from 1466 to 2.4Ghz, I bet she would have gone higher but I was running this with some 256MB PC2100 Crucial RAM. My girl friend (now my wife) bought it for me for $49 from SVC.com for my birthday.

 

[VirtualLarry]

It's really hard to say, but I think my PII-300 SL2W8. I still remember the S-spec, those were 450s that were downbinned to 300s because Intel decided to change the heatspreader layout on the "real" 450s. Pretty much every single chip with that S-spec would run at 450 Mhz no problems, thanks to the B21 pin trick.

 

[Hulk]

Cel-Er-On 300A

This is the chip that started it all for many people, myself included.
Pop it in, turn up the FSB from 66.67MHz to 100MHz and go from 300MHz to 450MHz just like that. Some lucky people even got 504MHz out of their, which was crazy then.
The highest factory clocked chip from Intel at the time was the PII at 450MHz and costing 5 times as much. While the PII has more cache it was off die so the 300/450A could actually be faster in some applications.

Forgot to add that this was the first chip to routinely provide a 50% overclock.

 

[dennilfloss]

Barton 2500+@3200+

 

[zCypher]

Wow, crazy I can remember having the 486 DX2/66 also, and I remember the 200MMX, Pentium Pro and those Celery 300A days! Nostalgia!

 

[Rifter]

Wow, I'm going back a bit.
Celeron 366 on the socket 370.

I had a pair of these at 550 on my Abit BP6 with 384mb of ram.
Good ole Alpha Heatsinks...

Same for me, except i only had one chip on a Abit BM6 and it was running at 615Mhz also with 384MB of ram.

 

[SlowSpyder]

It's got to be a toss up for me between my AMD Duron Applebred 1600 and my socket 939 Opteron 160. Both overclocked like mad, the Duron cost me around $50 new and went all the way up to 2.3GHz if I remember correctly. My Opteron happily ran at 2.6GHz (up from 1.8GHz). I never tried for more for some reason, so I probably could have gone even farther if I wanted.

 

[86waterpumper]

Another vote for the AMD K6-III+.

One reason these were so cool, is they weren't that expensive, and at the time I was working on alot of computers for people. Back then alot of people still bought custom built systems instead of big oems. Alot of them were running socket 7 systems with a k62 at say 300 or 350mhz. (nutrend and abs built rigs most of them which later became newegg ) I remember i bought a whole tray of them for upgrades. People were amazed you could drop in a k6III+ and suddenly be at 600mhz or 616 etc. Funny thing was alot of those systems were probably running 4000 rpm 5 1/4" quantum bigfoot drives so they were still crippled LOL.

I loved the k6III and socket 7 so much that I skipped the durons and slot athlons altogether along with the celerons people were getting such good o/c with at the time. I sort of wish I had kept one around to throw linux or something on.

 

[Rebel44]

Q6600

 

[jlee1]

Another vote for the Athlon XP. Esp the Barton cores. I still have a stock 3200+ running fine after seven years.

 

[Seven]

Easily the E6600. Coming from P4 was a real deal. Not much after that.

 

[ocre]

I had so many but my most favorite was...

My opteron 180 (s939)

But i have to say that its hard to say. Especially considering the ph2 720 i had that unlocked and overclocked to 3.6 on stock volts!

 

[nenforcer]

8-bit: MOS Technology 6502 / 6510 (Zilog Z80 close second)
16-bit: Motorola 68K Series
32-bit: AMD Athlon XP x86
64-bit: Digital ALPHA (way ahead of its time)

 

[HarryLui]

Cyrix 686MX. Yes, FPU sucked, but it was 1/3 of the price of a Intel CPU.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Pentium E2160 and Core 2 Quad Q6600. Both of those were simply amazing.

 

[mrjoltcola]

My Athlon64 3400+ - built her in 2004 and she is still running overclocked at 2.4Ghz right now seven years later. You got me thinking, now I want the fastest AGP video card I can buy for her. What would that be? A 3850 or a 4670?

 

[severus]

my favorite will always be my athlon xp 2200+ I think it was the original thoroughbred A core. I had it on an Abit NF7-S 2.0 with a Radeon 9800pro. System lasted me from 2002 until 2007! Unprecedented by todays standards!

 

[drizek]

1.5GHz 400FSB Dothan Pentium M, that I shorted to OC to 2.0GHz/ 533MHz FSB. Still running 6 years later in my laptop.

After that I think it would have to be my Athlon XP 2800+. Nothing too special about it I guess, it was just a good CPU.

The Phenom II X 720 I have now has been a great value, but it doesn't unlock into a quad core and it doesn't OC that much.

 

[StinkyPinky]

386 DX-40

Or my first CPU (rather than my fathers) which was the Pentium 2 350

 

[gevorg]

Athlon 64 3000+

 

[bunnyfubbles]

1. my current 2600K
2. my first more than-one-core-CPU, the Opteron 165
3. my first unlocked CPU, a mobile Barton Athlon XP-M

2600K takes first place, because while I enjoy overclocking, I don't do it for the sake of it as a hobby, I do it for performance, and thus the easier the better. Thus far the 2600K has been one of the easiest overclocking experiences I've ever had, and it nets me arguably the best performing CPU regardless of cost.

as fast as my runner ups were, and as great as they were value wise, they weren't the top dogs of their generations

Also had an E2140 which was fun to achieve a 100% overclock with, however its limited cache ultimately made it a relatively disappointing product (particularly when I had a 4+GHz E8400 and a Q9450 to compare it to) relative to the ones that made my top 3. The E8400 is still being used in an undervolted server capacity while I hate to bother with the E2140 at all, and given that the E8400 was also my first chip beyond 4GHz that would put that CPU above even the E2140.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

I completely forgot I had an Opteron 170. I'm thinking that wins out, even though my Q6600 probably outlasted any performance-based component I ever had.