I'm still of the opinion that the Pentium II 300 SL2W8 was better than the 300A. Sure, both would do 450 easily, but the extra L2 cache if the PII really gave it the advantage for multitasking.
Perhaps, but the title talks of legendary
value. Barton and 300A were cheap chips that could be pushed to end up near the high end of performance.
Personally for me, the i3-530 has been an extremely solid value CPU. It was not legendary, because people had bought into the need for quads, but the HT of the Clarkdales and "good enough" performance for gaming (even now) when it was overclocked meant I kept this CPU in my main rig about 2 YEARS longer than I ever intended. It has been an excellent value for me, and I've definitely received my money's worth. I'm currently testing out my Haswell CPU, but the i3-530 really still performs well enough for me to not really be complaining. It's just time for a change.
Barton, while it was awesome, I had so many issues with motherboards those days. I killed a couple ASUS A7N8X-? (E?.. I dunno, something) boards because of BIOS corruption issues. They were a good value, but motherboards weren't robust like they are now and experimentation resulted in dead BIOSes for me, ultimately costing significantly more. I got more life & value out of the S939 chips like the Opty 165.