What was your most significant CPU upgrade?

[Hulk]

I'm pretty sure mine was from a Pentium 90 to a Celeron 300a O/C to 450. I remember Corel Draw 3 going from almost unusable to almost snappy. The Pentium 90 was a Gateway system I bought. The Celeron rig was one of the first I built using that Abit motherboard that everyone was using. Was it the BX100?

Another pretty big jump was from that Celeron 300a to a PIII 850.

PIV 3.06 (Northwood) to C2D O/C to 3.2GHz was also a big performance upgrade. And that rig to a 2500k was another big jump. The 2500k to my current 4770k was definitely a noticeable jump but more incremental.

But none of them compare to the 5x increase in performance from that P90 to the 300a.

 

[Shmee]

Probably a P4 Prescott to a C2D E6320. Though Q6600 to i7 920 was also up there I believe.

 

[Hi-Fi Man]

The biggest jump for me was going from a Sempron 64 3400+ (manila, 1.8GHz, 256KiB of L2) to an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (Brisbane, 2.3GHz, 512KiB of L2). Dual cores changed everything back then. I remember being able to finally play iTunes, run uTorrent and browse the web with Firefox 3.0 at the same time without iTunes skipping playback whilst loading pages faster it was freaking amazing.

Intel and AMD's 65nm node may not have been that impressive but the jump from single cores to dual cores was monumental. Still, that Sempron was much faster than the P4 Willamete I used prior.

 

[Soulkeeper]

P4 prescott to Q9450

 

[ctk1981]

486SX 25mhz to AMD K6 233mhz to PIII 800mhz.

 

[Zodiark1593]

I'd say my biggest jump was from a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4-M (HP ZD8000) to a 2.1 GHz Core 2 Duo (HP Pavilion forget exact model though ) laptop. I later went to an i5-460M which was probably good for a 70% advantage, and then much later to my desktop's i5-4590.

Not including AVX, the P4 to C2D was probably the biggest jump. I was actually a little bit dissapointed with the desktop i5's encode performance until I got AVX going.

 

[alcoholbob]

Athlon 3200+ to Athlon X2 4200+ bar none. Going from single to dual core was the biggest jump I'd ever seen.

Every other upgrade since then has been mostly just PCIE/SATA/USB platform upgrades, not CPU ones.

 

[JeffMD]

ahh this is a toughie. I know there was probably a huge difference between a 486sx25 and a P120, but I dunno. I believe the p120 was when 3dfx dropped in. I've run through so many processors but I cant recall any giving the boost I got from going from a Q6600 to the fx6300. I think I was coming from an Athlon 2800 but from the start the q6600 never seemed to be good at gaming.

 

[Hulk]

486SX 25mhz to AMD K6 233mhz to PII 800mhz.

Whoa! That SX25 to the K6 233 was a MASSIVE upgrade! If you look at integer performance using CPUmark99 that was an 18x increase in performance!

You mean PIII 800MHz.

I had an IBM 486SX 25MHz before the Pentium 90. It was a DOG! No math coprocessor.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Whoa! That SX25 to the K6 233 was a MASSIVE upgrade! If you look at integer performance using CPUmark99 that was an 18x increase in performance!

You mean PIII 800MHz.

I had an IBM 486SX 25MHz before the Pentium 90. It was a DOG! No math coprocessor.

I had an 8088 (6?), with the 8087 co-proc (NPU). Wrote some text-based image-warping code compiled in QuickBasic, that used floating-point. Got quite good results.

Later, I upgraded to an AMD 386DX-40. While it was great for 2D games of the day, my float-heavy code ran like crap on it, because it had to use the emulated 8087 libraries.

Then some time later, I had an AMD 5x86-DX4-133. That was a bit faster.

Pentium MMX 166 @ 233 was even better, but then a PII-300 @ 450 was even more kickass.

 

[ctk1981]

Whoa! That SX25 to the K6 233 was a MASSIVE upgrade! If you look at integer performance using CPUmark99 that was an 18x increase in performance!

You mean PIII 800MHz.

I had an IBM 486SX 25MHz before the Pentium 90. It was a DOG! No math coprocessor.

Yeah sorry, PIII. Slot 1 processor to boot.

 

[MrTeal]

Probably a Mac LC with a 16MHz 68020 (32-bit CPU crippled with a 16-bit data bus), to a Pentium 150.

 

[Indus]

Celeron 300A @ 450 to Pentium 4 1.6A Northwood @ 2.4

I used to play everquest and it was very choppy after the first expansion. So when I upgraded to a Pentium Northwood and a GeForce 3 Ti 200.. I went from laggy and minimum settings to WOW Holy Shit, I can't believe someone could play the game without lag.

 

[waffleironhead]

Dual p3 500mhz in a p2b-d board, to a Prescott 3.0ghz. That was a great leap.

 

[Blitzvogel]

Going from an AMD Turion TL-56 1.8 GHz in a laptop to an Athlon X2 5600 2.8 GHz (Windsor) for my very first computer build was such an amazing experience, though the real revelation was going from the Geforce Go 7200 in that same laptop to the Geforce 8800GTS 320 MB!

 

[Idontcare]

For me, going from a single-core/nonHT 2.2GHz Pentium Northwood to a quad-core 4GHz OC'ed QX6700 was a massive jump in computer capability for my apps of interest.

 

[ehume]

Added SSD. No mere CPU update could hold a candle to that. After that I went through and upgraded my family's machines. We overbought to begin with, so with the SSD's in them, the 2008's and the 2010 were good to go. Even my old laptop that was acting dead. My older daughter used it until she got as Surface Pro this summer. All the other upgrades came with increments to MS Windows. Sometimes with the upgrades the machines felt slower.

Now, finally we can all feel down to Windows and the CPU's. But now when we upgrade the CPU's we are getting true upgrades on the Windows front. My i7 4770k is running Win7 at 4.3 GHz. Downstairs, my 4790k at 4.5GHz is seemingly running rings around the 4770k, first on Win 8.1, now on Win 10. It shouldn't go so much faster, so I have to assume it's the OS.

Probably my best CPU upgrade was going from the Apple ][+, with its 64K of RAM, to a Mac SE-20, with its 4MB of RAM. But there again, I was going from floppies to a hard drive. (I remember when the 1st HD for users came out. We thought, 'Who would ever find a use for 5 whole megabytes?' Ha.)

Actually, I remember that I did my 1st word processing on a mainframe. It used virtual punch cards. Having the Apple at home meant I could do work at home. At bottom, that was probably my best leap.

 

[videogames101]

My dad had some P3, went from that to a Athlon 64 3700+ then from the 3700+ to a Q9550.

Both were huge jumps. Since then, nothing so major.

 

[adairusmc]

Pentium III 866 to Athlon64 x2 4800+

 

[RaistlinZ]

Amateurs.

Athlon 64 3200+ to Intel i7-920

 

[skipsneeky2]

Pentium 4 to a E6750 back in the day.Also came from a 6200le to a 8800gts 512mb with the cpu upgrade.BF2 went from a royal mess to running quite beautifully.

Recently at least with my current rig,E5200 to a Q6600 made games like CS:GO nearly double their frame rate and it cost only $21. Any dual core to quad should be a significant upgrade.

 

[jhu]

1) 286 -> 486 DX2/66
2) 486 DX2/66 -> K62 350 MHz
3) Athlon 64 3200+ -> Athlon IIx4 640

 

[Mojoed]

Most significant upgrade was probably an old AMD XP to a Q6600. Still using the Q6600 7+ years later @3.5GHz.

 

[Eug]

In modern times, Apple A5 (iPad 2) to Apple A8X (Apple Air 2). In terms of CPU performance, A8X is about 11X as fast as A5, despite A5 only being about 3 years older.

If we include ancient history, I'd say my biggest upgrade was going from a 1 MHz 6502 to 40 MHz AMD 386 DX40.

And the biggest change on the same motherboard was on the famous Asus P2B, starting with a Celeron 366 and ending with a Pentium III Tualatin 1.4 GHz.

 

[SPBHM]

Pentium 133 to 600
but the best thing about it was leaving the trident 1MB behind and finally having D3D and OGL support, oh, also going from 16 to 128mb of memory.