What was your most significant CPU upgrade?

[Charlie98]

Ditching my old Dell with a Pentium D 805 @ 2.6GHz for a OC'd 2500K...

 

[Ajay]

My CPU history:

386
PI 166
P4 1.73 Willamette
AMD 64 s939 3200+
Intel C2D 4500
Intel C2D 7200 or 7300
Q9550
Core i7 860
Core i7 2600k
Core i7 3770k

So which one do you feel was the most significant upgrade?

 

[slag]

P166 overclocked to 200 mhz to a Celeron 266 overclocked to 448 mhz. Came out before the 300a celerons did and was insanely fast. I had 16 MB of memory rocking that build and could play diablo online and quake stupidly fast.

 

[mizzou]

i think 486dx2 to a pentium chip

 

[Bradtech519]

Pentium 1 166 with mmx to AMD Thunderbird 1.4 GHz

 

[Sonikku]

I wasn't PC gaming in "the olden" days.

First CPU: Socket A Sempron 2400+
Second CPU: Socket 754 Athlon 64 3400+

Framerate in WoW quadrupled. (1 gb ddr ram/Radeon 9600xt gpu) Clearly a processor bottleneck.

Although I will say the Core 2 Duo E6750 I upgraded to from the Athlon 64 single core was a pretty snazzy upgrade unto itself.

 

[bigboxes]

Pentium 1 166 with mmx to AMD Thunderbird 1.4 GHz

You just had to out do me.

 

[Unoid]

I'd love to say that it was my 2600k @ 4.8ghz build with 16gb ram in 2011. but that's a best LONG LIVED build.

What was the most significant bump was going from a P166 with 80mb EDO memory, S3 virge 2d, Voodoo 2 8mb 3d box I used from 1996 to 2001., 1.2gb HDD with 15" 1024x768 CRT

THEN:

My dad got a new job and knew how much I loved computing, he said go build your perfect PC and That your Christmas!

I went to m-wave and built out an AMD t-bird 1.4ghz (fastest cpu you could buy). 512mb DDR (or was it SDRAM?), two WD 100GB HDD's in raid 0 (bad idea 6 months later lol), and I believe an ATI 8500 (first tesselation in RTCW). And the most expensive part was the $850 Sony 21" CRT trinitron. I used that sucker until 2009.

I also got upgraded from 48.8k dialup to 1Mbit/s cable internet.


Talk about a huge jump in computing. Everything was amazing exponential. My dad made my YEARS.

 

[Unoid]

Pentium 1 166 with mmx to AMD Thunderbird 1.4 GHz

LOL, look at my post right above!. same jump was amazing.

 

[RussianSensation]

Without consulting benchmark scores to verify, off the top of my head, I'd say:

#1. Pentium 2 233mhz MMX --> Athlon XP 1600+ 1.4Ghz overclocked to 1.6Ghz (~Athlon XP 1900+ speeds).

#2. Pentium 4 "C" 2.6Ghz @ 3.2Ghz --> Core 2 Duo E6400 @ 3.4Ghz

#3. Athlon XP 1600+ 1.4Ghz @ 1.6Ghz (~Athlon XP 1900+ speeds) --> Pentium 4 "C" 2.6Ghz @ 3.2Ghz.

#4. Core 2 Duo E6400 @ 3.4Ghz --> Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.4Ghz*** (some programs I used benefited from 2 more cores which gave a huge performance boost)

My next upgrade should be pretty big though as I waited a long time on SB.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

My next upgrade should be pretty big though as I waited a long time on SB.

What OC are you running on that 2500K again?
Can't say that I blame you though, seeing as to how I have a _ton_ of OCed 2500K / 3570K systems in service

 

[ClockHound]

PIII at 1.2Ghz to 6750 at 3.2Ghz was a pretty good leap.

Planning to upgrade to 6700k in a few months. To make it have the proper impact tho, means I have to pull that 6750 rig out of the closet, fire it up and use for a few months - which will be painful - 320GB of spindle booting molasses. The 860 to X5675 was pretty stunning - at least for the render stuff I do.

 

[soccerballtux]

Barton 2500+ at 1.8ghz to Sempron64 2300+ (1.8ghz) that I overclocked to 2.1 or 2.3ghz. That was the day I was finally happy with my PC.

 

[biostud]

Except my newest, all were huge leaps of extra performace.
386sx 25
P-75
PII-300
Athlon 2500+
X2-3800+
I5-750
I7-5820k

 

[svenge]

Athlon 64 3700+ (San Diego, 2.2 GHz) -> i5-4570 (Haswell, 3.2-3.6 GHz)

 

[stockwiz]

My Q6600 build was my most impressive jump but my sandy bridge build for the HTPC built in early 2011 is not far behind.

I don't have any plans to replace both my sandy builds any time soon.

I don't remember specifics about my previous builds other than I had a dual core opteron, a dual core E6600, a pentium 4 of some sort, and a pendium 3 running at 600 mhz.

 

[Kalessian]

Pentium 1 MMX 200 mhz (upgraded from some cyrix cpu) to AMD palomino 1.73ghz. I wish I had gotten a tbred, though, as the palominos were terrible overclockers (older node). Had to save up money doing chores for years.

 

[PliotronX]

I have fond memories of my Thoroughbred Athlon XP 1700+ @ 2400MHz going to an Opteron 165 (first AMD dual core) @ 2.7GHz but I think my later move from the Q6600 @ 3.6GHz to a 4670k @ 4.6GHz was pretty mind blowing. Perhaps the single biggest jump for me was a Celeron 300A @ 454MHz to the Pentium 3 700E @ 1GHz. Game scores jumped higher than any percentage of any upgrade I'd ever seen.

 

[poohbear]

Ah, is this what we're reduced to in the current slump? Reminiscing about which was best our upgrade? Certainly hasn't been anything worth noting since Sandy bridge days! If ure on a laptop....then the jump to Core M for battery life would probably be the biggest jump in terms of power efficiency!

 

[guskline]

"Upgrading" an Intel 386 DX 33 to an AMD 386 40!😆👍

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Ah, is this what we're reduced to in the current slump? Reminiscing about which was our upgrade? Certainly hasn't been anything worth noting since Sandy bridge days! If ure on a laptop....then the jump to Core M for battery life would probably be the biggest jump in terms of power efficiency!

Pretty much. I mean the newer gens are exciting from a "higher perf + more batt life at stock clocks" perspective (mainly for portables), but that's about it.

Frankly, I was more stoked when I snagged a couple of Dell T5500s for cheap and stuffed them with X5660s

 

[Sonikku]

I'd love to say that it was my 2600k @ 4.8ghz build with 16gb ram in 2011. but that's a best LONG LIVED build.

What was the most significant bump was going from a P166 with 80mb EDO memory, S3 virge 2d, Voodoo 2 8mb 3d box I used from 1996 to 2001., 1.2gb HDD with 15" 1024x768 CRT

THEN:

My dad got a new job and knew how much I loved computing, he said go build your perfect PC and That your Christmas!

I went to m-wave and built out an AMD t-bird 1.4ghz (fastest cpu you could buy). 512mb DDR (or was it SDRAM?), two WD 100GB HDD's in raid 0 (bad idea 6 months later lol), and I believe an ATI 8500 (first tesselation in RTCW). And the most expensive part was the $850 Sony 21" CRT trinitron. I used that sucker until 2009.

I also got upgraded from 48.8k dialup to 1Mbit/s cable internet.


Talk about a huge jump in computing. Everything was amazing exponential. My dad made my YEARS.

Wish I had a dad like that.

 

[jhu]

Went from MSM7227 (600 MHz ARM v6) to Exynos 4210 (1.2 GHz Cortex A9). Performance difference was night and day.

 

[BurnItDwn]

K6 233 to Celeron 300@464 on bh6 felt like the biggest most intense and needed jump. Games like Half Life and Total Annihilation Core Contingency ran like a dream on the celeron, and functioned poorly.

Overclocked Baron 2500+ Socket A to Socket 754 Athlon 64 3200
Socket 754 to Socket 939 Athlon X2 3800+
Athlon X2 3800+ to 1st gen Phenom

I upgraded my phenom to phenom 2, then moved it to the basement when I upgraded to i5 2400.

Not too long ago picked up an i5 4690k, its better than the 2400, but not as big of a jump...

Intermediatly between the celeron 300 and barton, I ran on my primary box celermine 533 @ 896, durons & socket athlons

In other boxes, I have also run slot Athlons, a netburst based cheap server box (started with 1.8 celly, finished with 2.0 something 533 FSB), and various PPro boxes and even a power pc based laptop.

 

[BigDaveX]

My CPU history:

Pentium 75MHz
Pentium MMX 133MHz
Pentium III 450MHz
Pentium 4A 1.6GHz
Pentium 4C 2.7GHz (my Intel motherboard had a very mild overclock feature :awe
Turion 64 1.8GHz
Core 2 Duo (Merom) 2.0GHz
Core 2 Duo (Penryn) 2.66GHz
Core i7 920 2.66GHz
Core i7 5820K 3.6GHz (with multi-core enhancer enabled)

Though the biggest leap was probably the one from the Pentium MMX to the Pentium III, it was diluted by the fact that it was also when I got an actual 3D accelerator card, which made a far bigger difference to what I could do with my computer. So, the leap that felt the biggest to me would probably have been the leap from the Pentium III to the Northwood-A, closely followed by the two i7 upgrades.