What was your most significant CPU upgrade?

[meloz]

Some amazing performance leaps in this thread.

I once went from a Pentium III (Coppermine, anyone remember?) to Sandy Bridge i3-2100. Being senile I cannot recall the exact MHz of that olde Coppermine P3, but IIRC it was a very weak processor. Around 533 MHz or so, if not lower.

So I used a Pentium three for ten years as my desktop. And it worked, sorta, because I used that PC for browsing, email, programing and gettting my toes wet in the linux world. The system was utterly inadequate for gaming or any 'power' use, but for my limited usage it worked. I should have dumped the P3 system around 2006 but like a masochist kept using it for another four years. I develop some weird sentimental attachment to old hardware which is hard to explain.

Moving to Sandy Bridge was easily my biggest performance upgrade, and also my second biggest tech regret. I had the option to buy i5-2500K and passed on it for a cheap i3 thinking in 12 months or so I will upgrade again, and that would be the time to splurge on a 'big' processor. Why "waste" money on a stopgap Sandy Bridge when Intel are making such fabulous performance leaps....

Four years later, I am still using i3-2100. Sandy Bridge was the last time Intel made a significant improvement in CPU performance. Although the iGPU improvements since are tantalizing, I cannot justify a new build, yet. Maybe Kaby Lake....and that to take advantage of chipset features like Sata Express more than anything else.

I can see this Sandy Bridge with me for another ten years or more. I have come to love it, cannot see myself ever selling it. I will demote it to a test bench or something when I do upgrade in future.

 

[bononos]

286 12Mhz to 80486dx4
I remembered limping on the 286 to finish x-wing.

 

[Mr Evil]

Z80 -> 68000

The change from 8bit to 16bit was nice.

 

[zambien1]

Biggest Upgrade:
Tandy 8086 with FDD to generic 286 with a hard drive

Other good ones:
286 to 486 dx/66

AMD Athlon XP 2200+ to C2D E6400

 

[moonbogg]

Biggest upgrade ever that blew me away was C2D E8400 to i7 2600K. That was ridiculous.
I also remember my first CPU upgrade. It was a gift. A 133mhz 486 DX2 drop in upgrade to replace the 66mhz chip. This let me play Duke Nukem and when the screen shook from explosions, it didn't lag. C&C ran much better also.

 

[tynopik]

286 12Mhz to 80486dx4
I remembered limping on the 286 to finish x-wing.

i think you held on to that 286 a bit too long



486 DX2/66 > PII 266 > 1.2 GHz Tualatin Celeron

 

[cytg111]

Meh, have had some good runs, K6-3@300 -> celeron300@504, P4 prescott@3 -> core2quad@4.5 -> haswell i7(current). The 8086->80286 was pretty significant too but a whole nother ballgame back then.

 

[jhu]

Four years later, I am still using i3-2100. Sandy Bridge was the last time Intel made a significant improvement in CPU performance. Although the iGPU improvements since are tantalizing, I cannot justify a new build, yet. Maybe Kaby Lake....and that to take advantage of chipset features like Sata Express more than anything else.

I can see this Sandy Bridge with me for another ten years or more. I have come to love it, cannot see myself ever selling it. I will demote it to a test bench or something when I do upgrade in future.

You can just upgrade the processor to an i7 Ivy Bridge.

 

[creed3020]

Athlon II X4 640 @ 3.4GHz to Intel Core i5 4690K @4.3GHz

Both quad cores but what a different I've seen between these two. Software just opens and everything is so smooth. Both systems had an SSD.

 

[Arachnotronic]

You can just upgrade the processor to an i7 Ivy Bridge.

Yeah. This would be a pretty huge jump, IMO.

 

[smitbret]

Going from AMD Barton 2500+ to Athlon 64 x2 4400. Like just about everyone else, the dual-core was huge. The jump from my 333MHz Celeron to an Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 GHz was a gigantic jump but not nearly as noticeable.

 

[TStep]

Same board - Abit VR6?? running a low speed overclocked Celeron 300 or 333 to an overclocked PIII Tualatin around 1.6ish. A long time ago.

Board switch - C2D 6300 to i7 2700k. Used to switch hardware like a maniac so not alot of huge changes.

 

[DrMrLordX]

286 12Mhz to 80486dx4
I remembered limping on the 286 to finish x-wing.

Good old X-wing. I played that on a 386.

Brings to mind another big upgrade for me . . . going from a 386dx40 to a Pentium 100. That was the machine where I first used Windows 95. The machine started with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 which was meh but Win95 was a big change.

So maybe that should count as my "biggest upgrade". It's definitely neck-and-neck with the Tbird upgrade.

 

[LTC8K6]

Probably when the company swapped my Dell with a Northwood 2.8 for an ASUS with an i5-3330.

 

[sonoma1993]

Pentium 166 MMX to a k6-III 450Mhz

 

[tenks]

Is this a scientific thing or a perceived thing?

From how it felt at the time, it was a really big deal personally, going from a 6 year old 1ghz Pentium 3 Coppermine to a 3.2ghz p4 Prescott.

Numbers wise. Probably from my i7 620 arrandale laptop chip to a i7 2600k sandyb desktop chip


great topic~

 

[sm625]

I went from a cyrix 333 to a 800MHz athlon. It had to be 4x as fast.

 

[ensign_lee]

Phenom II to Sandy Bridge. Oh it was amazing.

I loved upgrading, and thought I would again soon. ... still haven't.

SKYLAKE I WANTED YOU TO BE AWESOME.

 

[DeathReborn]

It's gotta be either Athlon XP-M 2500+ @ 2.3GHz to Opteron 165 @2.8GHz in a desktop or 2x P3 1GHz to Athlon X4 620 @ 3.2GHz in a file/print server or perhaps 4x Opteron 8216 to 2x Xeon E5-2667 v2 in a workstation/gameserver.

I did get my parents to upgrade their laptop from a Celeron M530 to a Core i5-5200U, suffice to say they are impressed despite being Luddites.

 

[wabbitslayer]

Radio Shack Color Computer to a Tandy 1000SL :biggrin:

 

[AE-Ruffy]

Pentium 166mhz to AMD k6-2 350Mhz

Pentium II 650Mhz OC'd to 800mhz to AMD 1.33Ghz Tbird
From then on I did tons of upgrades and sidegrades

AMD X2 64 4800+ to C2Q 9400 was another big leap since I needed the cores.

Then Intel 2700k, which im still using to this day.

I do have some other i5's and i7's in the house, My ESXi hosts are running I5-3450s or something. Looking to upgrade to xeon for all at some point.

I don't care to OC anymore.

I've probably gone through near 40 different CPUS on personal machines alone going back to the 90's, there was a period there where every few months I was upgrading, benchmarking and changing things around. AMD 64 s939 was an expensive socket for me.

 

[ehume]

Z80 -> 68000

The change from 8bit to 16bit was nice.

You are dating yourself. That was 1970's and 1980's equipment. You went from CP/M to a Mac, I think. Eyeball-popping.

I put a CP/M card in my Apple ][+ to get WordStar. Getting a Mac was mind-blowing.

 

[Mr Evil]

You are dating yourself. That was 1970's and 1980's equipment. You went from CP/M to a Mac, I think. Eyeball-popping.

I put as CP/M card in my Apple ][+ to get WordStar. Getting a Mac was mind-blowing.

lol, not quite that old. I started with a ZX Spectrum in the 80s when I was a lot shorter than I am today, and moved on to an Atari ST. The biggest improvement between the two wasn't really the CPU, but no longer having to use the Spectrum's awful rubber chiclet keyboard.

 

[nickb64]

Pentium D & 1GB of DDR RAM to i3 330M & 4GB RAM was a pretty big jump for me.

 

[Deders]

My biggest upgrade was from a 386SX 40 to a Pentium 2 350, opened up a whole new range of games for me.

Next big one would be from the PII-350 to an AMD Thunderbird 1400

My last 2 CPU upgrades have both (in some cases more than) doubled my computation power:

Athlon64x2 5600 @ 3000MHz to i5-750

i5-750 @3800MHz to i7-6700 @4600MHz.

How far we've come. I wonder what % processing power the 386 would be compared to the skylake.

Edit: before the 386 I had a 3.5MHz spectrum 128K +2A