What was your most significant CPU upgrade?

[Leyawiin]

Athlon X2 6400+ to Phenom II X4 955 BE. Using the same GTX 260 my quality settings and FPS went way up in all my games.

 

[bbhaag]

Four years ago I went from an Athlon xp 3000+ to a Phenom 2 965x4. I really liked it.
I'm still using the 965 now but it's oc'ed to 3.7.

 

[hectorsm]

AMD Opteron 165 to Core i7 920 @ 3.4GHZ (3.6GHZ turbo). This is still my main system. I've had it for over 6 years now.

 

[K7SN]

See title for a real game changer (at work)! Upgrade at home from a 8086 to a 80286.

 

[Sabrewings]

I think it would be from my old Q6600 to my current 4790k. I saw a real world increase in video encoding rates of 4-5 times faster. Though, my previous jump was pretty large as well going from a P4 3.0C to the Q6600.

 

[rodserling]

Probably a Pentium 4 based Celeron to a sempron 2800+ overclocked to high hell.

 

[Achilleslastand]

AMD Sempron 2200 to AMD Phenom 2x4 965
And to a lesser degree,
AMD FX-8350 to i7-4790K

 

[Infernus]

December 2000 - Celeron 300A to 1ghz Thunderbird (Socket A)

I remember finally being able to utilize my Voodoo 5 5500 in Quake 3 to it's full potential.

Upgrading from a Dual 2ghz Mobile Barton (Socket A) -> Athlon X2 5200+ (AM2) in 2007 was a huge bump too.

 

[teejee]

I went from 120Mhz Pentium to Athlon XP1600, probably ten-fold performance increase

 

[XiandreX]

Where to begin... well note worthy upgrades...

486dx4 100 mhz - P166MX

AMD Phenom II 940 - i5-3570K @4.1GHZ

Other hardware upgrades

2D video card to my Diamond Monster Voodoo 1
and Mechanical hard drive - SSD

 

[Dave2150]

Of late? I7 920 to I7 6700K. Over double the performance in most applications I use.

Before that, the E6600 to I7 920.

 

[Scalesdini]

Probably a tie between every upgrade I've ever had. From a 386 to a Pentium II, from the Pentium II to a single core Sempron, from a single core Sempron to a Phenom II 555BE, from that to an FX8350 for a month and from the FX8350 to an i7-5820k.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

P1 166mhz to P4 1.73 Ghz

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

Probably when I went from a TMS9900 CPU running at 3.0 MHz
http://cdn.cpu-world.com/CPUs/TMS9900/L_TI-TMS9900NL.jpg

To a 386 SX-16, running at about 5 times as fast.

 

[Ancalagon44]

I went from an Athlon XP 2400+ running at 2.0Ghz to a Athlon 64 X2 5600+, which had 2 cores, each running at 2.8Ghz.

Probably around 4x speed increase counting the fact that an Athlon 64 was considerably faster clock for clock than an Athlon Xp.

 

[sammykhalifa]

This spring. I upgraded my 2008 2.33ghz Core 2 Duo to an i7-4790k

 

[nemesismk2]

before my 386 pc i had atari stfm 1040 which if i could i would still be using it lol i also had a sinclair spectrum 128k which was a great computer ti h some great games.

 

[dark zero]

Mmm..
From a Pentium D 930 to a Core 2 Duo E6750 and then to a Mobile Pentium P6000, who moved to a Core i3 380M. And... A Core i7 4702 MQ

 

[JoeRambo]

Going from oced 166MMX to 300A celery @ 450+ was ridiculous. I remember windows literally flying with it.

P4 Northwood with HT was great upgrade too, before i got real dual core (E6400) it was the real deal. While cpu was not fast (even @3.6Ghz ...), HT added extra smoothness in programming tasks.

 

[Mir96TA]

Tandy 286 XT to 486DX33

 

[realjetavenger]

Amateurs.

Athlon 64 3200+ to Intel i7-920

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.GHz was a gigantic jump but not nearly as noticeable.

My biggest jump was from an Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton) to an overclocked i7-930. That was humungous.

 

[redhotiron2004]

Gone from pentium D930 3GHz(2 pentium processor) to intel i5 4590. From 2GB ddr1 ram to 8GB ddr3. Huge difference.

 

[ArisVer]

AMD 386DX40 > Intel Pentium 200MMX > AMD Duron 700 > AMD Athlon XP1600+ (chip upgrade) > Intel Xeon E5240 > Intel Xeon E5450 (chip upgrade) > Intel Pentium B980 (downgrade)

 

[aaksheytalwar]

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

 

[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

Another Tandy... nice. I remember when we upgraded our old Tandy 8086's RAM so that we could run King's Quest III. It ran so slow but we had no idea because that was how everything ran. I always set the speed to max in the game even though it didn't make much of a difference.

Then I got my 286 and Gwydion just ran off the screen at light speed.