Kalm_Traveler

FX cpus were horrible for gaming while that Xeon E3-1231v3 was an i7 for more like an i5 price at the time (sadly Intel closed that loophole with Skylake by forcing the use of more expensive server boards with the lower end Xeons).

I definitely don't remember the years, but the list of CPUs I've ever owned is extremely tiny. I only make a new build when I absolutely have to. Exception is the 3900X, it was less of an urgent need but the bottleneck on my 4690S/GTX1080 combo was getting a bit annoying.
 
Intel Pentium 166 MHz Intel Pentium 4 1.5 GHz Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q6600 Intel® Core™ i5-4690S AMD Ryzen™ 9 3900X (Current)  

1. AMD K6 - 200 MHz (1997)
2. AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (2001)
3. AMD Athlon64x2 4000+ (2007)
4. Intel Xeon E3-1231v3 (2014)
 
Probably will upgrade to a Ryzen 7 system next year since I expect 4C/8T to run like shit in the next console gen.

honestly you are wasting your money. Buy an old 21" Sony Trinitron CRT and play at 1920x1400 or 1600x1200 higher refresh rate. Quality is far better than any modern LCD. 
 
To answer your question. 
Mac PowerPC System 7
Intel Pentiums in the mid-late 90s
Pentium II in early 00s
Athlon 64 in mid 00s
Ivy Bridge i7 in early 10s
5820k. first gaming PC I built. 
upgraded to 5960x (e5-1660v3) - present

Enjoying a "lack-of-funds"-mandated frugal life, obviously  

Honestly, I just wanted to be able to play Witcher 3 on my old 3440 x 1440 100Hz Gsync screen with all the settings maxed out without fps dipping much below 100. Hello CPU bottlenecks.

Glad I'm not the only one here who remembers computing in 1993  and a 486 no less, though I'm jealous of your 66MHz - I think those all came with a heatsink?

 
 
I always wondered what end result of not having a math co-processor would have been but didn't understand computers enough back when that was a thing one might actually run into.  

You reminded me that I totally forgot to put on there that I had a no-name brand 8088 machine given to me after the 486 (it was at my dad's house) but long before 2000 when I earned my own money to build my first 'real' computer. I used the 8088 to play some very very old DOS games and its upgraded 4800 baud modem to check out local BBSes. On the 486, dad got me a Sound Blaster 16 for Christmas which came bundled with a new-fangled Compact Disc ROM drive.

 
 
I didn't realize that until making the OP - seems like I do a major upgrade every 2 years or so. Graphics cards I'm not 100% sure on though - I remember buying the very first DDR Geforce card for my 2000 rig, a Guillemot/Hercules 3d Prophet DDR-DVI but after that I'm not sure what I had in the Pentium 4 era, then bought a Geforce GTX 285 2gb it looks like in 2010 per my email history, in there somewhere was a 7600GS, and I definitely got a GTX 980 in 2015, then 1080 in I think 2017 but then it turned into a 1080 Ti, then two of them, then two Titan V's (I was trying to hack them into NVLink working), back to two Titan Xp's, then 2018 Christmas-ish to two Titan RTX's. Apparently I love being broke.

I haven't been into pc building for very long, but I had many upgrades in a short span of time due to my learning.
 
Family prebuilt computers (not my personal machine)
1st (a very long time ago) Some really old Pentium in a windows xp machine
2nd (not quite as long ago) Core2 duo E7400
3rd (late 2017) i3 2100
 
My rigs
1st (mid 2018) Core2 duo E7400
2nd (late 2018) Core2 Quad Q8200
3rd (Early 2019) Celeron G3900
4th (April 2019) i7 6700k
5th (July 2019) Ryzen 5 2600x
Future: Maybe a Ryzen 4000 or 5000 series cpu
 
Laptop
1st (early 2019) i3 380m
2nd (also early 2019) i5 460m
I actually upgraded the cpu in the laptop for a whopping 1% performance bost.

I'll go ahead and include the CPUs in my parents' PCs that I used, otherwise my list would be pretty sparse.
 
First, my parents' CPUs:
 
Jan 1989 = Intel 286-10 Oct 1995 = AMD 486 DX4-120 Mar 1999 = Intel Pentium 166 MMX Feb 2002 = AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz, Socket A (last one before I got my own, also his last ever desktop) Aug 2008 = Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 (used this for a few years when my board died) Mar 2017 = Intel Core i7-8565U (iirc, I don't really use this one.)  
Then, mine:
Feb 2008 = AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ (mobo died ~Mar 2012, so I used C2D until...) Jan 2015 = Intel Core i7-4790K (my current desktop) Dec 2015 = Intel Core i3-6100 (was in my laptop) Nov 2016 = Intel Core i7-6700K (Black Friday sale at Fry's (RIP yet?), replaced the i3 in my laptop - this has been my daily driver for about a few years now.)  
 
 
My next tentative upgrade is socket AM5 or TR5 in my desktop, around late 2021 or 2022.  I'm hoping for at least as big of a performance / value jump (overall at minimum, and same rate per month/year if I wait longer) as my dad's incremental 286-10 to 486DX4-120 inch-up.
 
(He paid $102 for the 486, and I'd guess the 286 was going for around $279 based on 287-10 math chip prices at the same time in PC Mag archives, etc.  Per Wiki's instructions for second article, 286-12 got 1.28 MIPS, and 486DX4-100 got 70 MIPS.)
 
For my laptop, I may wait for DDR6 or DDR7 before I replace it; although I'm tentatively hoping for a GPD Pocket size device with an 8+ core SMT Ryzen APU late this summer.
 
Looking at the thread, I see a lot of you make more frequent / smaller upgrades than I or my parents do.  Idk about you all, but I don't really like minor incremental upgrades.  (Sometimes it's necessary though, for example someone mentioned their 6700K got fried, and one if my boards died.)
For me, anything equal to or less than my dad's 286-10 to 486DX4-120 upgrade would be considered "incremental".  Also, if the upgrade-to generation's ULV Celeron-Y / Athlon doesn't absolutely *destroy* the upgrade-from generation's flagship multi-socket Xeon/Epyc, it's too small an upgrade, or too soon to upgrade.
 
 
As for a real-world scenario...
 
My i7-4790K took 4 days to transcode a 4-minute video to HEVC (H.265), 4K, q=0, keyint=1 in Handbrake.
That same 4790K took 2 minutes to transcode 2 hours of audio to 320kbps mp3, q=0, using a multi-threaded Lame encoder.
 
I want my next CPU to be faster at 4K HEVC video encoding than my current one is at 320kbps mp3 audio encodiny.
 
 
 
 
Could I give honorable mention to the GTX 970M 6GB in my current laptop?  It's the first at least halfway-decent GPU that I have ever had. (Although my brother did have some gaming GPUs at home - I remember an NVidia Riva TNT for example.  My parents' PCs never had powerful GPUs - probably at best comparable to that era's GT x10 or x20, maybe x30 equivalent or so.)
 
We used APUs / on-board GPUs before that to 2008.  (In 2002 and earlier there were no such things as APUs and the like.) The Radeon Xpress 1250 ob-GPU my 2008 build was quite a bit faster than the MSI GeForce2 MX400 dGPU in my dad's 2002 build.
 

Well, my first, as in it was my Dad's when I was little, was a killer 8k TRS 80 Color Computer.  We had that when the Atari was new.
 
My first build was a 486 40mhz but was missing the math co-processor.  I think I spent $200 on 4 mb of RAM, more on a sound blaster soundcard and a killer 9600 baud modem.

1993, some kinda 486
used crappy celerons and prescotts til 2006 (?)
2006 athlon 3700
also 2006 opteron 165 binned
2007 Q6600
2008 Q8xxx (one of the wolfdales)
2012 2600k
2015 6700k (fried)
2017 8600k
2018 9900k

You can open a museum.

Hey guys, I got this idea from Linus talking on the WAN Show last month recalling his personal CPU history and thought it would be fun to compare with LTT forum members. 
I'll start it off with my own personal CPU timeline and maybe a short comment (not counting family machines that were not my personal computers).
 
1st (~ 1993) - Intel 486 DX 33 MHz (no heatsink) - Windows 3.1 workstation dad got for me from work (Novell in its heyday)
2nd (2000) - Intel Celeron 566 MHz - Windows 98SE baby (my first self-purchased rig)
3rd (~ 2003) - Intel Pentium 4 HT 3.2 GHz - Windows Xp
4th (~ 2006) - Intel Pentium 4 HT 3.0 GHz (PSU failure fried the previous rig) - Windows Xp
5th (2008) - Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 3.33 GHz - dual booted Windows Xp and 7
6th (2011) - Intel Core i7 2600k OC 5 GHz - Windows 7
7th (2015) - Intel Core i7 5820k OC (I think 4.3 GHz) - Windows 7
8th (2016) - Intel Core i7 6900k OC 4.5 GHz - Windows 7 -> 10
9th (2018) - Intel Core i9 7960x OC 4.7 GHz - Windows 10
10th (2020) - Intel Core i9 10980XE OC 4.9 GHz - Windows 10

Honorable mentions that were not in my main personal rig: 2018 Intel Celeron G3930 (2 of these in mining rigs), 2019 AMD Ryzen 7 2700x (powered my home server last year), 2018 Intel Core i7 7700 (HTPC), 2018 Intel Core i9 9900k (2018 Christmas gaming rig), 2019 Intel Core i9 9900ks (2019 Christmas gaming rig) and lastly 2020 Intel Core i5 9400 (pfSense box).

Admittedly in my younger years I was anti-AMD, but with age has come a pinch of wisdom - which is why I used the Ryzen 2700x for my home server. Other than its heart-attack-inducing voltage fluctuations that shocked me coming from Intel, i was extremely impressed with it and if they keep advancing like Zen 2 has shown us I will be switching to AMD for my next full platform update.

What does your personal rig CPU history look like?

dual channel run better , there's plenty explanation on google 

As stated above, single channel you are effectivly cutting your memory bandwidth in half. 

Really don't know what was in the pre-build my parents bought me when I was a kid.
 
1. First build was with an i5 2500k
2. 4790k
3. 5820k
4. AMD 3900x

AMD FX-6300 AMD Ryzen 5 2600  Up next? Perhaps a 4000 desktop series ?

Starts 1993...
*486 DX2 66 MHz
*Pentium MMX 120 MHz
*Pentium 2 266@450 MHz
*2x Celeron 366@550 MHz on Abit BP6
Assorted Athlons up to T-bird 1200 MHz
*P4 Northwood 1.8 GHz
Dual Xeon 2.4 @ 3.2 GHz
Athlon 64 X2
*Core 2 Duo E6600, later replaced by Q6600
Athlon X6 @ 3.5 GHz
*i7-2600k
i5-4570S
*2015 i7-6700k
*i7-8086k (current main gaming system)
 
In the above, ones marked with * were main systems. I had other systems at the same time which were usually dedicated to crunching. I don't have anything older than the 4570S, although I have since got more E6600's.
 
While not main systems, I have a bunch of other CPUs, running or not, including:
Ryzen 3600, 3700X, 2600, 1700
Intel HEDT: 5820k, 5930k, 7940X
Xeons: E5-2650, E5-2667, E5-2683v3
Consumer: 8350k, 7350k, 6700T, 6600k, 6100, 5775C, 5675C, 2x4790, 2x4150T, some older stuff too...
 

1st Pentium 4
2nd Pentium G630
3rd I5 2500S that I got scammed in buying(supposed to be a 2500k)
4th 6700k

For sure - for starters here's the old case (he sent this to me after I made him promise to get it out of my sight forever)

I'm not sure what you're asking exactly...
 

 
These are USB 1/2 and 3.x motherboard headers.
 
the Type C connector is for USB 3.1 Gen 2,  USB 3.0 and 3.1 Gen 1 are the same connector, the larger 20 pin connector in the right of that picture.

USB motherboard headers before the type C connector have 2 ports per header. If your case has only 2 front USB 3.x type A ports, it should only need one USB 3.x motherboard header.

@Kalm_Traveler1
Btw, make a picture of the build when you're done, I got so involved in this topic I kinda wanna see what turns out of it.

why not just buy a 32gb kit with 4 of them that were already tested together?

I see your point, but if you look at what was available 10-15 years ago and how much of a difference it made (even in simple day to day computing) to go a tier higher on parts and compare it to what it looks like today, then if he keeps using his PC as casually as he did until now, he can easily get 10 years out of today's mid range components.
 
If he does get caught up in gaming over the next couple years, then he'll still have the option to drop a high end Ryzen 4000 series and/or a higher end 2020/2021 GPU at a point in time where they'll probably be available at discount prices and it will still give him a really nice experience on a 2560x1440 panel.
 
I just feel that with how you described his particular use case, there's really no need to overbuild it as much, because even the low end of today's hardware would be a ton more responsive, snappy and comfortable to use, then that old system he grew into.

full build including monitor:
PCPartPicker Part List Type Item Price CPU AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor $189.99 @ Amazon CPU Cooler Cooler Master Hyper 212 RGB Black Edition 57.3 CFM CPU Cooler $29.99 @ Newegg Motherboard MSI B450-A PRO MAX ATX AM4 Motherboard $99.99 @ B&H Memory G.Skill Ripjaws V 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 Memory $81.99 @ Newegg Storage Crucial P1 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive $99.99 @ B&H Video Card EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8 GB XC ULTRA GAMING Video Card $403.98 @ Newegg Case Fractal Design Focus G ATX Mid Tower Case $55.88 @ Amazon Power Supply Corsair TXM Gold 550 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply $73.98 @ Newegg Monitor AOC C24G1 24.0" 1920x1080 144 Hz Monitor $144.99 @ Amazon   Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts     Total (before mail-in rebates) $1240.78   Mail-in rebates -$60.00   Total $1180.78   Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-01-17 05:45 EST-0500