Your personal rig CPU history thread - let's reminisce

[Kalm_Traveler]

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?

[DodoKrastavac]

1st Pentium 4

2nd Pentium G630

3rd I5 2500S that I got scammed in buying(supposed to be a 2500k)

4th 6700k

[porina]

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...

 

[GreatnessRD]

1. AMD FX-6300
2. AMD Ryzen 5 2600 

Up next? Perhaps a 4000 desktop series 

[Deli]

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

[Deli]

15 minutes ago, porina said:

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...

 

You can open a museum.

[xg32]

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

[web0623]

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.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

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:

 

1. Jan 1989 = Intel 286-10
2. Oct 1995 = AMD 486 DX4-120
3. Mar 1999 = Intel Pentium 166 MMX
4. Feb 2002 = AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz, Socket A (last one before I got my own, also his last ever desktop)
5. Aug 2008 = Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 (used this for a few years when my board died)
6. Mar 2017 = Intel Core i7-8565U (iirc, I don't really use this one.)

 

Then, mine:

1. Feb 2008 = AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ (mobo died ~Mar 2012, so I used C2D until...)
2. Jan 2015 = Intel Core i7-4790K (my current desktop)
3. Dec 2015 = Intel Core i3-6100 (was in my laptop)
4. 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.

 

[TrainFan475]

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.

[Kalm_Traveler]

6 hours ago, porina said:

Starts 1993...

*486 DX2 66 MHz

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?

 

 

3 hours ago, web0623 said:

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.

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.

 

 

1 hour ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

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.)

 

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.

 

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.

[bomerr]

What are you doing that requires 2X Nvidia TItan RTXs

 

 

[Kalm_Traveler]

3 minutes ago, bomerr said:

What are you doing that requires 2X Nvidia TItan RTXs

 

 

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.

[bomerr]

4 minutes ago, Kalm_Traveler said:

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.

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

[SteveGrabowski0]

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.

[Kalm_Traveler]

58 minutes ago, bomerr said:

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. 

Trust me you're not the only one who thinks that   I'd claim mid-life crisis but it's just becoming 'life'. Actually wanted to pick up a working 24" Sony GDM-FW900 CRT for my retro PC but I'm planning on moving overseas before end of year and need to keep giant heavy possessions to a minimum due to living space limitations in the new country.

[Just Monika]

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.

 

1. Intel Pentium 166 MHz
2. Intel Pentium 4 1.5 GHz
3. Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q6600
4. Intel® Core™ i5-4690S
5. AMD Ryzen™ 9 3900X (Current)

 

[Kalm_Traveler]

55 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

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.

what made you switch from team red to team blue for the Xeon?  (and you're probably right about that 4c/8t bombshell)

[SteveGrabowski0]

1 minute ago, Kalm_Traveler said:

what made you switch from team red to team blue for the Xeon?  (and you're probably right about that 4c/8t bombshell)

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).

[Kalm_Traveler]

4 minutes ago, Just Monika said:

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.

 

1. Intel Pentium 166 MHz
2. Intel Pentium 4 1.5 GHz
3. Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q6600
4. Intel® Core™ i5-4690S
5. AMD Ryzen™ 9 3900X (Current)

 

you're not joking! Nice aspect of your patience though is it looks like you would have experienced absolutely monstrous leaps in CPU horsepower with those first few upgrades!

[SteveGrabowski0]

5 minutes ago, Kalm_Traveler said:

what made you switch from team red to team blue for the Xeon?  (and you're probably right about that 4c/8t bombshell)

Also I bought that K6 because I was on a tight budget at the time and didn't want to spend for the Pentium II. I bought the Athlon XP because it was the best gaming cpu of the time (Intel was complete trash at the time, as bad as AMD was during the Bulldozer era). Then I got the Athlon64x2 4000+ because it was really cheap and I wasn't using my PC for gaming since I had a 360 which was really powerful for the time.

[Just Monika]

21 minutes ago, Kalm_Traveler said:

you're not joking! Nice aspect of your patience though is it looks like you would have experienced absolutely monstrous leaps in CPU horsepower with those first few upgrades!

Definitely extreme differences in the first few upgrades! I may have forgotten an additional CPU after the 166 MHz, I believe it was a 233 MHz Pentium in combination with some kind of Nvidia GPU with 32 MB VRAM. It was incredibly ill-suited for any kind of real gaming, the most it could do was Runescape (the original one) and simple games like Doom or StarCraft.

 

I'd say the most incredible upgrade was the i5 4690S which was my first experience with an SSD. Completely knocked me off guard with the speed and I never really stopped being impressed by it.

[Guest]

Oh gosh how far back really we need to go into the history and making of what is today.

I grew up on stories and have a 7 foot high computer cabinet in my garage that serves as my welding cabinet. 

The late 80's and 90's when computing became presence in my life, was mostly apple Macintosh products. 

Pocket electronic games where totally popular. Had all the good ones. Pocket Simon I remember well.

We even had the 1980 something lego space dude. lol, I had at least 12 of them.

Have seen a lot of hardware. I couldn't tell you every single system I've had. Can't remember them all.

 

Oh here's a picture of the placard on that old computer cabinet I've still got. Came from gramps.

 

 

 

 

[toasty99]

1. Phenom ii 955

2a. I7 920 (used for 15 minutes to update bios)

2b: Xeon x5650

3. Ryzen 1600 original

4. Xeon 1660v3 QS (i7 5960x would be consumer equivalent) 

[Husky]

1. Intel Pentium 4 2.80 @ 2.8 GHz

2. AMD Athlon XP 3200+ @ 2.2 GHz

3. Dual Socket AMD Opteron 254 @ 2.8 GHz

3. Intel Core i7 920 @ 2.66 GHz

4. Intel Core i7 6700K @ 4.4 GHz