The Worst CPU Ever Made

[Plouffe]

AMD and Intel have been competing for years and they've both had their ups and downs. Back in 2006, AMD may as well have been at the bottom of the ocean with how down they were when Quad FX launched. How bad is it now?

 

 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

So basically, stay away from any AMD product that has "FX" in the name. 

[Radium_Angel]

"Worst CPU evah!" LTT

 

Fine, where's the proof? We got a couple of dodgy GPUs, 1.5 games tried, no benchmarks, no hard numbers, no attempts at anything for proof, just "take my word!"

 

For the record, CraftComputing did a video on the Opteron CPUs, and did it way better than this one, with proof on just how bad these CPUs are, but I only know about that video because I"m subscribed to CC. 

 

It's 2023 gang, up your standards.

[Levent]

8 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

It's 2023 gang, up your standards.

kids dont care about numbers lol.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

i actually have a 2008 Mac Pro, ironically pretty close to that setup just intel. 2 quadcore Xeon E5462's, DDR2 ECC ram... it actually performs surprisingly well if you adjust your expectations a bit. 

edit: i'm a bit further into the video and i just wanna say, my Mac Pro with just one gpu (a Radeon HD 7770) has no issue playing back even 1080p 60fps youtube lmfao

as i said it performs surprisingly well for it's age. just shows how much further ahead Intel was at the time. 

Edited July 16, 2023 by Ashley MLP Fangirl

[Senzelian]

The 760 Mars is a truly terrible graphics card, but it's also one of the sexiest graphics cards to ever exist. Especially at the time this thing stood out against the competition.

[dogwitch]

5 hours ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

So basically, stay away from any AMD product that has "FX" in the name. 

there is that 1 fx chip that a oc dream.

but  rest of the line... ehhhh

[Japanatt]

Hi. First time here.

I think too that this test is quite unfair, like: why choosing slower opterons instead of the faster ones? Of course 2100 MHz isn't enough nowadays and at the time too.

Then what, just because you tried once to make a 3060 (that's quite too much i think) work on it, on a pcie v1.0, also on windows 7, failing, you say the platform is bad? Why not trying a less recent gpu, like an rtx20x0 series or a gtx10x0 series?

Also, using two very old 2x gpus of the old era, with one slightly faulty, isn't a nice thing, surely it would get issues, apart of the fact that SLI wasn't very well supported either by nvidia and by games coders. (The same is valid for Crossfire by ATI too, don't misunderstand me).

I'd love to test this platform myself and make a video on youtube but I guess it would be a mess to set up everything, also I would've like to choose better cpus for the "upgrade": did you know there were 3100 MHz 4-core opterons? Also 6 core opterons, making it the first to get 12 cores on a single motherboard...

[Radium_Angel]

22 minutes ago, Japanatt said:

Hi. First time here.

You are new here. Welcome.

Also, LTT videos are by and large really poor quality, both from a production standpoint, and a testing/information standpoint. This is a common theme to their videos.

 

[papajo]

16 hours ago, Plouffe said:

AMD and Intel have been competing for years and they've both had their ups and downs. Back in 2006, AMD may as well have been at the bottom of the ocean with how down they were when Quad FX launched. How bad is it now?

 

 

@LinusTech  We are about the same age linus so I really dont get why you say that unless if way back in highschool you were not a computer nerd or into computers...

Because I remember me and my friends and the guy who had a brick and mortar store and who would become my first boss back then (actually by the time FX 74 was out I think I was already a "PC technician" in his store lol)  thinking that it was the tits! 

 

I say that because it seems to me that you base many of the things you say on "I feel lucky" google results and dont remember clearly how things went down e.g:

Comically overpriced? Why? I mean ok for me (a kid in highschool) it seemed very expensive I give you that.

but in general the fx 74 pair was price competitive (~$900 yes, but on December 2006,  which fell down to $520* in early 2007) that makes me feel that you (or the guy who wrote the script for you) just googled "AMD FX 74 launch price", saw $999 and called it a day but everybody in our age group knows that both CPU companies  and especially AMD (which for AMD holds true to this date albeit in the past their pricing was better still its something especially when nowadays intel does almost 0 reductions)   used to have an inflated pricetag at launch but a few months after the launch they used to reduce the price a lot! 

* note the buyer review in newegg's page and I quote: "Pros: Best cpu on the market (if you get quad amd cores)" <-- this is an indication to the people's sentiment about that CPU 

and ok it was not as good (although it traded blows**) as similarly priced Intel core 2 extreme QX6700*** (also $1000 with the difference that extreme edition used to have the same price without reduction during the entire product life on shelves so when fx 74 went down to about $500 the qx still was about $1000!!)

***  Note that the qx6700 launched a few months earlier compared to the FX 74 pair so AMD wasnt "nefarious" as you imply in positioning at this price point, it saw intel's pricing and offered a similar one <-- dont forget that at this time period AMD was in the hay days and not the underdog again at this particular time period. 
** This is a review I remember having in my magazine collection from maximum PC (a kinda intel/nvidia biased magazine but anyway) 




In which we see that compared to the $1000 extreme edition intel in games it is lacking behind but not by much but in scientific/calculation based tasks it is ahead again not by much <== but keep in mind that kidos wouldnt spent 1000 or even 500 back then for a CPU to game with despite it fairing well in gaming too, people like scientists engineers accountants brokers etc would so and they would care about the performance on workstation applications. 

 

Now consider that the Q6600 (a CPU released after the FX 74 chronologically speaking) which had a pricetag of about 650-850 (and also with locked OC! typical intel handicaps! ) during 2007 was worse than the extreme editin qx6700 and thus worse overall compared to the FX 74 pair. 

e.g a reference comparison of q6600 vs qx6700 (Note that the FX one here is a dual core and not the FX 74 dual core pair , I couldnt find a bench result that has all three of those CPUs together)


I also would like to add a few lines from that comparison just for nostalgia reasons, back when we cared about power and didnt care about consumption or noise but on the contrary the moar the bettah!!!

 

 

 

 

[Lenovich]

The Intel Atom first generation CPU is the worst. Made to be obsolete at the start.

[Remove]

This looks like the type of MOBO a mid-late 2000s kids' TV show would have the nerd character fawn over.

[mdk777]

Yeah this seemed pointless.

There was a constant  ebb and flow over the years. INTEL, AMD, NVDA all had years where they had to stretch to promote HALO products.

So, I skipped the FX series, just like I skipped the over priced and over temp INTEL chips that were available as HALO products.

The list of products that cost 2x or even 4X the best (most efficient/economical/sublime solution available at the same time) is HUGE.

 

POINT of fact, those who were involved in distributed computing, gave this a great deal of thought....even to the point of spearheading some of the optimizations that are common today in data centers and automated overclock/ undervolted automated utilities.

 

So, this is kind of a Captain Obvious review of history.....Most of the technology was either energy inefficient and or also cost prohibitive.

 

That is the norm. The exception is the technology that really moved those metrics in the right direction.  

 

   

[Ubersonic]

Random fact, the reason ASUS brought out an absurd Mars 2xGTX760 card is because the GTX760 GPU was a cut down GTX670, and that meant they could reuse most of the design they had made for the Mars 2xGTX680 which Nvidia had banned them from releasing at the 11th hour (as the decided last minute they didn't want an AIB card smashing the GTX690). The Mars was supposed to be ASUS's middle finger to Nvidia, as instead of having their R&D wasted they respan it into a Titan beater (at least from a gaming POV).

[bobbienet]

at the 7:00 mark Linus says they didn't want to buy ECC DDR2 memory, Maybe Brian has some spare?

[RoseLuck462]

Cool vid! I remember reading about these dual CPU MOBOs in PC mags back in the day, still want to build one either intel or AMD!

 

For the vid itself I think the audio gets too low when Linus whispers…

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

8 hours ago, RoseLuck462 said:

Cool vid! I remember reading about these dual CPU MOBOs in PC mags back in the day, still want to build one either intel or AMD!

 

For the vid itself I think the audio gets too low when Linus whispers…

build an intel setup. if you want something dualsocket there's TONS of Xeon systems with supermicro mobo's for next to nothing on ebay. 

keep in mind to check the power connectors on those motherboards, since many are made for servers. you might also need some extra fans on things like the chipset heatsink, since again those boards are designed for servers where they get tons of airflow. 

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

On 7/17/2023 at 11:30 AM, Lenovich said:

The Intel Atom first generation CPU is the worst. Made to be obsolete at the start.

If we're going to depart the desktop space, I raise you by the AMD Geode LX-700, a truly terrible processor in every possible way. Geodes were so bad that they became a punchline amongst electronics engineers, they also pretty much single handily killed any chance the one laptop per child project had of becoming relevant.

[bobbienet]

4 minutes ago, ImorallySourcedElectrons said:

If we're going to depart the desktop space, I raise you by the AMD Geode LX-700, a truly terrible processor in every possible way. Geodes were so bad that they became a punchline amongst electronics engineers, they also pretty much single handily killed any chance the one laptop per child project had of becoming relevant.

Cisco used them in their ASA 5500 series for the longest time also

[Japanatt]

On 7/17/2023 at 1:30 AM, Radium_Angel said:

You are new here. Welcome.

Also, LTT videos are by and large really poor quality, both from a production standpoint, and a testing/information standpoint. This is a common theme to their videos.

 

Thank you.

Yeah, I saw it. I watch LTT videos from time to time and I found them quite nice on average, and yeah I think I remember some of them where I was kind of disagreeing on something, I don't recall what or why now. But now I see that this time they get really low, dissing an old technology while not giving it a chance. Not cool.

Quite a shame, it give me a little suspect that they just do videos for get their sponsors pay them whatever content they make. I hope I'm wrong tho.

[LinusTech]

This thread is baffling. I remember how this went down just fine.

 

How many benchmarks did you want us to run on it to determine that it is, in fact, terrible. Would a couple more sticks of RAM taken it from 10/10 terrible to 9.8/10 terrible. Maybe. Who cares? It was just a fun little retrospective look at a shoddy product, not a personal attack on you or your favorite company. AMD is doing fine now. We can laugh about this.

 

FX-7* was literally so bad throughout its entire life that no other motherboard manufacturer bothered to make motherboards for it. It wasn't an exclusivity deal. It was just still-born. Everyone from AMD and ASUS that remembers this absolute shit show knows it was terrible. If you think you know better than them, you're wrong.

 

No offense, but reading this thread made my IQ lower. 

[Redicat]

Opteron was pretty stupid aswell it was very neash 

[YellowJersey]

Found audio levels a bit all over the place. The lows were too low and the highs were too high. Had to constantly adjust the volume to balance being able to hear Linus and not getting yelled at by the wife.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

On 7/20/2023 at 11:14 PM, Redicat said:

Opteron was pretty stupid aswell it was very neash 

i mean they are server chips, never intended for desktop use. 

[Princess Luna]

On 7/16/2023 at 2:29 PM, Levent said:

kids dont care about numbers lol.

More like they care about the wrong numbers.