Favorite old CPU?

[Black_Mage]

Is there an old CPU that was a favorite for you?

 

Mine is the Core i7 4770. In the entire time I had a desktop with a 4770, I never had a problem with my CPU being a bottleneck. I don't understand how a company that made a rock-solid CPU is the same company with disastrous 13 and 14 series CPUs. I bought a desktop with an AMD CPU for the first time because of that mess.

[Needfuldoer]

The Motorola 68000 was the chip of my formative years, then I got plenty of seat time with its successors the 68030 and 68040. The PowerPC "G3" was a game-changer too, adding tons of L2 cache and clock speed to the venerable 603ev.

[Hinjima]

I absolutely loved my i7-950! 

I overclocked the thing to 4.2ghz, this is a 25% increase in clock speed.  It was insane.

I still have it and my good old Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R

[Beerzerker]

One of my all time faves was my old Opteron 165 I had that would run/bench @ 3.4Ghz+ all day long.
It still holds several benching records at the bot including fastest validation clockspeed to this day.

I remember back when these chips were all the rage for being cheap while OC'ing well too.
I never would have thought I'd have the best Opty 165 out of all one day but it happened.



 

[Somerandomtechyboi]

basically all of the 32nm i7s/xeon w but particularly the w3680/980x due to having halfway decent pricing and most bins being able to do 4.8 at 1.55-1.6v or 4.5 ~1.4v alongside triple channel ddr3 ~2800 on gigabyte boards and yes i do have both chips

 

honorable mention to 45nm nehalems as the imc is similarly good but high freq is useless due to triple channel needing +3 uncore over mem multi and anything between 1:1 and 2:1 is unstable but damn they fly when you give em a gigabyte board best one being able to hit 3400c11 on air which afaik none of the old ln2 records even come close (dont think any of em even managed 3200) so probably wr holder but i havent subbed yet cause i dont know where this chip is as its literally in a pile of other w3503s alot of them being average or trash bin cpus

 

Spoiler

 

1 hour ago, Hinjima said:

I absolutely loved my i7-950! 

I overclocked the thing to 4.2ghz, this is a 25% increase in clock speed.  It was insane.

I still have it and my good old Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R

assuming it isnt a garbage sample which it probably isnt you should be able to easily hit 2800 dualchannel maybe even challenge that 3400 frequency screenie as i am well aware that w3503 is nowhere near the best chips thst can do 4.8ghz uncore and whatnot

 

theyre also bulletproof 45nm in particular ive run quite extensively with vtt 1.7v+ though ive only done p95 stresstests over a day with 1.7v vtt on my i7 930 with visible degradation on the w3503s that i need to run at 1.94v so about 1.7v is probably safe though that 930 has been run close to 1.8v and still shows no degradation even from the one time i tried 2850 stable with 1.77v

 

1 hour ago, Black_Mage said:

Mine is the Core i7 4770. In the entire time I had a desktop with a 4770, I never had a problem with my CPU being a bottleneck. I don't understand how a company that made a rock-solid CPU is the same company with disastrous 13 and 14 series CPUs. I bought a desktop with an AMD CPU for the first time because of that mess.

haswell is particularly good, still goes up against zen2 performance wise especially once overclocked though noone seems to run proper ram configs on it and get stuck with abysmally slow <2600 ddr3 so itll probably pull ahead even further with a proper ram config paired with the 4.6-4.8ghz youll usually get out of the cores

Spoiler

recently got haswell with a z97x soc + g3258 and managed 3200c13 4 stick stability (last i checked it was 101 hours stable but its been a couple days since then) cause strong board for 4 stick and the ics im using seem to be particularly good at 2dpc configs (hynix 2gbit cfr) albeit caveat in the form of degrading with high voltage (>2.3v) where my gdie will run 2.3v and likely above without issue if it werent for it destabilizing past 2.3v

[atxcyclist]

I just replaced a bad graphics card to get my old office workstation useable again, and it has a 4790K in it; That chip is quite good for routine use and even in an H97 board, turbos great and I used to do architectural 3D rendering on it (some 24+ hours long), and never had a problem with the chip or board. If there were a practical way to get platform security, Windows 11 would run no sweat on it.

[tankyx]

I loved my Core 2 Duo E5400. Such a good overclocker for very cheap. I was able to make it run stable at 4.3GHz from 2.7GHz on air it was stupid fast.

Replaced it with an i5-2400, which was a let down, then I got a 5820k that was really good, but I got a 8700k and mobo kit for free so I replaced it LOL

[Tan3l6]

 Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton) would be my favorite one. 1800Mhz CPU that with mild under-volt worked 2400Mhz stable.