List your favorite processor(s) of all time

[Storm-Chaser]

This one always peaks my interest, so Im curious to see what you guys have to say about it. List your favorite processor and why, be sure to add OC details for the rest of us (and cpuz snip, etc). I know, it's pretty subjective. But no matter, we will all most likely walk away with some good data, perhaps something that inspires a new build, even.

 

For me, its the AMD OEM 970 BE processor, which was released as a quad core Phenom II. Zosma core chips actually have 6 cores, and sometimes you can get lucky and unlock the two hidden cores, making this chip faster than AMDs flagship, 1100T in base clock (no turbo tho). According to my research, they unlock about 50% of the time. Will add some screenshots later of some of my better overclocks on this platform and go into further detail as to why this processor is number one in my book.

 

 

 

Edited March 17, 2022 by Storm-Chaser

[pio]

Athlon x2 / Opteron dual core Toledos.

 

Rocked a Manny x2 3800+ when I first joined enthusiast forums back in the day, was able to get 2.5GHz stable out of it and 2.97GHz on a suicide run out of it.  Swapped to an Opteron 165, got 3 stable and nearly 3.4GHz on a suicide run.  I was beating Core 2 Duos and even Core 2 Quads on some benchmarks with the setup.  Gaming, I was quite literally right there with the Intel setups, and even Phenom II setups.  I was still on my Opteron 165 when most of the forums had 1090T's and 1100T's (or Q9550's / i7 920's).  Wasn't until the Core series from Intel came out that I really felt the urge to upgrade, bit that bullet with second gen 2500k.

 

Socket 939 is where my absolute love is at.  Very first generation of x64 processors, and also the very first actual dual cores.  I mean they were SOOO good AMD used the same exact CPU's across 3 different sockets and generations.  Socket 754 with single channel DDR and AGP (single core parts though), Socket 939 with the dual cores and dual ch RAM, and then later on AM2 with dual ch RAM and DDR2 over DDR.  But to be perfectly honest, I have a fondness for every generation.  They've ALL had their perks and weaknesses.

Edited March 17, 2022 by pioneerisloud

[PCSarge]

i have a few favorites. some new some old.

 

but since i have to only pick one.

 

my old first-gen i5-750. that chip took a beating from me overclocking. so much of a beating in fact it kept ticking after a board blew the VRM through it doing sub zero OCing.

[Storm-Chaser]

@PCSarge

U can post more than one processor if you'd like. 

 

Im adding a Xeon 2696 v3 to the list...

(make that two)

 

I always move forward with the motto if you like something buy two of them. twice the headache sometimes but well worth it in most cases.

[PCSarge]

2 minutes ago, Storm-Chaser said:

@PCSarge

U can post more than one processor if you'd like. 

in that case ill throw two more in:

 

my Pentium II w/MMX way back when, which was the first PC i ever built i think i was 11 at the time.

 

and my AMD FX-64. you were the king of kings my friend. wherever you ended up.

[Storm-Chaser]

18 minutes ago, PCSarge said:

in that case ill throw two more in:

 

my Pentium II w/MMX way back when, which was the first PC i ever built i think i was 11 at the time.

 

and my AMD FX-64. you were the king of kings my friend. wherever you ended up.

Havent heard that processor mentioned in a month of sundays. But yeah, it was the same for me but I had the AMD K6 2 450 (with 3d now) instead. 

 

I think the pentium II logo will be forever etched into my memory. In my early PC enthusiast days it was the gold standard for a while there.

 

 

 

[Sir Beregond]

Shout out to my 4790k keeping me going for the past 7+ years.

[ArchStanton]

E8400 Wolfdale.  She's still chugging along in somebody else's desk at work.  W10Pro is asking a lot of her, but so far, she has met the challenge of every subsequent Windows release and its associated bloat.

[Sir Beregond]

22 minutes ago, ArchStanton said:

E8400 Wolfdale.  She's still chugging along in somebody else's desk at work.  W10Pro is asking a lot of her, but so far, she has met the challenge of every subsequent Windows release and its associated bloat.

The first computer I ever built from scratch completely had an E8500 Wolfdale. So I understand. 

[Snakecharmed]

Can't go wrong with this and it needs no introduction.

 

[ArchStanton]

27 minutes ago, Snakecharmed said:

Can't go wrong with this and it needs no introduction.

Aye, a true workhorse, and the "sire" of most of what followed.

[Storm-Chaser]

3 hours ago, Snakecharmed said:

Can't go wrong with this and it needs no introduction.

 

Nice to see a "proper" 2600K set up and dialed in exactly as God intended. 

 

[damric]

I'm thinking and really I have 3 favorites, all great budget overclockers of course.

 

$99 Phenom II x2 Callisto unlocked to x4 @4GHz

$117 Skylake i3-6100 with huge base clock overclock for 4.6GHz

$85 Ryzen 5 1600 AF @4.4GHz

 

Those MSRPs 

 

I still have 2 of my 1600 AFs and I'm considering swapping the best one back into my main rig because I hate this 2700x

[Sir Beregond]

5 hours ago, damric said:

Those MSRPs 

 

I still have 2 of my 1600 AFs and I'm considering swapping the best one back into my main rig because I hate this 2700x

Those are some fine MSRPs!

 

Just curious what you don't like about your 2700X?

[damric]

38 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

Those are some fine MSRPs!

 

Just curious what you don't like about your 2700X?

It's a dog. It's not stable even at stock. It has no stable overclock head room. It runs hot, even under water at stock. It's only saving grace is that it was a freebie

[J7SC_Orion]

...I have got to do the ' x -1' thing as I have too many fav CPUs. But the least favourite / most hated was a 5960X Haswell-E I lovingly called 'nemesis'...the X99 boards with the unauthorized (by Intel) 'OC pins' were a mess to begin with, especially with the early bios. But nemesis was a particularly crazy sample...

 

...no matter how stable nemesis appeared to be after days /weeks of various successful stress tests, every three weeks or so, it would blue-screen with Q-codes all over the place and no rhyme or reason, usually with only light loads. I finally made peace with it, assembled it into an underclocked system with Corsair Dominator Platinum and a EVGA Classified and gave it away to some friends' kids. I even drove 40km to deliver it - it felt good after I left their driveway.  

 

 

Edited March 18, 2022 by J7SC_Orion
typo

[ENTERPRISE]

Well I think for my list it will be short, the showstoppers for me were:

 

Pentium 4 3.4Ghz (Northwood) - Loved this as it was a great clocker, and stayed much cooler than the newer architecture "Prescott" 

Intel i7 4790K - Loved this as it was a great performer (still is really) and I got mine binned from Silicon Lottery and I had a 5.1Ghz sample which was really great. 

[ArchStanton]

8 minutes ago, J7SC_Orion said:

it felt good after I left their driveway.  

made me think of:

 

[Alex]

2500K.

 

I still have one in my media PC and how that CPU changed not only price:performance but also overclocking definitely makes it one of the best CPUs in my mind.

[Sir Beregond]

8 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Well I think for my list it will be short, the showstoppers for me were:

 

Pentium 4 3.4Ghz (Northwood) - Loved this as it was a great clocker, and stayed much cooler than the newer architecture "Prescott" 

Intel i7 4790K - Loved this as it was a great performer (still is really) and I got mine binned from Silicon Lottery and I had a 5.1Ghz sample which was really great. 

Wow! So what's a safe max voltage to give the 4790k? Most I got out of mine stable was 4.6Ghz. Was a little disappointed. I only went as high as 1.35v though.

 

That said, it's kept me going for the past 7+ years. I also have another computer in the house with one.

[ENTERPRISE]

1 hour ago, Sir Beregond said:

Wow! So what's a safe max voltage to give the 4790k? Most I got out of mine stable was 4.6Ghz. Was a little disappointed. I only went as high as 1.35v though.

 

That said, it's kept me going for the past 7+ years. I also have another computer in the house with one.

Blimey, I will have to check my notes lol but the voltage was super reasonable considering what speeds I was getting. 

[mouacyk]

X5470, makes Q6600 look like a piece of crap. It can run at 4GHz on stock voltage and overclock to 4.4GHz, while 6600 needs an extreme overclock to reach 3.6GHz.

Edited March 19, 2022 by mouacyk

[Alastair]

All time favourite processor. That has to be any of the Vishera based AMD FX 8 cores. 

I loved Vishera for its infamy. It received a lot of hate. A lot of it undeserved, simply because its reputation was already tarnished thanks to its older brother Zambezi. I found its price to performance to be fantastic. I managed to get into the FX platform fairly cheaply as I already had a 990FX board available from a previous build so my entry into AM3+ was just a CPU. Stock like all FX's it was terrible. But once you figured out how to overclock it, man it was amazing. A good core clock combined with a good memory and CPU-NB overclock really turned that chip into something good. 800+ CBR15 was pretty dang good back in the day. It was always such a pleasure when people asked about GHOST at LAN's and events and how their eyebrows raised when they heard what processor was running. It was a guilty pleasure of mine seeing their reaction. 

 

And its also the processor that is responsible for my journey into water cooling and also case modding. I bought a nice Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro specifically for this CPU, because the Hyper 212 I scavenged from GHOST's predecessor was just inadequate. But that Water 2.0 had a dead pump on arrival. So I just went bugger it. Just go full custom. And I went down the rabbit hole from there.  I then started to think of more elaborate ways to push the overclocks. More and more elaborate ways to to prevent my midish-range M5A99FX motherboard from turning into a molten pool of slag once the overclocks went beyond what a 6phase board at the time should of been capable of doing. 4.8, 4.9, 4.95, eventually I got to 5.1GHz on my FX in its last few months with a delid and direct die cooling with liquid metal as my TIM. That CPU lasted for so long. 2013 until 2020. What a bargain in my opinion. I would actually STILL be running it now to this day if I hadnt of broken off (not bent) some pins after I dropped it during some loop maintenance. Since I was getting such good life out of it I had planned to keep that system going until the dawn of DDR5. It had no issues pushing a pair of R9-Fury X's in crossfire. So when the life support for Multi-GPU was finally pulled and I switched to my now V64 it had no issues pushing that either.  And to be honest I miss that CPU. I find my Ryzen boring by comparison. I don't get the same thrill and excitement trying to push a few MHz above what Precision boost can do. What a thrill it was getting 25-30% more performance out of a CPU. Now with my Ryzen the best I can pump out of it is MAYBE 5%. I used to run 4.95GHz 1.48V with 2700CPU-NB on 2000Mhz DRAM at 9-10-9-27 1T. I delidded the processor got I used set of MFR based Corsair Dom Plat 2666's and pushed 5.1 at a little over 2133 cas 9 on 4 sticks of ram. The IMC only ever managed 2400 on 2 sticks. But that was still plenty fast back then. 50ms latency makes my Ryzen seem slow. Best I have managed on these C-dies with 1800fclk/3600 is 70ns. 

 

Then the my next favorite processor is what started my overclocking journey in the first place. Much like the FX it kinda was an underdog to begin with. A Conroe core Intel E2180. 1.86GHz of dual core fury. Which I managed to get to 2.7GHz on some weird ASRock hybrid DDR/DDR2 and AGP/PCIE mix board with the stock cooler. I had no idea what I was doing. I was on the stock cooler. I just pushed bclk. I had no idea back then that the DRAM and FSB were all linked back in those days. So when I reached that 2.7GHz was it because the CPU was falling on its face. Or just my off brand DDR2 667 Sticks had reached their limit. I guess I will never know. But I do have an E2200 that I have knocking around in the garage somewhere that I really want to test out and see what I can do with it. But I don't have a good motherboard for it. 

 

Then finally my last two favourite processors both tied for third I guess. My Athlon2 640 quad core. My first ever quad core. Got it to 3.9GHz. That was fun. And my Phenom 2 965C3. 4.2GHz. 4 blazing fast cores that were arguably the exact same cores in my athlon. But that L3 made a difference to the performance. 

 

My most hated CPU of all time. I had an Intel Wolfdale E7500. I dont know if I got a lemon. Or if my board was rubbish or what. But after reading reviews and seeing people pushing through 4GHz on Wolfdale I couldn't wait to try my hands at it. Best I managed was 3.6 and I really felt let down. Suffice to say it didn't last long. 

 

[damric]

I have a Ryzen 5 5600G coming next week for some abuse on my X470 Taichi. Who knows, maybe that will be my new favorite.

 

$209 at Walmart right now.

[The Pook]

AMD 64 3000+ Venice

Intel Pentium 4 Cedar Mill (631/641/651/661)

Intel Pentium D Presler (915/920/930/940/945)

AMD X4 960T Thuban 

 

never owned a Cedar Mill P4/Pentium D but they OCed to the moon and were the first to regularly OC to 4+ Ghz. even though AMD matched (or beat) their performance it was still cool to see OCs to >4.0+ in 2006 considering AMD didn't crack 3.0 until 2007. 

 

  

3 minutes ago, damric said:

I have a Ryzen 5 5600G coming next week for some abuse on my X470 Taichi. Who knows, maybe that will be my new favorite.

 

$209 at Walmart right now.

 

my 4650G is pretty neat but I wouldn't call it my favorite of all time 

 

 

Edited March 19, 2022 by The Pook