Your favorite cpu

[jelloslug]

Not sure if this is the right place to post this. The question is:

What is your favorite CPU and why

 

[FoulOnWhite]

For me it’s the Intel e6300 which I was close to an air cooled WR with. It oc’d to 107% from 1.8 to 3.9ghz which was incredible and my most memorable cpu.

 

[jelloslug]

For me it’s the Intel e6300 which I was close to an air cooled WR with. It oc’d to 107% from 1.8 to 3.9ghz which was incredible and my most memorable cpu.
View attachment 374944

Those were the days! Very impressive on air.

 

[AusWolf]

Athlon 64 because it matched competing Intel products in performance with a whole gigahertz lower clock speed.

C2D E8000 series because they were crazy fast in games.

Any quad core i7 for the same reason.

The 7800X3D because it's ultra efficient.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I've never been too attached to a CPU, but I suppose it's the Core i7-990X. It was very expensive to me as a teenager, but I've actually used it for around 8 years and it handled pretty much everything I've thrown at it. I kept it, both because it's too abused to sell and because it might make a nice keychain (I don't have the heart), so I keep it as a collectible.

 

[Slackaveli]

Not sure if this is the right place to post this. The question is:

What is your favorite CPU and why

Well, up until now I had an easy answer for you-
Intel Broadwell i7 5775-c. What a magnificent gaming king it was! So good in fact that Intel rushed Skylake out just a couple months later, and then Kaby Lake quickly as well. Why you ask? Well...

Broadwell was late to market. I think some issues with 14nm (foreshadowing 10nm in fact). It's main feature was a much better iGPU that was fed with a massive Crystalwell 128mb L4 cache.
[note: all from memory, correct me if i botched a detail]
The cache was whatever for the iGPU, I never tried it and I dont think more than maybe some hundreds did. But, boy howdy was that cache ever great when you disabled the iGPU as it then worked with dGPU as a last level L4 and boosted certain games WELL past even Kaby Lake performance (one example was Assetto Corsa) provided the games assets fit in cache (or more technically the eDRAM die).

Intel buried Broadwell for a couple reasons; and by buried i mean almost zero promotion, very few chips fabbed, and iirc it was literally like 2-3 months later when Skylake dropped- with a ton of marketing hype. Turns out they didnt even intend for the L4 cache to boost games in that way and didnt want competition for Skylake from much-pricier-to-fab Broadwell (mostly bc of the Crystalwell cache). It wasnt until Coffee Lake that I moved on, and in those special titles that loved cache i had to tune my 8700k to 5Ghz+ and it's ram to 4000c15 just to match it, and it actually was a few % short even. But in other titles the 6 cores screamed ahead of the lowly 4-core Broadwell @ a mere 4.2Ghz tuned/oc'd and I was happy, while maintaining a great love for that strange but amazing little chip the 5775-c. Even the naming was weird.

Since then I had a super bin 10900k that I'll give honorable mention to- I was able to tune that same ddr4 kit to 4400c17 and 5.3Ghz on all 10 cores. Noice. My son still rocks it to this day, on a 4080super & is still mostly not cpu-bound.
13700k came next, nothing special but a beast when tuned. Only left the 10900k bc my son wanted it and bc i wanted to play with ddr5 ram (ram tuning is fun to me). Still would call Broadwell my favorite nostalgically.

But, FINALLY, I have returned to my roots and picked up a 9800x3d from Microcenter on Black Friday. I guess I have a new favorite finally.

Appreciate the post and chance to reminisce on a by-gone era that just popped back up with 3d cache. And if you think about Intel's currently horrible situation with 3 straight gens of the same spinning-of-tires in the mud, and now a performance regression with Arrow Lake one has to wonder if instead of killing off their Gaming Cache discovery they had at least kept that in their back pocket for future use how things might have turned out a bit better for them, at least in the gaming space. I find it incredibly ironic that AMD is now using gaming cache (a better solution, too, and faster with L3 vs L4, yet still a massive pool for cache) to beat the brakes off of Intel in gaming.

I still have that little devil, my daughter uses it in her gaming PC. Turns out The Sims and Fortnight both fit in cache and she gets pretty damn good performance out of it (and my old 1080ti).

 

[AusWolf]

Well, up until now I had an easy answer for you-
Intel Broadwell i7 5775-c.

Oh man, what I would have given to get my hands on one of those back then! Unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found in my area.

 

[de.das.dude]

AMD Athlon 3500+. First CPU i had. Been team AMD ever since. Just so snappy and so well priced.

linky

 

[Frick]

Pentium III Tualatin. Or anything for slot1. Athlon 3000+ Venice. The Barton Athlons.

I guess most of the CPUs I've had are favourites. The Conroe e4300 was good. Wolfdale e8400. Pentium M 2.1Ghz. It's quicker to say the one CPU I didn't like: Athlon 3200+ Clawhammer, but mostly because the shitty Packard Bell laptop it was housed in couldn't cool it at all. I had some s370 Celerons that sucked.

 

[Hyderz]

Amd athlon xp 2400+ got it in 2003 and powered the best games in 2004 along with my GeForce 4 ti4600

 

[Tatty_Two]

Intel Q9450 for me although I did really enjoy the Barton Core XP Athlons.

 

[Tomgang]

First must be the cpu's i ever owned.
core i7 920. Really a good cpu and could overclock to at least 4.4 GHz all core on air cooling. Im sure it could do more with better cooling. That was a cpu i was really happy about.

Next will be core i7 980X. Overclock it to 4.75 GHz on air for benchmark but ran really hot. Normal day was more lige 4.5 GHz all core. Also a great cpu i abused alot with voltage up to 1.55 volt while running hot. It took the beating like a champ.

These will be the greatest cpu's for my part. Cause of there oc capacity and stability throw i abused them, specially the 980X. I was on x58 for 12 years before moving to amd zen 3. That should tell how happy i was with X58 and the cpu's.

 

[Dragokar]

Mine is the AMD Athlon 64 3200+ ADA3200AEP5AP on socket 754......I got it directly from AMD in Germany just by asking......and yeah some business relations......and it was a major step coming from a 2500+ Barton core even though this one was epic also.

 

[pavle]

Intel Core2 Quad Q9550.

 

[AleXXX666]

Well, put my 1st vote to i7-5820K. Got it used - exchanged my i7-8700+Z370 mobo kit to i7-5820K+ ASUS TUF SABERTOOTH X99 just to try. Glad the seller agreed for excahnge - for him it's easier to sell newer parts, for me it's a chance to try otherwise "expensive" parts back days. Tinkered a little with it and was happy enough.

I owned a lot of processors, both Intel and AMD, well.. very good was also Ryzen 9 3900X - same story, got it for an exchange to my 5600X

10700K served me well too.

Couldn't miss my 1st laptop "upgraded" CPU - Core 2 Duo T8100 bad@ss was same good as newer laptops with 1st core i3 stuff.

Currently I like my ASUS TUF i7-11800H. True 8 core, no BS like "i7" of same gen but with less cores. Hot asf, though. But it's ASSUS to blame for sh*t cooling

Also I very liked i7-3667U from little HP EliteBook Folio 9470m. The laptop was pretty fast for casual surfing.

 

[FoulOnWhite]

Those were the days! Very impressive on air.

Freezer 7 pro. Imagine it with a big D15 or something

 

[JackOO7]

When we are not confined to x86; I loved my first computer the Atari ST (with Motorola 68000 CPU).
Some time later I switched to an AMD Thunderbird 800.
Now i love my 7800x3d.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

5600x. It's recent, but hear me out.

This is the end of 2020 for a release. It's 6 cores, and 12 threads. It comes in in the value segment, is stomped in gaming performance, but only when you compare it to similarly slotted CPUs. If you look at this from the perspective of longevity, value, and efficiency the thing is an absolute titan....even if not the best. It had a well established platform, multiple generations of motherboard compatibility, and in 2024 it was still a viable option for those budget conscious but wanting solid performance.

It's easy to love the x3d chips for pure gaming. It's easier to lover threadripper for core count. It's even easy to love Intel for raw performance in gaming without being dedicated to it. I love the 5600x because it redefined what an entry level processor with 6 cores could and should be...and a decade after Intel's launch of them in the enthusiast block it made 6 cores a standard instead of an aspiration.

 

[freeagent]

E8600 ES probably.. X5690 ES was good too. 3700 Sandy gave me my first taste of 3GHz, Though my old coppermine gave me my first taste of 1GHz.

I like all of my CPU's for different reasons. E6300 too, for the same reason above.

 

[Macro Device]

Basically any ancient (pre-2002) Athlon/Duron CPU. No safety, no limits, no reason. Pure chaos and massacre. Truly manly processors.

 

[freeagent]

Basically any ancient (pre-2002) Athlon/Duron CPU. No safety, no limits, no reason. Pure chaos and massacre. Truly manly processors.

The crunch the core made as a chunk broke off while you are trying to clip the cooler on was fantastic.

 

[The N]

Back then, I first used E5200 and did a good overclock. I quite liked that CPU. However, both i5 2500K and 2700K were my TOP favorites. Their offerings were beyond expectations, of course at that time, and overclocking was so much fun. Gone are days when overclocking the chip at 4.5GHz and then 4.8GHz...4.9GHz...5.0GHz ON AIR were the goals of every PC enthusiasts/Overclocker. There is nothing like that after Sandybridge. Basically, overclocking and benching was fun back then, but now its all about which company offers the most efficient plug and play max-boost-clocks-chip.

 

[freeagent]

Now that I think about it..

My 5900X was a lot of fun to play with when it was new. I made a lot of submissions to HWBOT and had some gold cups and all that, but those are gone now

And it was my first taste of 5GHz and up lol..

 

[malons]

AMD Athlon 1600+ AGOIA 0213, best CPU I have had for overclocking, back in 2002

 

[Ware]

[note: all from memory, correct me if i botched a detail]
The cache was whatever for the iGPU, I never tried it and I dont think more than maybe some hundreds did. But, boy howdy was that cache ever great when you disabled the iGPU as it then worked with dGPU as a last level L4 and boosted certain games WELL past even Kaby Lake performance (one example was Assetto Corsa) provided the games assets fit in cache (or more technically the eDRAM die).

Do you have any reference for that? I can't imagine any way eDRAM on the CPU package was used as some kind of cache by a discrete GPU.
From what I can see, disabling the iGPU would allow all the eDRAM to be used by the CPU.