The Top 5 Best CPUs of All Time

acascianelli said:
Sad to see that this list only contains x86 CPU's.
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Came to say the same thing. 68k and 6502 belong in the list. I still recommend learning assembly on these before attempting to jump into x86 architecture.

6502 dominated the 8 bit era.

I do agree with the 386 and PPro though, very fond of both.
 
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Pentium 3 Tualatin, Core 2 Q6600, Westmere EP Xeon, Sandybridge 2700k, 68030, 6510.

And I still have machines running each one of these processors. My main workstation's still running dual X5675's and they don't miss a beat - Yes, I've also got an m.2 SSD as my boot drive. ;)
 
Mazzspeed said:
Pentium 3 Tualatin, Core 2 Q6600, Westmere EP Xeon, Sandybridge 2700k, 68030, 6510.

And I still have machines running each one of these processors. My main workstation's still running dual X5675's and they don't miss a beat - Yes, I've also got an m.2 SSD as my boot drive. ;)
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Why the 2700k over the 2600k? My 2600k hit 5.2Ghz with a chunky AIO, is the 2700k more consistent with that max OC, or did they go higher?
 
Is best defined by the amount of time a consumer level CPU stayed relevant?

1. Intel 80368DX (1985) still relevant today (32bit address space)
2. Intel i7-980x (2010) still relevant today ( 6 cores/12threads, 4GHz+)

People's favorites

3. AMD Athlon XP Thoroughbred (2002). Complete lack of competition from Intel.
4. Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2007) Lot's of cool stuff to play with.
5. Intel i5-2500k (2011). Complete lack of competition from AMD.
 
Rauelius said:
Why the 2700k over the 2600k? My 2600k hit 5.2Ghz with a chunky AIO, is the 2700k more consistent with that max OC, or did they go higher?
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I always found the 2700k to be binned higher and therefore stand a higher chance at a decent overclock, however mileage may vary. I guess, at the end of the day I'm just posting the processors I really liked based on personal experience. ;)
 
The i7-2700k was released 9 months after the i7-2600k. If we are talking absolutes the 2700k cannot be in any chart as it is a follow-up model with cosmetic differences.
 
ncknck said:
The i7-2700k was released 9 months after the i7-2600k. If we are talking absolutes the 2700k cannot be in any chart as it is a follow-up model with cosmetic differences.
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Fair call, assume it's the 2600k, Sandy Bridge in general. It's still a very capable generation, even today it holds it's own just fine.

I've got a SB 2600, 2600S and a 2700k here and they're all still great processors.
 
Mazzspeed said:
Fair call, assume it's the 2600k, Sandy Bridge in general. It's still a very capable generation, even today it holds it's own just fine.

I've got a SB 2600, 2600S and a 2700k here and they're all still great processors.
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SB was a huge leap in speed, but Haswell was a huge drop in power consumption, Broadwell (5775C) was arguably the single best sandybridge descendant to this day when it comes to power vs task energy consumed
 
I don't think anyone will remark fondly about that great CPU of its time that changed the world by using less power.
 
slot athlon was the first time they beat intel. I went from a k6-2 300Mhz to that athlon and wow it was great.
 
mkrohn said:
slot athlon was the first time they beat intel. I went from a k6-2 300Mhz to that athlon and wow it was great.
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AMD had competitive and sometimes superior processors before the K7. Their 386 and 486 clones came in faster clock speeds than anything Intel ever offered. I've never had any good experiences with K5 and K5 derived chips (K6, K6-2, K6-3) from AMD.
 
My Phenom II 965 is still going strong for daily tasks and web browsing (OC'd@4Ghz). I recognize its not that popular among the folks here but still relevant in my mind and was a significant improvement over the original Phenom. My Phenom 9500 is pretty slow on Windows 7 while the Phenom II is still quick and handles tasks like a champ.
 
My vote would be for Athlon 64 and athlon X2. Those were the days of the intel Presshot and I think the AMD camp back then was at the top.
 
Meeho said:
I don't think anyone will remark fondly about that great CPU of its time that changed the world by using less power.
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Oh, yes, I do! All the time!

My Phenom II rocked, but GOD WAS IT LOUD.

Less power = less heat = less noise.
 
I was one of the lucky few with one of these:

E8700.jpg
 
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Keljian said:
Ok so few things missed:
  • Original slot A athlons, significantly faster at lower clocks than competitors for everything - I had a 600mhz, it was paradigm shifting.
  • C’T 286 - the only 286 which could swap into and out of protected mode without a hard reset. Showing intel how it as done
  • Am386dx40 - who needs a 486 anyway?
  • Motorola 68k series - Amiga anyone?
  • Intel Q6600 - making quad mainstream
  • Ryzen - architecturally very balanced, highest possible throughout per x64 core ever created
  • I7-5775C - integrated gpu with ram on the chip, extremely high performance/watt on the desktop (higher than most things out even now)
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  • The Slot A Athlons weren't that good. The chips were fast, but that's not all it takes to make my list. I saw tons of slot A Athlons in the shop that had died. Although this was primarily due to bad VRM's on the motherboards used by OEMs.
  • The 286 thing, I'm going to say still wasn't a big deal. There are plenty of other processors more deserving of being on a list of top 5 CPU's.
  • No. Just no. This wasn't an x86 CPU. In case you hadn't noticed, that's what I concentrated on. This is after all a PC gaming site that came around well after the Amiga was long gone. Its a good series of CPU's, but I felt it was beyond the scope of this list.
  • The AMD 386's were nothing special as I recall. Even if they were, the initial innovation here was all Intel's for all the reasons I mentioned in the article. In fairness, this was around the time I was coming into the hobby, so the AMD version may not have had the proper context. As I recall from those days, it was generally accepted that AMD and Cyrix CPU's were essentially knock off CPU's that may have been better at a very specific task, but were sold at bargain basement prices for a reason. I remember software compatibility problems back in the day with non-Intel CPU's. That alone disqualifies them in my eyes. Even if these were faster though, overdrive style chips on an older platform aren't good enough for the list. The only one that had a shot at making this list was the Pentium II Overdrive which was socket 8.
  • The Intel Q6600 was a fantastic processor with a ton of longevity. It very nearly made this list for the very reason you mentioned. So I'll give you that one.
  • Ryzen is good, but only time will tell. The judgement of these processors involves a bit of hindsight. However, Ryzen wouldn't make the list right now due to having worse IPC than Intel's offerings.
  • No. I don't agree. There is an obvious enthusiast's perspective here and I don't give a shit about integrated GPU's.
 
Dan_D said:
  • The Slot A Athlons weren't that good. The chips were fast, but that's not all it takes to make my list. I saw tons of slot A Athlons in the shop that had died. Although this was primarily due to bad VRM's on the motherboards used by OEMs.
  • The 286 thing, I'm going to say still wasn't a big deal. There are plenty of other processors more deserving of being on a list of top 5 CPU's.
  • No. Just no. This wasn't an x86 CPU. In case you hadn't noticed, that's what I concentrated on. This is after all a PC gaming site that came around well after the Amiga was long gone. Its a good series of CPU's, but I felt it was beyond the scope of this list.
  • The AMD 386's were nothing special as I recall. Even if they were, the initial innovation here was all Intel's for all the reasons I mentioned in the article. In fairness, this was around the time I was coming into the hobby, so the AMD version may not have had the proper context. As I recall from those days, it was generally accepted that AMD and Cyrix CPU's were essentially knock off CPU's that may have been better at a very specific task, but were sold at bargain basement prices for a reason. I remember software compatibility problems back in the day with non-Intel CPU's. That alone disqualifies them in my eyes. Even if these were faster though, overdrive style chips on an older platform aren't good enough for the list. The only one that had a shot at making this list was the Pentium II Overdrive which was socket 8.
  • The Intel Q6600 was a fantastic processor with a ton of longevity. It very nearly made this list for the very reason you mentioned. So I'll give you that one.
  • Ryzen is good, but only time will tell. The judgement of these processors involves a bit of hindsight. However, Ryzen wouldn't make the list right now due to having worse IPC than Intel's offerings.
  • No. I don't agree. There is an obvious enthusiast's perspective here and I don't give a shit about integrated GPU's.
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Going to have to disagree on a few points there:

1. The amd 386dx40 had no compatibility issues with Intel software as it was essentially an Intel designed chip, where cyrix and co's incompatibilities were really a problem later.

2. The C&T 286 wasn't a "thing" because not many people knew about it and it wasn't advertised well. It was a display of what other manufacturers and designers can do at a time of vast innovation

3. 5775C, I don't really care about integrated graphics either, but I care about task/watt figures and in that respect the 5775C is a monster

4. Slot A athlon, you're going hard on a processor because of the supporting hardware? Is that fair when you're talking about CPUs?
 
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Keljian said:
Going to have to disagree on a few points there:

1. The amd 386dx40 had no compatibility issues with Intel software as it was essentially an Intel designed chip, where cyrix and co's incompatibilities were really a problem later.

2. The C&T 286 wasn't a "thing" because not many people knew about it and it wasn't advertised well. It was a display of what other manufacturers and designers can do at a time of vast innovation

3. 5775C, I don't really care about integrated graphics either, but I care about task/watt figures and in that respect the 5775C is a monster

4. Slot A athlon, you're going hard on a processor because of the supporting hardware? Is that fair when you're talking about CPUs?
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1.) The AMD chips were reverse engineered Intel CPU's and they weren't exact copies of them either.

2.) Great technical achievements aren't the only criteria for the list.

3.) We will agree to disagree.

4.) No, not entirely. It was a good chip, but I think several that came before or since were more deserving of spots on the list. Its as simple as that. I do not have fond memories of Slot A Athlons for the reasons I mentioned. Now, in a top 10, I'd probably have placed them in it.
 
Dan_D said:
  • No. Just no. This wasn't an x86 CPU. In case you hadn't noticed, that's what I concentrated on. This is after all a PC gaming site that came around well after the Amiga was long gone. Its a good series of CPU's, but I felt it was beyond the scope of this list.
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I would have amended the title to "The Top 5 Best x86 CPUs Of All Time" if that were the case. PC gaming focus or not, you never know what kind of computer enthusiast is gonna show up on a site like this with that kinda headline.

After all, the 68000's influence cannot be understated, between the Macintosh (and its matching LaserWriter printer line), the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Sharp X68000, and more arcade boards than I can count, with some of the more notable ones by Sega using two or even three of them in tandem for all those crazy sprite-scaling effects you saw in Space Harrier, OutRun, Galaxy Force, Power Drift, etc. Small wonder the X68000 managed to get so many arcade-perfect ports (or close to it) with the same CPU and OPM FM synth.

If anything, the only reason Intel's relatively poorly-designed x86 architecture survived is entirely due to the IBM PC and its numerous clones from the Gang of Nine (and over in Japan, the best-selling NEC PC-98 and Fujitsu FM Towns), and it persisted long enough for Intel and AMD to work around all the old design flaws and just keep the instruction set around for backwards compatibility.

Then again, I'm the kinda guy who appreciates an old Amiga 500 just as much as today's i9/Threadripper monstrosities backed up with RTX 2080 Ti cards. (My wallet hates me for it, though, because Amigas are stupid expensive for what they are, especially the AGA models. You can trip on cheap Macs for days, but even Amiga 500s are $100-150 minimum...)

Dan_D said:
  • The Intel Q6600 was a fantastic processor with a ton of longevity. It very nearly made this list for the very reason you mentioned. So I'll give you that one.
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Going from the Athlon XP 1800+ Palomino to a Q6600 G0 felt like hitting LUDICROUS SPEED! even without any overclocking. I've never had a jump like that in performance since.

Sure, my 4770K performs better, and quite noticeably better in games that are CPU-intensive, but for day-to-day use and general casual computing, even Core 2 systems are still plenty adequate. My younger bro actually still games on my old Q6600 build as a sort of hand-me-down, and the fact that it still holds up reasonably well after 12 years (albeit maxed out to 8 GB of RAM and with a GTX 760 4 GB instead of the original 8800 GT) is something I never would've thought I'd say about a CPU before then, especially recalling the turn-of-the-millenium CPU arms race where systems were already obsoleted in as little as one year due to exponential clock speed jumps.

It'll probably end up getting retired in the next few years, though, but not because it's too weak. Rather, I'm seeing signs of games and other software starting to demand SSE4 and other newer instruction sets that the Q6600 doesn't have, which is going to be a big problem if they become as much of an expected minimum requirement as MMX and SSE2 are now.
 
acascianelli said:
Sad to see that this list only contains x86 CPU's.
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The reason for this is simple. That's what I know. While I know the Motorola 6800 and a few other non-x86 CPU's, I'd have to compile a lot of data to do a list for non-x86 CPUs or to include them in a list like this. This type of content I typically do off the cuff in a short period of time whenever I'm inspired to do so.

Gaffney982 said:
I'm going to back you on this one. That slot 1 Celeron 300A netted me an easy 60% overclock with minimal cooling and tweaks. #1 in my book!!!
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If overclocking was the primary consideration in this list, the 300A would have been on here. In fact, it would probably be #1.
 
I remember seeing all the hype for the 300A and getting a 333 to play with... not quite the same, unfortunately. :(
 
cdr_74_premium said:
I remember seeing all the hype for the 300A and getting a 333 to play with... not quite the same, unfortunately. :(
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That's OK. My first 300A wouldn't do 450MHz. It would do something like 416MHz and that was all. My second chip did better though. It did 450MHz no problem. I also had a pair of 533A's on my ABIT BP6 that went to 600MHz+ that I ran for awhile. That was a great setup. Not as much of an overclock but the 300A was unique at the time.
 
I happened across this thread and was going to nominate the DEC KI10 TTL processor as one of the best performance/value CPU's of its time. But I guess you're talking single chip CPU's...
 
Dan_D said:
That's OK. My first 300A wouldn't do 450MHz. It would do something like 416MHz and that was all. My second chip did better though. It did 450MHz no problem. I also had a pair of 533A's on my ABIT BP6 that went to 600MHz+ that I ran for awhile. That was a great setup. Not as much of an overclock but the 300A was unique at the time.
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You can push 533s to 600+ reliably? I've got a couple in my own BP6 that weren't overclocked because I didn't think Mendocinos would have the headroom to hit 100 MHz FSB at that multiplier with any semblance of reliability - at least not without plopping on more exotic cooling than the system is currently worth.

Of course, this being FSB-based overclocking and all, there's that constant concern about memory, AGP and PCI clock dividers that's easy to forget in this post-Sandy Bridge era. The closer to 66, 100 or 133 MHz FSB, the better, as I loosely recall...
 
My Opteron 170 was my first foray into enthusiast level hardware, 2.0 overclocked to 2.8 was a beast until conroe came along! Current chip is a beast as well, 5 years old and putting down THESE kinda numbers, aint too shabby!
 
Pentium 166 MMX (certain specific S-spec only) @ 233 mhz (37.5 mhz bus) or 262.5 (41.5 mhz bus) was the king what started everything. Was very lucky to find that at the Pomona computer show way back during the voodoo1 days?
 
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