Best CPU's of all time?

Wolfedales were ok in the sense that at 4700MHz it was as strong as a stock Q6600 :D

In the end Yorktown's were the icing on the cake. So looking back to that socket specifically, anything under Yorktown and Wolfedales were best left to the past.

In spite of that I had an E6300 Conroe and it overclocked insanely well, one of my faves from that era.. but my E8600 was better :)
 
realworld said:
Easily Skylake and its rebranded/modifed variants. Those things aged like finewine.
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Best is such a weird metric.

good value?
9900k (5 years)
5755c
4770
c2q (q6600)
athlon 745 c0 3200+
athlon 600
k6-200
486sx25
386dx40
 
My short list of best CPUs:

-Motorola 68000 (will explain below)
-Intel Celeron 300A-366 Mendocino (comically easy overclocks, supported SMP in Abit BP6 and similar boards, all-time best value CPU Intel ever made)
-Motorola/Freescale PowerPC 750 "G3" (very competitive performance-per-watt vs. x86 for the time, eventually powered GameCube/Wii/Wii U, even still used in radiation-hardened form for spacecraft!)
-AMD Athlon Thunderbird (beat Intel to 1 GHz)
-AMD Athlon 64/Opteron (dropped the Hammer on Intel's inefficient NetBurst architecture, IA-64/Itanium and all those big iron RISC architectures like Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, even POWER, cemented x86's dominance in the computing market)
-Intel StrongARM/XScale up through PXA270 (big leap over competing ARM designs in terms of speed, but then Intel sold their ARM division to Marvell to go all-in on x86)
-Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield (easily overclockable, first reasonably affordable quad-core CPU, viable for casual computing for a whopping 6 to 10 years after release)
-AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X (Zen 1 didn't beat Skylake-X in single-thread, but it brought gobs of PCIe lanes and cores when Intel was still nickel-and-diming us all with the X299 platform and its UP TO crap that Linus famously ranted about)
-AMD Ryzen 5800X3D (hell of an upgrade path for AM4 owners, highlighted the importance of large caches for simulation games in particular, doesn't catastrophically fail from SMD overvoltage like its later Zen 4 successors would shortly after launch)

It might be too soon to put the Intel Core i7-12700K in that list, but I think Alder Lake in general - more specifically, the Golden Cove P-cores - will end up there eventually because they showed that Intel could finally retake the lead after years of Eternal Skylake 14nm stagnation, one-up AMD's introduction of PCIe 4.0 with PCIe 5.0 lanes, and if not for their frustrating market segmentation and fusing it off shortly after launch, formidable AVX-512 performance (which should be officially supported in Sapphire Rapids, at least).

Value-wise, consider this: $350 Micro Center bundles with a mobo (and now RAM!), and the ability to use affordable, mature DDR4 instead of DDR5 in its early adopter phase. It's why I didn't go for Raptor Lake instead.

Reality said:
It's interesting that only two people in this thread (correct me if I'm wrong) mentioned the 68000. This thing was used everywhere including it's clocked up iterations.

It was found in numerous PCs, as well as game consoles and arcade systems.
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The Macintosh, the Amiga, the Atari ST, the X68000 (named after it, even!), the Genesis/Mega Drive, the Neo Geo, countless arcade boards (Sega's X Board used two 68000s, their Y Board added a third!), early Palm PDAs, even TI-89/92 graphing calculators - honestly, no list of all-time best CPUs is complete without the 68000.

It is a far more elegant design than the Intel 8086 ever was, and its successors - 68020/68030, 68040, 68060 - wound up powering their fair share of UNIX workstations (NeXT, Sun, SGI, Sony NEWS, etc.), Macs, late-model Amigas and Atari TTs and Falcon030s, too.

Alas, Motorola couldn't ramp up the 68040's clock speeds fast enough right as Intel was dropping the 80486DX2, and by the time the 68060 was a thing, the Apple/IBM/Motorola alliance had already formed to replace 68k with PowerPC and one heck of an elegant 68k emulator to go with it, which was indeed faster than just continuing to iterate on native 68k. (Sun Microsystems even contemplated buying Apple in their beleaguered '90s state just for the 68k emulator they whipped up for the PowerPC transition!)

applegrcoug said:
The 2600k had staying power that is going to be tough to match. The 4790k may come close, but probably wont last as long.
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I think part of that is because they're both 4C/8T CPUs, something Intel stagnated with for a very long time on non-HEDT until AMD finally got out of their own NetBurst moment with Bulldozer/FX and brought Zen 1 (Ryzen/Threadripper) to market.

The 2600K has a few years longer on the market for that time when quad-core CPUs were good enough, so it had staying power in that sense, but the quad-core CPUs are showing their age now due to both the core count arms race on both sides post-Ryzen, and more recently, the dramatic uplifts in single-threaded CPU performance and PCIe bandwidth that Zen 3, Zen 4 and Alder/Raptor Lake have brought.

Now, it's time for the octo-core CPUs to shine. They may fall behind quickly on core count, but I'm thinking that the large cache on the 5800X3D and 7800X3D will more than make up for that. The latter even has AVX-512 support, which should help stave off obsolescence by lack of instruction set (a very real problem with pre-Haswell CPUs right now).
 
NamelessPFG said:
-Intel Celeron 300A-366 Mendocino (comically easy overclocks, supported SMP in Abit BP6 and similar boards, all-time best value CPU Intel ever made)
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These Celerons were very good and provided clear upgrade path for Pentium/MMX owners. Still nowhere near best value CPU proposition that Intel had.
Its release price was $149 and had OC from say 300MHz to 450MHz typically.

For comparison Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2140 1.6GHz cost $74 and easily overclocked to around 3.2GHz
E2160 at $84 could overclock slightly higher to limits of Conroe at 3.4-3.5GHz
These Pentium Dual Cores make Celeron 300A look pretty mediocre actually 🤯

I would rather compare value of Celeron 300A to Pentium D 805 which from 2.66GHz could hit 3.8GHz (4GHz required beefy PSU and cooling while 3.,8GHz was still within reasonable power consumption regime).
It was released at $241 at first but its price was quickly reduced to more reasonable levels and I remember snatching it around $100 new and got used repurposed Pentium 4 mobo for it (because many received BIOS upgrade to support Pentiums D, at least normal model without HT. Apparently supporting HT made easy to give them support dual cores) and OCed to 3.8GHz making for excellent dual core system at the time before two cores became popular. Athlon X2 were pretty expensive with at least 60-70% price to CPU (X2 3600+) and mobos which could actually overclock it to be faster than 3.8GHz Pentium D costing at least twice as much as what I got my mobo for. Also unlike Athlon X2 these Pentium D worked with Windows XP beautifully and without any issues with games.

-AMD Athlon 64/Opteron (dropped the Hammer on Intel's inefficient NetBurst architecture, IA-64/Itanium and all those big iron RISC architectures like Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, even POWER, cemented x86's dominance in the computing market)
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So true. AMD K8 slapped Intel Itanium silly 🫣

It might be too soon to put the Intel Core i7-12700K in that list, but I think Alder Lake in general - more specifically, the Golden Cove P-cores - will end up there eventually because they showed that Intel could finally retake the lead after years of Eternal Skylake 14nm stagnation, one-up AMD's introduction of PCIe 4.0 with PCIe 5.0 lanes, and if not for their frustrating market segmentation and fusing it off shortly after launch, formidable AVX-512 performance (which should be officially supported in Sapphire Rapids, at least).

Value-wise, consider this: $350 Micro Center bundles with a mobo (and now RAM!), and the ability to use affordable, mature DDR4 instead of DDR5 in its early adopter phase. It's why I didn't go for Raptor Lake instead.
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Imho Raptor Lake was much better launch than Alder Lake with most issues with P/E cores on software side resolved, much higher clocks and increased number of E-cores and cheaper previous chipset generation mobos available.

Also Raptor Lake has actually pretty good performance/power and Intel just overclocked their chips far beyond where they are efficient in order to compete with AMD 16 core CPUs:

The Macintosh, the Amiga, the Atari ST, the X68000 (named after it, even!), the Genesis/Mega Drive, the Neo Geo, countless arcade boards (Sega's X Board used two 68000s, their Y Board added a third!), early Palm PDAs, even TI-89/92 graphing calculators - honestly, no list of all-time best CPUs is complete without the 68000.

It is a far more elegant design than the Intel 8086 ever was, and its successors - 68020/68030, 68040, 68060 - wound up powering their fair share of UNIX workstations (NeXT, Sun, SGI, Sony NEWS, etc.), Macs, late-model Amigas and Atari TTs and Falcon030s, too.

Alas, Motorola couldn't ramp up the 68040's clock speeds fast enough right as Intel was dropping the 80486DX2, and by the time the 68060 was a thing, the Apple/IBM/Motorola alliance had already formed to replace 68k with PowerPC and one heck of an elegant 68k emulator to go with it, which was indeed faster than just continuing to iterate on native 68k. (Sun Microsystems even contemplated buying Apple in their beleaguered '90s state just for the 68k emulator they whipped up for the PowerPC transition!)
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Motorola has much better CPU design and its just too sad IBM went with crappy cheap'o'intel instead.
If we had 68000 in first PC it would not only be superior product and we would avoid all the nonsense with conventional/extended memory in DOS.
68000 already had 32-bit pointers and supported 32-bit instructions (they were half as fast as 16-bit instructions therefore its 16-bit CPU) so everything would just work and if older application needed 32-bit operations it will run faster on 32-bit CPU once it was released as is the case on all MK68K platforms.

Motorola not so much could not make faster 040 as much as they already knew effort spent developing these CPUs would not be profitable with market drying up and all the RISC commotion. Having cash-cow that PC was Motorola could focus on their MC68K unobstructed by "who will buy our CPU's?" questions.
In the end PowerPC had similar IPC as 68060 proving Motorola could easily make MX68K processors as fast as RISC.
 
For me, Intel holds that crown in games. I still rock my 6 years+ skylake 6700k, which manages to give me 120+ fps with a 6700xt. I also have a 4790k as an HTPC paired with RX580, which still gives me 60+ FPS in medium to high settings in most games on the TV. Those Intel chips are, in my opinion, still worth it for games and I don't feel like getting some very hot and expensive Alder Lake along with a huge and expensive and noisy water cooling system just to tame it. My two cents.
 
Still using my C2Q 6600 (original overclocking made easy) for Google searches and YouTube viewing in my garage. My i7-3770k (another easily overclockable CPU by intel) still rockin it since 2013 build, wife's computer now, working with MS Teams Videoconferencing on W10, and taught online all through covid (which she preferred rather than be in the college classroom), does all her class prep and research to this day on this 3770k. Was going to upgrade her computer, but she's retiring in a year....I think we can get another year out of it. Amazing though how SSD's and modern graphics cards can prolong the life of older but initially robust CPU's, for everyday general use computing but not necessarily modern gaming though. I'm working with an i7-6950x and an i9-10980xe, (the X99 and X299 platforms are very robust and versatile for data analytics and deep learning) both of which will be infamous in the years to come. IMHO
 
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XoR_ said:
These Celerons were very good and provided clear upgrade path for Pentium/MMX owners. Still nowhere near best value CPU proposition that Intel had.
Its release price was $149 and had OC from say 300MHz to 450MHz typically.

For comparison Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2140 1.6GHz cost $74 and easily overclocked to around 3.2GHz
E2160 at $84 could overclock slightly higher to limits of Conroe at 3.4-3.5GHz
These Pentium Dual Cores make Celeron 300A look pretty mediocre actually 🤯
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It is all relative. You see when we were clocking those 300a's they instantly tied or bettered the best chip on the market, the very expensive PII450. The E2140 with its low cost and 100% O/C while very impressive, it didn't catapult it to an equal of the best chip on the market the Core 2 Extreem QX6800. Which had 8 times the L2 of the 2140, twice the cores, higher FSB and its own O/C abilities. Intel eclipsed that chip with the QX6850 two months later that upped the FSB even higher along with base clocks.
 
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funkydmunky said:
You see when we were clocking those 300a's they instantly tied or bettered the best chip on the market, the very expensive PII450.
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the OCd 300A cpus could actually beat the PIIs in certain applications becuase even though they had less L2 cache the celeron had it on the die running at full speed vs the PII which was off-die running at a slower speed
 
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funkydmunky said:
It is all relative. You see when we were clocking those 300a's they instantly tied or bettered the best chip on the market, the very expensive PII450. The E2140 with its low cost and 100% O/C while very impressive, it didn't catapult it to an equal of the best chip on the market the Core 2 Extreem QX6800. Which had 8 times the L2 of the 2140, twice the cores, higher FSB and its own O/C abilities. Intel eclipsed that chip with the QX6850 two months later that upped the FSB even higher along with base clocks.
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Imho it had nothing to do with best chip on the market (especially that at max OC these Pentiums were faster than fastest dual core Core 2 Extreme) and simply C2D already weren't expensive. You could snatch CPU with Core 2 Duo name for price of these old Celerons. Pentium Dual-Core didn't capture imagination as much.

Core 2 Quad in 2007 were very expensive, including Q6600. They became much cheaper later on during first i7's era. Especially 65nm Q6600 were great cheap pick.
At lower price end Pentium DC were amazing CPUs for the price. Later superseeded by E5200 for the same price. Less impressive % OC but to be honest something like E2140 was severly underclocked to begin with.

FLECOM said:
the OCd 300A cpus could actually beat the PIIs in certain applications becuase even though they had less L2 cache the celeron had it on the die running at full speed vs the PII which was off-die running at a slower speed
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This did happen but not often.
It was however interesting that Celerons used better cores.
I wonder why Intel didn't release Slot 1 CPUs with L2 and L3 caches. Even putting Celeron core with additional 512KB cache on 100MHz FSB would rip everything on its path to total world domination.
Especially would be helpful with their efforts making sure everyone sees AMD's Athlon as nothing more than distant second at best or even third vs cheaper models without L3 cache.

Then again Broadwell @ 4.2GHz with 128MB L4 cache with pretty much the same core as Nehalem beat Skylake @ 5GHz in most games or at least traded blows. It is another thing I always wondered why they didn't do for Skylake or their derivatives when competition from AMD heated up. Then AMD beat them to the punch with X3D processors scoring wins on gaming benchmarks across the board.

Some times Intel ways are too mysterious to me...
 
I got the most mileage out of my i7-920 and i5-4690 CPUs. Of course, my 13700 leaves everything I've ever used choking on its dust.
 
i think i had my Q8300 running at 3.6ghz 1.28v i had that thing for a good long while until i changed it out for a 4790k
but i do remember Q6600's being very popular and very easy to overclock
 
1.) Loved my 300A on a BX440 back in the day.. In the top 3 of all time greats.

2.) AMD's 5X86 and Athlon XP were great bang for the buck. Athlon XP was in it's day qualifies to be in the top 10 for value.

3.) AMD X2 lineup was OK until Core 2 came around .. then I ran an OC'd Q6600 for several years (in the top 10 IMHO).. been running Intel ever since, so I have no other AMD mentions.

4.) 4790k should be in the top 10 IMHO.

5.) Currently running a 9900k.. Does absolutely everything I need it do still after 5 years... I bought used, so it was a great value upgrade from my 4790k.

6.) Apple M2.. yeah it is not X86, but definitely should be in the top 10 (or less).
 
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I think the 13900k, 13700k and 13600k will age well.

They all pack a whallop, and tuned (undervolted) they match or beat the efficiency numbers of the 7xxx x series chips and are better at idle.

The efficiency cores are above skylake grade, so even without the “P” cores you have a 9700k on board on the lower end models, and the 13900k has two sets of 8.

The P cores are another level entirely.
 
The CPUs and builds that stand out the most for me were:

My first, an Intel 486
Pentium 3 500mhz
A dual CPU Pentium 3 1ghz system I built right when the 1ghz came out, so I had 2ghz and felt fancy, lol.
QX9650 and QX9770 because they were so much fun to OC and when I got really serious about water cooling.
 
Pentium Pro @ 166MHz.

The good 'ol days of playing "Doom" until when I went to sleep and had the game burned into my retinas.
 
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Have had my i7 5820k the longest. A beast of a CPU. But I remember enjoying my Intel E6600, as well as my i7 920.
 
Camaroz06 said:
Hello All,

sort of a light hearted usless thread. What do you feel are the best CPUs of all time? Can be any producer.

I'd have to throw my hat in for the Q6600 and E6600 from the core 2 duo line, and even the i7920.
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2500k, Q6600, Opteron 165, 5600x/5800x3d not in any particular order
 
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For me it was prolly the original Athlon. The P4-era was a dark time for CPUs and that really shook things up.

Second would be the Core 2 Duo. e6400? maybe. I scrimped and saved and my GF thought I was crazy to spend that much on a CPU. It served me longer than any other CPU I've owned.

Honorable mention to the K6-2 as it rocked the price/performance expectations at the time. 3Dnow Baby!
 
For me it would be the Q6600, 2500K, and 3700K. The 2500K was my introduction into watercooling. Every single pc since has been water cooled. These CPU's were so fun to overclock. I manage to get the 2500K to 5ghz daily. The 3700K was also at 5ghz daily. I'm still using the 3700k as my living room media PC. That thing is going on over 11 years and still chugging along at 5ghz.
 
Opteron 165 was the most fun I ever had overclocking a CPU. By default it was a 1.8Ghz CPU and I was able to get 2.7 out of it delidded. 2.6 not delidded. Eventually I chipped the die because of the pressure and it no longer worked but by then I already had a new machine and was just playing around. Such good times. I had it paired with a 7800GTX originally and then an 8800GTS and it absolutely crushed everything I needed it to. :)
 
XoR_ said:
This did happen but not often.
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It happened consistently. It came down to what the application needed. Bigger slow cache or fast small cache.
I went back and read some old reviews and the consensus was win, win, win for the ol'Celery as far as consumer use goes. Read one review where it bested the P3-450 which also had half speed cache.
 
Niner21 said:
I had a Q6600 paired with a DFI LANparty board for a long time. My old Athlon 2500+ was a great cpu also paired with a NF2 board back in the day.
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Had both as well. The Barton was great for its day, but the Quads opened a whole new door.

My Coppermine 500E that ran at 700MHz all day was solid, too.

-bZj
 
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