Best CPU's of all time?

Q6600. Nothing has come close to the staying power of that CPU.

One thing I didn't consider.... maybe form now on, *all* high end CPUs will have that kind of staying power... maybe the Q6600 was just the first of the "good enough" CPUs.

I mean, the i7-920 won't be out of date for desktop applications for another decade (at least!) I'd bet, same for the Sandy Bridges, Ivy Bridges, etc..... they will will easily have a 6+ year lifetime of being relatively unchallenged by software....

So yea, maybe the Q6600 just the first of many....
 
The Intel Pentium line and AMD K7 slot processors.

They re defined processing power for the PC.
 
Probably an outlier, but the first bottom-up build I did was using a Northwood P4. Didn't know crap from crap other than a price premium of $250 for the part running @ 3.06ghz was not gonna happen. 24 hours, a Zalman heatsink + Delta fan and some reading on the internet later I had it scootin' along at the same 3.06ghz. God bless that little Northwood. It's what got me into overclocking.

Edit : Almost forgot, the part I bought was 2.53ghz stock.

I have a Northwood-C P4 (the bottom-end one for retail - 2.6GHz stock) that is still serviceable (at least for Linux), and it's still in the ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe I bought it for. My default was not stock - I typically ran it at 3 GHz - and did it with Intel's stock HSF, at that. I actually dropped it down to stock when I passed it to Mom (I went to the original Mighty Mouse and LGA775); however, other than the RAM (used in other projects), the CPU/motherboard has entirely original parts other than the battery.

Given a proper case (ATX - this is, after all, a former workstation board), it's certainly resurrectable.

The E had been originally home to a P4 Northwood-B; however, I had been hearing some nice things about HTT (the 3.06 GHz Northwood-B was too pricey, however) so I waited for the C. The overclocked (remember - stock HSF) C ran XP, then Vista (first with an AIW 9700 Pro, then an x1650 PRO - both in AGP, of course); amazingly, both still work (given enough HDD, I likely could easily get 7 to run on it; if it weren't for the non-standard DELL case design, I'd transplant into an XP-powered Dimension 2400 I just finished disinfecting - even at stock, it would be more launch than the P4B that's in it today)
 
Lack of Alpha love in this thread is sad read up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha
one of the most ground breaking CPU imo
the Ahtlon would later use its bus tech

I have LOTS of respect for DEC's Alpha - I actually got some hands-on time with them at various trade shows and watched - shocked - as an AXP-150 destroyed a 486DX2/66 (both running NT); if it weren't that Intel got off their duffs and got faster Pentiums out there cheap, I would likely have bought an AXP-150 instead (via DEC Lanham, MD - they actually had a local retail store on Annapolis Road right off the Beltway). The Alpha had one big problem - it was pricey compared to the Pentium-100 that would launch a year later. HyperTransport (which the Alpha pioneered) was indeed licensed to AMD (among others); it was a major factor in the original Athlon (and later Opteron). Amusingly, the latest HyperTransport licensee is the same company that acquired the Alpha and Digital Semiconductor - no less than Intel (a variant of HyperTransport is used in LGA13xx/LGA11xx/LGA20xx); when DEC was acquired by Hewlett-Packard, Intel acquired Digital Semiconductor (minus the Alpha - that was acquired by NEC Semiconductor) primarily for, of all things, their Ethernet business (despite Intel being one of Ethernet's original" Old Men", you'd have most likely have heard of 3Com, DEC and, quirkily enough, AMD, in terms of Ethernet before Intel came to mind).
 
My most memorable:
-Pentium (remember the hype Intel did for this thing!? Shesh...)

-Athlon 64 (and x2) My most-upgraded motherboard EVER. Socket A was great...

-C2D series. I still use these processors for a LOT of machines (all but one) at work. An e8400 can still chew through any office software with ease, and upgrading to Q9400 helps with intensive threaded tasks without having to do a complete redo of the system.
 
Celeron 400, I think it was. Socket A, I think. I overclocked it to around 950.
 
Zilog Z80(a) waaaay ahead of it's time great processor a landmark CPU for 8bit days I kid you not and yes I have my Sinclair Spectrum and it still works!
 
Q6600 G0 without a doubt. Once it was down around the $200 point it really got special. Even when nehalem was out with much pricier boards and processors, the Q6600 was still holding its own for performance/value.

E6600+E6700 were fairly popular too at the beginning of the core 2 days. For paying under $300 for this processor, you could have a system that would kick AMD's 64 X2 offerings at the time (6000+ and 6400+). Eventually AMD started this "Black Edition" stuff to stay competitive, released a chip with less cache and at 65nm instead of 90nm of the previous two mentioned chips. Intel was still the better choice imo.

The Q9450 is more "meh" in my head. It was better than the Q6600 in every regard, but for the price the older chip couldn't be beat. Disregarding that fact though, the Q9450/9550 wins.

Wasn't the E5200 pretty hot for awhile? Super cheap and could be clocked REALLY high. $72 for a chip that could be easily pushed to 4GHz? very nice.

Some of the early K10 Phenom/Athlon chips that had cores that were disabled (and unlocked via the BIOS) was pretty lulzy. Not so much "best of all time" but it was hilarious, and a good chunk of people took advantage of this trick.

I'd have to put the i7-920 as being one of the best too. Intel's first processor with an integrated memory controller... finally able to 1 up AMD on a good chunk of benchmarks (the memory related ones). But X58 had kinda high power usage, and with mobos being over $300 and procs starting at nearly $300 too... it was an expensive fold to join at the beginning.

i7-2600K (combined with the 2500K) would rival the Q6600 in terms of popularity. Clocks high, clock per clock was faster than LGA1156/1366 chips, P67 B3 was a good price and decently featured.

Since then, I haven't seen any "wowza" chips. Just like the Q9450 is "meh" compared to the Q6600, the 3570k/3770k is "meh" compared to the 2500k/2600k. Intel using TIM between the die and IHS with those IB chips has really lowered their popularity for people who want to OC high and have decent temps.
 
Some of the early K10 Phenom/Athlon chips that had cores that were disabled (and unlocked via the BIOS) was pretty lulzy. Not so much "best of all time" but it was hilarious, and a good chunk of people took advantage of this trick.

Paid $99 for my 550BE in January 2010, unlocked to quad. Probably my best bang/buck CPU. Still goin' fine.
 
It think it's hard to beat the i7 920.

People still running the i7 920 at ~4.5GHz today. At that speed it's still faster than a stock Ivy and not much slower than an overclocked Ivy.

They came out in November 2008 so they have been around for 3 years and 9 months. Coming up on 4 years now and are probably still great for another couple years.

5-6 years where your CPU can still run the most new and demanding tasks very quickly is hard to beat.

Perhaps Intel just hasn't been able to improve CPU tech that much in the last 3 years besides some die shrinks and energy efficiency (which is still great don't get me wrong).
 
Zilog Z80
Motorola 68000

motorola 68000

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.


Necro I know! It's an interesting thread to bring back from time to time
 
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.


Necro I know! It's an interesting thread to bring back from time to time
A lot of people are really only going to think about traditional Intel x86 PC's when talking about CPU's. I'm familiar with a lot of CPU's beyond that scope but non-Intel/AMD CPU's rarely come to mind when talking about or thinking of CPU's.
 
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.


Necro I know! It's an interesting thread to bring back from time to time
Yep, great CPU. My Atari 520ST used that CPU. Loved that computer back in the day.
 
Far as overclocking goes. My vote goes to the unlocked 1.5 volt AMD t-bred B 1700s. Easy extra 1.0ghz or more on a 1.4ghz chip with a good nForce2 board. $65 CPU running faster than $350 ones. Twenty years later and same one is running in my Epox board today.
 

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Far as overclocking goes. My vote goes to the unlocked 1.5 volt AMD t-bred B 1700s. Easy extra 1.0ghz or more on a 1.4ghz chip with a good nForce2 board. $65 CPU running faster than $350 ones. Twenty years later and same one is running in my Epox board today.
I was able to push a Northwood Celeron 1.8GHz to 3.0GHz with 100% reliability. The funny thing was, I compared it to my Pentium IV 2.4C at stock and overclocked speeds (up to 3.0GHz), and the Celery lost every time. Still, I was impressed by the 1.2GHz clock speed increase. Meanwhile, I'm the same guy who had to get 3x Celeron 300A's to find one that would actually do 450MHz. It often seems like I either get CPU's that clock like crazy or don't clock worth a shit. I rarely get anything in between. I had been able to push many a Intel Core i5 2500K past 5.0GHz. I had ones that would do 5.1GHz and 5.2GHz all day. We had a lot of those as review/test bench CPU's back in the HardOCP.com days.
 
I don't have much experience with older cpus, but my vote will be the Q6600. That's where me and my brother learned a lot about overclocking and overall pc performance/cooling/etc. Good times.
 
Upon seeing this topic, I immediately thought of the DEC KI-10. Yes, the KL was a lot faster, but it was a huge power pig.

Not exactly a desktop CPU, though.
 
Q6600 was indeed one of the best CPUs of all time.
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.
 
Think I had mine up to 3.2ghz or so on a huge air cooler :D
I was on an EVGA 680i SLI board at the time. Their VRM's and some other design issues with those wouldn't really allow me to overclock all that high. I think I could get around 2.8GHz on that setup. The 680i SLI boards were dogshit.
 
Even today, the Q6600 is still fast enough to power an office system, as long as the system has enough RAM and an SSD; and it will run Windows 11 fine (using a bypass of course).
 
Things that came to mind:

66mhz slot/socket 370 Celerons set to 100/133. Modding Tualatin pentiums 3S into slot 1 motherboards with an abit slotket that allowed for fsb and voltage adjustments.

Gold finger mods on socket A made it a mix bag, so whatever the cheapest green pcb sempron you could find.

S754 with the mobile Turion was nice, but not enough mobo options, only went with the dfi motherboard

Opteron 165, Athlon x2 3800 both could easily hit 3ghz usually. Opty has 2x1mb cache, Athlon were a mixed bag of 2x512kb and 2x1mb depending on the model. Still have both, the 3800x2 would hit 3.2ghz but I had a house fire that may have killed all my s939 and s775 stuff. Had cold boot bugs with the dfi cfx3200 motherboards, but damn they overclocked well! I remember smashing some records before core 2 dropped, running a mix of HIS ati 3850 and 3870, after bios modding the 3850 and overclocking both with pencil volt mods. Running a peltier on the 3800x2, up to 3.4ghz but more stable at 3.2g, and 4x512 ddr-500 crucial ballistix sticks pushing near 600 with fans on them. That system was HOT! Looked great with UV cathodes though.

Skipped phenom, it was worse than 939 for gaming. Phenom 2 was fine, a few fun cpus you could unlock cores, I had an x2 5000 that unlocked to a quad core, cpuz said something funny but I don't recall now.

Q6600, 4ghz+ was easy with the abit ip35 pro. Q9450 too, which needed crazy high FSB to clock worth a snot, but would save you a bunch over the 9550/9650 if your board could do it. Never bothered with core 2 duos much till later on, I was always a multitasker so quad all the way.

Intel 2000-4000 series were fine, lots of 4770ks still in action.

Lga1366 forever, 920 were ok but I love me some westmere xeons. I had a quad core xeon with an unlocked multi too, helluva deal over the 980x. 4ghz easy, 4.2+ doable with x5670 or similar. Too bad we never got more modern features before x58 died. X79, x99, x299 were all fun too. Still have an x299 with a 7940X, 8x8gb of corsair vengeance rgb ram.

6700k 7700k intel was OK, but 8700K was great. 9-series isn't much better unless you get a 9900K. Coffeetime modding is great fun, I have a 5ghz 9600K in an MSI Z170.

Not much to say with Intel 12th or 13th gen, just fine tuning and going for efficiency, Intel already factory overclocked em'. Amd 7 series looks neat, low wattage draw but I'm wondering what OC headroom they have.
 
I had a C300a and an C333a as well as a Duron 600 that did the magical 1GHz with the pencil trick. All monsters in their day.
Edit* had to mention my C333a was X2 on an Abit BP6 so dual 550MHz on Win2000. I was a gamer so no bump to me but I think I was more into OC'ing then games at the time so a massive win for me. Compared to an actual dual 550MHz setup at the time it was laughable that a few hundred $$ system could do that.
 
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Even today, the Q6600 is still fast enough to power an office system, as long as the system has enough RAM and an SSD; and it will run Windows 11 fine (using a bypass of course).
I agree. I have one forsale in the classifieds right now in an Abit IP35 Pro board! I ran this rig up until a few months ago. It was very snappy with 8gig RAM and an SSD.
 
i7 2600k by far. Bought on launch day and it's still someone's primary computer today, around 12 years later. Went from my main rig, to my wife's, then sold to a coworker, he sold it to his brother. Same case, MB, memory, and OCZ Vertex 4 SSD in it. He just had to replace the power supply this year and it was an original PC Power and Cooling 610 I bought in 2007. That power supply was originally in my first Intel build, Core 2 Duo e6750. 2600k overclocked is still faster than the majority of office computers I have deployed. I sent an email asking if he'd sell it back to me as I typed this.
 
For recent processors, I feel like the 8700K is a shining star. They're still a damn good CPU and you can get a pretty good uplift vs. stock performance with minimal effort.
I can't think of another CPU that really wow'd me like that one did since the Athlon days.
 
P4 2.4C Northwood.

Oh man, that brings back the feels. I had a hand picked M0 stepping 2.4C running at 3.4ghz on an ABit IC7-Max3 for a long time. That was the only processor I've ever had that I'm pretty sure I killed overclocking. Ran for YEARS at 3.4 without a problem then suddenly started being unstable at 3.4. Then 3.2. Then 3.0. Then at stock speeds.

Tried different motherboard, different RAM, different power supplies. You could feel it getting worse from over the coarse of about 2-3 months.

Ended up replacing it with a Celeron D 320 [email protected] until I ditched my i875 system entirely.

We'll probably never see those kind of huge overclocks again thanks to Intel/AMD turning overclocking into a marketing tool.
 
Sandybridge.
$300 something 2600K was beating the last year $1000 cpu in most things, matching up to full mutltithreaded affair even, brought quicksync.


I remember when we tried our capture movement system we were making at work to run on a Core i5 2400 instead of the Q6600s, just how much of a different world it was, a complete new tier of performance for such a reasonable entry price points.

Not only that, but like pointed out the giant longevity of them (still has one running 24/24 in my server and stopped to be the main machine just in like 2019)
 
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