Worst CPU's of all time?

[Dan_D]

I had Cyrix 486 chips, and those pretty much ruled. I see someone mentioned the Cyrix SLC chips as a negative, and in fairness, they were ultra-low power draw CPUs that were really meant for portables.

They were about 10-20% slower than their Intel counterparts at the same clock speed. I had a Cyrix 80MHz 486 chip that was slower than an Intel 486 DX2 66MHz CPU in most tests.

Plus, there was software out there that simply wouldn't run on non-Intel CPUs.

 

[Tactlesss]

I have one of the first generation Asus eeepcs even in 2006 800mhz should have been able to perform better than that piece of shit. It would choke when I was typing in notepad.
I have nothing but rose tinted glasses for the K6-2.

 

[sethk]

I think Itanium could be debated as worst because it hurt intel quite badly and allowed AMD to gain a toehold. Intel made a huge bet on this with HP, trying to turn away from their bread and butter x86 with a non compatible VLIW architecture that in my opinion would likely not have become universally great as a general purpose CPU because of its reliance on apps being compiled just right to get the most out of each cpu. And that’s if the market embraced it (which it did not).
AMD walked right in the door left open and defined the x64 uarch which for a long time was labeled “amd64” by microsoft to distinguish it from intel IA64 and which intel was forced to adopt after having argued it as unnecessary for a while.

 

[Dan_D]

I think Itanium could be debated as worst because it hurt intel quite badly and allowed AMD to gain a toehold. Intel made a huge bet on this with HP, trying to turn away from their bread and butter x86 with a non compatible VLIW architecture that in my opinion would likely not have become universally great as a general purpose CPU because of its reliance on apps being compiled just right to get the most out of each cpu. And that’s if the market embraced it (which it did not).
AMD walked right in the door left open and defined the x64 uarch which for a long time was labeled “amd64” by microsoft to distinguish it from intel IA64 and which intel was forced to adopt after having argued it as unnecessary for a while.

Itanium had a very long life span and was useful for certain niches. It was also very good at what it was typically used for. I don't think Itanium really makes the cut for worst CPU's of all time. Not when cacheless Celerons, Netburst P4's, recalled 1GHz PIII's, Pentium 60/66's, and $1,000 Extreme Editions that underperformed exist.

 

[daglesj]

No no no no no!!!!

The worst CPU of all time was from AMD. It's one that most of you here would not have noticed but I did about 10 years ago. It was the bane of my life. People and cheap laptops.

The AMD E1 series.

This was from the real dark days of AMD and whoever borought it to market I would gladly kick them hard in the nuts over and over.

Back then you could take pretty much any crappy laptop and transform it with a 120GB SSD. Not these E1 machines. Putting a SSD in one meant you could do maybe one mouse click every two minutes rather than every 6. These things ran at 100% CPU just sat on the desktop doing nothing.

 

[Dan_D]

No no no no no!!!!

The worst CPU of all time was from AMD. It's one that most of you here would not have noticed but I did about 10 years ago. It was the bane of my life. People and cheap laptops.

The AMD E1 series.

This was from the real dark days of AMD and whoever borought it to market I would gladly kick them hard in the nuts over and over.

Back then you could take pretty much any crappy laptop and transform it with a 120GB SSD. Not these E1 machines. Putting a SSD in one meant you could do maybe one mouse click every two minutes rather than every 6. These things ran at 100% CPU just sat on the desktop doing nothing.

I don't even remember those. Looking it up, I can see why. It was never intended for enthusiasts.

I see people have forgotten the Cyrix Media GX 120MHz, 133MHz, and 150MHz CPU's. They were one of the earliest SoC designs and soldered onto their motherboards. They powered some particularly awful Compaq Presario machines and were sold as DIY options. These CPU's were everything all in one and a lot of their functionality was software driven. They were the WinModem of the CPU world.

Complete trash.

 

[M76]

Without a doubt AMD E1-2100.

Runner up: Pentium 4 Willamette.

 

[[Spectre]]

Atom N2xxx series chips....what the actual fuck.

 

[Dan_D]

Atom N2xxx series chips....what the actual fuck.

Here is a list of some of the worst desktop CPU's I can remember.

Cyrix Media GX
IDT Centaur/WinChip
AMD Geode (about as fast as one)
Intel Celeron 233 and 266MHz (Without L2 cache)
Nearly any Intel Overdrive CPU for a previous generation's socket/motherboard (Excludes Pentium II Overdrive for Pentium Pro boards to some extent.)
AMD K5 (Massive disappointment)
AMD Am5x86 133MHz (Was worse than the Cyrix version.)
Pentium IV Willamette (Socket 423)

 

[OFaceSIG]

Here is a list of some of the worst desktop CPU's I can remember.

Cyrix Media GX
IDT Centaur/WinChip
AMD Geode (about as fast as one)
Intel Celeron 233 and 266MHz (Without L2 cache)
Nearly any Intel Overdrive CPU for a previous generation's socket/motherboard (Excludes Pentium II Overdrive for Pentium Pro boards to some extent.)
AMD K5 (Massive disappointment)
AMD Am5x86 133MHz (Was worse than the Cyrix version.)
Pentium IV Willamette (Socket 423)

I'm not mistaken Geoge is based on VIA tech, which in turn, VIA based it on Cyrix 4x86 tech.

 

[Dan_D]

I'm not mistaken Geoge is based on VIA tech, which in turn, VIA based it on Cyrix 4x86 tech.

The AMD Geode is essentially a modernized Media GX which was developed by Cyrix. After Cyrix and National Semi-Conductor merged, an updated version of the CPU was sold as the Geode in 1999. Later on Cyrix was sold to VIA and put the Cyrix name on some VIA stuff. However, the Geode itself was later sold to AMD in 2003. A version of the chip was released as late as 2006.

 

[XoR_]

I don't even remember those. Looking it up, I can see why. It was never intended for enthusiasts.

I see people have forgotten the Cyrix Media GX 120MHz, 133MHz, and 150MHz CPU's. They were one of the earliest SoC designs and soldered onto their motherboards. They powered some particularly awful Compaq Presario machines and were sold as DIY options. These CPU's were everything all in one and a lot of their functionality was software driven. They were the WinModem of the CPU world.

Complete trash.

Never used time accurate Cyrix Media GX 120-150MHz but I had later 400MHz variant and its performance was pretty much like 400MHz 486 would have. Read: not so great.

Similar performers to Cyrix Media GX were Cyrix C3 CPU's and 400MHz model was very similar actually.
Unlike Media GX these used Winchip tech which VIA who acquired both Cyrix and Winchip used instead of evolution of actual Cyrix CPUs. Too bad because Cyrix engineers had pretty decent core in development.

As for original Cyrix which often is being put in such lists/topics it imho doesn't actually deserve to be called one of the worst CPUs. There was obvious issue of underwhelming FPU performance, especially in games but otherwise those were at the time fastest ALU/INT x86 processors per MHz. In my testing Cyrix MX @ 166MHz feels considerably snappier in Windows than Pentium MMX 166MHz. With better FPU and fabrication those were pretty good cores with great potential. Better than AMD K5 or K6.

As for AMD they had similar issue to Cyrix but FPU was slightly faster and INT/ALU slower. Faster variants of both AMD and Cyrix had to use chipsets of questionable quality and its those chipsets which caused most issues. Celeron A + some 440LX and later BX were much better choice, even if somewhat more expensive but that doesn't make AMD K6 a bad CPU.

Atom N2xxx series chips....what the actual fuck.

As a mobile phone CPUs Atom N2xxx weren't that bad for the time.
From ARM we had Cortex A9 with 4 cores and Atom N2xxx with just two was mostly there in multi-theaded performance and much faster in single thread performance.
For actual PCs these CPUs were obviously outdated - basically CPU cores didn't differ at all from very first Atoms which themselves were pretty slow when they came out.

What was the worst part of these CPUs was that being SoC any PC built with them used PowerVR GPU and while those were not bad GPU cores by itself no one ever wrote proper Windows driver for them so they mostly operated in software mode. So tablets, small form factor PCs and motherboards with this CPU were all terrible. In the company I worked at the time we bought two micro ATX boards and used XP on them. Driver was the worst GPU driver I ever used, just simple VESA driver and not very stable either. Displaying one program all the time they ran without issues though.

Otherwise again, for Android devices these were pretty decent CPUs for the time they came out and had good power consumption and performance/power.

What to me makes these CPU's terrible however is the fact those were the CPUs which Windows 8 was targeted for and because M$ realized they won't be able to run Windows 8 (just look at how Windows 8 Release Candidate looked...) they started cutting every effect from the system making it the ugliest OS ever and maybe if not for this effort they wouldn't cut features they did have in RC related to desktop.

-----
In over-promise + under-deliver category / simply worst CPU range I would put Netburst series and more specifically Celerons.

Netburst was cache hungry architecture and 256KB was an absolute minimum they should ever put there. Still terrible but 128KB made these Celerons just seem broken at places and 256KB Northwood Cellerons wouldn't be nearly as bad as 128KB cache version that we got. Even Prescott, overall slower architecture was significantly faster with 256KB L2 over faster Northwood with 128KB L2. Still with their price any performance gains from additional cache wouldn't make them better than getting AMD K7 but perhaps people who did got them wouldn't feel as cheated.

Another thing is that Pentium 4 were always horribly priced and entry Pentium 4 didn't even offer Hyper Threading - the only feature which made these processors interesting. With HT using Windows 2000/XP was much more pleasant and consistent experience even compared to later AMD offerings like Athlon 64 but to get HT you had to spend top buck so not many people who had Pentium 4 even had it. Of course Hyper-Threading was already there on the die and Intel could just as well enable it for more CPUs.

In simpler words Intel made a cash grab. They knew people thought clock speed == performance and designed horrible architecture which then they made even more horrible with Prescott and asked horrendously high prices for these CPUs.

And to make matters even worse while they were selling Pentium 4 on desktop they already had much faster and leaps and bounds more efficient Pentium M which they could easily adapt to desktop.

At the very least Pentium D 805 - that silly thing made from gluing two Prescotts, was actually a decent Netburst product for its time and I would exclude this CPU from category: terrible. Otherwise Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading were also good CPU's, albeit very expensive which doesn't make them great products.

 

[Dan_D]

Never used time accurate Cyrix Media GX 120-150MHz but I had later 400MHz variant and its performance was pretty much like 400MHz 486 would have. Read: not so great.

Sadly, I had to fix a lot of systems based on them back in the day. Several of them were brought in because they couldn't run some pretty basic applications at all leading to the customers outright returning them.

Similar performers to Cyrix Media GX were Cyrix C3 CPU's and 400MHz model was very similar actually.
Unlike Media GX these used Winchip tech which VIA who acquired both Cyrix and Winchip used instead of evolution of actual Cyrix CPUs. Too bad because Cyrix engineers had pretty decent core in development.

I remember. The Cyrix C3 moniker was used because the name was more recognizable than IDT's but at its core it was a WinChip.

As for original Cyrix which often is being put in such lists/topics it imho doesn't actually deserve to be called one of the worst CPUs. There was obvious issue of underwhelming FPU performance, especially in games but otherwise those were at the time fastest ALU/INT x86 processors per MHz. In my testing Cyrix MX @ 166MHz feels considerably snappier in Windows than Pentium MMX 166MHz. With better FPU and fabrication those were pretty good cores with great potential. Better than AMD K5 or K6.

There is a reason why I never place the Cyrix 6x86 CPU's in such lists. The CPU was great for the money and often just as fast or faster than its Pentium counterparts aside from the FPU. The Media GX I think does deserve to be in that list. Not just due to its raw performance but also due to the driver and software issues with them.

As for AMD they had similar issue to Cyrix but FPU was slightly faster and INT/ALU slower. Faster variants of both AMD and Cyrix had to use chipsets of questionable quality and its those chipsets which caused most issues. Celeron A + some 440LX and later BX were much better choice, even if somewhat more expensive but that doesn't make AMD K6 a bad CPU.

Notice I didn't mention the K6, K6-2 or K6-3. I only mentioned the K5 because it was very lackluster. Partly due to being really late to the party. The issues with the K6's and its successors were mostly on the Super-7 platform which was dogshit. I don't include the Nx586 from NexGen Systems either as it was a decent product. It simply didn't have an FPU originally but did get one later.

 

[Starfalcon]

The AMD Geode is essentially a modernized Media GX which was developed by Cyrix. After Cyrix and National Semi-Conductor merged, an updated version of the CPU was sold as the Geode in 1999. Later on Cyrix was sold to VIA and put the Cyrix name on some VIA stuff. However, the Geode itself was later sold to AMD in 2003. A version of the chip was released as late as 2006.

Yeah those Geodes suck so bad, the thin client registers at my job have those in them. Not to mention they only have 2 gigs of memory. We have had these terrible systems for over 6 years now, and the only reason they even work is they run a super stripped down linux version on them. They lag every time we look parts up on them and even more when we open up the register. Sad thing is the cash drawer registers are dual core pentium socket 775, and they seem blazing fast compared to the geodes.

 

[funkydmunky]

I have one of the first generation Asus eeepcs even in 2006 800mhz should have been able to perform better than that piece of shit. It would choke when I was typing in notepad.
I have nothing but rose tinted glasses for the K6-2.

Had one too. The original 7" eeePC. It was deliberately down clocked to hit power draw numbers. I loved tweaking it and would run it at full chip clock when plugged in. Good times. First gen used a proper Celeron and later models used the Atom. It came with default Linux OS but I did put TinyXP on it and the 4GB SSD (first I ever used) was quite impressive compared to my best 7200rpm HDD's in my desktop at the time.
I used to run MSFS 2000? on it and a hole bunch of emulated games and such. IT DID NOT choke on notepad that is for sure. Not sure if that is just you exaggerating for fun or not, but it was a snappy little system with that first gen SSD EVEN with Windows.
Oh I still have that little bugger in a drawer. Can boot notepad under (slow XP) if needed

 

[XoR_]

Had one too. The original 7" eeePC. It was deliberately down clocked to hit power draw numbers. I loved tweaking it and would run it at full chip clock when plugged in. Good times. First gen used a proper Celeron and later models used the Atom. It came with default Linux OS but I did put TinyXP on it and the 4GB SSD (first I ever used) was quite impressive compared to my best 7200rpm HDD's in my desktop at the time.
I used to run MSFS 2000? on it and a hole bunch of emulated games and such. IT DID NOT choke on notepad that is for sure. Not sure if that is just you exaggerating for fun or not, but it was a snappy little system with that first gen SSD EVEN with Windows.
Oh I still have that little bugger in a drawer. Can boot notepad under (slow XP) if needed

From my experience these were not so much proper SSD as just raw FLASH storage and were absolutely terrible for running XP on them.
I even once replaced ZIF drive in netbook for MD drive. It is a tiny CF form factor hard drive. I did it to make netbook usable and it actually worked quite well. System became much snappier and wouldn't choke as much. Stil pretty slow because CPU was slow and this MD was also very slow but much more responsive than its default "SSD"

There is a reason why I never place the Cyrix 6x86 CPU's in such lists. The CPU was great for the money and often just as fast or faster than its Pentium counterparts aside from the FPU. The Media GX I think does deserve to be in that list. Not just due to its raw performance but also due to the driver and software issues with them.

Notice I didn't mention the K6, K6-2 or K6-3. I only mentioned the K5 because it was very lackluster. Partly due to being really late to the party. The issues with the K6's and its successors were mostly on the Super-7 platform which was dogshit. I don't include the Nx586 from NexGen Systems either as it was a decent product. It simply didn't have an FPU originally but did get one later.

Sorry, I meant it in general and not as response to you.

Sadly, I had to fix a lot of systems based on them back in the day. Several of them were brought in because they couldn't run some pretty basic applications at all leading to the customers outright returning them.

Its hard to judge from using terminals because they might not have proper BIOS but in general yes I noticed compatibility was pretty terrible. DOS programs would crash with random issues. If these earlier GXes ran anything like that then what you say would make perfect sense.

Terminal in question ended up running TinyCore Linux and running bunch of servers (Xvesa, VNC, Apache with PHP, FTP and Samba) and somehow ran stable and was actually pretty snappy. Its more thanks to TinyCore Linux than Cyrix GX for sure

 

[funkydmunky]

From my experience these were not so much proper SSD as just raw FLASH storage and were absolutely terrible for running XP on them.
I even once replaced ZIF drive in netbook for MD drive. It is a tiny CF form factor hard drive. I did it to make netbook usable and it actually worked quite well. System became much snappier and wouldn't choke as much. Stil pretty slow because CPU was slow and this MD was also very slow but much more responsive than its default "SSD"

They were the SSD of the day and it was fast. 4GB was all. Not interested in a pissing contest about original eeeePC. Ran XP for years on the little bugger! Your wrong and your exaggerated history is lame.
But keep trying yo!

 

[lopoetve]

There is a reason why I never place the Cyrix 6x86 CPU's in such lists. The CPU was great for the money and often just as fast or faster than its Pentium counterparts aside from the FPU. The Media GX I think does deserve to be in that list. Not just due to its raw performance but also due to the driver and software issues with them.

Notice I didn't mention the K6, K6-2 or K6-3. I only mentioned the K5 because it was very lackluster. Partly due to being really late to the party. The issues with the K6's and its successors were mostly on the Super-7 platform which was dogshit. I don't include the Nx586 from NexGen Systems either as it was a decent product. It simply didn't have an FPU originally but did get one later.

I had several of the 6x86- personally bought a PR90 and a family member bought a PR200. As a broke kid, the 90 worked like a pentium 66 up till we got into heavy FPU stuff, and did just fine for dos and early window games. Got it cheap too- so no complaints there.

The 200 was primarily a desktop system for office tasks and early web browsing. It also did great at that, and with the addition of my first set of 3D accelerators, did exceptionally well at games that supported it (this eliminated many of the FPU constraints even for quake, as vquake ran great). Basically a pentium 166. Now without the 3D card it was slow as shit for certain things, and there were some fun DMA oddities with two games, but… no complaints. Both served for years.

I will say that if you were looking for a cheap fast 486, the K5s went well- but they were just a fast 486. Had two that were basically fast 486 133s.

I had the same issues with the K6. I did build a LOT of them - the SiS boards had a shit ton of quirks, but if you were building for basic office tasks you could get them happy with some time investment and they were cheap. I did have two super 7 boards that I got happy for myself. Family threw one of them out, the other died after god knows how many years of use. But that was after 12-15 different systems that I built, most of which I set up as a basic workstation and sold via the newspaper. I want to say the good ones were Via, but it’s been a very long time.

 

[OFaceSIG]

I had a P166+ Cyrix and it was fine in Windows. Zero issues in desktop apps. But as others have stated. Gaming was a big NOPE.

 

[XoR_]

They were the SSD of the day and it was fast. 4GB was all. Not interested in a pissing contest about original eeeePC. Ran XP for years on the little bugger! Your wrong and your exaggerated history is lame.
But keep trying yo!

My typical experience with netbooks was of slow FLASH drives. Though when I started to think about eeePC it might be true their disks were cut above likes of Acer or other cheap brands.
Netbook I replaced disk for was Acer and had 16GB Samsung P-SSD1800 16GB and its performance is the same as cheap CF card of the time. Running XP from cheap CF cards, SD cards and cheaper USB keys (much harder to install but it was possible) was consistently horrible and this was due to way they had to read-erase-write whole blocks of sizes like 256/512KB even when one byte changed.

SLC memory however was not half bad for the purpose of running OS. If your eeePC used SLC drive then it might have been better than slow HDD.
Otherwise most netbooks using simpler MLC FLASH wre really as bad that replacing their SSDs for slow MD drive did improve performance.

 

[Dan_D]

I had several of the 6x86- personally bought a PR90 and a family member bought a PR200. As a broke kid, the 90 worked like a pentium 66 up till we got into heavy FPU stuff, and did just fine for dos and early window games. Got it cheap too- so no complaints there.

In my processor collection, I still have a 6x86 of some sort. Back in the day I ran a 6x86 PR200+.

The 200 was primarily a desktop system for office tasks and early web browsing. It also did great at that, and with the addition of my first set of 3D accelerators, did exceptionally well at games that supported it (this eliminated many of the FPU constraints even for quake, as vquake ran great). Basically a pentium 166. Now without the 3D card it was slow as shit for certain things, and there were some fun DMA oddities with two games, but… no complaints. Both served for years.

Quake ran on the 6x86, it was just considerably slower. This was true even with a 3D accelerator, although as you said the GPU hid some of the CPU's deficiencies. I still recall getting only around half the FPS my friends did even when my machine was otherwise just as powerful or identical excluding the CPU. I had a PR200+ while some of my friends had Pentium 166MHz and 200MHz CPU's.

I will say that if you were looking for a cheap fast 486, the K5s went well- but they were just a fast 486. Had two that were basically fast 486 133s.

This isn't true. The K5 was Pentium class, it's the AM5x86 that wasn't. That was more of an overdrive processor just like the Cyrix 5x86 120MHz and 133MHz CPU's. Those CPU's were a few Pentium / Pentium Pro features in an otherwise fast 486.

I had a P166+ Cyrix and it was fine in Windows. Zero issues in desktop apps. But as others have stated. Gaming was a big NOPE.

Gaming was far from "a big NOPE." I owned the PR200+ as well as a few of the lower end chips for other systems. The PR200+ was fine in any game that didn't utilize the FPU. Back then that was not the majority of games. It's games like Quake that gave the Cyrix 6x86 its reputation for not being good at gaming. In Descent it was fine. In Redneck Rampage it was fine, in Quake, it was a half frozen shit sandwich. It wasn't ideal, but it still ran Quake engine based games.

 

[lopoetve]

In my processor collection, I still have a 6x86 of some sort. Back in the day I ran a 6x86 PR200+.

Quake ran on the 6x86, it was just considerably slower. This was true even with a 3D accelerator, although as you said the GPU hid some of the CPU's deficiencies. I still recall getting only around half the FPS my friends did even when my machine was otherwise just as powerful or identical excluding the CPU. I had a PR200+ while some of my friends had Pentium 166MHz and 200MHz CPU's.

This isn't true. The K5 was Pentium class, it's the AM5x86 that wasn't. That was more of an overdrive processor just like the Cyrix 5x86 120MHz and 133MHz CPU's. Those CPU's were a few Pentium / Pentium Pro features in an otherwise fast 486.

Right. Dammit - like I said, a long long time ago. That's what I had - the 5x86, and it was a perfectly fine "super fast 486" - which is what that family member wanted.

 

[OFaceSIG]

Gaming was far from "a big NOPE." I owned the PR200+ as well as a few of the lower end chips for other systems. The PR200+ was fine in any game that didn't utilize the FPU. Back then that was not the majority of games. It's games like Quake that gave the Cyrix 6x86 its reputation for not being good at gaming. In Descent it was fine. In Redneck Rampage it was fine, in Quake, it was a half frozen shit sandwich. It wasn't ideal, but it still ran Quake engine based games.

I played a ton if Interstate '76 back then. I don't know what game engine it was based on, but even a Pentium 90 outperformed my P166+.

 

[Dan_D]

I played a ton if Interstate '76 back then. I don't know what game engine it was based on, but even a Pentium 90 outperformed my P166+.

I don't recall the reason, but I knew that game had issues with the non-Intel CPUs of the time.

 

[NamelessPFG]

I played a ton if Interstate '76 back then. I don't know what game engine it was based on, but even a Pentium 90 outperformed my P166+.

I'76 runs on the MechWarrior 2 engine (as would Heavy Gear 1 and Battlezone '98 afterward), which in hindsight did not age well with newer hardware and OSes. The GOG release could only do so much to make it modern computer-friendly, though it's at least less likely to outright crash than MW2: Mercenaries v1.1 will. (That one I have never gotten to work outside of a native Win9x environment!)

Case in point: it's actually possible to run I'76 too fast and mess up the physics due to being linked to framerate. You'll know for certain if everyone's wheels start spazzing out. I don't think an AMD K6-2 350 went past that threshold, but a Pentium 4 EE 3.2 GHz certainly will, never mind anything from the Core 2 age onward. (Thankfully, Vsync on a 60 Hz display mode will mitigate it.)

Seriously, if the worst complaints we tend to see about PC games nowadays are "locked at 60 Hz", "no ultrawide support/locked at 16:9" and so forth, we have it easy. Games like that in the Win9x era just straight-up broke if you didn't have the right hardware, the right drivers for said hardware (which are not always the latest version available!), and the right OS (in other words, not WinNT/2000/XP), and the Win3.x era was apparently even worse with WinG being a failure of a graphics API.

 

[funkydmunky]

Gaming was far from "a big NOPE." I owned the PR200+ as well as a few of the lower end chips for other systems. The PR200+ was fine in any game that didn't utilize the FPU. Back then that was not the majority of games. It's games like Quake that gave the Cyrix 6x86 its reputation for not being good at gaming. In Descent it was fine. In Redneck Rampage it was fine, in Quake, it was a half frozen shit sandwich. It wasn't ideal, but it still ran Quake engine based games.

I loved my Cyrix PR200+! But I got to admit it was was my second x86 PC and the very first I built myself. I cut all my noob teeth on that system and it was so much cheaper that my minimum wage ass could afford it. I had no reference point to compare with so it was all joy to me. I had a Pentium running room mate that repeatedly told me it won't run some things to ensure his P75 remained supreme. I never found them though.

 

[KickAssCop]

CELERONS!

 

[Andrew_Carr]

I have one of the first generation Asus eeepcs even in 2006 800mhz should have been able to perform better than that piece of shit. It would choke when I was typing in notepad.
I have nothing but rose tinted glasses for the K6-2.

I'll never forget the way that mini-laptops were intentionally nerfed. I had the original 7" eeePC and used it for note-taking in class. It fit into a cargo pocket so you always had it with you, and the keyboard (while awful), worked fine for note-taking. I expected the future generations to improve on the speed issues and such, but then from what I remember intel & microsoft had issues with asus using cheap OS licenses etc. in mini laptops, so it became a situation of either increase the size to keep prices low or throw a half-baked linux distro on it. I hated the Atom CPUs they used instead, so those would get my vote for just being so underwhelming.

 

[DonKing]

The celeron cpu were the worst for me

 

[Unabomber]

For me, it's a tie between two Cyrix chips.

The first one was a 486 DLC-33.

Basically, the thing performed worse than a 386 DX 40 MHz (AMD) CPU. Even though Cyrix claimed that it was as good as a 486 SX 33 MHz, that was far from the truth. Maybe it was closer to a 20 MHz 486 SX, but that's as good as it would ever get.

Even when I overclocked the CPU to 40 MHz, and combined it with a Diamond Speedstar Pro 24 VLB video card (my motherboard could take either 386 or 486 CPU's), when playing Doom, I had to reduce the border size by two clicks in high res mode to get a relatively smooth frame rate. Once the action got hairy, I had to reduce it a couple more or switch to low res mode. Keep in mind, the Cirrus Logic-based video cards were excellent DOS performers for their time.

Once I gave away that CPU, and replaced it with an AMD 486 DX-40 with the above hardware, I could play Doom full sized, high res detail.

Just for shits and giggles, I put in an AMD 386 DX-40 in that system to test it, and sure enough, it had better performance than the 486 DLC 33 (not overclocked). I could even play Strike Commander with the 386 DX-40, and when I put the 486 DX-40 back in, it became vanilla smooth.

The second one was a Cyrix 6x86 P-166. That thing performed worse than the Pentium 133 it was to replace, and I promptly returned it. While it was OK for grunt use (Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes) seeing the framerate become lower as a result of this "upgrade" was disappointing, to say the least.

 

[funkydmunky]

I'll never forget the way that mini-laptops were intentionally nerfed. I had the original 7" eeePC and used it for note-taking in class. It fit into a cargo pocket so you always had it with you, and the keyboard (while awful), worked fine for note-taking. I expected the future generations to improve on the speed issues and such, but then from what I remember intel & microsoft had issues with asus using cheap OS licenses etc. in mini laptops, so it became a situation of either increase the size to keep prices low or throw a half-baked linux distro on it. I hated the Atom CPUs they used instead, so those would get my vote for just being so underwhelming.

Ya the EeePC's of Asus developed a new NetBook category that the industry immediately drove into the ground of low cost shit.

 

[funkydmunky]

The celeron cpu were the worst for me

BLASPHEMER!

 

[Stugots]

Ya the EeePC's of Asus developed a new NetBook category that the industry immediately drove into the ground of low cost shit.

I ran an EeePC 1008HA as my daily driver for the longest time.

Dumped way too much money into that little damn thing too. Maxed out the RAM, upgraded to an SSD. It was very usable for me as long as I was mindful of its limits. I really liked NetBooks. To this day I will not touch a chromebook.

 

[Stugots]

The celeron cpu were the worst for me

Any more specific than that?

 

[compgeek89]

I had a Celeron D circa 2007 and it was an awful experience. I thought "I don't need performance, just doing basic stuff." I had a Core 2 Duo before that, and an Athlon 64 X2 before that... the Celeron was bad enough I couldn't even use the computer without being frustrated. I was shocked it was that bad.

 

[Stugots]

I had a Celeron D circa 2007 and it was an awful experience. I thought "I don't need performance, just doing basic stuff." I had a Core 2 Duo before that, and an Athlon 64 X2 before that... the Celeron was bad enough I couldn't even use the computer without being frustrated. I was shocked it was that bad.

I had a decent experience with Celeron D. Ran one after my P4C [email protected] failed completely. Had a pretty serious overclocking setup at the time so I overclocked the piss out of it. It was a Celeron D 320 2.4ghz that I was running at 4.0ghz. If I remember correctly it was benchmarking about the same as a Pentium 4 at 3.0-3.2ghz. For a budget garbage CPU I was impressed.

 

[xSneak]

The AMD bulldozer cpus; even the refresh ones were terrible. I was getting 30-35 FPS on TW:Shogun II with my FX-8320 at 4.5ghz, when I switched over to a 4770k I was in the 60s.
AMD Ryzen 1000 series were garbage also. I went to a 1700x from a 5820k build and it got worse performance when gaming while streaming. Pure gaming performance I don't think was any better than the 5820k. It couldn't do better than 2933mhz dual rank ddr4 either. I remember the gaming + cpu encoding performance being unplayable.
Other terrible CPUs would be the Pentium D series of dual core p4s glued together.

 

[Stugots]

The AMD bulldozer cpus; even the refresh ones were terrible. I was getting 30-35 FPS on TW:Shogun II with my FX-8320 at 4.5ghz, when I switched over to a 4770k I was in the 60s.
AMD Ryzen 1000 series were garbage also. I went to a 1700x from a 5820k build and it got worse performance when gaming while streaming. Pure gaming performance I don't think was any better than the 5820k. It couldn't do better than 2933mhz dual rank ddr4 either. I remember the gaming + cpu encoding performance being unplayable.
Other terrible CPUs would be the Pentium D series of dual core p4s glued together.

I still have a Pentium D system in my basement as a backup firewall.

 

[funkydmunky]

I ran an EeePC 1008HA as my daily driver for the longest time.

Dumped way too much money into that little damn thing too. Maxed out the RAM, upgraded to an SSD. It was very usable for me as long as I was mindful of its limits. I really liked NetBooks. To this day I will not touch a chromebook.

We got one of the 10" second gen EeePC's for my niece. Made sure it had the SSD for durability as she was 10. It also included some sort of Nvidia GPU as well as the Intel iGPU. It was never enabled. Didn't see the point for extra power drain for what she used it for. Anyways she finally graduated high school using that damn little thing. Only had to replace a power brick in all those years.

 

[NightReaver]

The AMD bulldozer cpus; even the refresh ones were terrible. I was getting 30-35 FPS on TW:Shogun II with my FX-8320 at 4.5ghz, when I switched over to a 4770k I was in the 60s.
AMD Ryzen 1000 series were garbage also. I went to a 1700x from a 5820k build and it got worse performance when gaming while streaming. Pure gaming performance I don't think was any better than the 5820k. It couldn't do better than 2933mhz dual rank ddr4 either. I remember the gaming + cpu encoding performance being unplayable.
Other terrible CPUs would be the Pentium D series of dual core p4s glued together.

Lmao. Ryzen 1000s were not garbage by any means. What are you on?