Intel Pentium MMX

I second this! Mine would be Intel Pentium MMX also since it's the processor that has the most nostalgia for me and my main retro rig uses a Pentium 200MMX.

Second fav for me would be a Pentium 4, preferably a P4 HT @ 3ghz. 🤣

My first computer had a Pentium iii, therefore I feel sentimental about them in a way I don't about other processors.

I'm also curious about non-x86 architectures, (ARM, PPC, MIPS, m68k, SPARC, Alpha, etc.) Though the only ones I have are the ARM in my phone and the PPC in my old G3 imac.

AMD 80386DX40
Pentium MMX (233 preferably
Pentium III (Coppermine 1000 preferably)

It feels to me like these are the main pillars of an evolution process. I find 8088 and 80286 as a bit too old and limited to my taste, and find P4 and later as not so vintage. 486s, normal Pentiums and PIIs feel like not so important intermediaries, IMHO.

All told, I always have a soft spot for those lovely green colored Cyrix 5X86s, though I'm not sure why...🤣

I have an odd soft spot for Athlon XPs.

Private_Ops wrote:

I have an odd soft spot for Athlon XPs.

can't blame you, they were brilliant , there was a reason why it was generally the gamer's choice at the time.

For me it is:

Intel Pentium Pro
AMD Athlon Classic (with external L2 cache)

CPU list updated. 😀

I'm going to be completly unpopular and say the Netburst Pentium 4/Celeron/Celeron D,Pentium D yeah i know it is not the best, but it is now a long dead end, really cheap, has a ton of variety and covers loads of the bases for reto computing, loads of games and apps were optimized for it in it's day, it covered 6 years of our computing lives. It runs from 1.4 > to just shy of 4 gig and even has a dual core as a possible option. Unlike the Athlon XP(don't get me wrong this is a wonderful CPU) has SSE2 and in later versions SSE3, also supports 64-bit in the later chips. It is the most versatile of the reto CPU's, still used in tons on places like library's, banks etc. Most importantly, it's the wrong choice from 2001 that we couldn't afford anyhow so bought an Athlon 😀 Anyhow, now all hail the Netburst now is is cheaper than free! 🤣

BSA Starfire wrote:

I'm going to be completly unpopular and say the Netburst Pentium 4/Celeron/Celeron D,Pentium D yeah i know it is not the best, but it is now a long dead end, really cheap, has a ton of variety and covers loads of the bases for reto computing, loads of games and apps were optimized for it in it's day, it covered 6 years of our computing lives. It runs from 1.4 > to just shy of 4 gig and even has a dual core as a possible option. Unlike the Athlon XP(don't get me wrong this is a wonderful CPU) has SSE2 and in later versions SSE3, also supports 64-bit in the later chips. It is the most versatile of the reto CPU's, still used in tons on places like library's, banks etc. Most importantly, it's the wrong choice from 2001 that we couldn't afford anyhow so bought an Athlon 😀 Anyhow, now all hail the Netburst now is is cheaper than free! 🤣

The right netburst CPU's aren't easy to find very cheap in The Netherlands though. Often they sell them as "P4 3GHz" but forget to mention weather it's a Northwood or the less impressing Preshott and the better boards are like 30 euro each.
I got more Athlon (XP) boards and only 1 or 2 good Northwood boards, but perhaps I'm just being unlocky or I'm just not looking in the right places 😀

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I think the only reason AMD was able to one up Intel was because Intel was too busy picking its butt trying to figure out ways to scam people with the Pee4, Rambust and Itanic. Intel probably didn't deserve to survive a mistake like that, but somehow they did.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/193480-i … ing-shenanigans

Get your 15$ back.

And guess what, Intel still does this crap today.

I prefer either the P Pro or Athlon Xp.

My favorites are the Pentium Pro and the AMD K6-III.

MartinC wrote:

sliderider wrote:

Sounds simialr to the Compaq machine that I had. 533mhz K6-2 and integrated S3 Trio3D AGP video and no AGP slot.The last video card I ran in that was a GeForce 4MX 440 PCI. It was way past time to buy a new system so I stopped upgrading it and bought a Compaq Evo W4000 2.4ghz Northwood machine and Radeon 9500 (unocked to 8 pipes) to replace it.

Shit that would have been some great upgrade. But I bet you still looked fondly on the K6-2 😀

Not really, actually. It wasn't long after Shadows of Luclin was released that I had to get rid of it because it just lagged too much. The minimum specs for Everquest to be playable took a huge jump when Luclin was released, and it wasn't up to it anymore. Processor speed went up, video card went up, and because the graphics spec jumped from DX7 to 8.1, you couldn't even use Windows 95 anymore because 8.1 isn't supported in 95. A lot of people were really pissed off at the time because not only did they have to upgrade their video cards, they also had to upgrade to at least Windows 98 to keep playing. Originally the spec was announced to be DX8.0, but it got changed about 2 months before it went live. I always suspected Microsoft paid them a lot of money to bump the spec to 8.1 to help kill off Windows 95. There were still millions of people playing EQ in those days so forcing all of them to upgrade would have meant a lot of money for Microsoft and allowed them to drop 95 support from future applications that much sooner.

I'm going to be completly unpopular and say the Netburst Pentium 4/Celeron/Celeron D,Pentium D yeah i know it is not the best, but it is now a long dead end, really cheap, has a ton of variety and covers loads of the bases for reto computing, loads of games and apps were optimized for it in it's day, it covered 6 years of our computing lives. It runs from 1.4 > to just shy of 4 gig and even has a dual core as a possible option. Unlike the Athlon XP(don't get me wrong this is a wonderful CPU) has SSE2 and in later versions SSE3, also supports 64-bit in the later chips. It is the most versatile of the reto CPU's, still used in tons on places like library's, banks etc. Most importantly, it's the wrong choice from 2001 that we couldn't afford anyhow so bought an Athlon 😀 Anyhow, now all hail the Netburst now is is cheaper than free! 🤣

I... actually have to agree with that. I've recently had the opportunity to play around with a Penium D 930, and it has been an absolute joy to overclock. It's true that the clock rate that I got it up to means jack squat, but it was fun nonetheless. Also, where I am (the US), Pentium 4s are dirt cheap and terrible enough for me not to feel guilty when I inevitably melt one. Hurray for pumping 1.45 volts into that thing and getting it up to 4.3 GHz without caring about thermal output in the least!

Despite this, I'd have to say that my favorite retro CPU is split between the Pentium III and the Athlon XP. I grew up on the Pentium III, but my first True Desktop Machine (tm) was an Athlon XP that I got suckered into swapping out for a P4. I really wish that I still had that thing to see what it could do.

SSE2 support is a big plus for the P4 nowadays. It's frustrating when you run into apps that won't run on an Athlon or a P3 because of SSE2 requirements.
Steam has broken their game launcher app at least twice now with an "accidental" SSE2 requirement. It's getting common for programmers to turn on the SSE2 flag in their compilers without even having a good reason for it.

For sheer power, P3.

If I had to pick *one* based on sentiment and frequent use, I'd go with Socket 7 MMX.

My favourite based on humour would be the socket 4 P60 w/ obligatory FDIV. And my favourite for later more CPU-intensive games would be the Socket 370 P3s @ 1 Ghz. The P4s play less nicely with DOS and other hardware cards...

The 386 Platform and the Curiose 486DRx2/DLC and SXL2 CPUs

486 followed by P3