1980: MOS 6507 @ 1.19MHz (Atari VCS)
1990: Ricoh 2A03 @ 1.79MHz (Nintendo Entertainment System)
2000: AMD K6-2 300 w/3DNow @300MHz (First computer)
2010: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 @2.66GHz (Longest use computer @ about 13 years)
2020: AMD Ryzen 5 2400G @ 3.6GHz (Current computer)

Socket3 wrote on 2020-07-14, 14:24:

Horun wrote on 2020-07-13, 02:59:

I do remember the early I7 being very poor in performance compared to the latter Quad-Core's so never went that way, waited until i7-3770 came out a few years later in 2012, and still have that one on a Intel board too.

Really? In 2009 I switched for a Q9550 to a i7 920 and the difference was night and day. The i7 not only felt twice as fast, but it overclocked a lot better too, despite being on the same manufacturing process. Perhaps it depends on what you used your pc for...

I do not call these results dramatic or diff night and day as far as Q9650 vs i7-920, specially when 2 years later you could get a i7-3770.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-C … 920/m1706vs1981
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Co … Q9650/834vs1050

The 950 was much better but was actually replying about the 920 in my earlier reply...

Horun wrote on 2020-07-14, 22:45:

I do not call these results dramatic or diff night and day as far as Q9650 vs i7-920, specially when 2 years later you could get […]
Show full quote

Socket3 wrote on 2020-07-14, 14:24:

Horun wrote on 2020-07-13, 02:59:

I do remember the early I7 being very poor in performance compared to the latter Quad-Core's so never went that way, waited until i7-3770 came out a few years later in 2012, and still have that one on a Intel board too.

Really? In 2009 I switched for a Q9550 to a i7 920 and the difference was night and day. The i7 not only felt twice as fast, but it overclocked a lot better too, despite being on the same manufacturing process. Perhaps it depends on what you used your pc for...

I do not call these results dramatic or diff night and day as far as Q9650 vs i7-920, specially when 2 years later you could get a i7-3770.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-C … 920/m1706vs1981
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Co … Q9650/834vs1050

The 950 was much better but was actually replying about the 920 in my earlier reply...

The first generation I7 really became interesting when overclocked to 4GHz or so, otherwise, the performance difference was not that great in general .

EDIT: Here are some real-world and synthetic comparisons .
https://www.anandtech.com/show/2658

darry wrote on 2020-07-14, 23:11:

The first generation I7 really became interesting when overclocked to 4GHz or so, otherwise, the performance difference was not […]
Show full quote

Horun wrote on 2020-07-14, 22:45:

I do not call these results dramatic or diff night and day as far as Q9650 vs i7-920, specially when 2 years later you could get […]
Show full quote

Socket3 wrote on 2020-07-14, 14:24:

Really? In 2009 I switched for a Q9550 to a i7 920 and the difference was night and day. The i7 not only felt twice as fast, but it overclocked a lot better too, despite being on the same manufacturing process. Perhaps it depends on what you used your pc for...

I do not call these results dramatic or diff night and day as far as Q9650 vs i7-920, specially when 2 years later you could get a i7-3770.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-C … 920/m1706vs1981
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Co … Q9650/834vs1050

The 950 was much better but was actually replying about the 920 in my earlier reply...

The first generation I7 really became interesting when overclocked to 4GHz or so, otherwise, the performance difference was not that great in general .

EDIT: Here are some real-world and synthetic comparisons .
https://www.anandtech.com/show/2658

as software progressed the i7 gained a significant advantage over the C2Q
between having HT (8 threads) and the much faster interface between cores/memory/caching and so on, the difference can be huge for many current applications, specially the latest games
even a stock 920 vs a qx9770@4GHz, you will find cases where the i7 is very playable and with the C2Q it's simply unplayable

Horun wrote on 2020-07-14, 22:45:

I do not call these results dramatic or diff night and day as far as Q9650 vs i7-920, specially when 2 years later you could get […]
Show full quote

I do not call these results dramatic or diff night and day as far as Q9650 vs i7-920, specially when 2 years later you could get a i7-3770.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-C … 920/m1706vs1981
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Co … Q9650/834vs1050

The 950 was much better but was actually replying about the 920 in my earlier reply...

Like I said, it depends on what you were running on it. I did lots of rendering at the time - 3DS Max - so the extra threads and wider memory bus on the I7 made a huge difference.

2000: K6-2/400 @ 450
2010: by this time I was almost exclusively on a single laptop, a Dell D430 with a Core 2 Duo SU7300 @ 1.3GHz (800MHz deturbo)
2020: i7/3770 at stock speed (3.4 ~ 3.9 GHz)

It's funny how the 2000 "gamer-spec" PC was hopelessly outdated and obsolete in 2010, but the 2010 low-power "ultrabook" is still suitable for some light tasks in 2020. I still use it as a "half-top" (the display died) for the odd thing including some browsing. It's running Linux Mint.

In 2010 I had a system based on Pentium 4 650 (Prescott 2M) @ 3,4 GHz + ATI HD 3650 AGP and 3072 MB RAM.

That can't be right. The GTX 680 came out in spring 2012.

Sorry, memory played a trick on me... what I meant was the GTX 480. Some years later I had a gaming laptop that had a GTX675M and that probably confused me.
Thanks for pointing out

Let's see. 10 years ago was 2010.

I'm a young'un. In 2010 I was 12 years old. My "main rig" was this laptop:

Gateway Solo 1400
Intel Celeron 900 MHz
512 MB SDRAM (I think)
40 GB HDD
S3 Trident graphics
VIA AC'97 sound
Floppy and CD drives

This is the laptop my dad gave me with an install of MS-DOS 5.0 that he dug out of his old floppy disk collection, and taught me programming with Microsoft Quick Basic. I got a ton of mileage out of that thing. It never did graduate from MS-DOS, and I learned everything there was to learn about how to use a command line interface to its full potential. And I never did get that AC'97 sound working in MS-DOS even though it claimed to have Sound Blaster emulation built-in. There was a thread about this recently; somebody figured out how to make it work. I would have liked to have had that when I was 12 years old trying to get sound out of Commander Keen.

These days I am somewhat "richer" in technology.

Primary rig 2020:

Lenovo Thinkcentre thin client (for work + internet)
Intel Core i7-4770
Intel HD Graphics
16 GB DDR3 1600 MHz RAM
512 GB SATA3 SSD

Secondary rig 2020 (used as media center and game PC):

Dell Optiplex 9020
Intel Core i7-4790
nVidia GTX 560 Ti
16 GB DDR3 1600 MHz RAM
256 GB SATA3 SSD

I also have several Thinkpads that I use for laptops, the main one being a T420s which has served me well so far.

2010 :
Intel P4 Prescott @stock speed 3.2Ghz
XFX Ati Radeon HD4870 @100°c 😈
8 GB Ram
1TB Hard Drive

2020 :
Intel i7 8700k 3.7@4.8 Ghz
Nvidia RTX 2070S
64GB RAM
1TB Nvme + 512GB Nvme + 2x256GB Sata SSD

keenmaster486 wrote on 2020-07-15, 14:28:

And I never did get that AC'97 sound working in MS-DOS even though it claimed to have Sound Blaster emulation built-in. There was a thread about this recently; somebody figured out how to make it work.

Where is that thread? Please "feed me that gold treasure". I have a few virtual machines with AC97 that could benefit from that...

Bruninho wrote on 2020-07-15, 16:37:

keenmaster486 wrote on 2020-07-15, 14:28:

And I never did get that AC'97 sound working in MS-DOS even though it claimed to have Sound Blaster emulation built-in. There was a thread about this recently; somebody figured out how to make it work.

Where is that thread? Please "feed me that gold treasure". I have a few virtual machines with AC97 that could benefit from that...

AFAIK, support for DOS audio on boards with an AC97 CODEC chip depends on the controller used (the DC97, usually integrated into motherboard southbridge), not on the AC97 CODEC chip used .

OK, so I guess it's been a year and I can update:

1990: Motorola 68000-7
2000: Intel Pentium II 300
2010: AMD Phenom X3 8450
2020 AMD Ryzen 5 2600

In that case, I'll update too:

1990: 386sx/20
2000: P3 650
2010: C2D E4300 (overclocked to 2.4Ghz)
2020: i5-4590

2000 (PC): P2 400 (moved to Socket A in 2001)

2010 (Laptop): Core Duo T2500 (a Lenovo 3000 V100 was my daily driver back then)
2010 (PC): Athlon64 X2 4200+ AM2 (already pretty outdated)

2020 (Laptop): i5-520M (ThinkPad X201, this CPU is 10 years old now, still seeing daily use with Win10 + SSD + 8GB RAM)
2020 (PC): Xeon E3-1240 v5

I was never willing to spend the extra money to have the latest and greatest CPUs...

gex85 wrote on 2020-07-17, 11:20:

I was never willing to spend the extra money to have the latest and greatest CPUs...

+1. There's so much better value out there. Often you get 90% of the performance at 10% of the price, especially when you factor in a powerful GPU and are primarily gaming.

clueless1 wrote on 2020-07-17, 23:16:

gex85 wrote on 2020-07-17, 11:20:

I was never willing to spend the extra money to have the latest and greatest CPUs...

+1. There's so much better value out there. Often you get 90% of the performance at 10% of the price, especially when you factor in a powerful GPU and are primarily gaming.

I agree and will add that the last few generations of top of the line GPUs have been both much too expensive compared to the slightly lower end one the scale and, IMHO, thermally unmanageable . A TDP of 250 watts is too extreme for my taste and, if rumours are true, the next generation from Nvidia will be 300W+ . If things keep going in that direction, PCs will need to come with refrigeration units !

My strategy, at this point, is usually to wait until a game is a few years old so that the upper mid-range card I usually choose to buy will be able to handle these older games perfectly .

My personal limit for a GPU is a about 175W-180W TDP for a GPU, anything above that is quite unlikely to be considered .

2000: Celeron 633
2010: i7 870
2020: i7 6700k

2000: 450mhz Pentium ii
2010: 2.4ghz Pentium 4 (2011 went to Athlon ii 250, then 2013 jumped to FX 8350. Jumped to x5650 x58 in 2018)
2020: Ryzen 5 2600

1990: Schneider CPC464
2000: Celeron 466, 256MB, G400
2010: Phenom II 965, 8GB, GTX460
2020: i5 2500k, 16GB, GTX770