Wait, what twenty years? I thought 286 was just... oh damn.

😁

Nice history, I wouldn't go for IVY bridge unless the prices dropped a lot.

Very nice history! Funny how you went from a 633Mhz -> 2Ghz... night-and-day I'm sure!

I started with an IBM PCjr that my grandmother gave me in 1992 (I was 8 ). I tore it down, cleaned it out, and had all the pieces on my parents dining room table. Needless to say my mother freaked out because I was scratching the table, and my dad bet $5 I couldn't put it back together.

$5 and countless PC builds later puts it all into perspective. I learned that day that money can be made working with computers... still going strong!

nforce4max wrote:

Nice history, I wouldn't go for IVY bridge unless the prices dropped a lot.

Yeah, $244 is a little more than I'd like to spend. My current CPU cost me $100. Unfortunately, Intel has the market cornered right now. I keep checking, but the price hasn't budged since that chip came out.

I used a Commodore64 much later than I really "should" have. Had brief stints with an XT and a 286, but first "real" computer was a 486 DX4100 which saw a LOT of use. I wish I had kept it.

Then a Pentium MMX 166, which was another real workhorse (but eventually died). Next was a Pentium 233 MMX - which oddly enough was never used that much - recently downgraded into a DOS and Windows 3.1 Box - the oldest one I still have

A Pentium 3-500 on Asus P2B - another real workhorse system. Still have it, but it is not being used at the moment

A couple of k6-2 500 machines on Epox and Tyan boards - these were eventually decommissioned and parted out.

Three Tyan 1854 boards with p3-1000 Mhz processors (all still running, but unsed).

Two ASUS CUBX boards with 650 and 850 P3 chips - currently used tor retro gaming

Two Athlon XP2400+ systems - one used for rendering and movie editing, and the other running PCLnux. Currently the fastest machines I have.

My main computer list for the last 20 years is much shorter. Those are only the computers that were bought new.

486DX 33 --> Got upgraded with evergreen overdrive later on. ( Bought by my dad )

P2 400 --> Mostly Bought by my dad but I contributed 750$ from my teenager summer job on the total price.

Athlon XP 1600+ ---> First computer bought by myself, was on a budget. After less than 2 years half the caps had leaked and it crashed so much i had to replace it.

Athlon XP 2600+ ----> First computer I bouight only quality parts for ( I did not want the same thing as the last one to happen )

Quad core Q6600 ----> Was my main computer for a while but then it became a dedicated recording machine when i bought another one a year later.

Quad core Q6700 ---> Im typing with it right now.

I still have all of these PCs, I used the 486 just yesterday.

I also have about 30 other computers but they are mostly Giveaways or trash finds, or in some case i bought them for peanuts.

ncmark wrote:

Three Tyan 1854 boards with p3-1000 Mhz processors (all still running, but unsed).

I have one of those boards in my Retro-Ghetto build and I'm getting ready to inherit another from a friend. They are great mobos for accepting a huge variety of CPU's.

MaxWar wrote:

I also have about 30 other computers but they are mostly Giveaways or trash finds, or in some case i bought them for peanuts.

I wish I had held onto some of my older PC's. I used to do repairs and upgrades for a living and accumulated a LOT of stuff. I never really thought I'd be interested in Retro, so I sold or scrapped most of my leftovers.

Quite honestly, I don't think the 1854 is so great. I think it's largely the fault of the Via chipset. I could never get voodoo video and awe64 sound to co-exist. And those always seemed slower compared to comparable BX-chipset boards. I think Asus P3B or CUBX is a much better board.

2000 - Pentium III 700 - I wanted a 733, but somehow ended with a 700
2003 - Pentium III-S 1.4 - my ASUS CUSL-2 didn't support Tualatin so I had to buy an Abit ST6-RAID to run the greatest P3 of all time. Two years later I sold the CPU for exactly the same amount of money as I spent on it.
2005 - Athlon 64 3000+ (Winchester) - I wanted the revolutionary A64 since day one, but I had to wait for the S939 platform, because S940 was very expensive.
2009 - Athlon 64 3200+ (Venice) - just to support faster memory.
2012 - Core i7 3820 - I wanted the high-end platform and the 3820 is was the cheapest CPU. The upreadability to 6-cores is a nice bonus.

ncmark wrote:

Quite honestly, I don't think the 1854 is so great. I think it's largely the fault of the Via chipset. I could never get voodoo video and awe64 sound to co-exist. And those always seemed slower compared to comparable BX-chipset boards. I think Asus P3B or CUBX is a much better board.

Guess I'm going to struggle with this soon, as I'm inheriting a Voodoo2 and already have a AWE64 on this board. Back in the day, I was already using higher-end cards than the Voodoo2 with this mobo. I'd agree it's definitely not an overclock-friendly board.

1992 - Z80 in my ZX Spectrum clone.
1995 - 486DX4/100
1997 - Pentium 133
1999 - 486DX4/100
2000 - Pentium 90
2001 - 486DX2/66
2002 - Pentium MMX 166 then 200
2003 summer - Pentium III 450
2003 late - Celeron 600 overclocked @750 and 900
2004 - Celeron 1200
2005 - AMD Sempron 2600+, 1.6 GHz, socket 754
2007 - AMD X2 4200+, 2.2 GHz
2011 - AMD Athlon II X3 455, 3.3 GHz

My good old ZX Speccy clone is stil working, but now I prefer to use an emulator; sometimes I feel like playing one of the old games without having to dust my cassette player or wait 5 minutes to load a game.
This is my straight CPU list, the ones from the main computer.
I have been toying around with 6502, 6510, 68000, 68EC020, like found in Acorn BBC, C64, Amiga 500, Atari Mega ST and Amiga 1200.
I won't mention the CPU's used in my game consoles.

Here is my history although some happend at the same time as I maintained several rigs at the same time over the years.

Motorola 608030
Pentium 1 100MHZ
Pentium 233
Pentium 3 500
Celeron 1.1ghz
Celeron D 420
Core 2 Duo E6400
Core 2 Duo E7200 (removed IHS)
Athlon 3500 35W AM2
Athlon 3800 X2 AM2
Phenom x3 8250E (great overclock 62%)
Phenom 2 820 With L3 unlock
AMD A4 3400M
AMD A8 3530MX Broken clock divider 🙁
Celeron 11101
i5-760
Q8200 Low voltage oc @ 3.25ghz with only 1.16v vcore

I tend to bounce back and forth depending on my ever changing need as well rare hardware failures.

The worst cpus that I had to depend on were a 600mhz celeron on a HP board and later a am2 3800x2 (terrible overclocking sample).

nforce4max wrote:

Here is my history although some happend at the same time as I maintained several rigs at the same time over the years.

Pentium 1 100MHZ

I had this CPU in a Compaq desktop, I later sold with my K6-2 550 to buy my Pentium III 800EB, motherboard and RAM. For a while, I used it to play older DOS games.

I also had a few Pentium III 500's (slot I think). I never really used them bc they were pretty obsolete by the time I got them.

My CPU history is simple enough,
apart from the Z80 when I was 6 or 7 yo I managed to use a 25MHz 386 SX from 1991 until 1998 when I could not squeeze any more productivity from it and assembled my first build from scratch with a Deschutes 350MHz, which I still have.
Despite a short experience in silent computing with a mobile Athlon-XP circa 2003 I have been more or less disconnected from the hardware stuff 🙁 ... until I started to get nostalgic and get back on it full speed.
Come to think of it I need a new build and I've been thinking about a 3GHz Dual Core (I think is the G860?) for user with XP...

simbin wrote:

nforce4max wrote:

Here is my history although some happend at the same time as I maintained several rigs at the same time over the years.

Pentium 1 100MHZ

I had this CPU in a Compaq desktop, I later sold with my K6-2 550 to buy my Pentium III 800EB, motherboard and RAM. For a while, I used it to play older DOS games.

I also had a few Pentium III 500's (slot I think). I never really used them bc they were pretty obsolete by the time I got them.

I sadly had to get by on one back in 2007 and it did ok back then since I had 512mb ram but it was very long in the tooth. I still got that 100mhz p1.
I mainly played aoe2 and n64 emulation back then.

The CPUs in computers I purchased or built for personal use:

AMD 286-16
Pentium II 233MHz
Pentium 4 1.8GHz
Athlon 64 3500
Core 2 Duo T5600 (laptop)
Opteron 185
Core i7-2700K

other CPUs I've collected over the years:

Intel:
286-10 with 287 FPU
486SX-25 (soldered--all-in-one Compaq)
486DX-33
486DX2-50
Pentium MMX-233
Pentium II-300 <--burned my fingers a few times pulling this one out of its slot
Pentium II-350
Pentium III-550 katmai (three of 'em)
Pentium III-866
Pentium III-1000
Pentium III-1200A
Pentium III-1400S (two of 'em)
Pentium III-M 1266
Celeron 333 (Mendocino)
Celeron 900 (coppermine)
Celeron 1.7 (Willamette)
Pentium M 745

AMD:
K6-2 300
K6-2 450
Athlon XP 2400
Athlon XP 2700
Athlon 64 3200 (754)
Athlon 64 X2 4600

This list only takes into account the "main" systems I have owned over the years. If I were to count all the extra systems I owned, then this list would be looooong. 🤣

1998/1999 - Pentium 133MMx <-- I got this system when I was about 5-6 years old as a hand-me-down system from my parents. My dad had originally bought it in 1996 as a Pentium 75 box, but he had the CPU and motherboard upgraded about a few months later so he could run Diablo better.

2000 - Celeron 300 <-- This was the next hand-me-down system I got from my parents. It lasted me a bit longer than the previous system I owned.

2002/2003 - Pentium III 700 <-- This was the second-last system I got as a hand-me down. Worked quite well until I borked the OS. 😜

2004 - 486 DX2 66 <-- I originally got this system from a friend of mine just as an extra box to screw around with, but I ended up using it as my main box for a while when I borked the OS on my Pentium III.

2005 - Pentium 4 Prescott 2.4GHz <-- Holy crap, this was one hell of an upgrade! 😁 Out of all the desktop systems I've owned, this is the one I ended up using the longest. It started out as a low end box with 256MB of ram and onboard graphics, but I eventually upgraded it to 1GB and a Radeon 9000. 😁

2008 - Pentium M 1.6GHz <-- First laptop I ever owned. For a while I used it in lieu of my Pentium 4 for online stuff, since I didn't want to tarnish its "pure" OS install and watch it slow down like every other internet-connected machine I had seen. Eventually I hooked the P4 to the internet and found that it wasn't as draining on performance as I thought it would be.

2009 - Pentium Dual-Core E6300 Wolfdale 2.8GHz <-- Excellent machine, and quite cheap to boot! 😁 I originally built it so that I could play Team Fortress 2, and I still use it as my main desktop machine.

2012 - Core i5 540m <-- Got this one recently from my dad, in an Alienware m17x R2 laptop. At first I was quite impressed with its capabilities, but then I realized that the machine itself had quite a few problems (namely a broken DVD drive, loudass GPU fan, and some other stuff). I still use this system fairly often, but I actually prefer my Pentium Dual-Core box for getting real work done.

my list was like this:

1988 - XT 8088 4.77 MHz CGA, yeah tech was slow in my town, at that time, updated to 256K VGA skipping EGA and anything else.

1995 - Pentium 100, 8MB memory, 1MB Tseng? interlaced monitor that what the monitor manual said.

1998 - Pentium 166 MMX, 32MB memory, 2MB S3 Virge

2003 - Pentium IV 1.8 GHz (x18 stepping, 100Mhz bus)

2004 - Pentium IV 2.2 GHz (x17 stepping, 133MHz bus), somehow I feel this one was slower than x18 stepping models, this box has the same config as the 1.8 GHz one.

2009 - Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E7500 @ 2.93GHz, this time i realize that what i need is more speed/core and not number of cores.
Simply because I try my friend's older but overclocked single core, and games/apps I want, runs better there than this one.