alt Hacker NewsMy first PC was a 286/12 with an AMD chip in it.
I well remember the 486SX/2-66's and how terrible they were. I liked to say that Compaq put the "sorry" in Presario.
In the late 90's, between around 96 and 98, I made good money building AMD 486 DX/4 133's. Those things were blindingly fast for the price. As I recall there was even a 150MHz variant.
Still, my favorite CPU of all time remains the AMD K6/2-450. It wasn't until the Phenom II BE950, a dual core that I unlocked to quad core , that I felt I had a CPU that matched the K6/2-450 in value. Since then I've had a couple of Ryzen's for my daily driver/work machine, and couldn't be happier. AMD has done a fantastic job keeping price and performance in tune. But, it goes even further if you shop smartly.
Overall, this was an excellent read, and brought back a lot of memories. The 6x86 for example- too much promise for what they actually delivered. And, thanks to this article I now know why so many cheap motherboards had their CPU's soldered. It wasn't a technology decision, but a legal one. I had no idea of that at the time.
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I bought an AMD Sempron "single core" CPU for a pittance (can't remember now how much it was, but it was the cheapest new CPU available) and as able to unlock the second core in the BIOS immediately with no issues, saving a ton of money. Those were the days.
Oh man, my first custom build had a Phenom II 955 BE. Overclocked beautifully, I loved that system. Got it in a barebones kit from good old TigerDirect, RIP
Fellow AMD fan here—it wasn't that long ago that I finally relinquished the old ABIT motherboard that overclocked my AMD badboy to eke out extra cycles for my DAW.
Also, for Half Life.
I had an AMD 5x86 @133 that lasted me several years... I had the secondary cache module and 64mb of ram, which was a lot for the time. It wasn't great for gaming, but general productivity software and just simple web browsing it was kind of a beast from the ram/cache performance. The next computer I really remember was an OC'd AMD Duron at 1ghz.