i5-2500k gets all the love, it was a banger of a cpu. For me, I was mightily pleased with the GTX660's I had in SLi - it was able to handle everything I could chuck at it admirably.
CPUs Pentium 4 Northwood 1.6GHz, such an easy overclock! Never managed to get decent clock on the old socket a stuff. Dual Tulatins!, Just for the fun of it. GPU dual 3dfx voodoo2 Riva TNT/2 Matrox millennium Gainward 5800U that was bios patched to a 5950U 7950 6600 that I put a zalman cu cooler to get better clocks!
Opteron 144 (although I had a 146 IIRC) was a crazy bargain in its day when overclocked. I replaced it with a Q6600 which again was a bargain after multiple price drops and an overclock. My fondest remembered GPU was the GTX275 - running faster than a much more expensive GTX285 depending on clocks.
First real amazing CPU I bought was the I7 4930k in 2013, I remember video file transcoding time with Handbrake, compared with my previous Q9650, was suddenly decreased from more than an hour to 4 minutes In terms of GPU, my first really outstanding one was the GTX 1080 FE, replacing my previous R9 290x. I went back to AMD in 2020 and I've been impressed once again with my first Ryzen, a 3600xt, coupled with an RTX 2060 super FE, games and movies, encoding and video editing, everything was so fast, of course as mentioned @adidan, with the tremendous help of SSDs and then M2... But my last upgrade, the Ryzen 9 5900x is really satisfying me, especially on multi-core tasks, coupled with a nowdays surpassed rtx 2080 super, I am satisfied for the use I make of it.
Ah, the last days of Core2 and LGA 775. I remember that time well as there was a tremendously populous online community across numerous forums. It was a doubly exciting time because Core i7 was on the horizon and the first hyperthreaded CPUs would be unleashed on the overclocking community. Fond memories for a nerd like me.
I will always have a soft spot for the Sandy Bridge CPUs as a group. I can't think of another release that came along and invalidated the competition like that. Not even 'these CPUs are better,' but 'these CPUs are so much better that you shouldn't even consider anything else, not last gen, not AMD, not anything, if you can't afford the i7 get the i5, it's still better than everything else,'. Plus they were super cool running, something that Intel immediately forgot how to do with Ivy Bridge, the twonks. As for GPUs, ATI 3D Rage I. Playing Quake 2 in glorious 640x480, you never forget your first...
2500 Barton. $25 and I pushed mine to 250 1:1 FSB. On a $35 Shuttle AN35N Ultra no less. Video card? 5900 Ultra flashed to 5950. My first flagship card. My 6600 GT was a killer card though. Ran that til I got a pair of 8800 GT.
First HT cpu (didn't work right but hey) was a P4 Xeon, in February, and followed by a Pentium 4 in November of 2002. 3.06Ghz, first time they got a desktop processor there shippable. The old Northwoods had such a deep pipeline that GHz was the only eBay to beat a missed step in the pipeline. I was in college. Glorious time for overclocking.
Tualatin Pentium 3 (the cheapest one with extra l2 cache) + Geforce 3 Ti 200 with both of them pushed to their limits.... an absolute monster combo for dirt cheap.
celeron 300a oced with a 2x delta screamer fans bolted on. with a matrox gfx card and 2x voodo2 sli my case at that time had air flow managed big fans held on by duck tape, sounded way louder than my mums kirby vacum. most stable mobo i ever owned was Abit it7 think it was the first usb only mobo at the the time. never had an issue bsod with that setup
My first combo where I thought ... "yep, I've finally made it.." was my Intel i7-980X Extreme, coupled with a pair of Asus Matrix GTX 580s in SLI, about 10 years or so ago. Nothing could touch that machine at the time.
CPU: I would have to go with the 2600K. It is still a decent budget processor and it is over a decade old at this point. The 2500K was great as well but its lack of hyper-threading meant it was mostly redundant a few years ago by this point. GPU: It would probably have to be the HD7970 that lived on forever through rebrands and 'fine wine drivers'. It is still a decent budget option even today. For me personally, the best GPU I ever owned was the Vega 56. It was a fantastic overclocker and in some ways it aged better than its Nvidia counterparts at the time. AMD set the voltage much higher than necessary on the cards and at stock it lead to lower performance and excess power draw. All you had to do was slightly drop its voltage and you had a card that performed around the GTX 1080 and significantly beat the RTX 2060. Once prices dropped, it also went for a lot less than those options. It always irked me that few reviews took the time to address this, it took literally less than a minute to do from the Radeon control panel and all Vega 56/64's benefited from this. AMD really shot themselves in the foot by not properly optimising the voltage at stock, they left so much performance on the table. It made it a very fun card to play with though and I got a lot out of it. On a similar note, I really liked the R9 Nano, it provided great performance in a super compact form factor. In order to keep it within its 150W TDP limit, the card rarely hit the target core clock of 1000mhz. If you increased the power limit by just 15% it would sit at 1000mhz all day, at which point it performed the same as the Fury X and was notably faster than the Nvidia 980. Not quite as excellent as the Vega series for optimising but it was a fun card still.
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-x800-xt-platinum.c23 Platinum Edition. Was a pretty stonking card at the time.
I've got a bunch of contenders for "greatest CPU." In kinda-sorta chronological order (by memory, I can't be faffed to look 'em up): Intel 4004. Kickstarted the company, was effectively the first commercially-available microprocessor. The great-granddaddy. MOS Technologies 6502, Zilog Z80. Neck-and-neck for their importance in the early days of home computing. Both still produced today, for that matter - if you work with any industrial IoT gear or even some home automation stuff, don't be surprised to find a modern 6502 or Z80 inside. Intel Pentium. Influential for negative reasons, really - FDIV bug, anyone? - but most interesting for being Intel's first named chip, because it turned out you couldn't copyright "80586." Intel Pentium Pro. Now here's where things get interesting. The P6 architecture. "Triple the speed of the Pentium," to quote Hackers' somewhat generous interpretation of the device. "RISC architecture is going to change everything." And it did. The Pentium Pro marked Intel's departure from a true CISC to what is effectively RISC with a CISC layer on top, the way all x86/AMD64 chips work today. (Simplifying things a bit, there: it had dedicated decode stages which translated CISC IA-32 instructions into micro-operations which could be optimised for parallelisation - but saying "RISC with a CISC layer" isn't exactly *wrong*.) Shame it absolutely sucked for 8- and 16-bit programs, tho'.
