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Graphics Greatest CPU/GPU

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by SuperHans123, 4 Sep 2022.

  1. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Snap! Rescued a Risc PC from a skip outside a printers. Got a Zip 250, CD-RW, and I've since added an Ethernet card and an IBM adapter board with the world's prettiest 486 chip in it:

    upload_2022-10-19_14-39-16.png

    As far as "greatest," though, I'd have to say the ARM1 has it beaten: inspired by the Berkeley RISC Project, it launched a company which, to my most recent knowledge, ships more cores than any other (though, granted, by... y'know, not actually shipping any cores.) Pulled Acorn (or, at least, parts of Acorn) out of the dustbin of history, too.

    Ooh, and let's go modern: what about RISC-V? Okay, it's an architecture, not a processor, but it's super exciting. Scales from microcontroller to supercomputer, 32-bit, 64-bit, and (prototype) 128-bit, can play processor LEGO with the thing and strap all manner of extensions and add-ons to the instruction set, and it's shipping in serious volume in actual commercial products. Got a recent Nvidia graphics card? There's RISC-V in that. Bought a non-Android/Wear/whateveritisnow smartwatch recently? Could well be RISC-V inside. Western Digital storage products? Yup, they've got their own (open-source) RISC-V core. Hell, Alibaba's dogfooding its T-Head RISC-V implementations in its cloud.

    Even Intel's launching a RISC-V platform, which is how you know hell has frozen over.
     
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  2. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    Not necessarily 'best', but certainly impactful... and not necessarily mentioned already...

    for GPUs

    nvidia G80... the first of the unified shader gpus [iirc], and the start of GPGPU as we know it now [iirc]... might be wrong misremembering, but this is the internet, and someone will be along to tell me so in due course.

    CPUs

    Broadcom BCM2835... was it a great cpu? not really. but it was available in sufficiently large quantities and at a low enough cost to make the raspberry pi possible.
     
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  3. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    You are correct and I second this.

    I had the original 8800 GTX, it was brilliant.
     
  4. David

    David μoʍ ɼouმ qᴉq λon ƨbԍuq ϝʁλᴉuმ ϝo ʁԍɑq ϝμᴉƨ

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    Was joking, bud. It was so difficult to get a hold of the PE was dubbed either Press Edition, because only tech journos had one, or Paper Edition, because it was effectively a paper launch.
     
  5. ModSquid

    ModSquid Multimodder

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    Not to be deliberately contrary, but the 2700K and 2x 2500Ks we have here are yet to come up against something they can't do, including running Ableton (unless you count getting cross-platform game chat to work, which is currently doing my nut). Well-deserved workhorse-status chips and they really opened things up at the time when it was seen how far you could push them :rock:.
     
  6. KayinBlack

    KayinBlack Unrepentant Savage

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    1700 JIUHB. 43 dollar CPU that already was a gaming beast and opened up overclocking for so many of us.

    Not so sure about GPUs, though my favorite was my quad r9-290x setup. Even after Crossfire broke those things were beastly.
     
  7. sonicgroove

    sonicgroove Radical Atheist

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    For me, it's between the i5 2500k and its big brother. 12 years on and the new stuff only wins out by sometimes as little as 20%. I have somehow made a habit of choosing very long lasting CPU choices....barton core AMD Athlon 2500, intel Q6600, 2500k, then 2600k. Whenever I felt they were getting a little sluggish, I just used their incredible overclocking potential to give them new life. My 2600k is running at a full time 4.8ghz daily, and very little can touch it even now.

    As for Gfx... my first ever brand new card was hd4770....it lasted 5+ years playing the games I did. I swapped it out for a GTX780, then a GTX1060. I can happily play just about any game at 1080p full detail so I'm happy with that. I could never imagine buying the latest greatest GFX card as its usually 3x the price of my entire system, and because I hold onto other components for so long, they would only bottleneck the performance anyway
     
    Last edited: 6 Dec 2022
  8. Mister_Tad

    Mister_Tad Will work for nuts Super Moderator

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    Favourite CPU for overclocking exploits was easily a P4 2.4C, my whole setup at the time was properly balls-to-the-wall and after this I retreated a bit from chasing benchmarks. Heavily vmodded P4P800, some unobtanium memory that did 300Mhz with crazy voltage for 1:1 at 3.6GHz on the CPU.

    I'm not sure I have a favourite GPU - possibly the one in the same system, which was a FX5900, again volt-modded, unlocked to an FX5950U, just because of how much I hacked at and abused that system.
     
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  9. dead beat

    dead beat Rippin six 4 life

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    Back when Sandybridge was released I jumped straight in and bought a 2600k which took 5Ghz in its stride. Maybe it's nostalgia but to me that was the golden era. I couldn't believe that value for money those CPUs brought when tested against the previous generation. It really was a leap in performance that I can't recall seeing since.

    I paired it up with three GTX580s in tri SLI and the whole system was fully water cooled. I used to tinker a lot more back then and eventually managed to get the core clocks on all 3 cards up to 1Ghz I believe, for a successful run on the Heaven benchmark test. The thread should be on the forum somewhere. For anyone that remembers the forum member "TrueGamer" (not sure what happened to him), we used to have a lot of fun trying to out clock each other back in the day
     
  10. andreinuk

    andreinuk Minimodder

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    IMG_20230131_155102.jpg


    Came across the box for my first agp GPU. Unfortunately no card but somehow the box is still here. Couldn't afford the 128 so had to go 64.
     
  11. The_Crapman

    The_Crapman World's worst stuntman. Lover of bit-tech

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    I will never forget tg's insane 970 rig with 3 4gb Cheesecake and a 4gb SC, couple of nidecs taped one the sides for extra cooling. I think he went on hiatus for a fair while after a messy breakup. Came back for a little bit, built a mental racing SIM, but drifted off again.
     
  12. Austin

    Austin Minimodder

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    My vote for GPU would be the Radeon 9500 Pro. Really propelled ATi forward as performance leaders especially due to Nvidia's failed efforts at the time. Was a big architectural and performance revolution back in the day along with the 9700 and 9700 Pro.

    For the CPU I agree that Sandy Bridge really impressed and aged so well but my vote would have to go to the Motorola 68000 as found in the original Amiga and Atari ST. It was truly amazing what developers could squeeze out of them and that they lasted so well. I loved that Amiga chipset: so very clever and easily 10 years ahead of its time.
     

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