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system upgrade that gave you the biggest perf. boost

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magellan

Member
Joined
Jul 20, 2002
I'd just like to ask everyone what system (CPU + motherboard) upgrade gave you the largest, most noticeable performance increase?

For me, it was going from an overclocked AMD mobile Barton (2600 I think) to an Intel Pentium D 945+. With the mobile Barton (socket 462 I think) alt-tabbing out of any process that had any significant CPU usage was an exercise in futility, much less any game. The Pentium D 945+ system changed all that.
 
Clearly this will be the one who waited the longest to upgrade.

For me, I went from a A64 3200+ To a e6750 C2D.
 
AMD K6-2 550Mhz to Pentium III 800Mhz. I paid $300 for that processor but I loved it so much. Don't remember the boads at that time, but I was in school, so I was getting the cheapest possible.
 
For me it was, without a doubt, AMD K6-2 500Mhz to Xeon 2.0Ghz (don't remember the exact model number) that ran with RAMBUS memory... something like 400Mhz if I remember correctly. That thing was just crazy fast! :p
 
Went from an Athlon 64 3200+ @ 2.1Ghz on an Epox NF4-Ultra to an FX 8120 @4.6Ghz on a Gigabyte 990Xa-UD3 made my whole year. OFC during most of the latter years on that A64 my work laptop got alot of use, but I dont cout that as it wasnt my computer, but it was running a C2D 7600(I think) @2.6Ghz
 
P1-200mmx @233 to piii-750

But i founf my upgrade i did last week from a c2d to haswell a bit jump as well
 
The one that gave me the biggest boost so far was going from a socket 754 Athlon 64 3200+ single core Venice at 2GHz (stock), to a socket LGA775 E4400 C2D (2GHz dual core) overclocked to 3GHz.

That was a massive difference, and I had no idea what I had been missing.

Even without the overclock it was a big difference.

Then I went to E8400 @3.6GHz, and after that Q6600 @2.8GHz.
 
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Because I've always used AMD until this year, it was from single to dual to tri to quad to Hexa to Octa Core in terms of Raw multitasking computing performance.

The biggest leap in performance on ANY system I've ever run was going from a single hard drive to Raid 0 SSD's.
 
For me it was, without a doubt, AMD K6-2 500Mhz to Xeon 2.0Ghz (don't remember the exact model number) that ran with RAMBUS memory... something like 400Mhz if I remember correctly. That thing was just crazy fast! :p

That must've been an expensive build. RAMBUS memory has always been pricey, that is, when it was available at all. Was your Xeon one of the Itanium models?

I've never actually met anyone who personally had a RAMBUS system and have never even seen a RAMBUS system or the memory itself. For a while there it seemed like RAMBUS would be the expensive future.
 
Just recently.

Had a Phenom 9650 with a ddr2 Asus board. Company I work for was getting rid of a ton of stuff, I was able to snag a QX9650 with a decent board, and ddr3 ram. Biggest jump ever. Ive always done gradual upgrades, and they've always been AMD. Current setup is in my sig.

I've never actually met anyone who personally had a RAMBUS system and have never even seen a RAMBUS system or the memory itself. For a while there it seemed like RAMBUS would be the expensive future.

A company I used to work for, we dealt with a ton of older stuff as well as new stuff. I saw a lot of RD ram, and yes, especially to this day RD (rambus) ram is very expensive. I only ever saw them in Dells. They were stupid and failed miserably because of the "continuity ram".
 
That must've been an expensive build. RAMBUS memory has always been pricey, that is, when it was available at all. Was your Xeon one of the Itanium models?

I've never actually met anyone who personally had a RAMBUS system and have never even seen a RAMBUS system or the memory itself. For a while there it seemed like RAMBUS would be the expensive future.

Yeah, it was expensive as hell. If I recall correctly, I had 2x512MB of RDRAM in that system (along with two continuity RIMMs). That was at the time when people had DDR266 and such. That thing was "tha bomb". :D

BTW, that was circa 2000.
 
I recently went from a Compaq laptop running AMD Ahtlon II Dual-Core P360 w/ 2gb of RAM that generally ran at 85 degrees.
To an AMD FX-4300 Quad-Core w/ 8gb of RAM and a NVIDIA geForce GTX 650 gpu.
My WEI went from 3.5 base to 6.1 base.
 
i7-930 to i7-3770K was a nice upgrade for me. I could definitely tell a substantial improvement in performance.
 
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