Discussion What was some of the most revolutionary PC hardware since the 2000s?

[Colif]

I had a run of hdd deaths in the early 2000's, I used to blame the HDD but now I blame the no name PSU that came with my case. PSU was such an after thought back then.

 

[Order 66]

I have also heard that the i7 6700k was a legendary CPU. what exactly made it so great? (I never had one so I wouldn't know.) The closest I ever got was an i5 6500, which ended up being pretty terrible in 2022.

 

[Order 66]

Fast internet of this kind is severely lacking in the US outside of the major cities. A lot of ground to cover, for sure. I like to gripe about mine, but just a few miles down the road from where I live, things like "working from home" aren't a possible reality.

I understand what you mean, My family and I have 25Mbps internet at home and games take forever to download at an actual speed of about 6mbps.

 

[boju]

I have also heard that the i7 6700k was a legendary CPU. what exactly made it so great? (I never had one so I wouldn't know.) The closest I ever got was an i5 6500, which ended up being pretty terrible in 2022.

2600k was legendary, with a base clock of 3.4 most of them could be pushed to 4.5 with little effort.

 

[Order 66]

2600k was legendary, with a base clock of 3.4 most of them could be pushed to 4.5 with little effort.

Thanks, but I was referring to the i7-6700k not the 2600k.

 

[boju]

Thanks, but I was referring to the i7-6700k not the 2600k.

I know.

 

[Order 66]

I know.

I am confused because you quoted my post which was referring to the 6700k but then you started talking about the 2600k, which is nice to know, but I also wanted to know about the 6700k.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

I wouldn't consider the 6700/6700k to be necessarily special. I agree that the 2600/2600k was revolutionary and was still almost decent until 6 and 8 core cpus with hyperthreading started becoming the norm.

 

[boju]

Ipc didn't really change much between 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th and 7th, there were improvements, just not as much a leap going from 1st to 2nd gen i7 with avx support which what made 2nd gen so great. 8th and 9th gen got the ball rolling again. Now 12th/13th gen doing it again.

 

[Order 66]

I wouldn't consider the 6700/6700k to be necessarily special. I agree that the 2600/2600k was revolutionary and was still almost decent until 6 and 8 core cpus with hyperthreading started becoming the norm.

I heard that the 6700k had a lot of overclocking potential, how good exactly was it at overclocking?

 

[AgentBirdnest]

I have also heard that the i7 6700k was a legendary CPU. what exactly made it so great? (I never had one so I wouldn't know.) The closest I ever got was an i5 6500, which ended up being pretty terrible in 2022.

Longevity, for one thing... The 6700K has remained a very usable CPU for many people, 8 years after it launched. I have a couple of friends still using them, and they have only started having some hiccups just now, with Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty. For most gamers, the performance was still "good enough" until recently.
(Keep in mind that the 6700K has hyperthreading, unlike the 6500. Those extra threads became more important for performance as time went on.)

 

[Order 66]

Longevity, for one thing... The 6700K has remained a very usable CPU for many people, 8 years after it launched. I have a couple of friends still using them, and they have only started having some hiccups just now, with Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty. For most gamers, the performance was still "good enough" until recently.
(Keep in mind that the 6700K has hyperthreading, unlike the 6500. Those extra threads became more important for performance as time went on.)

The i7 6700k and 1080ti would be the ultimate legendary build. both have lasted at least 6 years.

 

[Order 66]

Longevity, for one thing... The 6700K has remained a very usable CPU for many people, 8 years after it launched. I have a couple of friends still using them, and they have only started having some hiccups just now, with Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty. For most gamers, the performance was still "good enough" until recently.
(Keep in mind that the 6700K has hyperthreading, unlike the 6500. Those extra threads became more important for performance as time went on.)

I think it is hilarious that the 1080ti is lasting longer than the 3070 just because the 1080 ti has more VRAM.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

AMD may be helping there a bit too since you can run fsr 3 on those old gpus.

 

[Order 66]

The 1080 ti is still generally good for 1080p high settings unless the game is an unoptimized mess. Not to mention they are a great option for budget builds as they can be had for under $200 used.

 

[Order 66]

I would also say that frame generation tech is revolutionary for games that aren't so dependent on input lag. I personally use frame generation in Minecraft RTX because while the input lag is noticeable, it is not the end of the world in Minecraft because Minecraft is not really a fast paced game.

 

[kerberos_20]

I think it is hilarious that the 1080ti is lasting longer than the 3070 just because the 1080 ti has more VRAM.

that cant be right, in modern titles where is heavily used async compute, 1080ti would strugle hard, as it doesnt have hardware support and its driver emulated, light async compute is okay

 

[Order 66]

that cant be right, in modern titles where is heavily used async compute, 1080ti would strugle hard, as it doesnt have hardware support and its driver emulated, light async compute is okay

Yeah well for most games the more VRAM the better. the 3070 even with it's superior async compute is starting to stutter due to running out of VRAM. A problem that the 1080ti avoids for now.

 

[artk2219]

What was the most revolutionary PC hardware since the 2000s? Ex: Intel hybrid x86 CPUs (12th gen)

Im surprised no one has mentioned the Athlon 64. AMD's AMD64 x86 extension allowed for pretty much all of the advanced cpu's that followed. Intel's plan had originally been to develop a new architecture for 64bit computing with limited legacy compatibility (Itanium). The AMD64 extension did away with the 4GB ram limit, kept legacy compatibility, and allowed for future growth in the home market without splitting it into a pro and consumer architecture. The Radeon 9700 pro decimated everything before it and Nvidia scrambled for an answer, releasing the Geforce 5800 Ultra, a much hotter and louder card that still couldnt quite beat the Radeon 9700 and 9800 series. Nvidia didnt have a definitive winner until the GTX 8800 series, which introduced cuda cores and was a performance monster and finally definitively beat AMD and their Radeon HD 2900 series (I'll leave it here, the GPU markets been a wild ride except for 2016 - 2020ish). SSD's we're huge, easily twice and often times up to 5 times faster than a regular hard drive, it was the one upgrade you could make that made it feel like you had a whole new computer. Friggin flash drives and large portable storage, no longer were you limited by floppy sizes or did you have to worry about burning disks for copying large amounts of data. Widely available broadband internet, allowing everything else that came with it. Streaming, movies, music, tv shows, no longer did you have to buy or copy a disk to listen to or watch something. Wifi, and then wifi that doesnt suck, you could move your computer anywehere in the house that had signal, and you could connect any number of things to your home network. Widely available cell phones (calls from anywhere) and then smart phones, you could do most of what you used to need a computer for with a device that fit in your pocket. Widely available LCD monitors and TV's, you could have a huge monitor or tv for relative peanuts of what an equivalent CRT would have cost, if they even made on in that size, otherwise youd have to use a projector which you needed to control the environment for or had to replace the bulbs on every few months. Its been a pretty good 23 years.

 

[AgentBirdnest]

SSDs felt like an obvious one to me at first, but you can live without them. For me it's the USB flash drive, which first appeared in 2000.

I bought a preconfigured PC in 1999, then from 2001 (?) onwards I always self built. I remember only being able to use floppy disk for file transfers, which meant becoming familiar with disk-spanning software and having to keep something like 7 disks together just to e.g. back up AMD Catalyst software before reinstalling Windows 98 (spanning saving more time than re-downloading over a 56K modem + dial-up). When I first planned to build a PC I remember agonising over whether I should get a Zip drive or not, until a few months later when CD-RW drives became affordable (around the £120 mark, if I recall rightly) and I went with one of those.

Then USB drives came along and, while they might not be good for archival purposes, their ability to keep pace (in capacity and read/write speed) with the ever increasing size of files means they've more or less totally replaced other removable disks as a method of quick and easy portable storage, whether you want a handy copy of something replaceable or to transfer files between different computers. Plus the fact that while you couldn't always count on the destination PC having an optical or Zip drive, you knew it would have USB.

I think that unless you know the pain of having to write-span across multiple floppy disks, labelling them to keep the order and knowing that one disk fault renders the whole lot useless, just to move a dozen or so MB to another computer and taking probably the best part of ten minutes or more to complete the whole process, you don't realise how wonderful the humble flash drive is.

I don't have a reply, or anything to add. I just wanna give you props for a really well-written post, and a very convincing argument for "most revolutionary". It wasn't something I'd thought of, but totally agree after reading this.

A "like" just didn't feel adequate for what you wrote; I felt a need to tell you how good it was. : )

 

[neojack]

Im surprised no one has mentioned the Athlon 64. AMD's AMD64 x86 extension allowed for pretty much all of the advanced cpu's that followed. Intel's plan had originally been to develop a new architecture for 64bit computing with limited legacy compatibility (Itanium). The AMD64 extension did away with the 4GB ram limit, kept legacy compatibility, and allowed for future growth in the home market without splitting it into a pro and consumer architecture. {...}

YES you are totally right

the amd64 architecture litteraly saved all of us from the Itanium catastrophe.
At that time intel launched 64bits CPUs called them "itanium", but reserved them for servers at high prices, us peons would maybe still struggle with 32 bit today if it wasn't for amd's decision to give the 64bit architecture for free on all their consumer CPUs

the athlon XP 1800+ was the first CPU i bought with my own money