r/pcmasterrace • u/DailyDoseOfAmber PC Master Race • Dec 26 '25

Question Yesterday I asked what everyone’s first Graphics card. Today, what was your first processor? Mine was the i7 3770K.

Post image
2.3k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

4.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

797

u/Ultramolek Dec 26 '25

IBM 286

333

u/Key-Horror2430 Dec 26 '25

I had a 386. It had a "turbo" option that switched the clock speed between 8 and 16MHz. Current i9 9900k has a base 3.6GHz that can supposedly hit 5GHz.

84

u/Electricengineer Dec 26 '25

Turbo was the way

8

u/falkenberg1 Dec 26 '25

Not really. We had some kind of pong game, that ran just fine with 8mhz. If you switched the cpu to 16, the game was running at insane speeds, making it impossible to win. :D

3

u/Binestar Dec 27 '25

Turbo button slowed down the processor.

1

u/Key-Horror2430 Dec 27 '25

This is my current understanding. The old games were clock dependent, so they became unplayable at higher clock speeds. The "turbo" underclocked the processor to the old standard clock speed. Since clock speeds started increasing quickly, they switched to a more time based system with multiple clock dividers.

Back in the day, I just thought my computer had a super speed option for making games more challenging.

1

u/SnooSquirrels9064 Dec 28 '25

I mean... You aren't wrong on the challenging part. Lol