4 ms·
Advances in desktop CPU speed have been minimal over the past few years. If I could get a reasonably priced PC that's 50% faster than my two-year-old system, I'
by xpda 11y ago
Advances in desktop CPU speed have been minimal over the past few years. If I could get a reasonably priced PC that's 50% faster than my two-year-old system, I'd buy it today. Instead, the best performance gain for me is a PCIe SSD.
- Pengwin 11y agoExactly. My 4 year old desktop PC with an Intel sandy bridge CPU, which i added an SSD to a year ago, is perfectly fine for day to day work. energy efficiency since i purchased my computer has improved greatly, but i have no reason for a more efficient CPU, its still performing fast enough for all desktop applications and has no battery.
- simonh 11y agoDon't feel bad about your system not being as efficient as newer models. The carbon footprint of manufacturing it dwarfs that of its lifetime electricity usage, so scrapping it for a more efficient machine would be a false environmental economy. Better to make maximum usage of that sunk environmental cost.
- vacri 11y agoMy 6-year-old PC finally carked it over the past few weeks. About to go pick up my new whitebox in 30 minutes... Interestingly, before this 6-year-old PC, I'd been upgrading every 2 years, but I haven't felt the performance pinch since (okay, some games were a bit pinchy with what used to be a good card, but otherwise no)
- eropple 11y agoSame here. I have a Nehalem 2.8GHz, overclocked (press-button overclocking on the motherboard, I don't have time to mess around with that anymore), and it is perfectly fine for everyday work. The only reasons I'm considering upgrading are video games and to be able to go to 64GB of RAM (and that's only because I want to throw a lot of virtual machines at my problems).
- seanwilson 11y agoI'm even finding this with laptops now. I bought a high-end laptop a couple of years ago and it seems that a new one today at the same price wouldn't make a lot of difference to my day-to-day usage.
- pjmlp 11y agoI jumped into laptops around 2000. The trick is to buy models that you can replace battery, memory and HD. Already that brings the laptop a very long life, before the motherboard or screen eventually die. Or even the memory limit doesn't help anylonger. But even in 2016, 4GB - 8GB are still good enough if one isn't running VMs or development environments like InteliJ.
- seanwilson 11y agoSo I bought 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD drive. I only come close to the RAM usage when running multiple virtual box instances, I don't use all the disk and it's fast, and my battery still lasts about 10 hours.
- tzs 11y agoI have a 2008 Mac Pro that I keep at work (I didn't like the company-issued computer, so brought in my own), and a 2009 Mac Pro at home. I've upgraded them both to SSD, added USB3 via PCIe [1], and bumped the memory up to 32 GB in the 2009. I mistimed [2] the memory updates on the 2008 so only got that up to 12 GB or 18 GB (I don't remember which). Neither of these machines shows any signs of needing replacement. If I used them for gaming perhaps things would be different. Now that I think about it, all of my purchases of machines to run Windows over the last 15 years were because I wanted better gaming performance. [1] http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet%20Technologies/USB34PME/ http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet%20Technologies/USB34PM... [2] Memory prices often follow a U shaped curve, starting out high when a new speed of memory is introduced, then falling as that new speed becomes mainstream. Then something faster and incompatible comes out, and as that becomes mainstream production goes down on the older item, and prices rise. For example, current prices at macsales.com of 4x8GB in various technologies for Mac Pro: $290 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC Used in 2013 Mac Pro $200 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Used in 2010-2012 Mac Pro $195 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC Used in 2009 Mac Pro $780 800 MHz DDR2 ECC Used in 2008 Mac Pro