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Similarly, I only just upgraded from an i7 860 (2009) to a 6700K at the end of last year. In performance benchmarks, it's only twice as fast as my old one, and
by Nition 9y ago
Similarly, I only just upgraded from an i7 860 (2009) to a 6700K at the end of last year. In performance benchmarks, it's only twice as fast as my old one, and that's over seven years. Big difference to how things felt in the past. Imagine if your 66Mhz Pentium still ran well enough that you weren't sure it was worth upgrading to a 500Mhz Pentium III. Same time span.
- ido 9y agoThis was mostly only true in the 90s tho, when we saw the hockey stick part of the S curve: between 1981 and 1987 your comparable choice would have been upgrading a 5mhz 8088 to a 10mhz 286. a 386 machine would be ~$10k (in 80s $s!) and more like a high end multichip Xeon system or something today - they actually had a compaq 386 of that vintage in my first job and it was still in active service in 2001.
- Nition 9y agoIn that case I guess my problem is we bought our first computer in '95, so my kind of baseline experience is that super fast world.
- ido 9y agoOh it's a common (& valid) comparison :) Just wanted to add a little historical context.
- Frogolocalypse 9y agoTry and imagine since 1980. Kind of hard to explain to my boy actually. He has my old computer from about 7 years ago. At least i think it was 7. Intel 2600k? Still works a treat. It's almost as old as he is.
- Kenji 9y agoI also got Intel 2600K. Yes, it's still going very strong. No reason to switch until my motherboard breaks. Speed gains would be minimal, yet getting a new processor would be quite expensive.
- ido 9y agoi had an i5-2500k that my nephew got a couple years ago simply cause we moved to a different country and i didn't want to lug a big-ass desktop with me. I suspect most people wouldn't notice the difference between it and a brand new CPU.
- dsr_ 9y agoI just replaced my work desktop i5-2500 with an i5-4570. Same SSDs, 16GB RAM instead of 24GB. (Not a voluntary move.) There's no perceivable difference. If you have enough RAM to avoid swapping and cheap SATA SSDs, all the requirements for fast/large CPUs or graphics cards are special applications of some sort. Browsers and editors and terminal windows and video playback don't count.
- paulmd 9y agoEven with a very intense overclock, Sandy Bridge is starting to fall behind the pack in gaming. Not obsolete by any means but 5 years of even incremental IPC gains do add up, and Sandy Bridge is still running PCIe 2.0. The 2500k is starting to come out 30-50% behind the 7600K in many titles let alone a 7700K, which is a very perceptible difference. http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2773-intel-i5-2500k-revisit-benchmark-for-2017/page-3 http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2773-intel-i5-2500k-revisi... http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-is-it-finally-time-to-upgrade-your-core-i5-2500k http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-is-it-... For "work" workloads, Sandy Bridge is still quite potent though. Honestly in that segment the gains have mostly been coming from moving to more cores. A hexacore or octacore with hyperthreading/SMT knocks the stuffing out of an i5.
- Frogolocalypse 9y agoYep. It was that reason that i upgraded from the 2600k. My entire workspace is virtual machines. The 2600k started falling down there. Vmware without hyperthreading is kinda non optimal. Sub normal. Frfrrl. Everything else, it is still a cracking pc.
- jl6 9y agoI'm still on my i7 860 with nothing compelling me to upgrade. Intel's biggest competitor in 2017 is Intel from 2010.
- danieldk 9y agoIt really depends on your applications/field. If you are in machine learning or data analysis, AVX can give a welcome performance boost. Also, a maximum of 16GB RAM is quite limiting.