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The hardware section makes it sound like he's rebuilding his computer multiple times a year. Do people really find upgrading that often is worth the cost and th

The hardware section makes it sound like he's rebuilding his computer multiple times a year. Do people really find upgrading that often is worth the cost and the bother? What sorts of workloads do people deal with that having top of the line hardware even matters?

secure 6y ago
I rebuild once a year on average, but not every year (planning to skip this year, for example). In general, yes, I find it worthwhile to invest money and effort into a faster experience, but I’m very sensitive to latency, so YMMV :)
- zaroth 6y ago
  There's a sweet spot somewhere in there. I recently re-built my i7-3770 w/ SATA3 SSD into an Ryzen 3700x with NVMe and build times are just remarkably faster. I waited far too long.
devonkim 6y ago
Some folks like having shiny hardware and it’s partly a hobby rather than a need in almost certainty barring specific niche professional needs. I upgrade my workstation setup quite rarely because my work provided laptop is what I use 90%+ of the time. Top of the line is one thing (Xeons and Threadrippers or EPYC) but pretty powerful cost effective CPUs like a 3900X or 9900k are another. Even though I do ML stuff occasionally I still do it as a useless hobby and it’s not worth bumping up to a Threadripper or a crazy GPU, especially when I can use a cloud machine for a fraction of the price and as a bonus force myself to make it somewhat repeatable and deployable for someone else. If one’s been building machines in the past year or so, we’ve just had the biggest performance gains in CPUs in literally 10 years with the latest AMD CPUs. I went a long time with an E3-1230 but got really bored honestly after 5 years and built an i7-4790k ITX machine which wasn’t as big of a change as going from 8GB of RAM to 16 GB or to my first SSD. I got a 3900X this past year and the substantial performance gains are not a big enough reason for me to upgrade yet again compared to something like the new Ampere GPUs for even hobby machine learning purposes like mine. In the future a bigger reason for me to build again would be based around space efficiency reasons where a small case could fit on top of my desk and drive 4K AAA games, encode HEVC video day and night, and all with a 600w SFX PSU.
eeh 6y ago
I only have a old ThinkPad x230 to discourage me from spending lots of time on computers but that does not work.

secure 6y ago

I rebuild once a year on average, but not every year (planning to skip this year, for example). In general, yes, I find it worthwhile to invest money and effort into a faster experience, but I’m very sensitive to latency, so YMMV :)

zaroth 6y ago
There's a sweet spot somewhere in there. I recently re-built my i7-3770 w/ SATA3 SSD into an Ryzen 3700x with NVMe and build times are just remarkably faster. I waited far too long.

devonkim 6y ago

Some folks like having shiny hardware and it’s partly a hobby rather than a need in almost certainty barring specific niche professional needs. I upgrade my workstation setup quite rarely because my work provided laptop is what I use 90%+ of the time. Top of the line is one thing (Xeons and Threadrippers or EPYC) but pretty powerful cost effective CPUs like a 3900X or 9900k are another. Even though I do ML stuff occasionally I still do it as a useless hobby and it’s not worth bumping up to a Threadripper or a crazy GPU, especially when I can use a cloud machine for a fraction of the price and as a bonus force myself to make it somewhat repeatable and deployable for someone else. If one’s been building machines in the past year or so, we’ve just had the biggest performance gains in CPUs in literally 10 years with the latest AMD CPUs. I went a long time with an E3-1230 but got really bored honestly after 5 years and built an i7-4790k ITX machine which wasn’t as big of a change as going from 8GB of RAM to 16 GB or to my first SSD. I got a 3900X this past year and the substantial performance gains are not a big enough reason for me to upgrade yet again compared to something like the new Ampere GPUs for even hobby machine learning purposes like mine. In the future a bigger reason for me to build again would be based around space efficiency reasons where a small case could fit on top of my desk and drive 4K AAA games, encode HEVC video day and night, and all with a 600w SFX PSU.

eeh 6y ago

I only have a old ThinkPad x230 to discourage me from spending lots of time on computers but that does not work.