3 ms·

This completely fails to acknowledge that single core performance for CPUs from eg 2014 is comparable to middle range CPUs from a few years ago. Eg. i7-4790k f

This completely fails to acknowledge that single core performance for CPUs from eg 2014 is comparable to middle range CPUs from a few years ago. Eg. i7-4790k from 2014 has a single thread score of 2470 (similar to single-core performance focused Xeons from the same generation), compared to eg. scores of 2593 for i5-10400 from 2020 or 2579 for Ryzen 5 3600 from 2019: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html While their power usage is greater, price for the whole package will be much smaller, and real life experience, which mostly depends on how well 1-2 cores can run, will not be much different. Those Chinese motherboards also include updates like support for NVMe drives and newer wifi.

h2odragon 5y ago
Admitting that old parts could still be viable would undercut the entire foundation of the consumer electronics industry! Even the "Muh Power Consumption" argument for "new" hardware often fails in the real world: the CPU or even "the digital controls system" is a trivial part of the system's power input. Before long, people will begin to realize that latency issues have been the biggest problem for quite some time and begin to look at all those things Intel would never attempt to address them. We might find some of these older chips had more potential than was allowed to be realized at the time.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I found the user experience of an older 4th gen-ish dual socket server much more pleasant than that of a more modern 10th gen desktop. Expandability is also good, with plenty of space and power for storage. Energy consumption and fan noise, otoh, aren’t exactly great. Older PCIe is also a letdown.
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    You often dont need the full airflow those fans can provide; with some twiddling they can often be slowed, dropped entirely, or replaced with quieter ones. I ran "bottom edge" priced server gear from ebay in production for several years; most of that lived with the case as open as possible and few of the original fans there; i'd scored a surplus deal on potent 120vac 6in muffin fans and had those tied to things with bailing wire. Being able to reach things quick to replace them and visually diagnose the sources of smoke was another plus.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      My daily driver desktop for a couple years was a low end Lenovo tower server. Still smokes the 10th gen i7 laptop. I bought it new and it’s been a great machine ever since, even if nowadays it’s relegated to less interesting work like hosting a bunch of VMs.
      - smackeyacky 5y ago
        Mine is a similar sounding HPE deskside server. Thanks to the wave of decommissioning and moving to the cloud it has dual 3ghz cpu and 96gb of memory. As a dev machine it absolutely rocks even with a couple of VMs running at the same time.
        rbanffy 5y ago
        Linux's performance degrades really well compared to Windows and macOS. I routinely have ffmpeg transcoding videos to multiple formats and resolutions in the background (with nice -n 19, of course) and it's barely noticeable. If I try something like that on the Windows (beefier) and the Mac (beefy, previous gen CPU) the machine becomes unusable.
        necovek 5y ago
        As long as you have enough free disk space and set up some swap memory too. Otherwise, it "degrades" by OOMing arbitrary processes (which can easily break your desktop session, if such a process ends up being something like dbus), and even with swap, may end up slowing your desktop session to a grind if you've got some memory leaking long-running processes. Running out of disk? Sorry, things will just randomly blow up :)
- necovek 5y ago
  Oh, indeed, especially so since most hardware at people's homes is not running at high load. I've got a dual Xeon e5-2667 v2 server with 128GB of ECC RAM, two SATA SSDs and 3 8TB HDDs that mostly pulls ~150W at the wall (it runs my mail and web servers along with things like nextcloud and my test nested-kvm VMs all spread across multiple VMs) according to my UPS (well, 180W along with two wifi routers, one network switch and two modems for two internet connections: cable and fiber). I am sure power usage would be higher if it was more seriously stressed, but I am having a hard time justifying upgrading either my server or my desktop (aforementioned i7-4790k): the only reason I'd want to update my desktop is for more than 32GB of RAM.

h2odragon 5y ago

Admitting that old parts could still be viable would undercut the entire foundation of the consumer electronics industry! Even the "Muh Power Consumption" argument for "new" hardware often fails in the real world: the CPU or even "the digital controls system" is a trivial part of the system's power input. Before long, people will begin to realize that latency issues have been the biggest problem for quite some time and begin to look at all those things Intel would never attempt to address them. We might find some of these older chips had more potential than was allowed to be realized at the time.

rbanffy 5y ago
I found the user experience of an older 4th gen-ish dual socket server much more pleasant than that of a more modern 10th gen desktop. Expandability is also good, with plenty of space and power for storage. Energy consumption and fan noise, otoh, aren’t exactly great. Older PCIe is also a letdown.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  You often dont need the full airflow those fans can provide; with some twiddling they can often be slowed, dropped entirely, or replaced with quieter ones. I ran "bottom edge" priced server gear from ebay in production for several years; most of that lived with the case as open as possible and few of the original fans there; i'd scored a surplus deal on potent 120vac 6in muffin fans and had those tied to things with bailing wire. Being able to reach things quick to replace them and visually diagnose the sources of smoke was another plus.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    My daily driver desktop for a couple years was a low end Lenovo tower server. Still smokes the 10th gen i7 laptop. I bought it new and it’s been a great machine ever since, even if nowadays it’s relegated to less interesting work like hosting a bunch of VMs.
    - smackeyacky 5y ago
      Mine is a similar sounding HPE deskside server. Thanks to the wave of decommissioning and moving to the cloud it has dual 3ghz cpu and 96gb of memory. As a dev machine it absolutely rocks even with a couple of VMs running at the same time.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        Linux's performance degrades really well compared to Windows and macOS. I routinely have ffmpeg transcoding videos to multiple formats and resolutions in the background (with nice -n 19, of course) and it's barely noticeable. If I try something like that on the Windows (beefier) and the Mac (beefy, previous gen CPU) the machine becomes unusable.
        necovek 5y ago
        As long as you have enough free disk space and set up some swap memory too. Otherwise, it "degrades" by OOMing arbitrary processes (which can easily break your desktop session, if such a process ends up being something like dbus), and even with swap, may end up slowing your desktop session to a grind if you've got some memory leaking long-running processes. Running out of disk? Sorry, things will just randomly blow up :)
necovek 5y ago
Oh, indeed, especially so since most hardware at people's homes is not running at high load. I've got a dual Xeon e5-2667 v2 server with 128GB of ECC RAM, two SATA SSDs and 3 8TB HDDs that mostly pulls ~150W at the wall (it runs my mail and web servers along with things like nextcloud and my test nested-kvm VMs all spread across multiple VMs) according to my UPS (well, 180W along with two wifi routers, one network switch and two modems for two internet connections: cable and fiber). I am sure power usage would be higher if it was more seriously stressed, but I am having a hard time justifying upgrading either my server or my desktop (aforementioned i7-4790k): the only reason I'd want to update my desktop is for more than 32GB of RAM.