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I still run an i7-3770k in my homelab (Ivy Bridge, the successor to Sandy Bridge, but still a relatively shared platform with backwards compat) and despite the

I still run an i7-3770k in my homelab (Ivy Bridge, the successor to Sandy Bridge, but still a relatively shared platform with backwards compat) and despite the fact that it's older than dirt it is still a pretty great processor to this day. Not too long ago it was powering my gaming rig and it held up really well to modern titles at 1080p. The best part is that I got it at a university surplus sale for $60, complete w/ a decent antec case, corsair psu, 16gb of ram and a decent Asus motherboard.

generaltsos 3y ago
I still run the i7-2600k which I purchased new along with the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe motherboard in 2011 (maybe 2012?). It's been overclocked and water cooled from the start, I believe somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 or 4.7 GHz, and despite updating my RAM and GPU during that time, I have had practically zero issues whatsoever with the CPU and motherboard. It's certainly not very performant when compared to newer generations of Intel CPU, but for a little bit of gaming here and there I really can't complain!
seabrookmx 3y ago
Cheap ($35 USD) E5-2650v2 reporting in. Runs all my home server junk (plex, syncthing, etc) and my dev environment (an LXD container that I use via VSCode Remote SSH) without issue.
- Tool_of_Society 3y ago
  I have recently turned to the dark side of cheap ebay Xeon CPUs :P That's a nice chip for a super cheap price man.
Tool_of_Society 3y ago
I multibox games so I have quite a few systems you would qualify as "old as dirt" My secondary system is a sff hp/compaq business machine with an i7-3770 and 16 gb ram SSD GT1030 w/gddr5. It's my go to computer for when I need to go somewhere for a while. IT's small easy to pack and handles 1080p games pretty damned well. I'm sure modern "triple A" games would be upset at the lack of vram but I don't really care. I don't find many modern games to be worth my time. I bought the base machine off ebay for $50 bit over 5 years ago. I at one point had a stack of five SFF HP machines for manual multiboxing in a MMORPG. One i5-2500 2x i5-3470 and 2x i5-3470s all connected to USB numkey pads for easy hotkey usage. The i7-3770 CPU I picked up off ebay for $20 couple years later. My third box (still multiboxing) is an old rosewill case that I put an ebay dell optiplex 7010 mobo in with an e3-1230 (xeon i7-3770 basically). 16 GB ram SSD GTX660. Got the motherboard and cpu off ebay for about $30 total. Benchmarks put the e3 cpu within 1% of my i7-3770 cpu. E3-1230 CPUs are going for a fraction of the cost of an i7 3770 these days. I had originally intended to get a new low end cpu/mobo for this system (I have ddr4 ram sitting around etc) but the prices were out of reach for my budget. The e3-1230 was $12 shipped so I'm thinking of buying another to put in my other HP/compaq SFF machine that has an i5-3470 in it. I call this one my fourth system. It has 16 gb ram with a ssd in it. The GPU is an hd7570 1gb card I bought in 2018 for around $12. Funny story I ended up buying six of those cards for my stack of SFF because some porch pirate stole one of the cards. I'm sure they were happy to get a card that was worth at most 10 dollars shipped lol. All of these systems play almost all my steam games at 1080p. They also play World of warcraft, world of warships, warthunder, and such at 1080p. One of my SFF machines ended up at my sister's as a box for her kids to play games on. Cheap durable and easy to clean. All those systems use $20 SP 512GB SSD drives bought off amazon. Unbelievably cheap price for a drive that has vastly better performance than spinner drives. IF you had told me in the early 2000s that I would be using OEM components to game with I would of laughed at you. Then again if you had told me the current state of mainstream gaming I wouldn't of believed you either..
jtriangle 3y ago
I ran a ebay-special 3770k at 4.9ghz for years. Aside from occasionally having to hot boot it, that is, boot, then restart immediately, so my USB3 ports and NIC would work, it was flawless. Had to keep it on a nice AIO to run at reasonable temps (<80c), but, it performed well. I do miss those days, where you could get lucky and score silicon that'd run happily at 30% higher than its rated speed.
nirav72 3y ago
I’m Im still running a sandy bridge i7-2600k on a workbench/electronic hobby/3d printing area PC. Runs all the applications I use or need for tinkering around. Bought it back in 2011 as part of a gaming pc I built. Then transferred the CPU into a mini-itx motherboard and case, so I could mount it under the workbench. Along with that, I have a 2011 sandy bridge mac mini running ubuntu server and about 8 containers. (Including cloudflare tunnel and wireguard). I’m going to squeeze as much as I can out of them. At least until there is no OS support for either.
Sakos 3y ago
I had a 2500m ThinkPad T420 until recently. It could handle everything I did with it, including OBS screen recording and minor audio editing. Half-way modern games were out, but otherwise the device ran great. Sandy Bridge was an incredible turning point for consumer PCs.
post_break 3y ago
My gaming PC is still a 4770k that I delidded and overclocked the crap out of to like 4.7ghz. Paired with a 3060ti it's pretty much maxed out. It's showing signs of age and I look forward to going team red, but don't want to spend the money yet. 10 years I've gotten out of this chip.
- Tool_of_Society 3y ago
  I have an OCed ryzen 5 3600 system with a NVME SSD 32gb ram blahblahblah and it's running a GTX970 I bought about 3 years ago for $100. I had hoped the 40 series would be properly priced so I could actually afford to buy a GPU again......
  - onli 3y ago
    Even a RX 6600 would be a nice upgrade over your 970, and in that category prices are OK.
  - pipes 3y ago
    Interesting, I have a 3600 too, I thought they weren't over clockable because I read some random forum post saying so. I've been given bad info then? What have you clocked it too? Stock cooler?
- abujazar 3y ago
  I recently replaced my 4770K/3080 Ti rig with a 13600K and can wholeheartedly recommend the upgrade. Such an old CPU is not only keeping the GPU back, but load times etc are also like 10-50 times faster.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  I switched to Intel with Haswell, 4570k I believe. Broke my heart going back to Intel. I started building computers around 2005, and AMD was the shit. I got caught up in knowing all the spec differences between CPU lines, overclocking potential, and so on. One of my first motherboards was a DFI LANPARTY and there must have been about 70 ways to tweak RAM timing. I've never seen anything like it in modern mobos. Anyway, K10 or Bulldozer or whatever it was called by AMD was a flop, and Intel just kicked ass. I kept that Haswell probably longer than any other CPU I've used - About 5 years as my primary gaming CPU, before getting a Ryzen 1700.
LexiMax 3y ago
Can concur. My last personal PC had a 3570k and lasted for a very, very long time. I do wonder if AMD's Ryzen 5 3600 might be in a similar position for this generation.
letrowekwel 3y ago
Similarly I've never bothered to upgrade from my from old i7-2600k gaming build from 2011, and will likely use it for many years to come. Paired with GTX1070, more RAM, and a larger SSD, it still delivers good enough performance for anything I want (and have time) to play, including AAA games from few years ago.
parentheses 3y ago
I had a Sandy Bridge also and after years of gaming, and years in storage, the machine still fired up and played latest games. Haven't since reproduced this.
Keyframe 3y ago
Still rocking 3930k as one of my machines. It refuses to be obsolete.
- leptons 3y ago
  Me too until about 5 months ago. It's been a great CPU. I'm still using the same machine I bought in 2011 as my workstation, and in 2011 the 3930k was like jumping into the future with its 6-cores. It was definitely worth the cost considering how long it's been useful. I retired the 3930k CPU 5 months ago when I decided to upgrade the machine to the fastest possible CPU that would go into the socket-2011 motherboard. I found a Xeon E5-2697v2 CPU on eBay for about $40 (currently $30 with free shipping). So it took me from the 6-core/12-thread 3930k up to 12-core/24-threads. It's the final upgrade for this machine, there's really nowhere else for it to go. Maxed out 64GB RAM, RAID10 8-drive array, decent modern video card. I tried to get a TPM module but the BIOS didn't recognize it so it won't install Windows 11 unfortunately, I tried the workarounds but no go. I don't really need a new modern workstation, but when this system dies (if it dies, it's been a reliable workhorse), I'll get the fastest machine possible at the time and keep that for at least 10 or 15 years.
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    I've been thinking of upgrading it to E5-2xxxv2 as well, for years now heh. BUT, I think I'll just let it slide for maybe another half a year or year and retire it altogether. It has been really an amazing run also since 2011 and I am quite positive I could still get maybe few to five years out of it.
    - leptons 3y ago
      The E5-2697v2 scores 227 cpumark points faster than an Apple M1 CPU, for the price of $30 on ebay. It's an easy upgrade that makes the system still quite useful, although it runs quite a bit hotter than the M1. But yeah, it's really at EOL now as it won't run the latest OS - I mean it could, but damn Microsoft for locking my system out. I'd keep it going for 5 more years if Windows 10 seemed viable for that long.
theandrewbailey 3y ago
I built a desktop around an i7-2600 (not K) when it released in 2011. Moved it to the basement in 2017, where it's been a server ever since. The 16GB RAM that I loaded it up with is starting to look a bit restrictive, but does its job well. I will likely replace my current desktop (Ryzen 1800X) when Zen 5 releases, and replace that 2600 with my 1800X, then find someone that would be happy with an old i7 desktop PC.
- tuatoru 3y ago
  I'd still be using my 2600 if an add-in sound card hadn't died, in the process frying the PCI and PCIe hardware on the mobo.
  - theandrewbailey 3y ago
    My 2600 isn't in the same motherboard I originally got it in (or its recalled replacement[0]). I bricked that MSI board when I tried flashing the BIOS from Windows 10. Turns out, that utility didn't support Windows 10, so I'll avoid MSI boards going forward. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/intel-discovers-bug-in-6series-chipset-begins-recall https://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/intel-discovers-bug-in-6...
jeffbee 3y ago
Ivy Bridge and even Sandy Bridge are still in production at GCE. These things are economically viable long after the (very misguided, extremely outdated) traditional thinking of recycling hardware after 3 years.
- helf 3y ago
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- giantrobot 3y ago
  IIRC clock for clock even the latest Intel CPUs are only 30-40% faster than Ivy Bridge at best and hover around 20% faster on average. So I don't find it that surprising GCE (or AWS) keeps SB and IB machines around. I imagine VMs on the lower power tiers are far more popular than high power tiers so those older machines still end up with full utilization.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    I think the popularity of the ancient machine families on both GCE and EC2 is due to inertia and copypasta and ignorance. People write down "m4.large" and just leave it that way until it stops working. The GCE N1 family that contains SNB and IVB is slower but not cheaper. https://miro.medium.com/v2/1*j7PlMPFDlWI78cMdENJh7Q.png https://miro.medium.com/v2/1*j7PlMPFDlWI78cMdENJh7Q.png
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      That's a good point. I was thinking more about from GCE/AWS side, they'll keep these old machines running because they can shuffle off low priority/power loads to them. But it makes sense from the customer side they're just configuring by rote rather than looking for the best price-performance.
kingrazor 3y ago
I have a Nehalem/Lynnfield i5 750 that still runs like a champ. Won't play modern games without a good GPU but otherwise does everything I ask it to, and is still pretty snappy for its age. The biggest reason it's not my main rig anymore is because of a lack of USB 3 ports.
- jdboyd 3y ago
  I had an i5-750 with Maxwell GPU behind the TV for games with kids. It worked fine for a lot of things, but it ran out of CPU with Subnautica, which isn't exactly a AAA title, and I wasn't playing it when it first came out, but rather after updates presumably settled down, around 2018+. Overclocking may have given it a longer life, but I generally don't mess with that. If USB3 had been the problem, a USB3 card would be cheap. At about the same time I added a USB3 card to my main desktop for better SD card read/write speeds. I spend more on a good USB3 SD reader than I did on the USB3 card. Now the gaming PC is up to an i5-6500 with GTX1060. It is hanging in there fine for now. I'm only itching to upgrade it for Windows 11 support, but I don't really need Windows 11 on that machine.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  I've got an i5 530 in a server in my lab. Since it runs idle for long periods it isn't very power hungry. It is also beefy enough for a lot of different loads. I've found pretty much everything since the Core 2 Duo to be more than enough of for "server" tasks.
  - Arrath 3y ago
    Likewise, my i7 920 continues kicking and handling most any random task I throw at it. I retired it as my daily driver in late 2018, but I sure got my mileage out of that thing.
sokoloff 3y ago
I bought myself and the kids i7-4770/4790 Haswell Dells when they were 5 years old. It’s still my casual/personal/non-work desktop and was the kids machines until this spring when I finally upgraded them so they could play Valorant (TPM-related not performance related).
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>I still run an i7-3770k in my homelab ... The best part is that I got it at a university surplus sale for $60 If you don't care about energy efficiency or it's dirt cheap where you live then that's fine, but FWIW a modern 12th gen Intel Alder-Lake N100 NUC clone with quad E-cores[1] will smoke that, at 180 Euros with a TDP of only 10W, and at EU energy prices, the energy savings will make up the extra cost. I get and support the whole reuse/repair/recycle mantra, but just like with daily driving old cars, at some point it's worth letting them go and upgrading your daily driver to something new and efficient which you can also reuse/repair/recycle, as it's just not worth daily driving in 2023 anymore such old gas-guzzling tower PCs with old CPUs that consume ~95W just to offer less than half of the performance of a modern smartphone[2][3] except for bragging rights online on who has the oldest ruining CPU, or if you don't care about your energy usage. For example, a modern CPU encoding/decoding a video stream would use way less power thanks to its newer video decoder/encoder hardware IP blocks than a very old CPU going on full blast to SW decode/encode the video stream. The differences can be staggering. So, while the anecdatas of "lookatme, I'm still using an ancient CPU and it works great" are fun, there's a balance where you need to think how much of the environment and money would I be saving by keeping using very old hardware instead of throwing it away, and how much would I be saving by upgrading to something much more efficient and using that for longer with the same reuse/repair/recycle mantra, as at some point the balance always tips to the latter. [1] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B0BWLV6CK4/ https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B0BWLV6CK4/ [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-3770k https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-3770k [3] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2179368 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2179368
- supertrope 3y ago
  At $0.12/kWh 1W 24/7/365 costs $1/year. Assuming you don't use sleep mode and/or wake on LAN dropping down from 50W to 10W will save $40/year. On the environmental virtue side electronics have embodied energy usage that can surpass the lifetime electrical consumption especially if the devices are not always on.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
sznio 3y ago
I'm still running an i5-2500k (overclocked to 4.3GHz) in my main PC. Only decided to replace it now when I bought the new Call of Duty and realized it can't run it smoothly. It's _fine_ for everything else. My Ryzen 5800X arrives next week. Can't wait to return to Rust, which I dropped because compiling took ages.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  My 2500k could go up to 4.9 but the juice eventually lead to some massive degradation. It lasted me for 8 years until I jumped to a 3700x and now a 5800x3d. I like the performance but my next CPU is going to be 65w again. These things are hot. But not hot enough to jump on a 7800x3d. Funny how the best gaming CPU is 65w but the best GPU is about 8 times that. Heat and noise are important
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  Oh man, I did an upgrade from a i5-2000 series to a Ryzen 5000 series in a machine a while back and it was very worth it. It's great for compiling Rust projects compared to the Sandy Bridge processor, it's super fast. Worth it to upgrade your storage, as well, to something modern. Makes it even faster for building larger projects.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  don't forget to run a few benchmarks on your old rig so you can get some good data on how big the improvement is.
  - bobbob1921 3y ago
    (And that/if it’s stable ! Prime95)
- GOATS- 3y ago
  Long live the i5-2500K, had mine for 7 years, overclocked to 4.6GHz and it ran like a champion until I decided to build a new machine in 2019.
  - 3y ago
bpye 3y ago
My home server is still a Gen 8 HP Microserver with a Xeon E3-1230 V2 - so also Ivy Bridge. I wouldn’t mind something more modern and lower power but it seems any alternative with 4+ front drive bays would be quite a bit more expensive - and so it stays.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  I have the same, there doesn’t seem to be anything remotely in the same price range. Only much cheaper slow SSDs could remove the need for the bays and thus allow more options.
deleted 3y ago
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generaltsos 3y ago

I still run the i7-2600k which I purchased new along with the ASUS P8P67 Deluxe motherboard in 2011 (maybe 2012?). It's been overclocked and water cooled from the start, I believe somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 or 4.7 GHz, and despite updating my RAM and GPU during that time, I have had practically zero issues whatsoever with the CPU and motherboard. It's certainly not very performant when compared to newer generations of Intel CPU, but for a little bit of gaming here and there I really can't complain!

seabrookmx 3y ago

Cheap ($35 USD) E5-2650v2 reporting in. Runs all my home server junk (plex, syncthing, etc) and my dev environment (an LXD container that I use via VSCode Remote SSH) without issue.

Tool_of_Society 3y ago
I have recently turned to the dark side of cheap ebay Xeon CPUs :P That's a nice chip for a super cheap price man.

Tool_of_Society 3y ago

I multibox games so I have quite a few systems you would qualify as "old as dirt" My secondary system is a sff hp/compaq business machine with an i7-3770 and 16 gb ram SSD GT1030 w/gddr5. It's my go to computer for when I need to go somewhere for a while. IT's small easy to pack and handles 1080p games pretty damned well. I'm sure modern "triple A" games would be upset at the lack of vram but I don't really care. I don't find many modern games to be worth my time. I bought the base machine off ebay for $50 bit over 5 years ago. I at one point had a stack of five SFF HP machines for manual multiboxing in a MMORPG. One i5-2500 2x i5-3470 and 2x i5-3470s all connected to USB numkey pads for easy hotkey usage. The i7-3770 CPU I picked up off ebay for $20 couple years later. My third box (still multiboxing) is an old rosewill case that I put an ebay dell optiplex 7010 mobo in with an e3-1230 (xeon i7-3770 basically). 16 GB ram SSD GTX660. Got the motherboard and cpu off ebay for about $30 total. Benchmarks put the e3 cpu within 1% of my i7-3770 cpu. E3-1230 CPUs are going for a fraction of the cost of an i7 3770 these days. I had originally intended to get a new low end cpu/mobo for this system (I have ddr4 ram sitting around etc) but the prices were out of reach for my budget. The e3-1230 was $12 shipped so I'm thinking of buying another to put in my other HP/compaq SFF machine that has an i5-3470 in it. I call this one my fourth system. It has 16 gb ram with a ssd in it. The GPU is an hd7570 1gb card I bought in 2018 for around $12. Funny story I ended up buying six of those cards for my stack of SFF because some porch pirate stole one of the cards. I'm sure they were happy to get a card that was worth at most 10 dollars shipped lol. All of these systems play almost all my steam games at 1080p. They also play World of warcraft, world of warships, warthunder, and such at 1080p. One of my SFF machines ended up at my sister's as a box for her kids to play games on. Cheap durable and easy to clean. All those systems use $20 SP 512GB SSD drives bought off amazon. Unbelievably cheap price for a drive that has vastly better performance than spinner drives. IF you had told me in the early 2000s that I would be using OEM components to game with I would of laughed at you. Then again if you had told me the current state of mainstream gaming I wouldn't of believed you either..

jtriangle 3y ago

I ran a ebay-special 3770k at 4.9ghz for years. Aside from occasionally having to hot boot it, that is, boot, then restart immediately, so my USB3 ports and NIC would work, it was flawless. Had to keep it on a nice AIO to run at reasonable temps (<80c), but, it performed well. I do miss those days, where you could get lucky and score silicon that'd run happily at 30% higher than its rated speed.

nirav72 3y ago

I’m Im still running a sandy bridge i7-2600k on a workbench/electronic hobby/3d printing area PC. Runs all the applications I use or need for tinkering around. Bought it back in 2011 as part of a gaming pc I built. Then transferred the CPU into a mini-itx motherboard and case, so I could mount it under the workbench. Along with that, I have a 2011 sandy bridge mac mini running ubuntu server and about 8 containers. (Including cloudflare tunnel and wireguard). I’m going to squeeze as much as I can out of them. At least until there is no OS support for either.

Sakos 3y ago

I had a 2500m ThinkPad T420 until recently. It could handle everything I did with it, including OBS screen recording and minor audio editing. Half-way modern games were out, but otherwise the device ran great. Sandy Bridge was an incredible turning point for consumer PCs.

post_break 3y ago

My gaming PC is still a 4770k that I delidded and overclocked the crap out of to like 4.7ghz. Paired with a 3060ti it's pretty much maxed out. It's showing signs of age and I look forward to going team red, but don't want to spend the money yet. 10 years I've gotten out of this chip.

Tool_of_Society 3y ago
I have an OCed ryzen 5 3600 system with a NVME SSD 32gb ram blahblahblah and it's running a GTX970 I bought about 3 years ago for $100. I had hoped the 40 series would be properly priced so I could actually afford to buy a GPU again......
- onli 3y ago
  Even a RX 6600 would be a nice upgrade over your 970, and in that category prices are OK.
- pipes 3y ago
  Interesting, I have a 3600 too, I thought they weren't over clockable because I read some random forum post saying so. I've been given bad info then? What have you clocked it too? Stock cooler?
abujazar 3y ago
I recently replaced my 4770K/3080 Ti rig with a 13600K and can wholeheartedly recommend the upgrade. Such an old CPU is not only keeping the GPU back, but load times etc are also like 10-50 times faster.
unethical_ban 3y ago
I switched to Intel with Haswell, 4570k I believe. Broke my heart going back to Intel. I started building computers around 2005, and AMD was the shit. I got caught up in knowing all the spec differences between CPU lines, overclocking potential, and so on. One of my first motherboards was a DFI LANPARTY and there must have been about 70 ways to tweak RAM timing. I've never seen anything like it in modern mobos. Anyway, K10 or Bulldozer or whatever it was called by AMD was a flop, and Intel just kicked ass. I kept that Haswell probably longer than any other CPU I've used - About 5 years as my primary gaming CPU, before getting a Ryzen 1700.

LexiMax 3y ago

Can concur. My last personal PC had a 3570k and lasted for a very, very long time. I do wonder if AMD's Ryzen 5 3600 might be in a similar position for this generation.

letrowekwel 3y ago

Similarly I've never bothered to upgrade from my from old i7-2600k gaming build from 2011, and will likely use it for many years to come. Paired with GTX1070, more RAM, and a larger SSD, it still delivers good enough performance for anything I want (and have time) to play, including AAA games from few years ago.

parentheses 3y ago

I had a Sandy Bridge also and after years of gaming, and years in storage, the machine still fired up and played latest games. Haven't since reproduced this.

Keyframe 3y ago

Still rocking 3930k as one of my machines. It refuses to be obsolete.

leptons 3y ago
Me too until about 5 months ago. It's been a great CPU. I'm still using the same machine I bought in 2011 as my workstation, and in 2011 the 3930k was like jumping into the future with its 6-cores. It was definitely worth the cost considering how long it's been useful. I retired the 3930k CPU 5 months ago when I decided to upgrade the machine to the fastest possible CPU that would go into the socket-2011 motherboard. I found a Xeon E5-2697v2 CPU on eBay for about $40 (currently $30 with free shipping). So it took me from the 6-core/12-thread 3930k up to 12-core/24-threads. It's the final upgrade for this machine, there's really nowhere else for it to go. Maxed out 64GB RAM, RAID10 8-drive array, decent modern video card. I tried to get a TPM module but the BIOS didn't recognize it so it won't install Windows 11 unfortunately, I tried the workarounds but no go. I don't really need a new modern workstation, but when this system dies (if it dies, it's been a reliable workhorse), I'll get the fastest machine possible at the time and keep that for at least 10 or 15 years.
- Keyframe 3y ago
  I've been thinking of upgrading it to E5-2xxxv2 as well, for years now heh. BUT, I think I'll just let it slide for maybe another half a year or year and retire it altogether. It has been really an amazing run also since 2011 and I am quite positive I could still get maybe few to five years out of it.
  - leptons 3y ago
    The E5-2697v2 scores 227 cpumark points faster than an Apple M1 CPU, for the price of $30 on ebay. It's an easy upgrade that makes the system still quite useful, although it runs quite a bit hotter than the M1. But yeah, it's really at EOL now as it won't run the latest OS - I mean it could, but damn Microsoft for locking my system out. I'd keep it going for 5 more years if Windows 10 seemed viable for that long.

theandrewbailey 3y ago

I built a desktop around an i7-2600 (not K) when it released in 2011. Moved it to the basement in 2017, where it's been a server ever since. The 16GB RAM that I loaded it up with is starting to look a bit restrictive, but does its job well. I will likely replace my current desktop (Ryzen 1800X) when Zen 5 releases, and replace that 2600 with my 1800X, then find someone that would be happy with an old i7 desktop PC.

tuatoru 3y ago
I'd still be using my 2600 if an add-in sound card hadn't died, in the process frying the PCI and PCIe hardware on the mobo.
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  My 2600 isn't in the same motherboard I originally got it in (or its recalled replacement[0]). I bricked that MSI board when I tried flashing the BIOS from Windows 10. Turns out, that utility didn't support Windows 10, so I'll avoid MSI boards going forward. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/intel-discovers-bug-in-6series-chipset-begins-recall https://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/intel-discovers-bug-in-6...

jeffbee 3y ago

Ivy Bridge and even Sandy Bridge are still in production at GCE. These things are economically viable long after the (very misguided, extremely outdated) traditional thinking of recycling hardware after 3 years.

helf 3y ago
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giantrobot 3y ago
IIRC clock for clock even the latest Intel CPUs are only 30-40% faster than Ivy Bridge at best and hover around 20% faster on average. So I don't find it that surprising GCE (or AWS) keeps SB and IB machines around. I imagine VMs on the lower power tiers are far more popular than high power tiers so those older machines still end up with full utilization.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  I think the popularity of the ancient machine families on both GCE and EC2 is due to inertia and copypasta and ignorance. People write down "m4.large" and just leave it that way until it stops working. The GCE N1 family that contains SNB and IVB is slower but not cheaper. https://miro.medium.com/v2/1*j7PlMPFDlWI78cMdENJh7Q.png https://miro.medium.com/v2/1*j7PlMPFDlWI78cMdENJh7Q.png
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    That's a good point. I was thinking more about from GCE/AWS side, they'll keep these old machines running because they can shuffle off low priority/power loads to them. But it makes sense from the customer side they're just configuring by rote rather than looking for the best price-performance.

kingrazor 3y ago

I have a Nehalem/Lynnfield i5 750 that still runs like a champ. Won't play modern games without a good GPU but otherwise does everything I ask it to, and is still pretty snappy for its age. The biggest reason it's not my main rig anymore is because of a lack of USB 3 ports.

jdboyd 3y ago
I had an i5-750 with Maxwell GPU behind the TV for games with kids. It worked fine for a lot of things, but it ran out of CPU with Subnautica, which isn't exactly a AAA title, and I wasn't playing it when it first came out, but rather after updates presumably settled down, around 2018+. Overclocking may have given it a longer life, but I generally don't mess with that. If USB3 had been the problem, a USB3 card would be cheap. At about the same time I added a USB3 card to my main desktop for better SD card read/write speeds. I spend more on a good USB3 SD reader than I did on the USB3 card. Now the gaming PC is up to an i5-6500 with GTX1060. It is hanging in there fine for now. I'm only itching to upgrade it for Windows 11 support, but I don't really need Windows 11 on that machine.
giantrobot 3y ago
I've got an i5 530 in a server in my lab. Since it runs idle for long periods it isn't very power hungry. It is also beefy enough for a lot of different loads. I've found pretty much everything since the Core 2 Duo to be more than enough of for "server" tasks.
- Arrath 3y ago
  Likewise, my i7 920 continues kicking and handling most any random task I throw at it. I retired it as my daily driver in late 2018, but I sure got my mileage out of that thing.

sokoloff 3y ago

I bought myself and the kids i7-4770/4790 Haswell Dells when they were 5 years old. It’s still my casual/personal/non-work desktop and was the kids machines until this spring when I finally upgraded them so they could play Valorant (TPM-related not performance related).

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>I still run an i7-3770k in my homelab ... The best part is that I got it at a university surplus sale for $60 If you don't care about energy efficiency or it's dirt cheap where you live then that's fine, but FWIW a modern 12th gen Intel Alder-Lake N100 NUC clone with quad E-cores[1] will smoke that, at 180 Euros with a TDP of only 10W, and at EU energy prices, the energy savings will make up the extra cost. I get and support the whole reuse/repair/recycle mantra, but just like with daily driving old cars, at some point it's worth letting them go and upgrading your daily driver to something new and efficient which you can also reuse/repair/recycle, as it's just not worth daily driving in 2023 anymore such old gas-guzzling tower PCs with old CPUs that consume ~95W just to offer less than half of the performance of a modern smartphone[2][3] except for bragging rights online on who has the oldest ruining CPU, or if you don't care about your energy usage. For example, a modern CPU encoding/decoding a video stream would use way less power thanks to its newer video decoder/encoder hardware IP blocks than a very old CPU going on full blast to SW decode/encode the video stream. The differences can be staggering. So, while the anecdatas of "lookatme, I'm still using an ancient CPU and it works great" are fun, there's a balance where you need to think how much of the environment and money would I be saving by keeping using very old hardware instead of throwing it away, and how much would I be saving by upgrading to something much more efficient and using that for longer with the same reuse/repair/recycle mantra, as at some point the balance always tips to the latter. [1] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B0BWLV6CK4/ https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B0BWLV6CK4/ [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-3770k https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-3770k [3] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2179368 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2179368

supertrope 3y ago
At $0.12/kWh 1W 24/7/365 costs $1/year. Assuming you don't use sleep mode and/or wake on LAN dropping down from 50W to 10W will save $40/year. On the environmental virtue side electronics have embodied energy usage that can surpass the lifetime electrical consumption especially if the devices are not always on.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago

sznio 3y ago

I'm still running an i5-2500k (overclocked to 4.3GHz) in my main PC. Only decided to replace it now when I bought the new Call of Duty and realized it can't run it smoothly. It's _fine_ for everything else. My Ryzen 5800X arrives next week. Can't wait to return to Rust, which I dropped because compiling took ages.

beebeepka 3y ago
My 2500k could go up to 4.9 but the juice eventually lead to some massive degradation. It lasted me for 8 years until I jumped to a 3700x and now a 5800x3d. I like the performance but my next CPU is going to be 65w again. These things are hot. But not hot enough to jump on a 7800x3d. Funny how the best gaming CPU is 65w but the best GPU is about 8 times that. Heat and noise are important
heavyset_go 3y ago
Oh man, I did an upgrade from a i5-2000 series to a Ryzen 5000 series in a machine a while back and it was very worth it. It's great for compiling Rust projects compared to the Sandy Bridge processor, it's super fast. Worth it to upgrade your storage, as well, to something modern. Makes it even faster for building larger projects.
whalesalad 3y ago
don't forget to run a few benchmarks on your old rig so you can get some good data on how big the improvement is.
- bobbob1921 3y ago
  (And that/if it’s stable ! Prime95)
GOATS- 3y ago
Long live the i5-2500K, had mine for 7 years, overclocked to 4.6GHz and it ran like a champion until I decided to build a new machine in 2019.
- 3y ago

bpye 3y ago

My home server is still a Gen 8 HP Microserver with a Xeon E3-1230 V2 - so also Ivy Bridge. I wouldn’t mind something more modern and lower power but it seems any alternative with 4+ front drive bays would be quite a bit more expensive - and so it stays.

dontlaugh 3y ago
I have the same, there doesn’t seem to be anything remotely in the same price range. Only much cheaper slow SSDs could remove the need for the bays and thus allow more options.

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