3 ms·

Did you overall have a better experience than buying mid range and periodically upgrading components? I'm skeptical. I've probably spent around that much (very

by sagarm 3y ago

Did you overall have a better experience than buying mid range and periodically upgrading components? I'm skeptical. I've probably spent around that much (very rough estimate) on 3-4 builds over the same period, and for most of it I had a i7-6700k (4C/8T). If I hadn't just upgraded from a i7-12700F and RTX 3080 to i9-13900k and RTX 3090 within a year I'm pretty sure I'd be well under $5000. Perhaps I'll put together a spreadsheet with the total inflation adjusted spend for comparison...

leptons 3y ago
The i7-12700F is about 2x the compute power at about 1/2 the power consumption of my current Xeon CPU. The cost to power older hardware is not factored in to my calculations. I'm not also not necessarily getting 2x the work done if I had a CPU that is twice as fast - most of the time the computer is just doing menial stuff. I do have some tasks that max out all cores (no matter how big the system is) and that doesn't run too often, maybe once or twice a week typically. A faster system might save me a few minutes of my time. So far I haven't really needed to upgrade. I don't game, I write software, and about the only thing I'd like to be faster is compiling an IoT/C project that does slam all my cores and slow things to a crawl. But it's rare that I need a full recompile and the old system does well enough. I do also have a 12700F system that my work supplied, and while it's brand new and has Windows 11, it's rare that I find it performing any better or making me any happier than my old computer running Windows 10.
- sagarm 3y ago
  The premise is that spending more once is worth it. If you don't need a lot of compute, you probably could have gotten a still high-end machine for 1/3 the price.
  - leptons 3y ago
    That may be true, but it also generates 3x the e-waste.

3 ms·

Did you overall have a better experience than buying mid range and periodically upgrading components? I'm skeptical. I've probably spent around that much (very

by sagarm 3y ago

leptons 3y ago
The i7-12700F is about 2x the compute power at about 1/2 the power consumption of my current Xeon CPU. The cost to power older hardware is not factored in to my calculations. I'm not also not necessarily getting 2x the work done if I had a CPU that is twice as fast - most of the time the computer is just doing menial stuff. I do have some tasks that max out all cores (no matter how big the system is) and that doesn't run too often, maybe once or twice a week typically. A faster system might save me a few minutes of my time. So far I haven't really needed to upgrade. I don't game, I write software, and about the only thing I'd like to be faster is compiling an IoT/C project that does slam all my cores and slow things to a crawl. But it's rare that I need a full recompile and the old system does well enough. I do also have a 12700F system that my work supplied, and while it's brand new and has Windows 11, it's rare that I find it performing any better or making me any happier than my old computer running Windows 10.
- sagarm 3y ago
  The premise is that spending more once is worth it. If you don't need a lot of compute, you probably could have gotten a still high-end machine for 1/3 the price.
  - leptons 3y ago
    That may be true, but it also generates 3x the e-waste.