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I'm using a circa 2007 core 2 duo. I genuinely see no improvement in CPUs since then in price/performance. Is there a reason I should upgrade my kit that I'm m

I'm using a circa 2007 core 2 duo. I genuinely see no improvement in CPUs since then in price/performance. Is there a reason I should upgrade my kit that I'm missing?

petercooper 15y ago
In terms of raw CPU power, the i5/i7 was a big jump over the Core 2 Duo (both in going to quad core and general efficiency). This latest development, though? Not so much. A high end i5 or i7 is the best bang for the buck right now.
dkersten 15y ago
I'm still using a summer 2006 one! I think next year I'll be able to both rationalize and afford a complete upgrade of my desktop - I was waiting for it to be worthwhile to drop a large amount on a stupidly crazy gaming desktop, so a top of the line haswell-based cpu, a reasonably high-end graphics card or two, an SSD and bucketloads of RAM... yeah! (We'll see if that actually comes to pass.. more likely I'll end up replacing my laptop instead of my desktop, despite that the desktop is what I use to play games and its starting to show its age now.. reasonable graphics card, ancient everything else)
dubya 15y ago
On Mac laptops there's not much reason. You probably have an Nvidia GPU, which is still a bit faster than Intel ones and supports OpenCL. An upgrade would probably get you more max memory, and maybe twice the CPU performance, but it's not as amazing as a five year difference used to be.
r00fus 15y ago
I put an SSD + 2GB memory into my early-2006 Core "1" Duo mac mini, and it's almost as usable as my 2010 Macbook (hybrid SSD/HD with 8GB) when doing light tasks (browsing, note-taking, iTunes). Yes, the SSD is only SATA1, but that's still 4-6x faster on synthetic benchmarks.
yread 15y ago
I couldn't find all the numbers for any 2007 mainstream notebook cpu, but here is a comparison between 3720QM (an upper mainstream, 2012) and P8400 (upper mainstream 2008): Model 3DMark06 CPU Cinebench R10 32Bit Single Cinebench R10 32Bit Multi SuperPI 1M* SuperPI 32M* wPrime 32 3720QM 6470 4810.5 16822 11 594 12.9 P8400 2014 2526.9 4700.6 22.1 1212 34.2 321% 190% 358% 50% 49% 38% So you would see 2x performance in single threaded, 4x performance in multithreaded and probably way better battery life due to stuff like TurboBoost (and getting a new battery :-)
- gouranga 15y ago
  Thanks for this - appreciated :) Perhaps I should take a look at a newer machine! Battery life is what is super-important to me.

I'm using a circa 2007 core 2 duo. I genuinely see no improvement in CPUs since then in price/performance. Is there a reason I should upgrade my kit that I'm missing?

petercooper 15y ago

In terms of raw CPU power, the i5/i7 was a big jump over the Core 2 Duo (both in going to quad core and general efficiency). This latest development, though? Not so much. A high end i5 or i7 is the best bang for the buck right now.

dkersten 15y ago

I'm still using a summer 2006 one! I think next year I'll be able to both rationalize and afford a complete upgrade of my desktop - I was waiting for it to be worthwhile to drop a large amount on a stupidly crazy gaming desktop, so a top of the line haswell-based cpu, a reasonably high-end graphics card or two, an SSD and bucketloads of RAM... yeah! (We'll see if that actually comes to pass.. more likely I'll end up replacing my laptop instead of my desktop, despite that the desktop is what I use to play games and its starting to show its age now.. reasonable graphics card, ancient everything else)

dubya 15y ago

On Mac laptops there's not much reason. You probably have an Nvidia GPU, which is still a bit faster than Intel ones and supports OpenCL. An upgrade would probably get you more max memory, and maybe twice the CPU performance, but it's not as amazing as a five year difference used to be.

r00fus 15y ago

I put an SSD + 2GB memory into my early-2006 Core "1" Duo mac mini, and it's almost as usable as my 2010 Macbook (hybrid SSD/HD with 8GB) when doing light tasks (browsing, note-taking, iTunes). Yes, the SSD is only SATA1, but that's still 4-6x faster on synthetic benchmarks.

yread 15y ago

I couldn't find all the numbers for any 2007 mainstream notebook cpu, but here is a comparison between 3720QM (an upper mainstream, 2012) and P8400 (upper mainstream 2008): Model 3DMark06 CPU Cinebench R10 32Bit Single Cinebench R10 32Bit Multi SuperPI 1M* SuperPI 32M* wPrime 32 3720QM 6470 4810.5 16822 11 594 12.9 P8400 2014 2526.9 4700.6 22.1 1212 34.2 321% 190% 358% 50% 49% 38% So you would see 2x performance in single threaded, 4x performance in multithreaded and probably way better battery life due to stuff like TurboBoost (and getting a new battery :-)

gouranga 15y ago
Thanks for this - appreciated :) Perhaps I should take a look at a newer machine! Battery life is what is super-important to me.