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I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PS

• Barathkanna 11mo ago
  I agree with you on SSDs, that was the last upgrade that felt like flipping the “modern computer” switch overnight. Everything since has been incremental unless you’re doing ML or high-end gaming.
  • asenna 11mo ago
    I know it's not the same. But I think a lot of people had a similar feeling going from Intel-Macbooks to Apple Silicon. An insane upgrade that I still can't believe.
    • crazygringo 11mo ago
      This. My M1 MacBook felt like a similarly shocking upgrade -- probably not quite as much as my first SSD did, but still the only other time when I've thought, "holy sh*t, this is a whole different thing".
    • wongarsu 11mo ago
      The M1 was great. But the jump felt particularly great because Intel Macbooks had fallen behind in performance per dollar. Great build quality, great trackpad, but if you were after performance they were not exactly the best thing to get
      • skylurk 11mo ago
        For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better value if you cared about CPU performance. After the M1, my casual home laptop started outperforming my top-spec work laptops.
        • kergonath 11mo ago
          > For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better value if you cared about CPU performance. But not if you cared about battery life, because that was the tradeoff Apple was making. Which worked great until about 2015-2016. The parts they were using were not Intel’s priority and it went south basically after Broadwell, IIRC. I also suppose that Apple stopped investing heavily into a dead-end platform while they were working on the M1 generation some time before it was announced.
    • bigyabai 11mo ago
      It's a lot more believable if you tried some of the other Wintel machines at the time. Those Macbook chassis were the hottest of the bunch, it's no surprise the Macbook Pro was among the first to be redesigned.
    • redwall_hp 11mo ago
      I usually use an M2 Mac at work, and haven't really touched Windows since 2008. Recently I had to get an additional Windows laptop (Lenovo P series) for a project my team is working on, and it is such a piece of shit. It's unfathomable that people are tolerating Windows or Intel (and then still have the gall to talk shit about Macs). It's like time travelling back to 2004. Slow, loud fans, random brief freezes of the whole system, a shell that still feels like a toy, a proprietary 170W power supply and mediocre battery life, subpar display. The keyboard is okay, at least. What a joke. Meanwhile, my personal M3 Max system can render Da Vinci timelines with complex Fusion compositions in real time and handle whole stacks of VSTs in a DAW. Compared to the Lenovo choking on an IDE.
      • ponector 11mo ago
        There will be not so big difference if you compare laptops in the same price brackets. Cheap PCs are crap.
        • Kirby64 11mo ago
          > Cheap PCs are crap. Expensive PCs are also crap. My work offers Macbooks or Windows laptops (currently, Dell, but formerly Lenovo and/or HP), and these machines are all decidedly not 'cheap' PCs. Often retailing in excess of $2k. All my coworkers who own Windows laptops do is bellyache about random issues, poor battery life, and sluggish performance. I used to have a Windows PC for work about 3 years ago as well, and it was also a piece of crap. Battery would decide to 'die' at 50% capacity. After replacement, 90 minute battery life off charger. Fan would decide to run constantly if you did anything even moderately intensive such as a Zoom meeting.
      • array_key_first 11mo ago
        A lot of this is just windows sucking major balls. Linux distros with even the heaviest DEs like KDE absolutely fly on mediocre or even low range hardware. I got a lunar lake laptop and slapped fedora on it and everything is instant. And I hooked up 2 1400p/240hz over thunderbolt.
  • pstadler 11mo ago
    This and high resolution displays, for me at least.
  • wdfx 11mo ago
    The only time I had this other than changing to SSD was when I got my first multi-core system, a Q6600 (confusingly labeled a Core 2 Quad). Had a great time with that machine.
    • genewitch 11mo ago
      "Core" was/is like "PowerPC" or "Ryzen", just a name. Intel Core i9, for instance, as opposed to Intel Pentium D, both x86_x64, different chip features.
  • simlevesque 11mo ago
    I've had this with gen5 PCIe SSDs recently. My T710 is so fast it's hard to believe. But you need to have a lot of data to make it worth. Example: > time du -sh . 737G . ________________________ Executed in 24.63 secs And on my laptop that has a gen3, lower spec NVMe: > time du -sh . 304G . ________________________ Executed in 80.86 secs It's almost 10 times faster. The CPU must have something to do with it too but they're both Ryzen 9.
    • adgjlsfhk1 11mo ago
      To me that reads 3x, not "almost 10x". The main differrence here is probably power. A desktop/server is happy to send 15W to the SSD and hundreds of watts to the CPU, while a laptop wants the SSD running in the ~1 watt range and the CPU in the 10s of watts range.
      • simlevesque 11mo ago
        There's over twice as much content in the first test. It's around 3.8gb/s vs 30gb/s if you divide both folder size and both du durations. That makes it 7.9 times faster and I'm comfortable calling this "almost 10 times".
        • adgjlsfhk1 11mo ago
          oops. I missed the size diff. that's a solid 8x. that's cool!
        • ls65536 11mo ago
          The total size isn't what matters in this case but rather the total number of files/directories that need to be traversed (and their file sizes summed).
          • simlevesque 11mo ago
            I responded here, it's essentially the same content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150030
  • jug 11mo ago
    I thought so too on my mini PC. Then I got myself my current Mac mini M4 and I have to give it to Apple, or maybe in part to ARM... It was like another SSD moment. It's still not spun up the fan and run literally lukewarm at most my office, coding and photo work.
• sneak 11mo ago
  Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing their job and making their income should have a $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum? I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year but compared to revenue it seems silly to be worrying about a few thousand dollars per year delta. I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy, and upgrade them often, because, why take even the tiniest risk that my old or outdated hardware slows down my revenue generation which is orders of magnitude greater than their cost to replace? Even if you don’t go the overkill route like me, we’re talking about maybe $250/month to have an absolutely top spec machine which you can then use to go and earn 100x that. Spend at least 1% of your gross revenue on your tools used to make that revenue.
  • ambicapter 11mo ago
    I don't spend money on my computers from a work or "revenue-generating" perspective because my work buys me a computer to work on. Different story if you freelance/consult ofc.
  • mitthrowaway2 11mo ago
    Yes? I think that's crazy. I just maxed out my new Thinkpad with 96 GB of RAM and a 4 TB SSD and even at today's prices, it still came in at just about $2k and should run smoothly for many years. Prices are high but they're not that high, unless you're buying the really big GPUs.
    • sgerenser 11mo ago
      Where can you buy a new Thinkpad with 96GB and 4TB SSD for $2K? Prices are looking quite a bit higher than that for the P Series, at least on Lenovo.com in the U.S. And I don't see anything other than the P Series that lets you get 96GB of RAM.
      • lionkor 11mo ago
        Typing this on similar spec P16s that was around 2.6k or so. So if you call anything under 3k simply 2k, then it was 2k. Thats in Germany, from a corporate supplier.
• kube-system 11mo ago
  > I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. The mid 90s was pretty scary too. Minimum wage was $4.25 and a new Pentium 133 was $935 in bulk.
  • tossandthrow 11mo ago
    If you were in minimum wage jn the 90s your lifelihood likely didn't rely on Pentium processors. Also, it is frightening how close that is to current day minimum wage.
    • kube-system 11mo ago
      I was an unemployed student then -- a generous family member gifted me my first Windows PC, and it cost about the same as a used car.
    • briffle 11mo ago
      Yep, I had a Cyrix processor in mine during that time. Slackware didn't care.
      • pixl97 11mo ago
        It also worked as a very good space heater.
    • adventured 11mo ago
      Except nobody earns the minimum wage today, it's less than 1/2 of 1% of US labor. The median full-time wage is now $62,000. You can start at $13 at almost any national retailer, and $15 or above at CVS / Walgreens / Costco. The cashier positions require zero work background, zero skill, zero education. You can make $11-$13 at what are considered bad jobs, like flipping pizzas at Little Caesars.
      • GoatInGrey 11mo ago
        Counterpoint: affording average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment (~$1,675) requires that exact median full-time wage. $15 an hour affords you about $740 for monthly housing expenses. One can suggest getting two roommates for a one-bedroom apartment, but they would be missing the fact that this is very unusual for the last century. It's more in line with housing economics from the early-to-mid 19th century.
• TacticalCoder 11mo ago
  > For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing. The last one were I really remember seeing a huge speed bump was going from a regular SSD to a NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD... Around 2015 I bought one of the very first consumer motherboard with a NVMe M.2 slot and put a Samsung 950 Pro in it: that was quite something (now I was upgrading the entire machine, not just the SSD, so there's that too). Before that I don't remember when I switched from SATA HDD to SATA SSD. I'm now running one of those WD SN850X Black NVMe SSD but my good old trusty, now ten years old, Samsung 950 Pro is still kicking (in the wife's PC). There's likely even better out there and they're easy to find: they're still reasonably priced. As for my 2015 Core i7-6700K: it's happily running Proxmox and Docker (but not always on). Even consumer parts are exceptionally reliable: the last two failures I remember, in 15 years (and I've got lots of machines running), are a desktop PSU (replaced by a Be Quiet! one), a no-name NVMe SSD and a laptop's battery. Oh and my MacBook Air M1's screen died overnight for no reason after precisely 13 months, when I had a warranty of 12 months, (some refer to it as the "bendgate") but that's because first gen MacBook Air M1 were indescribable pieces of fragile shit. I think Apple got their act together and came up with better screens in later models. Don't worry too much: PCs are quite reliable things. And used parts for your PC from 2014 wouldn't be expensive on eBay anyway. You're not forced to upgrade to a last gen PC with DDR5 (atm 3x overpriced) and a 5090 GPU.
  • genewitch 11mo ago
    fyi someone or something is downvoting your recent posts to oblivion, and i didn't see any obvious reason.
  • dontlaugh 11mo ago
    It’s motherboards that tend to fail the most. I had one fail this year, albeit for the first time.
• aposm 11mo ago
  A few years later but similarly - I am still running a machine built spur-of-the-moment in a single trip to Micro Center for about $500 in late 2019 (little did we know what was coming in a few months!). I made one small upgrade in probably ~2022 to a Ryzen 5800X w/ 64GB of RAM but otherwise untouched. It still flies through basically anything & does everything I need, but I'm dreading when any of the major parts go and I have to fork out double or triple the original cost for replacements...
• Cerium 11mo ago
  Don't worry, if you are happy with those specs you can get corporate ewaste dell towers on ebay for low prices. "Dell precision tower", I just saw a listing for 32gb ram, Xeon 3.6ghz for about 300 usd. Personally, at work I use the latest hardware at home I use ewaste.
  • cestith 11mo ago
    At home some of my systems are ewaste from former employers who would just give it to employees rather than paying for disposal. A couple are eBay finds. I do have one highish-end system at a time specifically for games. Some of my systems are my old hardware reassembled after all the parts for gaming have been upgraded over the years.
  • silverquiet 11mo ago
    I got a junk Precision workstation last year as a "polite" home server (it's quiet and doesn't look like industrial equipment, but still has some server-like qualities, particularly the use of ECC RAM). I liked it so much that it ended up becoming my main desktop.
    • dotancohen 11mo ago
      My main desktop is temporarily a Dell server from around 2012 or so. Two were thrown out, each with two 2 GiB sticks of RAM, so I poached the other machine's RAM for a grand total of 8 GiB. I also threw in a small SSD for the / partition (/home is on the old HDD). The thing is dirt slow but I never notice, even YouTube video playback works fine. Even on hardware well over a decade old, Debian runs fine.
  • vondur 11mo ago
    Ha, I bought one of those for $500 from Ebay. It's a dual Xeon Silver workstation with a Nvidia Quadro P400 8GB, 128GB RAM and 256G SSD. I threw in a 1TB SSD and it's been working pretty well.
    • Forgeties79 11mo ago
• mikepurvis 11mo ago
  For a DDR3-era machine, you'd be buying RAM for that on Ebay, not Newegg. I have an industrial Mini-ITX motherboard of similar vintage that I use with an i5-4570 as my Unraid machine. It doesn't natively support NVMe, but I was able to get a dual-m2 expansion card with its own splitter (no motherboard bifurcation required) and that let me get a pretty modern-feeling setup with nice fast cache disks.
• forinti 11mo ago
  You can still get brand new generic motherboards for old CPUs. I swapped out old ASUS MBs for an i3-540 and an Athlon II X4 with brand new motherboards. They are quite cheaper than getting a new kit, so I guess that's the market they cater to: people who don't need an upgrade but their MBs gave in. You can get these for US$20-US$30.
• prmoustache 11mo ago
  As other mentionned, there are plenty of refurbished stuff and second hand parts that there isn't any risk of finding yourself having to buy something at insane prices if your computer was to die today. If you don't need a GPU for gaming you can get a decent computer with an i5, 16GB of ram and an nvme drive for usd 50. I bought one a few weeks ago ago.
• the__alchemist 11mo ago
  Man, it was just GPU for a while. But same boat. I regret not getting the 4090 for $1600 direct from Nvidia. "That's too much for a video card", and got the 4080 instead. I dread the day when I need to replace it.
  • jakogut 11mo ago
    The Radeon RX 9070 XT performs at a similar level to the RTX 5070, and is retailing around $600 right now.
    • the__alchemist 11mo ago
      No CUDA means not an option for me.
      • jakogut 11mo ago
        What kinds of applications do you use that require CUDA?
      • the__alchemist 11mo ago
        > What kinds of applications do you use that require CUDA? Molecular dynamics simulations, and related structural bio tasks.
        • vlovich123 11mo ago
          Is the CUDA compat layer AMD has that transparently compiled existing CUDA just fine insufficient somehow or buggy somehow? Or are you just stuck in the mindshare game and haven’t reevaluate whether the AMD situation has changed this year?
          • the__alchemist 11mo ago
            I haven't checkout out AMD's transparency layer and know nothing about it. I tried to get vkFFT working in addition to cuFFT for a specific computation, but can't get it working right; crickets on the GH issue I posted. I use Vulkan for graphics, but Vulkan compute is a mess. I'm not in a mindshare, and this isn't a political thing. I am just trying to get the job done, and have observed that no alternative has stepped up to nvidia's CUDA from a usability perspective.
• adventured 11mo ago
  You could still easily build a $800-$900 system that would dramatically jump forward from that machine. $700 in 2014 is now $971 inflation adjusted (BLS calculator). RTX 3060 12gb $180 (eBay). Sub $200 CPU (~5-7 times faster than yours). 16gb DDR4 $100-$120. $90 PSU. $100 motherboard. WD Black 1tb SSD $120. Roughly $800 (which inflation adjusted beats your $700). Right now is a rather amazing time for CPUs, even though RAM prices have gone crazy. Assume you find some deals somewhere in there, you could do slightly better with either pricing or components.
• ls612 11mo ago
  GPU prices are actually at MSRP now for most cards other than the 5090.
  • bilegeek 11mo ago
    Problem is MSRP is also inflated, and Covid has locked that in. Arc Battlemage is the only exception I see.
    • ls612 11mo ago
      You’ve never been able to buy more GPU performance per dollar than you can today.
      • kcb 11mo ago
        That's not very encouraging because that statement has been true most every day in computing for the past 50 years. The rate at which the compute per dollar increases is what matters.
        • ls612 11mo ago
          Yeah moores law is slowing down for sure. I’m just pushing back on the whole sky is falling doomerism in the PC community. I will admit I’m lucky that my current system with 64GB of memory and a 4090 is likely to be good for years to come so I can wait out the ram shortage.
• square_usual 11mo ago
  You can still buy DDR4 for pretty cheap, and if you're replacing a computer that old any system built around DDR4 will still be a massive jump in performance.
• hnu0847 11mo ago
  Don't all RAM manufacturers offer a lifetime warranty? That said, if the shortage gets bad enough then maybe they could find themselves in a situation where they were unable/unwilling to honor warranty claims?
  • SoftTalker 11mo ago
    I've never heard of a lifetime warranty on anything in the enterprise space. Maybe consumer stuff, where it's just a marketing gimmick.
    • chihuahua 11mo ago
      Oh, your RAM died? That means its lifetime ended at that moment, and so did the lifetime warranty. Is there anything else we can help you with today?
    • Kirby64 11mo ago
      Pretty much all consumer RAM vendors offer a lifetime warranty. Not exactly a marketing gimmick. G.Skill, lifetime warranty: https://www.gskill.com/warranty https://www.gskill.com/warranty Corsair, lifetime warranty: https://help.corsair.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033067832-Warranty-Corsair-Limited-Warranty#h_8027c849-7b41-4ccd-80c8-7d1103ce4db1 https://help.corsair.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033067832-Warr... Kingston, lifetime warranty: https://www.kingston.com/en/company/warranty https://www.kingston.com/en/company/warranty Teamgroup, lifetime warranty: https://support.teamgroupinc.com/en/support/warranty.php https://support.teamgroupinc.com/en/support/warranty.php
    • minusLik 11mo ago
      Hewlett Packard had a lifetime warranty on their network gear back in the day.
• acters 11mo ago
  I am still running an i5 4690k, really all I need is better GPU but those prices are criminal. I wish I got a 4090 when I had the chance rip
  • genewitch 11mo ago
    intel arc b580 (i think that's the latest one) isn't obnoxiously priced but you're going to have to face the fact that your PCIE is really very slow. But it should work. if you want to save even more money get the older Arc Battlemage GPUs. I used one it was comparable with an RTX 3060; i returned it because the machine i was running it in had a bug that was fixed 2 days before i returned it but i didn't know that. I was seriously considering getting a b580 or waiting until the b*70 came out with more memory, although at this point i doubt it will be very affordable considering VRAM prices going up as well. A friend is supposedly going to ship me a few GTX 1080ti cards so i can delay buying newer cards for a bit.
    • interloxia 11mo ago
      Note that some tinkering may be required for modern cards on old systems. - A UEFI DXE driver to enable Resizable BAR on systems which don't support it officially. This provides performance benefits and is even required for Intel Arc GPUs to function optimally. List of working motherboards https://github.com/xCuri0/ReBarUEFI/issues/11 https://github.com/xCuri0/ReBarUEFI/issues/11
      • genewitch 11mo ago
        you need to enable rebar even for gaming? i had to enable rebar for pytorch usage (the oneAPI requires it iirc).
    • TheAmazingRace 11mo ago
      By older Arc, I presume you're referring to Alchemist and not Battlemage in this case. One of my brothers has a PC I built for him, specced out with an Intel Core i5 13400f CPU and an Intel Arc A770 GPU, and it still works great for his needs in 2025. Surely, Battlemage is more efficient and more compatible in some ways over Alchemist. But if you keep your expectations in check, it will do just fine in many scenarios. Just avoid any games using Unreal Engine 5.
• testing22321 11mo ago
  I got a used M1 MacBook Air a year ago. By far the fastest computer I’ve ever used. It felt like the SSD leap of years earlier.
• davely 11mo ago
  About a month ago, the mobo for my 5950x decided to give up the ghost. I decided to just rebuild the whole thing and update from scratch. So went crazy and bought a 9800X3D, purchased a ridiculous amount of DDR5 RAM (96GB, which matches my old machine’s DDR4 RAM quantity). At the time, it was about $400 USD or so. I’ve been living in blissful ignorance since then. Seeing this post, I decided to check Amazon. The same amount of RAM is currently $1200!!!
  • VHRanger 11mo ago
    Same, I got 96GB of high end 6000MHz DDR5 this summer for $600CAD and now it's nearly triple at $1500CAD
  • genewitch 11mo ago
    what are you doing with that old 5950x?
• phantasmish 11mo ago
  I’m worried about the Valve mini PC coming out next year. Instant buy $700 or under. Probably buy up to $850. At, like, $1,100, though… solid no. And I’m counting on that thing to take the power-hog giant older Windows PC tower so bulky it’s unplugged and in a closet half the time, out of my house.
• KronisLV 11mo ago
  If I needed a budget build, I'd probably look in the direction of used parts on AliExpress, you can sometimes find good deals on AM4 CPUs (that platform had a lot of longevity, even now my main PC has a Ryzen 7 5800X) and for whatever reason RX 580 GPUs were really, really widespread (though typically the 2048SP units). Not amazing by any means, but a significant upgrade from your current setup and if you don't get particularly unlucky, it might last for years with no issues. Ofc there's also the alternate strategy of going for a mid/high end rig and hoping it lasts a decade, but the current DDR5 prices make me depressed so yeah maybe not. I genuinely hope that at some point the market will get flooded with good components with a lot of longevity and reasonable prices again in the next gens: like AM4 CPUs, like that RX 580, or GTX 1080 Ti but I fear that Nvidia has learnt their lesson in releasing stuff that pushes you in the direction of incremental upgrades rather than making something really good for the time, same with Intel's LGA1851 being basically dead on arrival, after the reviews started rolling in (who knows, maybe at least mobos and Core Ultra chips will eventually be cheap as old stock). On the other hand, at least something like the Arc B580 GPUs were a step in the right direction - competent and not horribly overpriced (at least when it came to MSRP, unfortunately the merchants were scumbags and often ignored it).
• snickerbockers 11mo ago
  >For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing. I only ever noticed it on my windows partition. IIRC on my linux partition it was hardly noticeable because Linux is far better at caching disk contents than windows and also linux in general can boot surprisingly fast even on HDDs if you only install modules you actually need so that the autoconfiguration doesn't waste time probing dozens of modules in search of the best one.
  • dotancohen 11mo ago
    How to determine which modules are actually needed, on a Debian system?
    • kasabali 11mo ago
      Set modules=dep in (https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf.5.en.html https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/initramfs-tools/initramfs...) and run update-initramfs. I doubt that'll affect boot time but it reduces initrd.img size a lot.
      • dotancohen 11mo ago
        Thank you. I'll spend some time to learn why that is not the default config setting.
      • snickerbockers 11mo ago
        maybe not on an SSD but it definitely helps a lot on HDD by virtue of having far less disk traffic. The kernel's method for figuring out which modules to load is effectively to load every single module that might be compatible with a given device in series and then ask the module for its opinion before unloading it, and then once it has a list of all (self-reported) compatible modules for a given device it picks one and reloads it.
        • dotancohen 11mo ago
• PHGamer 11mo ago
  you should upgrade to a used or new 12900k with DDR4 since its still cheaper than dd5 even if it is up. then get a used 3080ti with 12gb. youll be able to do proper h.265 decode/encode with that for up to 4k (unfortuantly not 8k but hey no one really has that yet)
• rasz 11mo ago
  Do yourself a favor and order $25 Xeon E3-1231 v3/E3-1241 v3 from China. Those work in all desktop motherboards. Used DDR3 ram is also so cheap you can bump to 32GB for another $20. easy cheap upgrades. CPU will be noticeable straight away, ram only if you are running out.
• nipperkinfeet 11mo ago
  I'm glad I kept my ageing Dell Studio XPS 7100. I need to stock up on some Dell Precision towers from the surplus in case my Studio XPS 7100 breaks. This AI bubble needs to burst soon.