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I've upgraded CPUs a number of times. However, it gets a bit problematic when they changed the socket every other year, but it's still nice to be able to spend
by Osiris 14y ago
I've upgraded CPUs a number of times. However, it gets a bit problematic when they changed the socket every other year, but it's still nice to be able to spend $50 to upgrade an old computer with a better CPU rather than buying a whole machine.
Another circumstance I had was that I had a motherboard fail. So I replaced the motherboard but kept all the other components including the CPU.
- marshray 14y agoYour experience may be different, but I've never seen a case where a $50 CPU yielded a significant upgrade. The new CPUs tend to change sockets before prices drop that low. With memory bandwidth being the major bottleneck, a new CPU in the same system never seemed to give more than 10% improvement anyway.
- rdl 14y agoI've done it only when I had a few machines which needed bleeding-edge CPUs (and price didn't matter), and other machines. I'd buy high end and cheap CPUs when putting both systems online, then in a year (assuming the motherboard/socket was still current), I'd put the old high-end CPU into the cheap machine, and buy a new high-end CPU for the important machine.