Richard Solomon has heard the rumblings over the years. As vice president of PCI-SIG, the organization that controls the development of the PCI-Express
Eh, I buy on a 4-6 year cycle. Here’s what I bought:
Phenom II x4 - ~2010
Ryzen 1700 - ~2017
Ryzen 5600 - ~2022/2023
So, ~7 years, then 5-6 years. I had my Phenom II in my NAS until I decided to move my 5600 to a SFF case and put my 1700 in as an upgrade (and it uses less power, so double win). Oh, and I still have that Phenom II and my wife’s old 6300 just in case my kids need a PC (they currently use mine).
You really don’t need a top of the line CPU for most things. If you go for something mid-range prioritizing cores over clock speed, it’ll last a while.
I haven’t had any PCIe bottlenecks, everything has been “fast enough,” and I upgrade when the CPU starts bottlenecking things. In fact, my GPU still doesn’t saturate PCIe 3, much less PCIe 5. So yeah, PCIe improvements aren’t high on my personal list of requirements. I’d prefer lower power usage and smaller physical size.
4-6 year cycle? What year is it? I build new PCs on a 10 year cycle. It’s not the 80s and 90s anymore, where your PC was horribly out of date after two years. Advancements in processing speed have slowed down enough that a 8-year-old CPU and 5-year-old GPU can still be decent.
Yeah, they’re decent, but performance limitations are noticeable after 5-ish years, like stuttering in newer games or whatever. I like sim games like Cities Skylines and Europa Universalis, so a better CPU is often a huge improvement. I don’t play many GPU intense games, so I rocked a GTX 960 until I got tired of Linux breaking and upgraded to an RX 6650XT for better Linux compat and better frames on my 1440p monitor.
So I down-cycle components into other machines. In the past, that was to my wife, but she has been playing newer games recently, so that’s out. So I upgraded my NAS from my ~15yo CPU to my ~7yo CPU (and my GRX 750ti since it doesn’t have on-board graphics anymore) to save on power and increase performance. Soon, I’ll down-cycle for my kids. I have two PCs that are almost ready to go (just need disks, and one GPU), and 2 kids that are almost ready to have their own.
So we do a decent job of reusing hardware. A given machine will probably have a CPU for 5 years, but we’ll use the CPU in some capacity for ~10.
Eh, I buy on a 4-6 year cycle. Here’s what I bought:
So, ~7 years, then 5-6 years. I had my Phenom II in my NAS until I decided to move my 5600 to a SFF case and put my 1700 in as an upgrade (and it uses less power, so double win). Oh, and I still have that Phenom II and my wife’s old 6300 just in case my kids need a PC (they currently use mine).
You really don’t need a top of the line CPU for most things. If you go for something mid-range prioritizing cores over clock speed, it’ll last a while.
I haven’t had any PCIe bottlenecks, everything has been “fast enough,” and I upgrade when the CPU starts bottlenecking things. In fact, my GPU still doesn’t saturate PCIe 3, much less PCIe 5. So yeah, PCIe improvements aren’t high on my personal list of requirements. I’d prefer lower power usage and smaller physical size.
4-6 year cycle? What year is it? I build new PCs on a 10 year cycle. It’s not the 80s and 90s anymore, where your PC was horribly out of date after two years. Advancements in processing speed have slowed down enough that a 8-year-old CPU and 5-year-old GPU can still be decent.
Yeah, they’re decent, but performance limitations are noticeable after 5-ish years, like stuttering in newer games or whatever. I like sim games like Cities Skylines and Europa Universalis, so a better CPU is often a huge improvement. I don’t play many GPU intense games, so I rocked a GTX 960 until I got tired of Linux breaking and upgraded to an RX 6650XT for better Linux compat and better frames on my 1440p monitor.
So I down-cycle components into other machines. In the past, that was to my wife, but she has been playing newer games recently, so that’s out. So I upgraded my NAS from my ~15yo CPU to my ~7yo CPU (and my GRX 750ti since it doesn’t have on-board graphics anymore) to save on power and increase performance. Soon, I’ll down-cycle for my kids. I have two PCs that are almost ready to go (just need disks, and one GPU), and 2 kids that are almost ready to have their own.
So we do a decent job of reusing hardware. A given machine will probably have a CPU for 5 years, but we’ll use the CPU in some capacity for ~10.