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The good thing about buying a slightly higher-end CPU is that it will last you for quite a few years. I got my CPU close to its release (2009) and don't feel like I am missing out on anything.

Furhtermore turns out that the Ryzen 5 matches the price that my current CPU is selling for at the moment. I have an Intel i7 860 (1st gen). I still don't think that I would benefit from upgrading at this point.

Of course, I use my system mostly just for writing code. Friends of me who are into computer animation and design follow changes in the hardware world more closely than I do. (And gamers as well).

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This is true in a different way as well: the $135 off lease Dell T1600 workstation I bought on eBay with an E3 1245 (v1 / Sandy Bridge) CPU still decently compares to a Kaby Lake i5 and so the price/value is sky high. I didn't just get the CPU but also motherboard, RAM, PSU, chassis.

Truth is, IPC growth has almost completely stalled, only 20% since Sandy Bridge https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_v... and so these ancient machines still serve us very well. And the E3 1245 had HT on which the i5 doesn't...

Mid 2013 I built my current workstation with the E3-1245 v3 ($290) that had just come out, maxed the ram out at 32GB. Been rock solid, great performer and expect to be using it for quite a few years more. The prior system was an again maxed out at the time dual pentium-pro that I kept kicking for 10 years.

Everyone has different values, but for me maximizing the time a system is viable and my work environment is stable is most important; I'll pass on the latest shiny until absolutely needed.

Now I can't edit but to clarify: this machine I bought less than a month ago.

I agree. Still running a Phenom XII 940. Of course I've been upgrading the HDD all along (went through a Raptor, a VelociRaptor, an early 80GB SSD and finally a 256GB Samsung), and put in a new video card about four years ago (don't play latest games, anyway.)

The Phenom cost me... $220. So the Ryzen 5 1600 has my name written all over it. But really, it would just make some things I do on my computer a little quicker. It would not have the profound effect that switching to an SSD did, in my opinion. I'll let the idea bake for a while.

I'm the same - Phenom II, upgraded to SSD and new graphics but that's it.

When you say this has your name written on it, are they socket compatible? The idea of changing motherboards/ memory etc isn't compelling - I'd just get a new system - but if you can drop these in then it's really tempting.

Nope, I mean, spending the same amount as I did 8 years ago, and getting 8 years out of this new CPU sounds appealing to me! But I've got a uATX case, so my motherboard selection is mildly limited. I don't mind swapping out a motherboard. I used to do it rather frequently, for myself and for others.

I believe the socket I have now is AM2+, which is not at all compatible with AM4. I'd also need new RAM. Overall, I'd expect to spend close to $400.

Nope, Phenom II could work in an AM3 or AM3+ socket (depending on whether your particular model supported DDR3 RAM) but AM4 doesn't physically fit. Plus the new CPUs don't have DDR3 controllers so they couldn't use your RAM anyway.

You mean Phenom II right? I have Phenom II X4 925 from 6 years ago. On the same boat. To think that I worked on Ryzen performance while it was being developed/brought up. I'm a bit emotional but still not pulling the trigger.

Yes, Phenom II X4 940. (I called it a Phenom II 940 in my previous post.)

I'm running a Phenom II 1055T (x6). It actually seems to be ok for pretty much everything, including gaming at 1440p (I've upgraded the GPU 3 times and am currently running a GTX 1070, 16GB of RAM, and an SSD). Not bad for a system that's almost 7 years old.

The only issue is that I tried using the Oculus, and it won't work. Apparently the CPU doesn't have some instructions required for VR. I tried using a hacked version of the Oculus setup program that bypasses the CPU check, but it still won't work.

Which is why I've been thinking about a Ryzen 5...

I had a similar chip since 2011 and only recently upgraded. For thread-heavy workloads even one of the fastest E3 Xeons is only like 40-50 % faster (if no special insns like AES can be used).

Safe to say it had superb price/performance (IIRC paid like 150 € for it).

I'm running a Phenom II X4 965 and I have yet to feel limited by CPU speed. Really snappy for everything I do. This is a 2009 CPU. To put that in perspective, that is like using a 486 DX4/100 in 2002, when the state of the art was Pentium 4's at 3 GHz. Pretty amazing, actually.

>To put that in perspective, that is like using a 486 DX4/100 in 2002, when the state of the art was Pentium 4's at 3 GHz. Pretty amazing, actually.

Stagnation in improvements is amazing ? :\

Yeah I upgraded other parts of my machine as well - just did not feel the need to touch the CPU. And actually, I had 8GB of RAM when it started out and I did not change that either. 8GB still runs fine for me.

I should switch to a 256GB SSD as well though, that is on my list of things I want to upgrade.

Your CPU is slower than the $50 G4560, and current high end CPU's are about 2 - 2.5X as fast as yours.

Sure, but whether or not you'll actually notice any difference is very workload dependent.

Completely agree. I am aware that my CPU is not a blazing fast machine. But I do not really notice the difference all that much (if at all) for the work that I am doing on it.

Which mainly consists of running : IntelliJ, Spotify, and maybe a few tabs in chromium on Ubuntu.

What if you were running a few virtual machines to develop (very common workload)?

According to [1], the i7-860 still has better multi-core performance and is pretty close overall.

[1] http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-G4560-vs-...

Well yeah, for writing code you might as well use decade old CPU and it wouldn't really matter. Only compile times would suffer.

If you use more performance-critical applications I think the best way to future-proof would be to buy an "unlocked" CPU that you'll be able to overclock when you want to juice out a bit more power (maybe at the cost of a better cooling system). At least that's what I do.

> Well yeah, for writing code you might as well use decade old CPU and it wouldn't really matter. Only compile times would suffer.

2007 is the era of the Core 2 Duo, which really are dated and slow compared to today processors.

5 years is reasonable, the evolution has been kinda slow lately.

Does it matter for writing code though?

I have an old crappy 32bit celeron laptop with 1GB of RAM that's about 10 years old and runs Debian. I still use it from time to time when I want to code on the go, it runs Emacs and Firefox just fine. If I were to change something I'd probably replace the crappy HDD with an SSD before I touch the CPU. And the screen resolution is pretty poor too. But performance-wise it just works.

I guess the key element for me is that I basically use the same software stack now that I did 10 years ago. Same shell, same window manager, same OS, same editor, same compiler. Only the web browser has significantly evolved in this time span.

1GB of ram won't run eclipse or visual studio smoothly. It's definitely not gonna run any test VM.

I remember when I first got Visual Studio, it used so much memory that it was the justification i used to get dad to spring for an extra 128MB of RAM, bringing the total to 256. I can't think of much it does now but couldn't then.

It should be ok for light docker usage.

Builds might become memory bound. C++ compilers use lots of ram, and you might not be able to run one per core in parallel (assuming this machine has 2+ cores). I suspect some other languages are similar.

It's only the linking stage that uses a lot of RAM and if you're building a single binary that's single threaded anyway. But if you need swap to link, it's going to take forever, and nowadays plenty of things need more than 1G to link (especially if you enable LTO)

I'll be going on 5 years this fall, which is my planned update period. Aside from some newer games, though, everything is great. Compilation times okay, heavy web browsing feels fine.

It's been a few years since games can't run on core 2 duo. I had to processor because of that. (running at 10fps isn't running fine).

Well, of course when writing code you do want to run your tools that you are using without any issues. (IntelliJ, Visual Studio, profilers, ..)

So it's not just the "pushing text into a file" which you could of course just do from the terminal as well if you were so inclined to do.

The idea of buying an overclockable CPU does sound like a pretty good strategy. ;-)

I have built computers with the intention of overclocking down the road but never got around to it. If you are going to overclock then do it with the intention of doing from the get go. Historically, are unlocked CPU's more expensive than locked CPU's?

I have an i7 860 as well. I've added 32GB RAM, a new 1050 (cheap, but very fast for what I do with it, panoramic stitching.)

The 860 is feeling a little sluggish these days for me. My laptop is about as fast... I'm excited about the jump once I decide to upgrade though and I've pretty decided that if it isn't a 2x improvement it's not worth jumping.

It's closer than I thought to my 2011 vintage Core i5-2500. I don't see any point in upgrading either....

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-860-vs-Intel-Core-i5-2...

If you really want bang for your buck, the non-X variants of the Ryzen chips are completely unlocked. So you can overclock/overvolt the chip to get within 3-5% performance of the high end model.

Right now, I think the Ryzen 1700 with some overclocking is the best deal in the market. The R5 1600 and 1400 might be similar.

This video has a quite interesting comparison of the price/performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RRt5WkVxuk

Agreed. I went with a 1700, and clocked it the same as an 1800X, saved $170 for effectively the same performance. The thing is a beast, for really cheap.

The performance is lasting just fine for me as well. I've kept up with a couple SSD upgrades and stupid-cheap DDR3 RAM. But my performance bottleneck has always been storage, and the current champion (and next upgrade for me) is a PCIe SSD using NVMe. And old processors just don't support that.

That's always the trick - whats the best bang for a buck while still future proofing. I'm still using my Q6600 doing development and playing the occasional game. Maybe the 1600 now to keep it at the 65W level.

Just to mirror your point, my desktop and main work computer has an i5 750 (2009). There hasn't been a single reason for me to replace it, unless it dies. It's an excellent processor and does everything I need it to do.

I also have an i7 7th gen in my laptop, to be honest there is no noticable difference between the two for my use cases.

I too have a 750 from 2009, overclocked to 3.5 GHz since the day I bought it. Still benches about half the score as brand new ~$200 CPUs.

I'll probably get one of these new fangled AMD raisens so I can have USB 3.0 and onboard LAN.

FWIW a Skylake laptop chip still felt "slower" to me than an i7 2600k, which is several generations behind. In my case I know the Skylake chip is being throttled (XPS 9350 runs hot)

Yeah but all the other components on your motherboard will become outdated. Every few years you'd probably want a mobo with the latest memory and storage support.

Same, still going strong on my i5 750 here. That gen was perfect time to buy.

My year old (cheap) laptop is actually significantly slower.

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