Hearing stuff like this really makes me want to build a PC, but I just know that as soon as I do, I'm gonna be Moore's Law'd so hard. I simply can't justify it given how much money is involved.
Haswell is the oldest CPU that supports AVX2, DDR4, quad-core standard, probably has USB3.0 slots and PCIe 3.0.
"Modern" machines like Skylake have increased to 6-core standard (even for an i5) or more (i7 and AMD Zen are 8-cores now). Those extra cores help with compiles / 3d blender renders / some other tasks, but its not a major improvement otherwise. USB 3.1 Type C isn't a big change from USB 3.0, and PCIe 3.0 and DDR4 are still mainstream.
In as little as a year however, things seem to be changing. Intel Icelake will be adding AVX512 to the mainstream later this year. We'll see whether or not consumers get an uptick in AVX512 usage, or if Adobe / other programs continue to push GPGPU instead.
With DDR5 being released in 2019 (with doubled bandwidth compared to DDR4) and PCIe 4.0 beginning adoption, and with PCIe 5.0 and USB4 standards being released, it seems like a major upgrade cycle will occur in the 2020 to 2021 timeframe. (It seems like the Desktop market is skipping PCIe 4.0 and just going straight to PCIe 5.0, quadrupling I/O bandwidth in one jump)
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Laptops are still waiting for LPDDR4 support. Kinda sucks for them. Intel really feels like they stalled out with all of these 10nm issues they've been having. A lot of their technology (ie: Ice Lake) was delayed due to the 10nm issues.
(acknowledging that this website is for a particular subset of computer users) I think this comment misses the point of the original comment. I use a desktop I built in 2011 (i5 2500k) as my main driver - I upgraded to an SSD and a RX580 recently, and it performs fantasticly. It has USB 3, which is iomportant to me for bulk file transfers to removable media. It plays any game I have thrown at it yet. I may upgrade the CPU/ram/mobo at some point, but haven't felt the need yet.
I'm sure my computer would be pretty terrible compared to a new i7 at the particular CPU-intensive tasks you mentioned (encoding, rendering, compiling...), but for everyday use and gaming it can't be faulted in the slightest. Very impressive for an 8-year-old CPU. Even 3 years ago, an 8-year-old computer would've been trash (core2 duo, ew)
If you have no desire to use it as a gaming rig but simply want a beast for compiling your code/video editing then it should last even longer.
I would building a PC right now, but the one I built two years ago is fine.
Sure, but you can get CPUs with 2-4x the number of cores at consumer price points, which is great for people who do streaming or virtualization.
> hot new NVME SSDs aren't noticeably faster than SATA SSDs
Oh yes they are, and I'd never go back
They're also great for people like me who use distros like Gentoo where we're regularly recompiling all the software we use as new versions become available.
My entire recompile cycle now takes literally weeks of non-stop compilation, on my old, slow 2-core laptop. Compiling qtwebkit alone takes several days. If I had 8 or 16 cores on a modern processor, that would be a massive improvement.
<edit> I’m surprised to learn how differing others’ experiences are, especially on the price of the overall system. When I bought my most recent desktop, I typed in the make and model of every part into PCPartPicker and learned that I would be saving over $100 by going pre-built.
There were some fair points made down thread about the PSU and mobo, which I hadn’t really considered. My RMA experiences with a few hard drives versus the exchange process at my local Micro Center (they swapped the whole thing out even though I was well past the return period) were night and day, and many of you must have had the opposite experience to take the stance that you did.
Regardless, I find it interesting how polarizing this issue is and I probably shouldn’t have written my original comment in such a provocative way (although it didn’t seem that way at the time). </edit>
Maybe for general purpose computers doing nothing special but its generally more cost effective to select and build your own PC for things like gaming.
Beyond that, computers are pretty robust. Its pretty hard to select parts that are incompatible assuming you get a CPU that fits the socket on the motherboard you buy and you don't go cheap on your PSU. Lots of tools (and communities) exist to make sure you're selecting parts properly (not overdoing it on the CPU when you're getting a low tier GPU for instance). I'm not sure what your OS comment implies because virtually everything will work on most widely adopted OSes (and if you're running a pretty obscure linux distro I'd assume you're familiar with driver woes).
I'm more than happy to be corrected, but if you're buying prebuilt you're likely paying for the parts and the labour involved. Unless the company is getting steep discounts on volume purchases (which they are only getting for bottom tier parts) you're not saving money by having them put it together for you.
I build my own systems because I like the constant incremental upgrade model. But when I recently had to help someone purchase a system I found it was hard to beat si prices with equally spaced hardware.
But Corsair, Falcon NW, and CyberPower are others.
I built my current computer and don't need a screwdriver to open the case, or to replace the SSD, HDDs, GPU, or RAM. They all just pop out now! First computer I've upgraded too.
If you know how to troubleshoot effectively, many issues are not that hard to isolate. There are some that are very time consuming to isolate but those issues tend to be pretty rare (troubleshooting memory etc.).
The nice thing about building a computer is just to be able to configure it exactly to what you want. In some cases some retailers do screwy things and/or send customers the wrong parts although there are some top flight retailers who don't do that and charge a premium for it.
It's not necessarily more price competitive for some things but there are certain key components that retail PC companies tend to cheap out on unnecessarily like the PSU and the motherboard. Cheaping out on the PSU can give the retailer a lot of extra margin but a good PSU is so cheap that it does not make that much of a difference in final price to the user.
If you learn a bit more about things like case airflow or are planning to overclock a lot of things that retail PC sellers do will drive you nuts so once you are at a certain knowledge level it is just better to build your own despite all the many petty aggravations and frustrations that can occur with it. All the annoyances tend to be temporary whereas the benefits last for years.
For a general purpose / MS Office / browsing desktop, going pre-built may be viable. For any more specific / demanding usage, building a computer yourself will allow you to get the performance you need for the price you want.
I'm decade or more past the point of enjoying building a new PC, but a pre-built machine never seemed to make financial or use-case sense for me. YMMV :)