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Comment by talmr | Hacker News Reader

Each time I see these kinds of reviews, I take comfort in knowing my eight year old i7 3770k is still chugging along at 4.7ghz OC. Its matched with 16gb ram and a 980 TI, and it handles most modern games at 60fps just fine albeit on lower settings. I also sometimes boot into Ubuntu to write some code while my girlfriend wants to use the macbook, and I just mostly use VSC and write Node or Go apps.

Maybe in the future I'll just get a newer GPU, but for my needs of primarily gaming and coding I don't yet see a reason to upgrade the CPU and motherboard.

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This is not an unreasonable spot to be in, but it's going to change in the next year or so I think for most gaming stuff.

The Ivy Bridge stuff is a little on the pokey side now; my i5-3570K was in my HTPC until earlier this year when I replaced it with an i7-6700K. But a higher-end Ivy Bridge will still be OK for most games for a little while yet. And a 980Ti is still a great card; I upgraded to a 2070 Super because I needed Turing NVENC but the 980Ti was playing everything great at 1080p and most things very well at 1440p. As things start to target the PS5 and Xbox Series X as their lead platforms, however, I would expect that to change. The PS5 will field eight Zen 2 cores and that's going to be a significant step up. Modern game engines are already really happy with multicore systems (the 3900X in my desktop gets put to work by Doom Eternal) and this will only increase. Increases in expected throughput is going to put the 980Ti in a bad spot, too.

That said, Ivy Bridge and Haswell really have to take the crown for "longest-lived worthwhile CPUs". That HTPC (which was formerly my desktop, and had 32GB of RAM because of it) is now a NAS, and it's great. I wonder how long it'll last.

"That said, Ivy Bridge and Haswell really have to take the crown for "longest-lived worthwhile CPUs"".

Sandy Bridge era CPUs (i5-2500/k, i7-2600/k, etc) were the ones that really shook up the market. Much lower power envelope and a large jump in performance from Nehalem. Ivy Bridge was the Tick-Tock iteration of SB, providing higher power usage/heat output (counterintuitively), with about a 5% IPC increase IIRC, based on the famous 3D Tri-Gate process. It was widely considered a bust at the time.

I was thinking that, but I know a lot of folks still running Ivy Bridge and don't know anybody still running Sandy Bridge!

Ivy Bridge was a minimal upgrade over SB. Higher power consumption with a roughly 5% IPC improvement under certain workloads. It was the trial for the Tri-Gate process, although it ended up being a bust (for that gen, at least - not too up to date with the newer iterations).

Still running a slightly OC'ed i7-2700K here, and a Radeon 290X. In terms of performance, older games run fine in my eyefinity triple-monitor setup, but newer ones I've been playing only in one screen recently, which means it's time for an update. A 9 year old CPU and 7 year old GPU being this fantastic in performance so many years later just goes to show how slowly CPU and GPU improvements have iterated.

Well this is the problem with intel. I'm typing this on a 5930K. A machine that happy overclocks to an all core 4.5Ghz without even bumping the voltage. I run it with custom turbo stops (minimum clock rate is now its previous 3.7Ghz factory turbo) up to around 4.7 with a liquid cooler.

Back when broadwell came out, I looked at upgrading just the CPU, but clock for clock it didn't add anything, so I didn't. Then intel changed the socket, effectively stranding me. So every year or so it gets a new GPU, faster NVMe, etc but the CPU is still a 5930k.

I did something similar with an AM2 motherboard, but AMD kept releasing cores that were backwards compatible to that socket, and after they stopped I went another generation before swapping it. Something like 8 years with the same motherboard (and in the end I was running a CPU that wasn't even officially supported on it) and copy of windows XP.

I don't really mind spending the money on faster hardware, but I really hate spending weeks stabilizing a complete motherboard/gpu/drivers, installing applications, etc. If I could plug something like the i7-10700K into this motherboard I would buy it right now.

Bottom line, I think intel is shooting themselves in the foot by changing the motherboard socket again. Sure people will buy it, but there is a subset of real enthusiasts that might have just upgraded a early low/midrange skylake for one of these newer higher end ones. Instead of being a $300-400 upgrade, its a new motherboard, ram, etc. So they might as well just buy an AMD.

IIRC Ivy Bridge is almost same CPU core archtecture as Sandy Bridge so almost no IPC improvement. Efficiency and GPU performance is mainly advertised.

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