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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

When you're a business, you can't make turn-on-a-dime decisions like that. You commit to business-equipment purchase/leasing/upgrade agreements with a particular OEM; who in turn usually commits (for economy-of-scale reasons) to one CPU supplier or the other. So, if you're stuck with an OEM who's in turn stuck with "the wrong" CPU supplier (right now Intel), that can make you cross, at the potential performance that's being left on the table.

But even for the individual, unless you're buying sealed non-upgradable appliance devices, you've still gotta consider the fact that in building a PC, you're choosing a motherboard socket, and thus potentially making it cheap to upgrade to later-gen CPUs that stay compatible with that socket.

In that mindset, it makes sense to be happy with the CPU maker you're "stuck with" for a while when they provide good, high-ROI upgrade options; and to be angry with them when they don't.

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>in building a PC, you're choosing a motherboard socket, and thus potentially making it cheap to upgrade to later-gen CPUs that stay compatible with that socket.

I'm curious how common it is for people to upgrade just the CPU or motherboard.

I tend to upgrade / replace my personal PC's every 4-6 years. At that pace, it's always seemed worthwhile to upgrade both motherboard and CPU at the same time, because of platform improvements. But maybe I'm an outlier.

One oft-stated reasoning is that people who currently don't have much money (e.g. college students) can build a PC with a motherboard socket targeted by both low-end and high-end CPUs; and then select, for now, the (cheap) low-end CPU. Then, a few years later, when they're working and have more money, they can replace it with the high-end version.

I'm not sure how common this actually is in practice, but it seems logical.

it's great if you decide to upgrade your CPU a couple years later and you motherboard is still compatible, but imo this is not a good reason to choose a particular platform in the first place. you never know when the CPU manufacturer is going to drop support for that chipset. even if the new CPU does support the old chipset, you might be sacrificing some new features or leaving some performance on the table. plus if I'm going to buy a high-end cpu, I'd like to pair it with a high quality power delivery also, which you probably aren't going to find in a college student's budget build.

AMD is pretty good about sticking with motherboard sockets and maintaining firmware compatibility. The motherboard I got with my 1st generation Ryzen is handling my 3rd generation chip just fine, though admittedly I'm missing out on PCIe 4.

They usually don't drop support for chipsets. They move to a new socket.

Probably not too common. The only people I‘ve seen do this were enthusiasts that had high end gaming rigs and spent a lot of money on their computers. It probably would’ve been cheaper for them to replace everything every 3-4 years. But it‘s their hobby and who am I to judge?

I had a time in my life where the price of a motherboard mattered. But you can't tell me, that most comments here on HN are from poor students which will not be able to afford a new CPU+Mainboard after 4 years or so.

I have not had this issue to be honest, i just switch both if required. Especially with PCI4 etc. its often enough critical to upgrade after a while and i did sell my old motherboard and cpu combi. That should reduce the 'in my opinion overstated risk' of wasting your old mainboard.

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