Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

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A good $500 PC [1] 10 years ago seems to have a 2x3GHz Pentium, 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD. The $1000 PC [2] from tomshardware was a 4x3.4GHz Core i5 with 8GB RAM, a GTX 670 and a 60GB SSD paired with a 750GB HDD.

The $1000 still sounds totally adequate for surfing, office use and some light gaming, as long as you invest $20-$50 in a bigger SSD (or have some patience when starting software). Machines like this are still sold, they're just smaller and cheaper now. Even the 2012 $500 PC is probably fine if you upgrade the RAM, and even without that upgrade is not much different from some of the mini-PCs sold today [3]

1: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-pc-overclocking-...

2: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-a-pc-overclock-be...

3: https://psref.lenovo.com/Detail/ThinkCentre/ThinkCentre_M70q...

Exactly $499US is all you need even today to get a pretty damn good machine in my book....4.4GHz 12th Gen i5, 4k OLED, 8GB DDR5, 256GB SSD PCIe4.0...from, of all places, Best Buy?

Now trust me...Best Buy is pretty much the last place I would look to buy a computer these days, but I have to give them credit for value here even though this system comes with crappy Intel graphics.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-14-2-8k-oled-lapto...

I’m a fan of 10-year-old hardware. In 2012 I was handed an i7 3770 with 8 GiB of RAM and a git URI for WebKit and told go forth and port! I think the box cost $750 and I know it ran the latest Debian. This machine is still my daily use machine with today’s latest Debian, more HDD, some SSD for ccache, and triple the RAM. The original configuration was so nice I bought a duplicate for home use. That one has had its video card upgraded and the HDD replaced with SSD, it gets used somewhat differently. The graphics upgrade was to match it to a 21x9 screen I splurged on. And it runs Windows 10 decently enough.

Absolutely - I am typing this on a 2012 Windows 7 PC, 8GB RAM and an SSD. CPU has a Geekbench 5 single-core score of 400 or something, i.e. in no way fast. But surfing the web is snappy and the computer works fine.

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