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Comment by LarryMullins | Hacker News Reader

A CPU a few years old is still good enough. If you have a limited budget and want the most bang for your buck, then stick with your old CPU and get a new GPU instead.

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Depending on what you’re doing - unless you need to game with slightly better FPS there’s nothing a gaming PC/laptop from a few years ago can’t completely crush still

I was thinking more about playing with new AI toys. TBH a 10 year old CPU and GPU are still fine for most games, latest AAA releases perhaps notwithstanding.

Hmm yeah I figure it’s better to just rent a monster machine in the cloud for that. But I haven’t dipped into that much yet

It’s not because then you’re trading graphical fidelity for input lag.

Input lag doesn't seem relevant for playing around with AI models for 5 minutes until you get bored.

Yeah just the “compilation” (sorry not a ML engineer term) would need meaningful resources. You can run a python repl and editor on a raspberry pi

Yeah, my Ryzen 3700x is a 3.5 year old CPU now. I might try to move to an AM5 build later this year, but it’s still a very decent PC.

2700X/RTX2080 - at the time I thought the 2080 was over priced but then things went mental and it looked like a solid buy.

I want to upgrade (held off while buying a house and moving/renovating) now I finally can...I realised the only game I play a lot isn't even capped by my current hardware so there just is no incentive to upgrade.

I had the same CPU from 2019 until a few weeks ago. Upgraded to a 5700X (electricity is expensive around here, so the lower wattage parts are appealing); with more aggressive memory timing got about 20% improvement in video encoding (main cpu-bound task I do regularly). With selling the 3700X net cost for upgrade was around $100- not a bad deal, even though I stuck with the stock cooler! This is after I have also doubled the RAM from the original build to 32G for ~$60 last October. I expect to get another 3-4 years of of this AM4/DDR4 rig before big overhaul.

Decades ago I did similar things, but the cadence was much faster (annual sometimes); my conclusion, like that of many others, is that PCs are usable for much longer these days. A net positive I believe.

> PCs are usable for much longer these days.

100% this. If my motherboard hadn't started to slowly fail (been running on the backup BIOS for the past year), I'd still use my 2013 Xeon system. It's still fast enough for daily use and as long as I'm not recompiling large codebases, it's still fine today.

I plan on using my new rig for at least 6 to 8 years as well. The times when CPU performance literally doubled every other year are simply over. For the average user, literally any mainstream CPU released in the past 5 to 8 years will actually do just fine (stuff like high-end gaming and video editing aside).

10 years old CPU (i7 4790) is still a decent and fully usable for everything except few unoptimised AAA games and jetbraing IDEs. It is performance equivalent to late 2021 mobile i5 10300h. The gap between different CPUs lines is huge. Back in 2020 you could buy a new celeron n3060 laptop with performance of pentium dual core from 2006. It was a straight e-waste, but people actually did something on it.

My work PC is a i7-6700 and it's....7 years old?

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