Comment by mgaunard
Comment by mgaunard a day ago
My desktop computer is a Sandy Bridge from 2011. I still haven't seen any compelling reason to upgrade.
Comment by mgaunard a day ago
My desktop computer is a Sandy Bridge from 2011. I still haven't seen any compelling reason to upgrade.
What factors would be compelling to upgrade for?
Just curious, since perf alone doesn’t seem to be the factor.
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-2600k
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-14900...
Because number bigger doesn’t translate to higher perceived performance…
The only compelling reason that I want to upgrade my Sandy Lake chip is AVX2.
So it is instruction set not perf, sure there will be improved performance but most of the things that are actually performance issues is already handed off to the GPU.
On that note probably rebar and PCIe4 but those aren’t dramatic differences, if CPU is really a problem (renders/compilation) then it gets offloaded to different hardware.
> Because number bigger doesn’t translate to higher perceived performance…
When the numbers are that far apart, there is definitely room to perceive a performance improvement.
2011 era hardware is dramatically slower than what’s available in 2025. I go back and use a machine that is less than 10 years old occasionally and it’s surprising how much less responsive it feels, even with a modern high speed SSD drive installed.
Some people just aren’t sensitive to slow systems. Honestly a great place to be because it’s much cheaper that way. However, there is definitely a speed difference between a 2011 system and a 2025 system.
Choice of things like desktop environments matters a lot. I’m using xfce or lxde or something (I can’t tell without checking top), and responsiveness for most stuff is identical between 2010 intel and a ryzen 9.
The big exceptions are things like “apt get upgrade”, but both boxes bottleneck on starlink for that. Modern games and compilation are the other obvious things.
> The big exceptions are things like…
> Modern games and compilation are the other obvious things.
I mean if we exempt all of the CPU intensive things then speed of your CPU doesn’t matter
I don’t have a fast CPU for the low overhead things, though. I buy one because that speed up when I run commands or compile my code adds up when I’m doing 100 or 1000 little CPU intensive tasks during the day. A few seconds or minutes saved here and there adds up multiplied by 100 or 1000 times per day. Multiply that by 200 working days per year and the value of upgrading a CPU (after over a decade) is very high on the list of ways you can buy more time. I don’t care so much about something rendering in 1 frame instead of 2 frames, but when I type a command and have to wait idly for it to complete, that’s just lost time.
Believe it or not, "good enough" often is good enough. Regardless of how big the numbers are.
For what it's worth, you may be pleasantly surprised by the performance if you upgrade. I went from an Ivy Bridge processor to a Zen 3 processor, and I found that there were a lot of real world scenarios which got noticably faster. For example, AI turns in a late game Civ 6 map went from 30s to 15s. I can't promise you'll see good results, but it's worth considering.