Richard Solomon has heard the rumblings over the years. As vice president of PCI-SIG, the organization that controls the development of the PCI-Express
4-6 year cycle? What year is it? I build new PCs on a 10 year cycle. It’s not the 80s and 90s anymore, where your PC was horribly out of date after two years. Advancements in processing speed have slowed down enough that a 8-year-old CPU and 5-year-old GPU can still be decent.
Yeah, they’re decent, but performance limitations are noticeable after 5-ish years, like stuttering in newer games or whatever. I like sim games like Cities Skylines and Europa Universalis, so a better CPU is often a huge improvement. I don’t play many GPU intense games, so I rocked a GTX 960 until I got tired of Linux breaking and upgraded to an RX 6650XT for better Linux compat and better frames on my 1440p monitor.
So I down-cycle components into other machines. In the past, that was to my wife, but she has been playing newer games recently, so that’s out. So I upgraded my NAS from my ~15yo CPU to my ~7yo CPU (and my GRX 750ti since it doesn’t have on-board graphics anymore) to save on power and increase performance. Soon, I’ll down-cycle for my kids. I have two PCs that are almost ready to go (just need disks, and one GPU), and 2 kids that are almost ready to have their own.
So we do a decent job of reusing hardware. A given machine will probably have a CPU for 5 years, but we’ll use the CPU in some capacity for ~10.
4-6 year cycle? What year is it? I build new PCs on a 10 year cycle. It’s not the 80s and 90s anymore, where your PC was horribly out of date after two years. Advancements in processing speed have slowed down enough that a 8-year-old CPU and 5-year-old GPU can still be decent.
Yeah, they’re decent, but performance limitations are noticeable after 5-ish years, like stuttering in newer games or whatever. I like sim games like Cities Skylines and Europa Universalis, so a better CPU is often a huge improvement. I don’t play many GPU intense games, so I rocked a GTX 960 until I got tired of Linux breaking and upgraded to an RX 6650XT for better Linux compat and better frames on my 1440p monitor.
So I down-cycle components into other machines. In the past, that was to my wife, but she has been playing newer games recently, so that’s out. So I upgraded my NAS from my ~15yo CPU to my ~7yo CPU (and my GRX 750ti since it doesn’t have on-board graphics anymore) to save on power and increase performance. Soon, I’ll down-cycle for my kids. I have two PCs that are almost ready to go (just need disks, and one GPU), and 2 kids that are almost ready to have their own.
So we do a decent job of reusing hardware. A given machine will probably have a CPU for 5 years, but we’ll use the CPU in some capacity for ~10.