TR Forums

Klopsik206 wrote:

Guys, I won't be waiting another year.
I am running AXP-M - have a bit of compassion please

You're going to tell us what you bought, right?

If you're still looking, this seems like a good deal to me.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... ILT-Q6600A

I am digging this post from 10 years ago (OMG! Time flys quick!) ...and this C2Q rig I was discussing (now upgraded with SSD, graphics and RAM) is still my primary PC!!!

It is still more than adaqute for anything I throw at it. It is event fine with moderate gaming (yeah, I don't game much anymore these days). Honestly, I don't see lots or reason to replace it. So it looks like it was more "futureproof" I was ever expecing it to be.

It says a lot about maturity (stagnation?) of PC industry IMHO.

Klopsik206 wrote:

I am digging this post from 10 years ago (OMG! Time flys quick!) ...and this C2Q rig I was discussing (now upgraded with SSD, graphics and RAM) is still my primary PC!!!

It is still more than adaqute for anything I throw at it. It is event fine with moderate gaming (yeah, I don't game much anymore these days). Honestly, I don't see lots or reason to replace it. So it looks like it was more "futureproof" I was ever expecing it to be.

It says a lot about maturity (stagnation?) of PC industry IMHO.

Are you sure your level of interest in something newer isn't RyZen? [Where's my bitcoin Lisa?]

chuckula wrote:

Are you sure your level of interest in something newer isn't RyZen? [Where's my bitcoin Lisa?]

Of course, it would be fun to upgrade just for the sake of it and getting back to good ol' times when I was building PCs for all friends and family, but I am beyond that (and older... ).

My point is - AFAIR my previous upgrade (it was Athlon XP-M -> C2Q) it was a HUGE leap. I just find it interesting I there's no such huge difference between my 10-years-old PC and other modern PCs I am working on. It is still perfectly usable!

chuckula wrote:

Are you sure your level of interest in something newer isn't RyZen?

/groan
/facepalm

Your old 2.4 GHz Kentsfield Core2Quad Q6600 may still be usable for everyday tasks (if you're patient) but you will notice a very significant performance improvement when you upgrade to a modern PC. The similar 2.5 GHz Yorkfield Core2Quad Q9300 PC that I put together a few months after you assembled this one has recently been replaced with a newer (Ivy Bridge Core i5-3570K) system. Even my father, in his upper 70s, noticed the difference in speed.

OT observation -- one of the posts from 10 years ago (yeesh) was pondering whether or not AMD was going to survive.

Scary that it's really only been in the past 9 months or so we've been able to say with confidence "yeah, they will."

My c2q rig is still going strong.
Overclocked to 3ghz, 8gb ram, Radeon 7870, 250gb ssd and 1tb hdd.
My son plays half life and other games on it all the time.

Upgrading to a core i7 2600k, Radeon rx 580 8gb, 16 gb ram, 500gb ssd and 5gb hdd is a huge change.

Both machines run windows 10, they both boot quick, but the new machine has a definite tailwind...

One thing to be aware of is that the Meltdown fixes will have a lot more performance impact on the older CPUs that don't support the PCID and INVPCID instructions. See below the graph on https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01 ... rformance/

I have 2 C2Q and a Core i7 920 at home. Beginning to think about upgrading.

I'm building a Athlon XP 2500+ / A7N8X / 2GB DDR1 3200 / like its still 2002. Paired with a 2007 X1950 Pro AGP.

And I'm really curious how disastrously bottlenecked a GTX 970 is going to be on a Opteron 175 + MSI NF4

The current CPU scene is so boring I'm going back in time to satisfy my PC building urges.

strangerguy wrote:

I'm building a Athlon XP 2500+ / A7N8X / 2GB DDR1 3200 / like its still 2002. Paired with a 2007 X1950 Pro AGP.

That's a cool combo. The GPU's overkill, but it should work really well for legacy gaming's sake.

strangerguy wrote:

And I'm really curious how disastrously bottlenecked a GTX 970 is going to be on a Opteron 175 + MSI NF4

That's gonna be brutal. I won't say you shouldn't do it, but that 970 won't even be able to stretch its legs on that config. Even a GPU half that fast would be underserved.

strangerguy wrote:

The current CPU scene is so boring I'm going back in time to satisfy my PC building urges.

Right? I just managed to procure a single core Athlon64 I'll set to running MS-DOS apps, because new kit just doesn't handle it properly.

Where's John Titor when you need him?

I somehow managed to skip DDR3 altogether.

2007: Core 2 Duo E6400 + DDR2
2011: bought a used Intel SSD
2016: i5-6600K + DDR4

Wirko wrote:

I somehow managed to skip DDR3 altogether.

2007: Core 2 Duo E6400 + DDR2
2011: bought a used Intel SSD
2016: i5-6600K + DDR4

I've never heard about someone making a bigger upgrade than some guy on Slashdot's leap forward. I've never been able to find the post again, but he went from bringing his family's 50 MHz 486 to college for the first two years of his comp sci study to building himself a 2 GHz Athlon64. Happily, the 120 gig drive he was able to goad the 486 into using had a Slackware install, and booted up with zero issues on the new config. The difference was reportedly flat-out insane...

Klopsik206 wrote:

My point is - AFAIR my previous upgrade (it was Athlon XP-M -> C2Q) it was a HUGE leap. I just find it interesting I there's no such huge difference between my 10-years-old PC and other modern PCs I am working on. It is still perfectly usable!

Uh, well, I guess if you're not using it for anything modern. I can see a difference between anything pre-Sandy Bridge and anything since, even after SSD upgrades and the like. Obviously it's not as dramatic as upgrading from a 1-Core CPU to a multi-core setup.

ludi wrote:

Klopsik206 wrote:

My point is - AFAIR my previous upgrade (it was Athlon XP-M -> C2Q) it was a HUGE leap. I just find it interesting I there's no such huge difference between my 10-years-old PC and other modern PCs I am working on. It is still perfectly usable!

Uh, well, I guess if you're not using it for anything modern. I can see a difference between anything pre-Sandy Bridge and anything since, even after SSD upgrades and the like. Obviously it's not as dramatic as upgrading from a 1-Core CPU to a multi-core setup.

I just think things are in 'good enough' territory for most people now. I'm still running a i7-930 oc'd to 3.2ghz. Yes, other things are faster now. There are improvements to someone like myself that runs a media server, runs multiple VMs and games with his 7870 would see. Likely 100%+ improvements. But for the most part, I'm only just starting to feel a bit of the crunch from older gear. I tend to upgrade when I can't reasonably do what I want to do any more and I'm not quite there yet.

On the other hand, I want a new shiny because it has been so long as well so I'm keeping my eyes on a new AMD or Intel build with as many cores as I can stuff. =)

K-L-Waster wrote:

OT observation -- one of the posts from 10 years ago (yeesh) was pondering whether or not AMD was going to survive.

Scary that it's really only been in the past 9 months or so we've been able to say with confidence "yeah, they will."

Since all their reduction in overhead and taking over the console space, I've been pretty confident that they at least had time to catch up, considering how slowly the competition has moved. It's just a shame that it's taking so long for them. I miss the leap-frogging and one-upping that made reading this site so exciting.

Now it's more like the hare and the tortoise. AMD caught up because Intel wasn't moving. In fact, it's starting to look like we really have reached or are close to reaching the end of Moore's Law, so it was only a matter of time. 18-month improvements are going to settle into single digits for everyone pretty soon, I think.

That's not so say everything will be worse. There's still going to be competition, and there's a lifetime of advancements to be made with electronics in general. It's just not going to be as fun to stay on top of as it used to be. Only revolutionary advancements will be noteworthy, while evolutionary will be more abysmal than ever.

The only things that I think will keep a good pace after the next few years are highly parallel processing, but it's not going to get any cheaper to make bigger chips with bigger packages and more layers. The vision these companies have of moving into the cloud is because maybe, eventually, that's the only way we can afford it.

GPU's are still advancing at closer to a doubling/generation. That said, I don't know know that performance/$$ is doubling with each generation. The 1080Ti is still pretty stupid expensive.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

GPU's are still advancing at closer to a doubling/generation. That said, I don't know know that performance/$$ is doubling with each generation. The 1080Ti is still pretty stupid expensive.

GPUs are highly parallel, meaning that they can be scaled up as much as they can physically fit more transistors per chip. This is the same with number of cores on a CPU. Moore's Law slowing down has already affected them, however, because the easiest way to keep costs down is to try and lower the size of transistors rather than increase the size of the chips.

Once we can't significantly increase the number of transistors per chip, it's going to take a whole lot more to get more performance. The reason GPUs are still advancing faster than CPUs is because getting more transistors alone doesn't do nearly as much for performance in a CPU, it mostly just increases efficiency. In a GPU you get big gains from a die shrink alone.

In a few years we will hit a wall where we can't physically fit many more transistors per chip without making the chips bigger. The way forward from there is going to be scaling with multiple chips and/or layering chips on top of each other. This is not going to keep costs down, will not be feasible for mobile computing, and will eventually run into thermal limits.

From there, it will be up to the brilliant minds of the architects to figure out better ways to design chips to make them faster, because simply using more transistors will not be an option.

Concupiscence wrote:

Wirko wrote:

I somehow managed to skip DDR3 altogether.

2007: Core 2 Duo E6400 + DDR2
2011: bought a used Intel SSD
2016: i5-6600K + DDR4

I've never heard about someone making a bigger upgrade than some guy on Slashdot's leap forward. I've never been able to find the post again, but he went from bringing his family's 50 MHz 486 to college for the first two years of his comp sci study to building himself a 2 GHz Athlon64. Happily, the 120 gig drive he was able to goad the 486 into using had a Slackware install, and booted up with zero issues on the new config. The difference was reportedly flat-out insane...

lol I went from a 286-16 (overclocked to 20 by changing the motherboard clock crystal) to a Pentium-100

Video decoding used be a CPU killer, until everything has a built in HW decoder.

Pre-Athlon XP era you have be to really careful which CPU and mobo to pick, especially for OCing since its the difference between +50% free performance versus none at all. Now I can barely get +8% performance out of my 8700K, and no more free lunch either since CPUs are already core/thread market segmented to the brim, and the mainstream chips are priced close together to the point one might as well just get the top $300 2700X/8700K and cruise on it for 5 years min.

notfred wrote:

One thing to be aware of is that the Meltdown fixes will have a lot more performance impact on the older CPUs that don't support the PCID and INVPCID instructions.

Yes, it is quite noticable on those older CPUs. I still have a couple of Core 2 Duo machines and they are too slow with the Meltdown patch enabled, so I had to disable it using InSpectre. Accepting that vulnerability (which is quite hard to exploit anyway), Core 2 machines are still quite usable for many things.

I use one in a lab setting to crawl the web for tech info + data sheets, to program ROMs, MCUs etc. and for that it is still perfectly usable. The main problem though is that it is not used regularly, so Win10 likes to install a bunch of updates after I boot it on as it could have been a month since last boot..

strangerguy wrote:

Pre-Athlon XP era you have be to really careful which CPU and mobo to pick, especially for OCing since its the difference between +50% free performance versus none at all.

IIRC even during the dominant days of AMD media encoding was one area (along with gaming) where the Pentium 4 did pretty well.
AMD wouldn't completely dominate the scene until the Athlon 64.

jihadjoe wrote:

Concupiscence wrote:

Wirko wrote:

I somehow managed to skip DDR3 altogether.

2007: Core 2 Duo E6400 + DDR2
2011: bought a used Intel SSD
2016: i5-6600K + DDR4

I've never heard about someone making a bigger upgrade than some guy on Slashdot's leap forward. I've never been able to find the post again, but he went from bringing his family's 50 MHz 486 to college for the first two years of his comp sci study to building himself a 2 GHz Athlon64. Happily, the 120 gig drive he was able to goad the 486 into using had a Slackware install, and booted up with zero issues on the new config. The difference was reportedly flat-out insane...

lol I went from a 286-16 (overclocked to 20 by changing the motherboard clock crystal) to a Pentium-100

OK, you win

Klopsik206 wrote:

I am digging this post from 10 years ago (OMG! Time flys quick!) ...and this C2Q rig I was discussing (now upgraded with SSD, graphics and RAM) is still my primary PC!!!

It is still more than adaqute for anything I throw at it. It is event fine with moderate gaming (yeah, I don't game much anymore these days). Honestly, I don't see lots or reason to replace it. So it looks like it was more "futureproof" I was ever expecing it to be.

It says a lot about maturity (stagnation?) of PC industry IMHO.

Stagnation?!?! The PC is now the phone in your pocket.

strangerguy wrote:

Video decoding used be a CPU killer, until everything has a built in HW decoder.

Audio decoding used to be a cpu-killer. I had to buy a separate hard drive for my CD rips to store them in WAV because my CPU couldn't keep up with MP3 decoding
Yes, I was that person that had 2 cd drives so I could rip my cd's faster.

Wow... sounds like what happened for my computer evolution. Built a C2D in early 2008 and it was chugging along, with a new SSD, new video card, more ram, more hard drives, until late 2016. Between my short people turning off the power strip and someone in my electrical panel accidentally tripping the circuit was on the BIOS got partially corrupted. Fortunately I had a Gigabyte dual bios board, which kept it limping along for a while. I finally got fed up with the process of actually using the backup BIOS and built a new box in early 2017.

Double the cores (i5), double the ram... woo

I skipped DDR3 too... at least in my main desktop.

Klopsik206 wrote:

It says a lot about maturity (stagnation?) of PC industry IMHO.

A laptop with a lowly i5-8250U has more than double the CPU power of your C2Q rig.

End User wrote:

Klopsik206 wrote:

It says a lot about maturity (stagnation?) of PC industry IMHO.

A laptop with a lowly i5-8250U has more than double the CPU power of your C2Q rig.

That's nothing. Apple's 2020 ARM Miracle chip has more than double the CPU power of Icelake!

I was holding off on any ARM burns but now that you mention it my iPad Pro is a better PC.

Full disclosure - former Q6600 owner