Oh, indeed, Core 2 Duo is all anyone needs for ordinary desktop and office tasks. My mom has a Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 GHz desktop, while my dad uses a C2D T6600 2.2 GHz laptop. That's all the performance they could ever need, really.
Core 2 still has plenty of life in it. Especially for Office type applications and web browsing. Lots of business/schools are still running them and I'd imagine they will continue to for some time. They do an incredible job and for the average user, I don't see much they'd need something faster for except gaming. Heck. We just started phasing out the P4 systems earlier this year/late 2011. We're now for the most part on Sandy Bridge/Ivy and I imagine we'll be on those for at least as long as P4. Especially for the office machines. Word processing/spreadsheets/web browsing hasn't gotten a whole lot more demanding in recent years.
Pentium 4, now...I pity anyone who has to tolerate using Pentium 4 regularly...
Lately I've been thinking about getting an upgrade, but my E8400 runs every new game I throw at it like a champ. . I keep thinking that I can hold out til' the next generation of CPUs since Core 2 seems fast enough.
..Handles web browseing well..
Pentium 4 @2.8
Samsung 4GB(4x1GB) DDR 400MHz
Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB
Blu-ray Drive
ASUS ATi HD 3650 512MB AGP
Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit
.. with all do respect, when you say webbrowsing i am also thinking flash, and flash will take any single core configuration to its knees at some point. It is not cause single cores necessarily suck, but flash does. On a massive scale.
the only time i have problem with flash is when i have multiple pages open using flash
-Bought. Sounds right to me. But really, who dont have 10+ tabs open these days ?
Q9450 running fine, presently at 2.6ghz. Runs everything i've thrown at it, including BF2, COD BO2 etc in regards to games, do coding too and is plenty plenty fast for my needs in that department too (ssd's do much much more for me in this department).
Core2 - Still Relevant.
But I will get haswell though .. as i suspect it will carry its weight for even longer than this core2 has.
I am still using Xeon 3110 with Win 8 64 Pro
Me2 - E3110@3.0Ghz w/4GB RAM, Win7Pro 64-bit.I'm typing this on a Xeon 3110 which is the exact same as your Core 2 Quad E8400.
It stills run pretty good and is still pretty snappy. Handles web browseing well, youtube, HD 1080p playback, and can run some games pretty good like i can almost max Portal and Portal 2
Pentium 4 @2.8
Samsung 4GB(4x1GB) DDR 400MHz
Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB
Blu-ray Drive
ASUS ATi HD 3650 512MB AGP
Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit
Could it handle Steam updating a game + 10 Firefox tabs + 2 Word documents + 1 Excel spreadsheet + Windows Media Player playing a song + 3 File Explorer windows?
Didn't think so. :sneaky:
Could it handle Steam updating a game + 10 Firefox tabs + 2 Word documents + 1 Excel spreadsheet + Windows Media Player playing a song + 3 File Explorer windows?
Didn't think so. :sneaky:
Last May I upgraded from a E8500 to a i5-3570K.
Just before that, I upgrade my gtx260 to a gtx680.
At the time, I used Skyrim as my benchmark game.
With the new gtx680 and old E8500, I got slightly higher framerates. But the true power of the gtx680 allowed me to enable more eyecandy. More AA, SSAO, highres textures, etc. Without the framerates dropping. But from an absolute standpoint, my raw framerates were not increased that much by the gtx680. The E8500 did hold it back.
Then I upgraded to a i5-3570k. And my framerates doubled.
Later I overclocked my CPU to 4.0GHz. A 10% increase. And my framerates in Skyrim went up another 10%.
When I overclocked my CPU I was playing Guild Wars 2. That game also got a framerate-increase that was linear with my overclock.
So yes, you might think your E8400 is running like a champ. But I think a new i5-3570K would still be "double champ".
BTW, as Haswell is only 4 months away, I would consider waiting with my upgrade until Haswell is released.
Could it handle Steam updating a game + 10 Firefox tabs + 2 Word documents + 1 Excel spreadsheet + Windows Media Player playing a song + 3 File Explorer windows?
Didn't think so. :sneaky:
My E8400 will handle something close to that. Having 8 gigs of RAM definitely helps with multitasking. I normally have Chrome open with 20+ tabs while I'm playing Dishonored, Guild Wars 2 or Torchlight II and can alt-tab between the game and Chrome with music playing (streaming Google Music via Chrome) no problem.
I would upgrade to a similarly-clocked QX socket 775 chip if I could get one for under $150 (not likely). Waiting to see how Haswell performs before considering a mobo upgrade. Would like to get SATA III support to make an SSD purchase more worthwhile.
Overall though, it's hard to justify a mobo upgrade when I can do pretty much what I want with the E8400. And I have no desire to move to Windows 8, so having to buy another Windows 7 license is a hinderance.