The real chip with longevity is the i7 2600k. It's about to turn 6 years old and it can still match modern chips' performance. When OCed, it will come close to matching stock i7 6700k. It eats all games and reasonable prosumer workloads with not trouble. And that is likely to remain the case for a few more years to come. With Kaby Lake being no improvement at all over Skylake, makes that i7 2600k one of the best CPU purchases in history imo.
It's like a catch-22, man! I have the 3770k in my main system, which is very similar to the 2600k. I've had it since 2012 and.... there's no zero need to upgrade it yet. And meanwhile, all these new chips are coming out, and they look really good, and and and...
I keep the tinkering bug thwarted by messing with my Core 2 Quad, but it won't keep it at bay forever!
im one gen newer, rocking a i7930@4.2Ghz for last 7 years.
On its third GPU now.
Yeah. Sadly. The CPUs are still viable for browser boxes, especially the Core2Quads using Chrome / Chromium, but the motherboard situation makes it a pointless endeavor to build new with those CPUs. Not when you can catch a 1151 board for under $50, and another $60 for a G4560 CPU, and have DDR4 that is not only available, but plentiful, unlike DDR2.I was looking the C2Q pricing, you can get the 771 Xeons and slower C2Qs (like Q6600) for some seriously low prices (like $10-20) and for that amount of money those are great CPUs for web browsing and such, but I think it only makes sense if you already have the motherboard and is running a slower C2D
That's very "Green" of you. Moreso than me purchasing (new) more "low-power" PCs to use. (I finally settled on mini-PCs using desktop CPUs.)A little background on my PC:
I got it nearly three years ago in a garage sale for $30. Same motherboard and CPU, but only 4 GB DDR2 and an old and mostly useless HD 3650. I put up with some of the downsides until last year when I finally got around to maxing the Ram and stuffing a 1050 Ti in there. Saved a lot of money with this machine.
It's like a catch-22, man! I have the 3770k in my main system, which is very similar to the 2600k. I've had it since 2012 and.... there's no zero need to upgrade it yet. And meanwhile, all these new chips are coming out, and they look really good, and and and...
I keep the tinkering bug thwarted by messing with my Core 2 Quad, but it won't keep it at bay forever!
Q9650 here, reckon this chip can do 4GHz easy, but motherboard being a P43 has a FSB wall around 415MHz. Feeding it 1.275v in BIOS for 3.6GHz, vdroops to 1.184v under load. LLC disabled, don't want to cook those naked VRMs. Plan to keep this as my forever Win 7 rig, the honor was originally given to one of my LGA1156 rigs that recently bit the dust. So a perfect excuse for a new toy and just in time for Ryzen, a story for another time I guess.
Exactly, I was running an E8400 so for just $30 (and the socket mod of course) I got 2 more cores and 3.5Ghz. I was just looking around and there are used 775 boards (mostly MSI) that support 16 gig ram but I'd be looking at $50 for the board then check and see if it will run a Xeon chip, do another socket mod and spend $24 more just to get to an 8Gb system, not really worth it IMHO.I have an E5420 (2.5GHz C2Q), which I got some years ago when the whole using 771 CPUs on 775 boards thing started, the PC is pretty bad overall running with the G31 IGP; but the CPU is fine for basic use; and I was surprised when I got it because it runs well with a Celeron 430 cooler and the power usage is not to bad for such an old CPU.
the cheap Asrock G31 and ram only allows limited OC, perhaps 3.0 is possible but I only felt comfortable running it at around 2.85;
I was looking the C2Q pricing, you can get the 771 Xeons and slower C2Qs (like Q6600) for some seriously low prices (like $10-20) and for that amount of money those are great CPUs for web browsing and such, but I think it only makes sense if you already have the motherboard and is running a slower C2D
Im playing BF1 on a Q6600 @ 3.25Ghz with a GTX970 4GB at 1080 on a P35 chipset Asus mb. Interesting thing is that the P35 is a PCIe v1.1 mb, wheres the GTX970 is PCIe v3 compliant. It seems to work OK though. I need to upgrade, but am enjoying playing BF1 with this setup.
My 3.06 GHz 4c/8t Nehalem can't play any new titles without significant stutters compared to my current i7. I don't miss it at all!
Wow, your playing it on a $600 video card and a $40 CPU. Your vid card's memory matches my system memory!.
Upgrade that 930 to a hex-core Westmere Xeon chip? Cost is around $40 these days on eBay unless I'm mistaken. Lots of X58 Xeon threads around here...
They just capped the CPU load of inactive tabs, they didn't really make it more efficient. Still a usability improvement though.the latest chrome update...
Reducing power consumption for background tabs
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Efficient power usage is an important aspect of speed, one of Chrome’s key pillars. To prolong battery life, Chrome should minimize power impact from things users can’t see. This includes background tabs, which consume a third of Chrome's power usage on desktop. Starting in version 57, Chrome will throttle individual background tabs by limiting the timer fire rate for background tabs using excessive power.
Chrome has focused on improving the user experience by throttling tab performance for many years. Like many browsers, Chrome has limited timers in the background to only run once per second. Via the new throttling policy, Chrome 57 will delay timers to limit average CPU load to 1% of a core if an application uses too much CPU in background. Tabs playing audio or maintaining real-time connections like WebSockets or WebRTC won’t be affected.
We've found that this throttling mechanism leads to 25% fewer busy background tabs. In the long-term, the ideal is for background tabs to be fully suspended and instead rely on new APIs for service workers to do work in the background. Chrome will continue to take steps in this direction to prolong users' battery life, while still enabling all the same experiences developers can build today.
Posted by Alexander Timin, Software Engineer and Power Saver
When has a GTX 970 ever cost $600? It launched at $329 MSRP.Wow, your playing it on a $600 video card and a $40 CPU. Your vid card's memory matches my system memory!.