Yuriman
Diamond Member
- Jun 25, 2004
- 5,530
- 141
- 106
The question really ought to be rephrased, "How many more useful years can I get out of my system, depending on how much I spend initially?"
This of course depends entirely on your use case.
Consider though, a gamer in 2010 building this hypothetical PC. They can spend $650 on a rig with a Celeron, SSD, and mid-range GPU, or upgrade to an i3 for $700, or an i5 for $800, or an i7 for $900.
An i7 from 2010 is still relevant today, while in some use cases you'd have had to replace the Celeron every year for 5 years, upgrading the motherboard 3 times (call it $125 each time). The hypothetical Celeron system in 2015 would still be slower than the original i7 (by a lot), but would have cost over $1,000, all said and done.
An i3 looks better in comparison (but is STILL slower than the 2010 i7), and an i5 better still, because performance per dollar is actually a lot better on higher end CPUs when you factor in a fixed motherboard price.
On the other hand, my dad is still happily chugging along on a Core2Duo from 2006. I feel I got some great value out of that machine.
This of course depends entirely on your use case.
Consider though, a gamer in 2010 building this hypothetical PC. They can spend $650 on a rig with a Celeron, SSD, and mid-range GPU, or upgrade to an i3 for $700, or an i5 for $800, or an i7 for $900.
An i7 from 2010 is still relevant today, while in some use cases you'd have had to replace the Celeron every year for 5 years, upgrading the motherboard 3 times (call it $125 each time). The hypothetical Celeron system in 2015 would still be slower than the original i7 (by a lot), but would have cost over $1,000, all said and done.
An i3 looks better in comparison (but is STILL slower than the 2010 i7), and an i5 better still, because performance per dollar is actually a lot better on higher end CPUs when you factor in a fixed motherboard price.
On the other hand, my dad is still happily chugging along on a Core2Duo from 2006. I feel I got some great value out of that machine.