Upgrade often, but cheap, or buy big for the long haul?

[SPBHM]

I also played Borderlands 2 using the same set-up. Through the first few levels average FPS was over 30 (smooth) at a resolution of 1280 x 1024 low.

when this game was launched I remember testing it on an e5400 (pentium) with a Radeon 5570 (a little faster than the Llano A8 3870K IGP, but not much), it kept most of the time over 30 at 1280x1024 medium but it was running Windows, which should be a a lot faster for this kind of game.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

You forgot the middle option. Buy medium and upgrade somewhere in between cheap and enthusiast. i5 and gtx 970, upgrade very few years.

My 3570K and GTX 970 like this idea.

As for VL's OP, I've never run the TCO numbers personally, but it sounds like an interesting little research project. The only caveat I have is that when you buy, you still need to be buying "enough" performance for a given task. That'll probably effect the math a lot.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Off the top of my head, if I'd bought an i3 instead of an i5 back in 2013, and replaced it with a brand new i3 two years later, I'd still have a slower system than what I have now, and I'd have spent more money. (2x ~$130 CPUs instead of a single $200 CPU, two motherboards instead of one, etc.) Heck, for the 2x i3 rigs cost, I could have bought an i7 and been REALLY happy.

So there's definitely some circumstances where "go big or go home" is fiscally responsible.

Or maybe the question is whether to get a new low end system every 3-4 years vs. a high end one every 7-8 years?

Would a Duron in 2002 -> E6300 in 2006 -> i3-540 in 2010 -> i3-4330 in 2014 be better than a OC'd Athlon Barton in 2002 -> Q6600 in 2008 -> i5-4670k in 2014? That many platform and RAM upgrades would mostly make up for savings on CPUs, I think.

Thing is, the high end consumer CPUs (consumer i7s) are about 4x as powerful as the lowest-end Pentium/Celeron desktop chips, and IIRC that's been a pretty consistent spread for a while. (At least as long as there's been consumer quads.) And we've been seeing relatively minor bumps in speed every generation for a while now. So you have to go quite a few generations back to find a high end CPU that the current low end can really embarrass.

 

[cbn]

I also played Borderlands 2 using the same set-up. Through the first few levels average FPS was over 30 (smooth) at a resolution of 1280 x 1024 low.

when this game was launched I remember testing it on an e5400 (pentium) with a Radeon 5570 (a little faster than the Llano A8 3870K IGP, but not much), it kept most of the time over 30 at 1280x1024 medium but it was running Windows, which should be a a lot faster for this kind of game.

It might be the A6-5400K CPU is better than the e5400 in this game.

P.S. I also suspect the AMD Linux drivers are also getting better. (Last time I tested the A6-5400K was with Linux Mint 17.1 and these new drivers in 17.2 seem to be doing a better job.....but I would like to investigate more especially decode for game streaming)

 

[jimwho]

CPUs tend to offer long-term good performance, unlike GPUs that become obsolete in a couple of years.

 

[Kenmitch]

Not sure what the future holds for me as the latest and greatest don't really look all that compelling to me. Microcenter used to have some pretty sweet deals at times. Looks like those days are gone.

Up to this point it's been pretty much buy to tinker around, play with new tech, and the never ending thirst for more power....Don't really even need it. Guess it's more hobby like.

Currently playing around with a 4790k.

 

[TStep]

I think many of the "long haul" proponents think that way in the context of hindsight (lack of Intel or AMD performance increases as of late) combined the inability to overclock cheap parts (at least on the Intel side).

On the Intel side, it's been 6 or so years since on could take a bottom end cpu and push it's limits to near top end performance via bus clocking, but you still needed a premium P55 or x58 board to do it. Sandy and newer, you had to buy a premium setup to fiddle with performance. So really it's been since C2D/C2Q since you could take bottom feeder parts and jack up performance.

Squeezing performance out of bottom end parts is really the only reason I would upgrade/sidegrade/downgrade (aka buy/try new stuff and max it out), otherwise, I'd skip a bunch of generations. Exactly as I'm doing now.

 

[sm625]

It is way better to buy i3 level hardware more often. I would take a skylake i3 over a 2600k any day. Even the base i3 does 3.7GHz. That's insanely fast. The 2600k might encode faster, but I usually dont sit there waiting for encodes to finish so it doesnt matter anyway.