Have CPU's got to a point where they don't have to be upgraded?

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Using a computer that I put together in Apr of 2008 (Rampage Formula x45. Xeon 3110, 6GB ram, 9800GTX), still happy with it on day to day ops. Gaming is a bit underwhelming now with the newer titles so I'll probably end up swapping out the 9800 with a new Kepler and keep everything else the same.

[Dan~]

No, greed and show off people will always exist.

I'm still very happy with my x6800 :)

[protocol7]

I'm still running the e6600 I bought used. Not feeling the need to upgrade just yet. The GTX 460 gives me enough of a boost in games.

[ToneKnee]

I am also still on a few year old PC (with upgrades). I am also on the i7 920 (pretty popular :p) and went from 6gb originally to 12gb. I also upgraded my GTX 285 to two GTX 460s in SLI last year. The 285 was still decent, but I needed more for BF3 and it was cheaper to sell that and get two 460s on sale than it was to get a 2nd 285 (I think it ended up only netting $80 difference). I also moved to an SSD...well, two, until one died... but after I got the RMAd drive I figure I will wait for my new rig.

I am planning on building a new rig this year. Going to sell off most of my current stuff (not sure if I will part or sell as a whole). I am going to be going with Ivy Bridge, GTX 770 or 780 (assuming rumors of skipping 600 naming are true), 24gb RAM (or 32, keeping my eye on prices), and mostly SSDs plus one large storage drive. Since I have to wait for Ivy Bridge and the new nvidia cards I have been slowly building up the other parts.I have several SSDs, a new PSU, looking towards a 3TB 7200rpm drive once it goes on sale again, and RAM once it drops. Also keeping an eye on a new case (currently on a V1 Antec Twelve Hundred...I have several annoyances with it like no hole to get to the CPU cooler back plate...).

I also plan on getting a new monitor... I am currently using 2 20" Dell Ultrasharps (only 1680x1050) and an older 18" Philips (1280x1024). I will probably grab a 24 or 23" Ultrasharp once they go on sale again - I need some 1080p lovin.

Please tell me you are going to have some redundancy with that 3TB drive. That's a lot of storage for one drive to have...

[Yuxi]

Flight Simulator X needs a Sandy Bridge at 4+ghz to run well maxed out with addon scenery/aircraft in dense areas, despite being 6 years old. See, there is still software pushing CPU upgrades :p

[qdave]

I got core i5 750 in late 2009, but i guess i wont need cpu upgrade till 2015 or so. Now video card and hdd is something that i might need to upgrade much sooner :(

[matt4pack]

I still have a Q6600, 4GB, GeForce 8600GTS system as my main workstation. Does everything I need and plays every game I throw at it except the mess that was GTA IV. Not at the highest settings of course but it's fine for me.

[Jose_49]

The main thing that CPUs will always be welcomed for, is encoding. The faster the CPU, the faster the encode is. Thanks God for the GPU acceleration which has helped too, but the more the merrier :)

[ozgeek]

I still have a Q6600, 4GB, GeForce 8600GTS system as my main workstation. Does everything I need and plays every game I throw at it except the mess that was GTA IV. Not at the highest settings of course but it's fine for me.

My system is the excatly the same except it got a GTX275 and this computer has been about 4 years old now and still working great. I can play GTA4 and most games on very high settings. So no point in upgrading any soon.

[dknm]

For some years, there've been few major architecture changes (1st sandy, 2nd gen sandy, ivy); you can optimize the production process only so far. Increasing frequencies is not feasible for mass consumption and slapping more cores on a die does little for anything but encoding or server blades. (and is limited by memory bus - no go in this direction either)

On top of that there's grossly inefficient software that is struggling to catch up with the multi-core deal. (CUDA, STREAM, iTunes, Rockstar rushed PC ports, some Adobe products *especially on macs*, DirectX libraries mess and list goes on)

The mobile push is a good thing, it forces programmers to streamline their code and hardware to be power conscientious.

Haswell is not too far off, promising a significant leap in instructions parsing. There's no shortage of horsepower, just of logical implementation.

[Fish]

PC's have become commoditized. While there will always be a small group of hardware enthusiasts, who will always want the newest and fastest, but in general, off-the-shelf PC's are good enough.

~ 10 years ago, when building a PC, you needed to consider the upgrade path. Moore's Law has a more pronounced effect. Within little more than 2 years, your expensive hardware was vastly out of date in terms of speed and capability. You needed to be sure that you would be able to drop-in the latest AMD or Intel CPU without the added expense of a new motherboard and RAM.

These days, it's quite likely that that PC or laptop you bought 3-5 years ago is still a very capable machine. You can also reasonably expect it to still be useful in another 3-5 years. The day will come when you decide that you'd like something faster, but I think it's highly likely you won't even consider upgrading any components at all. The PC/laptop/whatever will be passed to somebody in the family, or given to charity, and replaced entirely.

[Astra.Xtreme]

A bottleneck occurs when a series of operations need to take place but one piece has to wait on the other before it can do its part. This means that in a perfect system, speed of all operations are equal to each other and in sync so that data smoothly flows from end to to the other. When that does not happen, then a component somewhere is bottlenecking the system.

RAM is often a bottleneck for the CPU and the CPU is often a bottleneck of a GPU. While huge improvements have happened in RAM, CPU, and GPU speeds to reduce bottlenecks, the one constant has been the absolute slowest component in the system, the HDD. So to state otherwise is very wrong.

You also make false assumptions. You assume applications cache all data to RAM at somepoint so that its magically faster with no bottleneck. Games still have to load into RAM and levels still have to load. Efficent applications do not load everything into RAM and load it only when needed and using caching to reduce the effects of HDD speeds.

Does this mean that HDD speeds are devasting for application performance no? No, and no one is arguing that. Does it mean that if I don't have enough RAM or I have too many applications open that I will see applications take longer to load and respond when multi-tasking? Yes.

Either way, the HDD is still the bottleneck as it is one of the first operations that occurs and the slowest.

Thank you. :)

If he still can't understand that, then it's a lost cause, haha.

[ATLien_0]

I still remember way back around 2002/2003 when the first Pentium 4 hit the 3 ghz mark and everyone then thought that processors would be reaching the 4+ ghz mark a few years later. Turns out multi cores was the solution. But yeah I think at this point we really have maxed out on what the average consumer is going to need on a desktop. Heck my dad still have some Pentium 3 700mhz systems with 256 mb ram running at his office, mostly for the secretary to work on basic Word documents. Those were running Windows 2000 up until a year ago, now those are on XP while the rest of the office is on Windows 7.

[Andre S. Veteran]

Depends. My last machine was from 2007 with an E4400 and 2GB of RAM. In 2011 I upgraded to the i5 2500k with 8GB of RAM. Both costed about the same amount of money and this computer completely smokes the old one. When you do very cpu and ram-intensive stuff like editing large pictures with several layers, render high-def video with x264, you can never have enough CPU cyles per second nor memory. I really hope I'm able to buy a machine 4 times faster and with at least 24GB of RAM for under 1000$ in a few years.

[Sir Topham Hatt]

I too think hardware has come to a stalling point.

The problem is the other hardware. USB3 is great, but my two year old DSLR isn't USB3. My 5+ year old mp3 player isn't even USB2... hell I don't even know if my latest Galaxy Nexus is USB3.

And as has been stated already, the majority of software just uses one thread of the CPU anyway, so the others are wasted. When I know I can encode a full HD video and do various other tasks at the same time, then I will be impressed :p

Saying that, if I am in luck I'll be spending about ?1000 on a PC this year.

[booboo]

I've got 2 of the latest macbook airs, one has the i7 1.8ghz and the other has the 1.7ghz i5. I cannot tell any performance difference between them.

I actually think the i5 is faster (but this could because my i7 machine has been on for over 31 days).

But yeah, at the moment it seems very minimal, and like others have said the SSD is definitely the most noticeable performance boost!

[TheLegendOfMart]

Yeah,

I "upgraded" from a Core i5 750 to a Core i5 2400 and I haven't really noticed any difference, I used to read up about all the tech and keep up with the latest Chipsets/CPUs/Graphics by buying them 3-6 months after launch but I'm still rocking my Core i5 and ATI 5850 and it does everything i want it to do, it might not do it in Ultra graphics settings but i gave up caring about it long ago.

[StrikedOut]

I would still happily be running a Q9300 if my MoBo haddnt died on me. Couldnt source a replacement so upgraded to i5. Dont see me upgrading the CPU for a while, the GPU and HDD however....