OK NotAdmin made me think of this. Just throwing it open to the floor for a chat. New PC's. I have friend who's PC was I think 1st gen i5. Mine is a top end (now - not always) core2quad. He upgraded this year and we have this regular fight (I swear we're like a married couple sometimes) over the benefits of a new PC. He says "I'm living in a cage I can't see" and he didn't know he was in it till he got a new PC. I say I can't work out why I'd ever want to upgrade these days. So here's the thing... my PC works fine. I have less issues with it than someone who doesn't like windows 10 (like my friend) and is therefore constantly wound up by it, I have literally no problems. It boots fast, is never slow, and I can even run fairly modern games no issues. So why would I want a new PC? What's even weirder is my friend doesn't even like triple A games, preferring weird pixel art'y indie jobs. Nor does he have VR, which is the only thing I can think of that would warrant a new PC. So yeh... thoughts? I've been joking for a couple of years that I'd upgrade when intel made 10nm processors, largely because my old housemate wasn't sure we'd see much smaller than that due to physics (he did an AFM PhD). OK I hear we have 7nm now from some people but yeh it was only a joke really (cause what difference does the chip size make in practical terms?). So stuff goes on like all these people getting upset at having bought expensive high end 200 series nvidia gfx cards only for the 300 series mid range to blow them out of the water at a fraction of the cost. Why did they even want these cards? It seems to me people are just doing this so they can beat their mates in some obscure bench mark but what's the actual point? On the flip side. I do know that some people have need for more umpth. My friend who used to work at Crytek for example said they had a CPU network for compiling that he really misses now he does the covid WFH thing. Similarly another ex housemate does image processing and recently sent me a screen grab of 48cores maxed with him training a neural network. So indeed, I get that a few specialised professions have need of of a lot of processing power... but really, does the average person now? Opinions?... go! :D Wistrel
I got my new PC (nothing fancy, really: https://www.mm-vision.dk/visiongaming/vision-game-VG-pc, with extra RAM thrown in) because the old one (5+ years) started showing its' age. It'd frequently crash, constantly be out of memory, and was just getting slower and slower. I'm working on a few projects, and simply wanted something more reliable. It runs most games just fine, and I don't see the need to spend a crapload of money, if this machine gets the job done nicely.
How is power consumption and heat on newer equipment? I would imagine(hope) it would have improved over the last 5 years for comparable equipment?
I hear my PC a lot less than my previous one, though obviously when I fire up a heavy 3D game, the increase in sound is noticable. Both machines are from the same manufacturer, and for both I added silent/quieter fans. I can't remember if I replaced the power thingy on the old one. I very well might have.
don't get a new pc til old one breaks. I recently upgraded because old one got a weird hardware problem that made it reboot every 5 to 10 minutes. When you upgrade go big to 'futureproof' yourself a bit.
I still use my 6 years old PC. For example "The Elder Scrolls Online" runs reasonably fluid at very high settings. I use it especially now because it's located in my "winter lodging". I can run a lot of stuff on it. The reason to buy a new and bigger one last year was VR. Later I met the people who want to resurrect the famous Dornier Do X and I can handle big data with several CAD- and VR-programs now. Currently I enjoy it because I became chief designer for the project. And hey, I can view all this stuff at 1:1 in VR everytime I want. So what? My reasons for purchase a new PC: Enable VR and handle big CAD-data. I don't like the idea to buy new hardware because the gaming industry offers "cool" products wich doesn't run on my old machine. I simply don't buy neither this products nor the hardware to be able to use it. I do sooo cool things by myself, I don't need the stuff from outside - LOL!
get yourself a ryzen 7 and at least 64 gigs RAM, then you're fine for years. i recently paid less than 600 bucks to upgrade my PC, since my RX580 gpu is still fine to run everything on max settings now. no clue about VR tho, maybe that needs a better gpu, or two?
