I bought the AMD R5 1600 (no X) in 2017 and overclocked it, ran on that until last year when I bought the Ryzen R7 5800X (no 3D).
This has been fine for me for gaming, I did spend a bit more on GPU, but still I’m doing fine on a modest budget for my PC IMO.
I did throw in a new motherboard for the 5800X, because the newer chipset is supposed to be better for the GPU/CPU communication.
But a 7 year life on the old R5 1600 is insane, and then being able to upgrade to a new CPU on the same motherboard is crazy, although I upgraded the motherboard anyway.
I think that it depends a lot on what one is doing.
So, a lot of games are bound on single-thread performance.
I have a Ryzen 9 7950X3D in my desktop. That’s the blingiest desktop AMD processor from 2023. That’s a six-year difference between release of those two processors and moving from a midrange to a top-end processor.
It benches at less than twice the single-thread performance of the Ryzen 5 1600. It’s faster. But it’s not really transformatively faster. It used to be, in, say, up until the early 2000s, that you’d double serial computation performance every 18 months. A 6-year difference between processors, as between those two, used to mean that the newer one would run pretty much everything about sixteen times faster, even setting aside differences in the processor bin.
Parallel processing has improved at a better clip, either via adding more cores to CPUs or the massively-parallel computation on GPUs. So if software can really utilize parallel computation effectively, then one might get larger gains over that period. And for some software — and games are an area where some entrants can do that — they can take advantage. But for a lot of software, hardware just isn’t changing as quickly as it once did.
And for games, it’s very common that the way in which they can take advantage of more parallel compute is nice-to-have but not really essential ways, like bumping resolution up or adding some extra visual effects. It’s not “the game becomes unplayable because the game logic can’t keep up” or something like that, the way it typically would have been in the 1990s.
There are definitely things that one can do where parallel compute makes a larger difference. If you’re a computer programmer compiling software and your particular environment can do parallel builds, then you can often get a pretty linear performance increase in the number of cores. If you do 3D rendering or video rendering, you’re probably bounded by the CPU, and software is often written to take advantage of parallelism there. But the vast majority of software is mostly-limited by serial compute. And serial compute performance just hasn’t been increasing very quickly for quite some years.
From my perspective, a high end (at the time of purchase) desktop should still be usable in 10 years.
In 2023 I was working on an old laptop from 2014 with 760M and an i7-4702MQ, it was not the best (although I added an SSD and upgraded to 16GB RAM), but it did OK and could play older games just fine.
I aim for 10 years with a mid-life upgrade. I even do this with my laptops; my Inspiron got a new battery, a new CPU fan and an SSD for its 6th birthday. It’s 11 now.
Well I think that’s stretching it, and my old R5 1600 did get a new GPU, but I also had a period where I had to use an older GPU because the original Radeon 5800 suddenly quit on me just before it reached 2 years. I got a full refund, because the GPU prices were insane at the time, and the Radeon 5800 cost more than twice what I gave originally even as a 2nd hand used card!
I simply refused paying that much, and played retro games on a Radeon RX 560 for almost a year, a card I had bought dirt cheap for about €100 for a media machine.
I bought the AMD R5 1600 (no X) in 2017 and overclocked it, ran on that until last year when I bought the Ryzen R7 5800X (no 3D).
This has been fine for me for gaming, I did spend a bit more on GPU, but still I’m doing fine on a modest budget for my PC IMO.
I did throw in a new motherboard for the 5800X, because the newer chipset is supposed to be better for the GPU/CPU communication.
But a 7 year life on the old R5 1600 is insane, and then being able to upgrade to a new CPU on the same motherboard is crazy, although I upgraded the motherboard anyway.
I think that it depends a lot on what one is doing.
So, a lot of games are bound on single-thread performance.
I have a Ryzen 9 7950X3D in my desktop. That’s the blingiest desktop AMD processor from 2023. That’s a six-year difference between release of those two processors and moving from a midrange to a top-end processor.
But despite all that.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/2984vs5234/AMD-Ryzen-5-1600-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-7950X3D
It benches at less than twice the single-thread performance of the Ryzen 5 1600. It’s faster. But it’s not really transformatively faster. It used to be, in, say, up until the early 2000s, that you’d double serial computation performance every 18 months. A 6-year difference between processors, as between those two, used to mean that the newer one would run pretty much everything about sixteen times faster, even setting aside differences in the processor bin.
Parallel processing has improved at a better clip, either via adding more cores to CPUs or the massively-parallel computation on GPUs. So if software can really utilize parallel computation effectively, then one might get larger gains over that period. And for some software — and games are an area where some entrants can do that — they can take advantage. But for a lot of software, hardware just isn’t changing as quickly as it once did.
And for games, it’s very common that the way in which they can take advantage of more parallel compute is nice-to-have but not really essential ways, like bumping resolution up or adding some extra visual effects. It’s not “the game becomes unplayable because the game logic can’t keep up” or something like that, the way it typically would have been in the 1990s.
There are definitely things that one can do where parallel compute makes a larger difference. If you’re a computer programmer compiling software and your particular environment can do parallel builds, then you can often get a pretty linear performance increase in the number of cores. If you do 3D rendering or video rendering, you’re probably bounded by the CPU, and software is often written to take advantage of parallelism there. But the vast majority of software is mostly-limited by serial compute. And serial compute performance just hasn’t been increasing very quickly for quite some years.
And the GPU is generally more important than CPU for gaming.
From my perspective, a high end (at the time of purchase) desktop should still be usable in 10 years.
In 2023 I was working on an old laptop from 2014 with 760M and an i7-4702MQ, it was not the best (although I added an SSD and upgraded to 16GB RAM), but it did OK and could play older games just fine.
I aim for 10 years with a mid-life upgrade. I even do this with my laptops; my Inspiron got a new battery, a new CPU fan and an SSD for its 6th birthday. It’s 11 now.
My Ryzen 3600 rig is an HTPC now.
Well I think that’s stretching it, and my old R5 1600 did get a new GPU, but I also had a period where I had to use an older GPU because the original Radeon 5800 suddenly quit on me just before it reached 2 years. I got a full refund, because the GPU prices were insane at the time, and the Radeon 5800 cost more than twice what I gave originally even as a 2nd hand used card!
I simply refused paying that much, and played retro games on a Radeon RX 560 for almost a year, a card I had bought dirt cheap for about €100 for a media machine.