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Replacing Aging PCs on a Budget
Posted by anand lalshimpi in Gamer PC | May. 04, 2009 12:00 PM
One thing I enjoy tremendously about the tech industry is that the big chip companies (AMD, Intel, NVIDIA) are in a unique position where they don't have to worry about commoditization. Since the demand for more processing power doesn't taper off Moore's Law is used to drive performance up at the high end and cost down at the low end, without upsetting anyone's business model. Sure the big three would love to ship only high-end product, but thanks to the economics of semiconductor manufacturing there's a real benefit to shipping $40 CPUs as well as $1000 CPUs.
Lately the market has been inundated with talk about netbooks and other machines based on Intel's Atom processor. Admittedly, we're seeing a regular stream of products at price points that were not usually catered to thanks to the netbook. But the netbook and Intel's Atom really only exploit one aspect of Moore's Law - enabling very low cost, and correspondingly low performance PCs.
Intel sells its desktop Atom processor for $29. It delivers the performance of a mainstream notebook CPU from about 5 years ago. At $999 Intel will sell you a Core i7-965, a processor that's an order of magnitude faster than that. But at $74, there's another very interesting option: the Pentium E5300.
The E5300 is interesting because it's similar in specs to the first Core 2 Duo processors that Intel launched in the second half of 2006. And if you were following the CPU market at all back then, you'll know that the slowest Core 2 Duos were often just as fast as the fastest CPUs on the market.
In other words - for $74, you can buy a CPU today that's faster than anything from around 3 years ago - even systems using the top end $999 CPUs available at the time. This sort of performance at such a reasonable price point comes at an important time when many are looking to replace aging PCs, many of them with Pentium 4s and Athlon 64s. I don't think many realize the sort of performance you can get for less than $100 these days.
It's time to share your upgrade stories - what systems do you have now and what are you looking to upgrade them to?
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I've done a few upgrades since 1991 through 2007 (386DX25 -> 486-33 -> VLB 486-33 -> Pentium 133 -> Celeron 300A -> TBird 800 -> P4 2.533 -> Core2Duo E6750), and each one cost a diminishing amount of money, starting from about 2500 for the 486 down to about 1600 for the C2D. In each case, (except the VLB upgrade with the 486) there was memory, CPU, motherboard, Graphics Card upgrade included. What has amazed me is the cost of these upgrades has steadily decreased over time. Every time I upgraded the whole computer, I noticed a significant increase in performance for the tasks that I was doing at the time, and thought that I couldn't see any reason to buy more of a computer than I had. Naturally, software marches on, and I was proven wrong time and time again. I am sure that I'll be proven wrong again. At each point in the upgrade process, at least starting with the Celeron 300A in 1998, I was "surfing the internet, writing word documents, managing scanned photos". It's funny that the demands of "standard computing" has increased so much in the last 10 years. I'd have thought that it didn't matter all that much if you did those things. Again, proven wrong as I observed my wife fight with her 12" Apple G4 laptop to do "basic surfing" and the occasional Flash-based game online.
So, it seems that even the core tasks we do get more and more complex and require more and more resources to use.
Right now, I'd go with AdamO's recommendation that (almost) any dual core CPU with 2 GB of memory with any OS other than Vista (Linux, Windows XP, OSX) is enough to do "today's" core tasks reasonably well. Though the reality is that today's "Core Tasks" aren't really multithreaded at all, so why do we need a dual core processor?
At work, I also use a single core processor (A Pentium M, 1.8GHz) with 2 GB RAM, and it runs "everything" just fine (other than Subversion updates - but I blame that on SVN more than anything else). It does standard web surfing (in my case, looking up the odd error message in java compiling), document writing (in Office 2003 and OpenOffice3) just fine. That's probably good enough for 80% of the computing market, I'd think. This laptop was made in 2004 (Compaq nw8000). Sure it was (very) high end in 2004, but today's notebooks should pummel its capabilities.
So where am I going with this? I think that the upgrades people think they should do today really should follow a simple engineering principle: "What's broke?". If your computer does everything you need it to do today, and you don't notice that it's slow or inconvenient, then why bother upgrading?
If you do decide that your computer is too slow, it will again depend a great deal on what exactly you're using your computer for. Do you really need more than 2 cores? More than likely, the answer is "I don't even need more than 1 core". If that's where you fall, then why upgrade?
:)
My blanket recommendation to people is any dual core CPU combined with 2GB of memory for XP and 3GB+ for Vista.
Anything over or under this spec is unnecessary unless gaming or daily video editing is involved.
With that said, in business, my single core/1GB machines will continue to run until they break or a currently unforeseen software requirement shows up. They work well enough to keep people from complaining much.