[SOLVED] For how long will a CPU be relevant?

[XSR]

Hello,


I have i5-2500. It's crazy to see such old cpu hold trough all this 1080p60fps long video rendering, high end gaming, not to mention being used every single day for 10 hours for the past almost 6 years.

How long will a Ryzen or i5 be relevant? 9-10 years?

 

[jay32267]

It depends what you plan on doing with it.

I am still running 286 and 386 style Intel CPUs from the early 1990's because they do what I need them to do.

 

[XSR]

It depends what you plan on doing with it.

I am still running 286 and 386 style Intel CPUs from the early 1990's because they do what I need them to do.

Play games on 1080p/1440p.

It's crazy that a processor that was released in 2011 can still hold up with a fast GPU like GTX 1080.

will it be the same with the i5 9600k?

 

[grimfox]

I agree with Jay.

Your CPU is actually the same one I have in my work computer. That was an upgrade of the 90's era pentium that I had been running previously. I think in the consumer market there is a higher turnover rate than in the business market. I've heard stories of mechanics who bought a PC to print invoices and track inventory in the early 80s and used that same PC till they retired in the teens. It worked and did the task faster than they could with pen and paper so there was never a reason to upgrade. So it's relevant for as long as the user thinks it's useful.

I'm actually quite happy with my 2500 for what I do at work.

 

[86zx]

My main system used to be a old dell t7500 with 2 xeons in it and honestly those systems can still play any game on high details at 60 or more fps

 

[Rodrigodrt]

Well, 4770K here, best processor of all galaxies, still holding firm as heck, specially cuz its overclocked to 4.5 so, even with a GTX 980 it rocks every single game out there, the witcher 3 at max max with hairworks thing for instance, round 55-60 fps all the time.

thing is, hardware evolved way too fast, nowdays is completely different from 2 decades ago where you had a creepy ass 300mhz celeron, and next year intel brings up a 1ghz pentium 3 with astronomically higher performance, but the cicle of releasing new products every year continued, and as with everything else, that has a limit, mhz/ghz arent increasing by 100% anymore, the chips aren't shrinking 5-10x times the size anymore, and temperatures are more and more becoming a limiting factor... I remember when i had a passive cooled amd cpu that i forgot now....

so anyways, its not worth it anymore upgrade to the newest gen when you have the previous, unless something revolutionary happens or we go quantum, more and more the cpu's will last (as in delivering the desired 60+ frames) and less and less you'll be inclined to swap.

my guess, a good ryzen 5 will last 5-7+ years easily, unless the just what i said above proves true.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

I think however if you are a gamer things have changed. For a long time Intel had the market cornered. So they just did incremental upgrades each year.

I think now since AMD released ryzen, I feel like they caught Intel napping with the higher core counts and The fact they had faster cores.

You can see newer consoles will even have 8 core CPUs. I would say maybe at the upper end like i7 or ryzen 7, maybe the ryzen 7 due to hyperthreading more so, you may get 5-6 years. For the mid range, maybe somewhere between 2-4?

It seems like the last couple of years processor technology has developed very rapidly.

 

[Wolfshadw]

A CPU is relevant for as long as it performs what you need it to do. The ONLY reason I upgraded from my old Intel Core I5-760 was because it lacked the AVX instruction set necessary for VR. Otherwise I was perfectly happy with it's performance.

-Wolf sends

 

[jay32267]

I run really old PCs at work because the PCs run really old equipment....and upgrading isn't feasible due to them having ISA adapter cards and things like that.

It's pretty amazing how long you can keep old PCs running....especially with access to EBay.

Also at home....I have an old system from 2009 that runs 1080p great.
It runs an i7-980 6 core and a GTX 1080 on an ASUS P6T Deluxe MB.

 

[Nemesia]

It really looked like CPU's were 3.2GHz 4 cores for an eternity.

 

[86zx]

I think however if you are a gamer things have changed. For a long time Intel had the market cornered. So they just did incremental upgrades each year.

I think now since AMD released ryzen, I feel like they caught Intel napping with the higher core counts and The fact they had faster cores.

You can see newer consoles will even have 8 core CPUs. I would say maybe at the upper end like i7 or ryzen 7, maybe the ryzen 7 due to hyperthreading more so, you may get 5-6 years. For the mid range, maybe somewhere between 2-4?

It seems like the last couple of years processor technology has developed very rapidly.

In the end it really depends what the user plays for games and does for work, there’s still a ton of people out perfectly happy with getting 20fps on their 300$ laptop and then there are other people who can’t stand not having over 200fps on every game they play

 

[faalin]

I run really old PCs at work because the PCs run really old equipment....and upgrading isn't feasible due to them having ISA adapter cards and things like that.

It's pretty amazing how long you can keep old PCs running....especially with access to EBay.

Also at home....I have an old system from 2009 that runs 1080p great.
It runs an i7-980 6 core and a GTX 1080 on an ASUS P6T Deluxe MB.

I have a i7-980x @ 4.2Ghz with 3 gtx 780 ti's, still does good enough for a secondary gaming computer when friends come over.

 

[jay32267]

I have a i7-980x @ 4.2Ghz with 3 gtx 780 ti's, still does good enough for a secondary gaming computer when friends come over.

Ha....nice. I couldn't get the "x" version on EBay at the time......so I think I'm running 3.6 GHz.
....but it seems to be enough (with the 1080) to run every game I've tried on ultra 1080p 60 fps.

....and yeah.... it is my secondary gaming computer for my bedroom.....my living room machine is more up to date and runs 4K....but 1080p doesn't exactly suck compared to 4K imo.....I think 1080p is pretty damn good considering I was brought up with pong.

 

[Carl2]

If you want a computer to last I'd recommend using air filters and cleaning them often enough, I've had failures with pwr supplies, graphic cards ect because of dust. I've gotten in the habit of having two computers so I can connect to the network to fix problems with a computer that has stopped working. I really feel they are going to super computers with the CPU's being sold.

 

[Nemesia]

If you want a computer to last I'd recommend using air filters and cleaning them often enough, I've had failures with pwr supplies, graphic cards ect because of dust. I've gotten in the habit of having two computers so I can connect to the network to fix problems with a computer that has stopped working. I really feel they are going to super computers with the CPU's being sold.

The feeling when you have to use your phone to google a problem is horrible.

 

[Endre]

Hello,


I have i5-2500. It's crazy to see such old cpu hold trough all this 1080p60fps long video rendering, high end gaming, not to mention being used every single day for 10 hours for the past almost 6 years.

How long will a Ryzen or i5 be relevant? 9-10 years?

There’s not a single “good answer” for everybody.
It depends on what YOU are doing with it.

For instance, though most of my PC’s components are new (i7-9700K, 32GB DDR4, 2x M.2 NVMe drives, 850W PSU, etc.), my graphics card is NVIDIA GT 640!
I’m going to change it someday, but since I’m no gamer, it’s no hurry for me to do that.

 

[Zizo007]

9-10 years is a stretch, maybe it will be good for 5-7 years in games.
I only upgraded to Ryzen because my 4770K motherboard's pins were accidentally bent.
While my 1800X is satisfying, its still holding back my oced 2080 Ti. I just hope that there will be a bios update to my X370 motherboard to support Ryzen 4000. I will be upgrading to a 4800X when it gets released. I will keep that 4800X for at least 5 years. Ryzen will last long, its a revolution.

 

[madartzgraphics]

Hello,


I have i5-2500. It's crazy to see such old cpu hold trough all this 1080p60fps long video rendering, high end gaming, not to mention being used every single day for 10 hours for the past almost 6 years.

How long will a Ryzen or i5 be relevant? 9-10 years?

It depends on how much every programs and games will evolve in the future. For example, I have a decade old or maybe more CPU older than my cousin honestly. The time it was released, softwares are just windows XP, internet explorer, yahoo mail, basic fps games and basic websites. Now it evolved greatly to the point of triple A games, RAM hogging google chrome, Windows 10 that eats a lot too at max, oh don't forget adobe creative suite specially Adobe Premiere and After Effects.

Before, CPUs are slower, fewer cores, OC unfriendly, plus pair it with DDR3 DDR2 DDR1.. now we have DDR4 at 3200mhz+ imagine that.

For me, newer generation CPUs like Ryzen will hold that much even more than 2 decades with proper care. The problem back then is that programs are faster to evolve than hardwares but now it seems pretty equal at phase so I guess we don't need to worry about that much,.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

The best advice anyone can give is buy the best processor you are able to afford. In the past it seems when you spend extra for the higher end processors, they last. Like my wife's office computer now.

I bought it used from work and it has an i7 3770 in it. I upgraded to 16gb of ram and installed an SSD. The computer works great for her needs and is as fast for office work etc as new systems in many instances probably. You could probably even put a gtx 1060 or 1660 in there and game on it. So even though the 3770 is 6 or 7 years old, it might have a few more years depending on your usage. Whereas i5 or i3 systems from that era, still workable, but if you put to much money in those you might as well buy new hardware.

I will say at work we have one system that has an older i5 with 8gb of ram and a 1tb hard drive installed that they are going to sell for something like 25 dollars. I had a coworker asking about getting a copy of Windows 7 for a Vista machine. I basically showed him the machine they intend to sell and that he should stop messing with his Vista PC. I think he's going to purchase it and on something like that you could install Windows 10 onto an SSD, then you've got a good machine that will last a while for web browsing email, word processing etc.

 

[RodroX]

I have used an intel i5 3570 as my gaming rig for more than 5 years, sadly Battle Field 5 (and at to some extent Shadow of the Tomb Raider too) showed to me that it just wasn't enough to keep up with the GPU.
It wasn't horrible, but it was not enouhg to keep the frames at 60 all the time and without hiccups.

I still use the i5 3570 for a lots of task, but mainly for testing other components (it has become my "test rig"). For a test rig is kinda overkill but I didn't have one before so Im really happy is doing that job now!

Still for office work even a 2 core with HT or SMT is more than enough. And yes an SSD can give a huge breath of fresh air to any system with a slower mechanical drive.