[citation][nom]jacobdrj[/nom]Still chugging along on an ole' Q6600...My pappy is plenty satisfied chugging along on his ole' Q8200...Just bought a brand new A8 based Laptop...Its all about the SSDs...As a consumer (i.e. someone who does not use their system for content creation) once Quad Core processors and SSDs both became affordable, and once Windows 7 came out, the average consumer has switched from a 'IT' upgrade model of 'replacing all systems every 18 to 36 months', to an 'Automotive' cycle of 'replace it when it breaks'. Games are designed to work for the lowest common denominator to appeal to as many potential buyers as possible, and online content is still quite usable so long as you have 4 cores. When you have 4 cores and an SSD, you don't worry about having antivirus software running and killing performance in the background. As a side note: The 1st generation Intel i-series chips were very underwhelming to me. Not until Sandy Bridge did I see palpable performance gains on content consumption, and further, only the balance afforded by both the new Ivy Bridge and AMD's Llano make any sense for the average consumer, with the former being more than twice as expensive...I can't see myself recommending anything but APUs for the average content consumer for the foreseeable future...[/citation]
I'm with ya, still running a Q9450/Radeon HD4590 from 2008, and although I have the money to upgrade, I don't really have a good reason to, everything runs fine, including the most current games. I kinda wish the system would fail (gracefully) so I have a reason to build a new rig.