How often do you replace your computer?
- Thread starter Shawn Knight
- Start date
Skidmarksdeluxe
Posts: 8,645 +3,290
NicktheWVAHick
Posts: 492 +919
Always a new build. Never an upgrade. Every 5-6 years on average. Must be significant architectural changes in at least 3 of MB, Memory, CPU & GPU to pull trigger.
For a while every 3 years I always got solid middle of the road components. But currently I'm surprised how old my system is 2009 i5 750 lynnfield I think has seen xp, 7, and now 10. Just recently upgraded video to a Radeon r7 370 on sale to hold me over until a 480 or 1070. Other wise my 5850 held me until now playable at 1080p I did upgrade ram from 4 to 8 and a ssd when upgrading to w7. It just now with newer video cards that I am considering an up grade but until vr matures or a nice 34" ultra wide comes down to my budget or something to replace my three 21" lcds. (Which obviously I don't game on all three mainly for editing) for a better experience.
R
Raoul Duke
Depends on how much, how fast technology changes...so, built two in 2006-07 for me and my Dad. Built a i7-2600K in 2011, built i7-6700K, Z-170 last December (2015) with 2011 build going to my father. In between did change GPU and OS drive to SSD. 2015 build was major since DDR4, M.2 NVMe, went to AIO cooler so I hope I'm good for 4-5 years. Same PSU, going from 2 TB HD to 4 TB HD (in progress). Have cheaped out on monitor given computer specs, likely will ending up changing GPU given how fast they are improving.
alexnode
Posts: 149 +56
Unfortunately I have a rendering farm and every year I will upgrade one of the servers to a medium model if there is a 20%+ performance gain. Usually this will be 3 years interval for each machine. My gaming rig is a 4930K with a Titan and I might get a new graphic card in autumn. I don't want to be left behind but speed has slowed down a lot lately and I never buy the top end models at full price.
I keep mine forever. I upgrade them. Had a toshiba laptop from 2004 that I upgraded the hard disk on. Just replaced it with a mac a month ago because the case broke and I wanted to program iphone. The custom built ones are really great. One I had to replace 5 power supplies because the fan became noisy, altho upgrading dual boot to windows 10 has bugs in bcd(edit), and it sometimes only boots to that corrupt windows 10 partition without giving me a choice what to boot. If I never log on to win 8 or 10, only the 2 vistas or slackware linux, it never gets into that mode and is salvageable. Don't know what kind of caustic gas is in this room, but I leave the window open now and come to think of it I haven't replaced the power supply in the 3 years I've been doing so. I have the window open and I have less loss of short term memory. My brother gave me a pre 2000 hp desktop which his wife upgraded to win xp, and I may toss it out because new versions of adobe won't install because the chip doesn't have the instructions it uses. I have a 2003-4 custom I found in the garbage that my mother uses and I reloaded windows xp on it and had to replace the power supply. I now have good luck with $20 power supplies. One memory card crashed but I recently put the memory in from my dell and my mother actually said the response time was speedy. This reminds me of when I worked at littelfuse in des plaines, il. The it department head who was a genius but had a long way to go (programs were initiated on punched cards) said a user only told him the response time was fast was when he doubled the ibm mainframe memory. That was really something because 5 meg of intel mainframe memory for ibm cost $100,000. These mainframes only had 5-10 MEG of memory, but because the programs/os were written in assembler like the city of la police system it had 5000 police cars/users on it.
Well, I work in the PC games business for some time now, so what better excuse to have in order to upgrade the main components once every 2 years? Besides, if I wait any longer, the money I could get on the old components are not enough to make up for any significant chunk of the sum needed for the upgrade. I just made the jump from i5-4570, DDR3 1600 and a good AsRock H87 mobo to an i7-6700k (Amazon warehouse ftw, got it for less than the price of the non-k version), DDR4 3000 and a gaming Asus mobo.
But yeah, AAA games are the main reason for me to upgrade, and with a 32" QHD monitor I'm bound to keep my machine at the top of the game, sort to speak. In comparison, my so's laptop is almost 4 years old and with the notable upgrade to an SSD, she doesn't need anything better.
But yeah, AAA games are the main reason for me to upgrade, and with a 32" QHD monitor I'm bound to keep my machine at the top of the game, sort to speak. In comparison, my so's laptop is almost 4 years old and with the notable upgrade to an SSD, she doesn't need anything better.
Darth Shiv
Posts: 2,371 +886
I always wait for a major component milestone like SATA 3 SSDs with 512GB storage + TRIM. Or a gfx card performance threshold like 1080p on game X.
Usually around 4 years with minor components in between!
Usually around 4 years with minor components in between!
Prosercunus
Posts: 358 +283
Around 5 years. Probably one GPU upgrade in the middle there at some point.
It really depends on how the hardware and software is progressing. It's not exactly in a straight line.
It really depends on how the hardware and software is progressing. It's not exactly in a straight line.
I had my first computer in 1996, it was a Desktop (Compaq Presario 1501). In that period untiI 2008, I got desktop every 6 years. I had in total 4 desktop's. After that I switch to laptop, every 3-4 years, I got 6 in total including my actual Toshiba Satellite Pro C850. This year I"m building a new Core i7 6700k Desktop. So I might switch to my 6 years cycle 
cldmstrsn
Posts: 234 +236
About every 4 years. I just sold my GTX 780 and I am saving for a 1080 when they become available. I have a 3770k and I dont see upgrading that for another 2 or 3 years. At the moment im just using my laptop which is pretty respectable. It has an i7 5700HQ and a 980m and im pretty happy with the performance at 1080p.
lripplinger
Posts: 454 +251
My computer is at least six years old now, and still keeps on chugging along. The Core i7-860 "Lynnfield" combined with the Asus mobo I have has been rock solid this whole time. Right now I just want to upgrade my graphics card from the 660Ti I have currently. Us peasants tend to hold onto our computer hardware a lot longer. I don't know when I will build an entirely new system to replace this one. Maybe if I decided to sell this one I might. Its hard to just throw it out when all I do is 1080p gaming anyway. A graphics card will most definitely be my next upgrade.
lripplinger
Posts: 454 +251
Like I always say "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
GeforcerFX
Posts: 1,091 +547
Well I have always been a laptop guy(and a Gamer, I know....) but I have built many desktops, mainly for others. This year has been very weird for me as I have finally moved off my old XPS m1710 as my main computer. I have another 6th gen laptop that I will be using more often in the laptop role. But my main computer is now a desktop, it's not really "new" I have had the motherboard since 2011, but I put a 2600s, 16gb of ram, GTX 960, and 1tb SSD into it, as well as a new case and EVGA PSU. When for most of it's life it ran a G620, 4gb of ram, and a GT 430 as a HTPC. I guess I can only answer 11 years (bought m1710 in 2007), but I have had other PC's in that time, either built for a customer, or built for a singular purpose (ala HTPC), that I got to use. The m1710 isn't going anywhere and I have projects for it to work on still, but I had to move to something a lot more powerful for my main rig to get all the new work I am doing done as well. This system is already 5 years old(model wise) on the mobo and cpu, but I still out bench some of my friends new builds. I am hoping for 2-3 years on this, then move to whatever is a considerable upgrade. Will prob crab a new GPU on the next gen (not the pascal and Polaris, but there replacements)
Last edited:
StrikerRocket
Posts: 225 +186
No regular upgrades or strict rules for me. When I feel I need to run some latest game, I upgrade video cards, so that's around 4-5 years.
Exception: last month, I switched my main rig for an older generation one. After reading the article about the 32 threads monster on techspot, I bought 2 E5 2670 Xeons and built a rig with them. For $134, that's what I call a must have! My i7 3770K is still there, my wife is using it, I'll soon put my MSI GTX 970 Gaming in it, and grab a GTX 1070... I don't usually go for the latest hardware. I wait for bargains, like the 2 Xeons, and pull the trigger when I see one, or when I'm forced to upgrade, like with the i7 3770K I bought when my DFI mobo died on me (RAM controller went belly up).
Exception: last month, I switched my main rig for an older generation one. After reading the article about the 32 threads monster on techspot, I bought 2 E5 2670 Xeons and built a rig with them. For $134, that's what I call a must have! My i7 3770K is still there, my wife is using it, I'll soon put my MSI GTX 970 Gaming in it, and grab a GTX 1070... I don't usually go for the latest hardware. I wait for bargains, like the 2 Xeons, and pull the trigger when I see one, or when I'm forced to upgrade, like with the i7 3770K I bought when my DFI mobo died on me (RAM controller went belly up).
AncientYouth
Posts: 19 +12
On a i7 920 ,1366, 8gb ram and a 7850
Still works great 7+ years later, only recent upgrade was to a 40 inch philips 4k monitor which is shared with my ps4.
Eventually I will upgrade to a 4k system when it becomes more affordable
Still works great 7+ years later, only recent upgrade was to a 40 inch philips 4k monitor which is shared with my ps4.
Eventually I will upgrade to a 4k system when it becomes more affordable
gospelmidi
Posts: 23 +1
Once I have a system operating smoothly, without glitches, I "drive it until the wheels fall off," or until the end of a Microsoft Windows product cycle. I wait to upgrade Windows until Microsoft makes the old version obsolete. The limitation is MS Windows Updates: when MS stops updating a version of Windows, I must upgrade to a current version which MS is currently updating, which in turn requires updated hardware.
MS-DOS 3.30
Windows 3.11
Windows 95B
Windows XP SP2
Windows 8.1 x64
MS-DOS 3.30
Windows 3.11
Windows 95B
Windows XP SP2
Windows 8.1 x64
namesrejected
Posts: 398 +302
I don't remember all the details because it was a long time ago, but I spent over $10,000 on a Pentium 4 system when they first came out. Now I have a wife, and my first child 5 weeks old and really wish I had that money.....
TO BUILD A NEW COMPUTER!!!!!
Goodness, what a system $10,000 would build. However, I would wait for Cannonlake. Now I just dig through the dumpster at work, and pick out what they throw away. I have an AMD core2 duo or something, with 8 gig of ram, some GeForce with no fan, and somehow found a Samsung 840evo, the 500gig one. I think they tossed it when it started having the slow reads on files not frequently refreshed, I'm so heart broken it was in the trash.
TO BUILD A NEW COMPUTER!!!!!
Goodness, what a system $10,000 would build. However, I would wait for Cannonlake. Now I just dig through the dumpster at work, and pick out what they throw away. I have an AMD core2 duo or something, with 8 gig of ram, some GeForce with no fan, and somehow found a Samsung 840evo, the 500gig one. I think they tossed it when it started having the slow reads on files not frequently refreshed, I'm so heart broken it was in the trash.
Similar threads
Latest posts
-
Sony's Ghost of Tsushima brings familiar PlayStation features to PC- DanteSmith replied
-
New charging algorithm could double life of li-ion batteries- Freddie159 replied
