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Comment by mstipetic | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic but I got annoyed by laptops and bought a used Lenovo ThinkCenter tower for a few hundred euros and couldn't be happier. They're really well made, with high end components (i7 7700, 32GB ECC), and after I've stuck a graphics card in it I'm sure I'm set for years to come.

I'm actually surprised how incremental the progress was over the last decade, with regards to CPUs and to a lesser extent GPUs. I'd strongly suggest trying to reuse older hardware instead of spending $1000+ on new one

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>I'm actually surprised how incremental the progress was over the last decade

I think you're a bit over-exaggerating here as it really depends on what you do with your PC and where you're coming from.

If you've only been running Intel this whole time and all you do is light workloads then you won't notice much progress since they haven't made much, but if do CPU demanding tasks and were to try a Ryzen 3xxx/4xxx, or better yet, a 5xxx, you'll notice a huge leap forward (if you could find one in stock, that is).

However, your "new" 7700 is a bit old in the tooth now and, despite Intel's lack of major progress, it will still be left in the dust by a newer 10th/11th gen chip.

My old faithful Intel Q6600 still serves my parents just fine after 14 years of age, but I'm not gonna pretend it isn't slow by today's standards on the modern bloated web and with all the electron crap.

For sure, but for let's say gaming purposes a computer that was top of the line 5 or so years ago is still completely fine. I haven't been paying much attention as I was just buying a macbook for the last 10 years, but I remember a time when I was younger and a 2 year old computer was worthless.

Gaming also has its own different problems and pressures. For one, it's rarely a great move to make something that's far beyond the capabilities of the current-gen consoles since so many things will launch on them also. Even the "Pro" variants of this last generation were about 5 years ago by now.

You'd expect as the current console generation actually gets off the ground to start seeing more demanding upper settings, and eventually more demanding minimums.

I'm running a Thinkpad T530 with Intel graphics. Ram is maxxed out, I have a SSD, and I upgraded the screen to 1920x1080. It's more responsive than most other computers that I use. The only thing it struggles with is playing HD Youtube videos and WoW at the same time, and compiling large programs. Really, I think by this point, I'm on my second one, since I keep replacing parts when they wear out.

> I'm actually surprised how incremental the progress was over the last decade, with regards to CPUs and to a lesser extent GPUs.

sort of an odd thing to say when you just bought a machine with the last i7 desktop part to have only four cores. i7-7700 is only about 20% faster than an i7-2700k, but the 9700 and 10700 parts are way faster in any multi-threaded scenario.

I really don't want to argue, I'm just saying I remember a time when a 2,3 year old computer was worthless.. There are videos of people playing modern AAA game titles (on low settings of course, but at 1080p) with CPUs from 10 years ago and GPUs from 5+ years ago.

I don't think the i7 7700 supports ECC RAM?

I may well be wrong. Really not a hardware guy. Just super happy to have something that feels much snappier than my macbook and can run doom eternal for a few hundred euro

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