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My desktop is mostly from 2011. The GPU is only about 4 years old, but the case and many of the fans are at least 15. The newest drives are new SSDs. I ripped my whole CD collection with the current optical drive (DVD?) and a now-defunct one in 2001 or so (different case). The build started out as an Athlon XP, and then was a 64 bit AMD for a while.

These days, it's fine for 4K linux gaming. CPU performance really stalled out over the years. The original motherboard, ram, cpu, etc build was about $1000.

Many other computers and laptops have come and gone, but it's still my main home machine.



> CPU performance really stalled out over the years.

It can be fun to look through https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html. In single-threaded performance, the cheapest retail processor I could find at a glance just now (the Intel Pentium Gold G6405) is about 1.4× as fast as the fastest processor of a decade ago, the i7-3960X. The i3-12100 is about 2× the i7-3960X. The i9-12900KS is about 2.4×. (And all this disregards memory performance improvements which I believe will make typical loads much fasterer still.) Then multithreaded performance, well, there you’re looking at more like 5× increases on high-end SKUs of both eras.

(As for the Athlon XP 3000+, well, the i9-12900KS is around 10× single/170× multi on it.)

Simple simplified simplistic summary: a similar grade of processor now is probably at least 2–4× as fast as the one of a decade ago for practical tasks, even ignoring other related improvements.




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