Intel CEO: Most People Only Replace A PC After 5-6 Years

My upgrade cadance for my personal rig meant I should have replaced at 10th gen Intel, but with them being so underwhelming I decided to wait. I was hoping Ice Lake would of been 7 or 5mm by then when I planned that a few years ago. Then with all the gouging going on I have no choice but to wait now.
 
I run about a three year upgrade cycle, two years ago I bought the GPU, last year changed my case and bought some SSDs, this year (finally) got the 5900X for a CPU upgrade from a 2700X.
Next year probably add some water cooling... then start over again (maybe) in 2022, if retail prices return to sanity - otherwise, I'm actually nicely set for the next few years
 
It's about right, though I am closer to a 4 year average. Around the 03-06 timeframe my system was bouncing around 3200+, 3700+, and opteron 165 but was the same mobo & gpu. My 08 build was a q6600 based system. The refresh in 2013 was 8350 based. In late 2017 I moved on to my current 8700k based system. Been trying to upgrade now for a 2021 refresh, I've managed to get a 5950x and dark hero motherboard but am of course waiting on the gpu. As an enthusiast who also works from home, I am not the average user here but I'm not too far off the schedule either.
 
I upgrade GPU's pretty frequently, but with Intel's abysmal CPU increases my newest system is from 2017 and my oldest from 2013, the 13 one is just starting to show its age.

I'd swap to a 5900x or 5950x if I could get one.
 
Aireoth said:
I upgrade GPU's pretty frequently, but with Intel's abysmal CPU increases my newest system is from 2017 and my oldest from 2013, the 13 one is just starting to show its age.

I'd swap to a 5900x or 5950x if I could get one.
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This is the direction I've gone. Micro Centers are starting to get the 5900x and 5950x in stock more regularly now, mine in Cambridge, MA has 25+ of all 5000 series except for 5600x which they are low on. If you live anywhere near one and this is the last thing you're waiting on, might be worth the drive. The single core performance increase over my 8700k is substantial.
 
arnemetis said:
This is the direction I've gone. Micro Centers are starting to get the 5900x and 5950x in stock more regularly now, mine in Cambridge, MA has 25+ of all 5000 series except for 5600x which they are low on. If you live anywhere near one and this is the last thing you're waiting on, might be worth the drive. The single core performance increase over my 8700k is substantial.
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Sadly I'm in Canada and the bulk of AMD supply gets directed to US retailers. I can get a 5800x but not the 5900 or 5950 at retail price, I check about once a week. I'm sure this will clear up as we move into the summer and I'm not in much rush.
 
The reason we don’t upgrade is performance verses cost. If I get 10-20 percent increase, which really comes out to be very little actual observed speed improvement for a full system price… then why am I inclined to upgrade?

Why replace what isn’t broke?

This is also why I would consider AMD the better option. In terms of upgrade path if you can keep the same Motherboard and just do a chip swap your miles ahead. With Intel you very rarely can do this and move forward.

So both it comes down to which path is better? Am I seeing so much performance increase that it’s worth the hefty price tag? Or do I realize that extra 4-6 seconds here and there isn’t that inconvenient on my wallet?

Yes I’d like to upgrade a lot more but in terms of upgrading it just isn’t worth it for the amount of cost. Any more, as limited as my gaming has become a tablet would suffice. And we are not into the big nickel and dimes of subscriptions.
 
My first PC I fully built that wasn't a Frankenstein's monster of prebuilt and off the shelf parts - as were a few of my PCs before I started fully building - was a Core 2 Q6600 built in early 2007 followed by a 3570k rig built in the very start of 2013 - and that was just replaced when I received my 5950x last month

So going on 6 years and 8 years here in-between builds
 
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Still running a Dell T5500 workstation with 48GB of ram and dual X5675's, graphics via an Nvidia 980Ti.

It does everything I need it to do, it boots fast off an m.2 to pcie adapter and has 6TB of storage via SATA3 using a hardware raid card flashed to IT mode. Pfft, I just can't see the point in constantly upgrading anymore. The expense is out of control.
 
I built my PC for gaming but I quit gaming over a year ago so it'll probably last me close to ten years or longer before I feel the need to upgrade, I hope :)
 
2008 - X58 / i7 920
2015 - i7 990X (same X58 board)
2018 - X399 / 2950X

Some takeaways: HEDT in 2018 was at a turning point for increased performance and more cores. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that… It was probably not the best time to build such a system with no upgrade path from zen+ on X399.
X58 was the ultimate long term platform for a whole slew of reasons that Intel (or AMD) will not allow to happen again. My X58 build still gets used a few times a week and has yet to feel slow vs my much newer laptop, desktop, work laptop, etc.
 
2016 thread necromancy be damned, this statement has only proven more true than ever.

-I kept my Q6600/8 GB DDR2-800 build for six years before replacing it with my current 4770K/32 GB DDR3-2400 build once I realized DCS and PlanetSide 2 were heavily limited by old 65nm Core 2 architecture. Then I handed that thing down to my younger brother until upgrading him to an X5650/12 GB DDR3 X58 build for dirt cheap, still keeping the GTX 760 4 GB from the old system.
-I'm still using that 4770K build cobbled together in 2013 as my main desktop, and still with the same GTX 980 I've had in it since 2015, but usage declined in late 2020 because I got myself an HP OMEN X 2S. i7-9750H, 16 GB DDR4-2667, RTX 2070 Max-Q - it's more powerful than that aging desktop and supports NVMe to boot, but only when it isn't thermal throttling on me.
-Said laptop was a replacement for a really aging Fujitsu T902 with an i5-3320M, 16 GB DDR3-1600 and godawful Intel HD 3000 graphics. Poor thing had its CPU pegged to max by casual Web browsing these days, and you could forget PC gaming on anything past the early 2000s due to the awful integrated graphics. I decided a separate gaming/mobile workstation laptop and Cintiq monitor were the way to go, especially if combining the two means the whopping $5,000 entry price of an Acer ConceptD 9.

It's not the 1990s/early 2000s anymore; ever since the Q6600 brought the computing equivalent of discovering FTL to the masses and SSDs fell greatly in price since the old X25-M days, nothing since has really felt like a substantial upgrade any more.

I remember having to suffer an Athlon XP 1800+/512 MB DDR-266/Radeon 9600 XT desktop, some old Compaq pre-built junk with the Radeon slapped in a few years later because the GeForce 2 GTS couldn't do pixel/vertex shaders that newer games required, all the way up to 2007. Alt-Tabbing out of games ground everything to a halt for several minutes, Oblivion had to run on minimum settings that made it look worse than Morrowind while still running worse, and Crysis... well, it's a wonder it even ran on that thing.

But the Q6600 system? Suddenly, multitasking was possible, and all those earlier games were maxed out with no problems whatsoever, not even a hitch! (Except Crysis, but c'mon, it's Crysis. Just running that at 1280x960 Very High and having a kinda playable framerate was an achievement back in 2007, and it still holds its own visually with games released literally a decade afterward.)

Everything after that was just "Oh, my games run noticeably better now, but the rest of the computing experience isn't much snappier than it already was." You don't need that much computing power for casual stuff like creating Office documents, viewing photos/videos or playing digital music compared to what's readily available now, and you shouldn't need it for modern Web browsing either, except the Web 2.0 age has turned most sites into an obese mess of JavaScript and other wastes of CPU cycles on top of the content you're trying to access.

Perhaps part of it is that Intel stagnated for so long post-Skylake, and AMD's had the biggest resurgence since they dropped the Hammer back in the Athlon 64 days. It finally made me tempted to upgrade from Haswell, but given how DDR5 is around the corner and the sockets are about to change as a result, I'm not about to plunk money down on a dead-end platform no matter how enticing Zen 3 sounds.
 
Computers don't age like they used too, and if you time your purchases correctly you can enjoy years of gaming without need to pony up money. An i5 2500K with a Geforce GTX 970 would still be usable to this day.
 
DukenukemX said:
Computers don't age like they used too, and if you time your purchases correctly you can enjoy years of gaming without need to pony up money. An i5 2500K with a Geforce GTX 970 would still be usable to this day.
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That depends, the reality is that software hasn't changed like it used to (particularly games which drove the hardware for the average consumer). Most games at 1080p/60Hz will run fine on an aged system, and as a result the pressure to upgrade is thinning. Used to be you had to buy a new system because your old system was borderline incapable of running modern titles.

Now its only if you want higher resolution or refresh rates do you start finding the need to upgrade.
 
DukenukemX said:
Computers don't age like they used too, and if you time your purchases correctly you can enjoy years of gaming without need to pony up money. An i5 2500K with a Geforce GTX 970 would still be usable to this day.
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3.5 gb of VRAM probably would hold you back. GTX 1070 though I’d agree.

Those 970s were a problem
 
Revenant_Knight said:
Well, my fathers editing machine was built in Mid 2017 with a 7820X. We just ordered a 10980XE as a drop-in replacement for the CPU. So about 4 years there.
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Hope you got a good price on that! That's almost a 2 year old CPU

Edit: looks like they still fetch some good money on ebay
 
DukenukemX said:
Computers don't age like they used too, and if you time your purchases correctly you can enjoy years of gaming without need to pony up money. An i5 2500K with a Geforce GTX 970 would still be usable to this day.
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Cheap SSD and you can run that till the MB dies, which due to vast improvements in capacitor tech can easily be upwards of 10 years.
 
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