Question A Windows 11 Guinea-Pig-Progress and Journal Thread

[BonzaiDuck]

I've said it before in other recent posts. I can only be ultimately labeled an "Enthusiast", because I have too many computers, I build them -- sometimes compulsively, I was a do-or-die overclocker when overclocking made some sort of sense. I have a huge collection of cyber-junk in parts lockers, occasionally counting it as an advantage when I need something and find it in my bins.

That being said and as a slightly different parallel to the same problem of accumulation, I've discovered that my "Home Theater" rig has a cassette recorder/player, a turntable and a DVD player that I don't need or that I can easily replace with two other items: a blu-ray player (that should read DVD and CD formats) and an MP3 player or something similar. I haven't touched my LPs and cassettes or the equipment that plays them for 18 years. Being short on space in my house, this was a milestone realization. Suddenly, I can "find room" for stuff that is cluttering my man-cave.

Like old cars, I tend to keep my electronics too long. That also holds for my computers. It could be a common behavior for both enthusiasts and mainstreamers, but while mainstreamers may hold onto their PCs too long, they may have fewer PCs to pose a problem.

Now many of us -- and many of my mainstreamer friends as well -- are faced with this "Windows 11" dilemma. We are running perfectly-good computer systems for which a Windows 11 upgrade requires special attentions and hacks. Some enthusiast-dabblers I know have already tried installing Win 11 on their Devils Canyon rigs, and they didn't succeed.

Some Anandtech members and interlopers may have more space in their homes for their PC preoccupations, or they may actually have more computers to play with. They may already have the latest and greatest Intel processors to use in their daily work, making older models free for the uncertainties of experimentation.

So it seems almost unfair to call such enthusiasts "guinea pigs". But they can serve our community usefully -- as guinea pigs.

What I have in mind in the following proposal is a sort of journal or log of developing experiences with Win 11 installed on systems excluded by Microsoft. I think MS accommodated gen-9 and later processors with their newest OS.

Who is game for this? Who has already started with it? We'd like to track the experience of Win 11 on an excluded system to see if the worries about it materialize. For instance, people worry about the failure of future feature updates to Win 11 on such systems.

 

[Tech Junky]

W11 vs W10 isn't that big of a change technology wise. IT's the same junk MS has been putting out for years w/ a different skin applied to it. Thread director is the appeal for 12th gen and later CPU's as it handles the big/little cores more efficiently according to MS anyway. The brute power when you're dealing with a 20 thread 700/K/KF/H CPU though puts older gens to shame anyway. There's no real magic sauce needed and running a server with Linux on it performs better anyway because of the lack of Windows bad coding and bloat. By comparison the W11 version w/ 32GB of RAM uses at a minimum booted to the desktop / no open apps 4GB and the Linux running a few apps and idle ~3GB w/ only 16GB installed.

Opening Chrome on W11 w/ several tabs open jumps RAM to ~10GB from 4GB. There's nothing that requires using W11 vs 10 or 8 other than wanting to use something new and slightly different. When prepping my 8700K for sale and putting 10 on it the response was just as snappy as it could be with 11 w/o having to hack it to do 11.

There's just a bunch of hype and different reasons to use 11 at this point. Nothing special though in how it runs. It's mostly marketing in my eyes and experience so far running it for about a year. For me switching was just to stop getting nagged by all of the forced updates on 10. Then again I block updates by DNS and other hacks in group policies to just alert me to them rather than download and install them. Windows is really invasive compared to long ago with older versions. Reviewing updates before install in important these days w/ less QC/QA happening before pushing them out resulting in most issues.

Being more of a "prosumer" I'm more likely using HW/SW that isn't mainstream and more bleeding edge than most would be running. I don't need more than the laptop and server sitting around with fans spinning. I only need the two systems because one is the router/switch/AP/firewall/NAS/DVR that hosts everything and well the Laptop is the client along with other things to stream from the server. I try to keep them running similar CPU gens for practical purposes as enhancement are made to the MOBO side like PCIE / DDR moving to Gen5. The disappointment on the laptop side is they only incremented to Gen4 in most setups. I didn't' find mention of Gen5 in brands I was looking at when searching.

When looking at PCIE though it didn't make sense to bother with Intel 11th for it was more of a stopgap CPU release prior to ADL which was the major upgrade in terms of speed / cores / underlying bandwidth. Besides the obvious bigger things being upgraded the DMI went from 3.0 8GB/s to 4.0 16GB/s for peripherals besides the X16 / X4 NVME slot.

My recommendation for older CPU's at this point would probably be put linux on the machine and use virtualbox to run W11 if you really want to use W1. It's not going to be snappy since you have less cores / threads on older CPUs but, it will work. Now, if you're running a X299 / HEDT type setup then the VM will run just fine since you have more resources to allocate.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Well, I wouldn't mind going through the hacks at a later time to extend the life of my "old" rigs. But I want to know if Win 11 feature upgrades will succeed. I think that was the concern some had. So what do we have left? Less than three years or so. For someone who felt confidence in being on top of IT during the 90s, I suppose I could familiarize myself with Linux.

For me, it's not the money, but the time. If I'm going to build a 12-gen system, I want to set aside a few months for it -- probably beginning 2023.

I've been spending money on micro-computers and peripherals since 1982. I just feel weary of it now, but for years I've maintained an annual budget for it. So it's just a matter of the time. Some could argue "What time does it take? -- to drop an ATX board, CPU and RAM into a well-prepared case?" Certainly it can be done in a few hours. But I don't like unfortunate surprises when I'm doing "daily business" with my computers. I like to vet and test a new build.

From a different perspective, if you have a rig that's been through all that, and it seems lightning-fast, and -- if you thought of it as a sort of "achievement" -- it's hard to let go. The longer these types of inclinations persist, the less likely you can get someone in "Sale or Trade" or Ebay to buy your old stuff. Of course, if you got so many years out of it, sending it to the recycler is not really a loss.

 

[igor_kavinski]

If I'm going to build a 12-gen system, I want to set aside a few months for it -- probably beginning 2023.

Man, that worries me a lot. Why oh why do you want 12th gen in 2023? Get Zen 4! Or Raptor Lake! 12th gen was V1.0 of Intel's hybrid core cluster experiment. I know you aren't going to buy anything less than an i7-12700K. i7-13700K is going to be far better and refined and about the same price as an i7-12700K in 2023.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Man, that worries me a lot. Why oh why do you want 12th gen in 2023? Get Zen 4! Or Raptor Lake! 12th gen was V1.0 of Intel's hybrid core cluster experiment. I know you aren't going to buy anything less than an i7-12700K. i7-13700K is going to be far better and refined and about the same price as an i7-12700K in 2023.

Sure, Igor -- I'll weigh those considerations. I've got time for this. I still want to get some mileage out of these Skylake cores. But I need to have a sensible strategy.

Here's some skinny about mainstreamers and their desktop purchases. You can't blame people if they are "looking for a good deal." I know techies and enthusiast-dabblers who buy corporate-asset refurbs, and that's fine if one thinks they'll be satisfactory. People in that category are more likely to know beforehand what they're getting.

But now I see two local friends who bought "new" computers four years ago or more recently. One bought an i7-4790 system; the other friend bought three gen-6 INtel PCs more recently. They weren't buying "used" computers or corporate-refurbs. They got them from places like Best Buy.