Haswell, and the 10-year rig revisited

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Hell, even the venerable i7 920 is 4.5 years old now, and even with an assumed Haswell OC of 5GHz, that's only a ~55% improvement over a 4GHz 920 :|

 

[bigboxes]

x2 is from 2005, exactly 10 years ago we are talking about Athlon XP and Pentium 4 Northwood

my Athlon 64 X2 PC is also active and working well,

Yeah Markfw90, I was thinking the same thing. My wife has the X2 hand me down. She's not a power user, but even I have started to think of upgrading her rig.

 

[gipper53]

My father has been using my old Athlon 64 3400+ single core to run a small CNC machine he has in his basement. He designs electric guitar bodies on basic 3D CAD software then runs the CNC software to the machine. It's running XP on 2gb of RAM, ATI 9800 pro (remember that beast?) and the original hard drive. Hell, the CNC plugs in with a parallel port if that tells you something!

For this it does just fine and it still boots reasonably quick. I'm amazed the amount of wood dust that constantly builds up has not fried something. A few times the dust has been so heavy you could not see anything on the bottom of the graphics card, but it still keeps plugging away. If it dies he'll inherit the old HP6400 dual Xeon workstation (P4 era) I have sitting around. That old beast will expand to 8gb.

 

[cbn]

I see no real reason to wait for SATA Express, PCIe4, etc. It's one thing having the interface available, quite another to have devices that make full use of the interface.

Current SSDs can saturate the (SATA III) 6 Gbps interface.

According to this article at Xbit labs Intel will include SATA Express natively on the 9 series (Broadwell) chipset. If true, then I suspect we should see third party SATA Express at some point on the Haswell Boards.

 

[tweakboy]

Well, I have an X2 3800 rig that I used today. Its the only one that will run Dune 2000 for some reason. I think its 10 years old.

i7 Ivy Bridge 3770k is the 10 year CPU right now.

When Ivy E comes out Im gonna grab a 4930k

Haswell for enthusiasts not coming until 2014

 

[PingSpike]

If you'd asked me 5 years ago if you could build a 10 year machine, I'd probably have said no. But given how the rate of change on things I think its quite doable. Even thinking about a 10 year old machine now, it has probably been a bit of a pig the past few years but still usable. And that lifespan encompassed a period of time that included the introduction and mainstream acceptance of dual core processors, core2duo and pretty significant increases in memory and video card performance. There's no reason for me to think performance increases will increase their rate of introduction over the next 10 years versus the last 10 years and plenty of reasons for me to think that the delta will be smaller of the next decade versus the last instead.

I just went to see if I should upgrade my processor, a 2500K. I bought that chip over 2 years ago. The chip is still for sale and it has the same price at newegg as when I bought it. Intel has introduced a new chip that costs pretty much exactly the same with the same price essentially. There was a time when a 2 year old processor was basically worthless. Now it doesn't even drop in price and the only things introduced seem to be lower power versions of the same.

Whether it would be worth holding onto the old platform over that long is debatable. I see you have some concerns about the direction computing is heading over that time period as your rationale for this idea versus the traditional cost and upgrade hassle (future proofing) reasons.

I think the machine would be viable after 10 years. I wouldn't even really worry about the new interfaces personally, just make sure you have ample room on the motherboard's PCI-E bus and maybe try to snag a board with PCI-E 3.0 and probably USB 3.0 onboard. There have always been adapter cards for new standards and I don't expect things to be any different. That should cover you for USB 4 or new SATA standards. They might not be the most cost effective way to make those new standards available on your PC but the solutions do exist.

 

[cytg111]

Dude, a 2500K is good for another 5 years easily. Drop in some SSD's and a new descrete card next generation or next and you are set.

 

[Dark Shroud]

Dude, a 2500K is good for another 5 years easily. Drop in some SSD's and a new descrete card next generation or next and you are set.

The 2500k's IGP does not do OpenCL.
The 2500k does not have PCI-Express 3.0

These are two problems I face with my 2600k.

Add into that P67 & H6* motherboards having crappy chip sets.

 

[RU482]

The 2500k's IGP does not do OpenCL.
The 2500k does not have PCI-Express 3.0

These are two problems I face with my 2600k.

Add into that P67 & H6* motherboards having crappy chip sets.

I'll bite....why are they crappy chipsets? compared to what?

 

[2is]

The 2500k's IGP does not do OpenCL.
The 2500k does not have PCI-Express 3.0

These are two problems I face with my 2600k.

Add into that P67 & H6* motherboards having crappy chip sets.

PCIe 3.0 virtually useless currently
Lack of OpenCL cured by discrete card
Nothing wrong with the chipsets.

 

[rpanic]

Have a Xerox 820-2 running at 4mhz it still plays games as well as it did in 82.

 

[Vic Vega]

I have an Athlon XP 3200+ PC I built in 2004, so, going on 10 years. It's overclocked to 2.4GHz (from stock 2.2GHz) has an X1650 Pro 512 MB AGP video card, an SSD and 4 GB of ram. It works fine as an every day PC. I doubt anything will change between now and next year. You could call it a 10 year PC, though it's had some upgrades over time.

 

[Dark Shroud]

I'll bite....why are they crappy chipsets? compared to what?

The third party chips used in the motherboards for USB3 and sometimes for more SATA3 ports.

PCIe 3.0 virtually useless currently
Lack of OpenCL cured by discrete card
Nothing wrong with the chipsets.

Have you used any of the P67, H67, or H61 motherboards over the long term?

The third party chips sets have lower performance and I have had more than a few driver issues. Not to mention my pre-B3 motherboard's SATA2 ports crapping out. I was very relieved Intel paid the shipping for that warranty issue.

 

[pcunite]

Assuming I do something similar for my personal rig, except get a Haswell. Do you all think that the Haswell platform is a good investment for a "ten year rig"?

Absolutely. I just upgraded from an Intel Q6600 system and frankly, I could have gone another 2 years easily making it 7 years. I have a rule: Don't upgrade unless a new system will cut your time in HALF. My Q6600 cut a 3 hour task down to 15 minutes. It will take a 5Ghz system to half that.

However, for some new kinds of tasks I do, a new Intel i5-3570K paired with Sata III (6Gbs) has dramatically sped up certain jobs. So much so that I've enjoyed the upgrade.


If you want a 10 year system in 2013, I suggest the following.

• Mainboard with 10k capacitors (Asus Maximus V Gene, etc)
• Sata III ssd with 500 MB/s read 250 MB/s write
• 8GB system memory
• Very high quality PSU
• High quality UPS with line conditioning

 

[tweakboy]

Absolutely. I just upgraded from an Intel Q6600 system and frankly, I could have gone another 2 years easily making it 7 years. I have a rule: Don't upgrade unless a new system will cut your time in HALF. My Q6600 cut a 3 hour task down to 15 minutes. It will take a 5Ghz system to half that.

However, for some new kinds of tasks I do, a new Intel i5-3570K paired with Sata III (6Gbs) has dramatically sped up certain jobs. So much so that I've enjoyed the upgrade.


If you want a 10 year system in 2013, I suggest the following.

• Mainboard with 10k capacitors (Asus Maximus V Gene, etc)
• Sata III ssd with 500 MB/s read 250 MB/s write
• 8GB system memory
• Very high quality PSU
• High quality UPS with line conditioning

Why on earth does he need a Maximus. That is a motherboard for SLI tri and quad. Hes not going to SLI, your waisting money with the maximus unless you use SLI or above. You dont need that board. A good board is the Asus P8 series. 8GB only ? minimum get a 16GB kit if you want 10 years with this. 8GB will not give you ten years... gl

 

[VirtualLarry]

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238553/Next_gen_USB_SuperSpeed_to_eliminate_power_cords

New USB3.0 SuperSpeed spec (10.0Gbit/sec) and ThunderBolt spec (20Gbit/sec). Also something about 100W of power being available over USB3.0, with voltages ranging up to 20V.

Sounded kind of crazy to me. Charging/running an entire laptop, off of a USB3.0 port from some other machine?

So much for the idea of sitting on a computer for 10 years. They never seem to fail to churn the market with new "innovations". Nevermind if we need them or not. The 100W USB charging spec seems kind of pie-in-the-sky, if we build it, they will come, etc.

 

[Railgun]

Considering it's been talked about for at least two years and nada yet...

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, I finally built the rig. As least as far as today goes, it's VERY "snappy". Used an 80GB X25-M G2 SSD, scores a 7.8 WEI on Windows 7 64-bit. Sadly, the built-in IGP of the IB Celeron G1610 only scored a 5.0 on Windows Aero performance on WEI, which is really dragging my score way down. Not sure of the reason for that. It scored a 6.3 on gaming performance, surprisingly. CPU performance score was like 6.1, RAM score with 16GB of DDR3-1333 was 7.3 or 7.4.

Altogether, the rig flies thus far. Haven't added an A/V app yet. I expect that it will slow down some after that.

I was also surprised a bit by the fact that I'm running it with SATA2, with a SATA2 SSD, and it still scored a 7.8. Those Intel X25-M G2 drives were ahead of their time.

Edit: 18 minutes to download and install all 71 updates for a fresh installation of Win7 64-bit SP1, over a 3Mbit DSL connection. Not too shabby.

 

[A5]

Hell, even the venerable i7 920 is 4.5 years old now, and even with an assumed Haswell OC of 5GHz, that's only a ~55% improvement over a 4GHz 920 :|

To be fair, my 920 never hit 4GHz and I haven't been able to get it over 3.2 GHz for over a year now. I'm definitely ready for a 4+Ghz Haswell.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I ended up getting some G3258 combos with GA-H81M-DS2V v1.0 boards, 8GB of DDR3-1600 (GSkill), 240GB M500 SSD, Win7 64-bit, 7950 3GB video. Should last me awhile.

 

[stockwiz]

Any 2600K owner could use their rig 10 years if they are just doing 1080P/1200P gaming like I am... it might be the first truly 10 year build that still have good power when it's retired... though the Q6600 is still functional and is going on 7-8 years old, the 2600K is quite a jump from that mostly due to the clockspeed increase.

My 2 rigs are now 5 years old, having been built in early 2011.

 

[Shmee]

Nice 2 year+ bump guys. Lol. And larry, it seems you cheaped out on the CPU

Also, the 7950 is a good card (especially with OC) but it may start to struggle in the near future with modern games, depending on resolution.

 

[SPBHM]

Nice 2 year+ bump guys. Lol. And larry, it seems you cheaped out on the CPU

Also, the 7950 is a good card (especially with OC) but it may start to struggle in the near future with modern games, depending on resolution.

it should still beat a new gtx 950, specially when 3GB are a factor, so I think it will be safe as a midrange card for a while...

 

[sm625]

Edit: RE the P4 rig mentioned above. I'm not advocating every machine should be kept for 10 years. P4 is too old, slow, hot, power-hungry, etc. PCs from that generation should be replaced.

I believe you will find that this attitude will persist. 10 years from now, an ivy bridge machine will likely be seen in much the same way. Old, hot, and slow. In ten years, you should be able to buy a PC on a stick that contains an SoC which contains four cores with more IPC than IB, 32GB of embedded nonvolatile RAM, 1TB of embedded flash (or possibly just one single type of nonvolatile storage). It is also possible that the low end PC will completely vanish by then, replaced by a smartphone app.

 

[ultimatebob]

I don't know... the first Core i7 processors came out in 2008, and still perform well today.

If you got a high end Haswell chip now, it just might still perform adequately 10 years from now.