Question How many cores are you operating with on your PERSONAL PC at home?

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Mopetar

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2011
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Is it really that surprising that users on a tech forum skew higher than your average Joe? If you went to a car enthusiast forum you'd probably find that more of their members purchase high octane fuel.
 

BonzaiDuck

Lifer
Jun 30, 2004
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Is it really that surprising that users on a tech forum skew higher than your average Joe? If you went to a car enthusiast forum you'd probably find that more of their members purchase high octane fuel.
Well . . . my "Garage" threads have me running a 26-year-old SUV with 192,000 on the odometer and an engine that runs like new. So I USE high-octane -- definitely. It is now a "21-st century Android SUV". It may be true that I could get better gas mileage on something new, but I love the one I've got.

I suppose I came back to this survey thread for ruminating over replies about my Skylake motherboard replacement and Kaby-upgrade opportunity. It's true -- I haven't really "kept up" over the past couple years, and I remember that people were salivating as they waited for Optane when I originally built this rig. I was chided -- urged to buy parts for a Comet Lake deca-core, or something in-between.

Of course, it's my own responsibility to keep in mind who is more likely to frequent these forums, and adjust my attitude. And as I've said, maybe . . . after some time . . . I'll build a hexa-octo-deca-core -- something. I'm just not hitting a brick wall with the quad I'm running now.

At least, we're 27% of forum users -- still. I remember when half of the forum members were still running Win 7, while others had switched to Win 10, although the parallel is not a perfect comparison.

Another member was posting on Cases & Cooling to discuss the matter of "water or air", and he's at a crossroads with IIRC -- maybe an i9-10900K or something similar, noting that it typically records temperatures at 80C or a little more under stock settings. He says he uses it for work that involves media encoding, so I can see how someone could use such a processor that way. But he also noted that for other things, he wasn't using the rig to its full potential. I think it finally occurred to me that he could create a down-clocked BIOS profile, and easily switch back and forth.

At least, when I'm ready, I can find a lot of info from the multi-core pioneers here at Anandtech! :D
 

BonzaiDuck

Lifer
Jun 30, 2004
15,699
1,448
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I'm surprised by the amount of 4 core users.
On Anandtech? Perhaps you would guess that there are too many in the statistical count.

Everywhere else? My understanding of mainstream users suggests that there are even many our there who are rocking dual-core systems. I know a retired electronics tech, very PC, laptop and tablet-savvy, whose main desktop runs a Conroe C2D. Of course he's not a gamer. Not with diabetes and eye problems.

A widow I know not far from here wanted some extra income after her husband died, so she started selling Amway products. She bought a computer and got a tax deduction for it. It's probably at least ten years old, and I don't know if it's a dual-core or a quad. I don't think she even knows. But it keeps on ticking and takes a licking. We e-mail all the time.

I know a retired physicist back East whose son is an info-tech professional -- a gamer between high-school and college. The physicist has a range of devices, probably a desktop and a laptop, but nothing more than four cores.

Then there's my dentist, who has a hand in equipping his office LAN for his staff. He just buys Dell corporate asset turnovers and replaces the PSUs.

I"m actually building a quad-core this year, out of spare parts and dated technology. I'm more interested in the focus of the project attending to the case and its mods. If I opt for a hexa-core mobo, CPU and RAM in the next couple years, I can just swap in those parts.

I would think that turning over your dated mobo-processor-RAM as an Ebay or "Sale and Trade" combo could be a pain-in-the-ass. Surely, someone will buy it. Probably just not anyone chomping at the bit for this year's (or even last year's) technology. And in the field of mainstreamers, how many of them actually build their own desktop PCs?