Necro thread...
6 years later...and I am still using the same machine that I wrote about 6 years ago! I don't game (I have a PS4 for gaming), as the PC is used for general surfing, and light productivity tasks, so nothing is bogged down. This rig is almost 10 years old now, and shows no signs of slowing down for everyday tasks. I still use it for hosting small VM's as well. I also run a Plex Server on it to stream media to Roku's hooked up to 5 TV's thru the house. It just keeps chugging along.
Back in the mid to late 90's I would upgrade every 6 months. Now, I just can't justify replacing something that just works. I suspect I will be using this rig until the capacitors on the motherboard die.
I still have the 16 GB of DDR3 RAM that I bought many years ago for $25 at a Microcenter deal (I did test it out when a friend built an i5 system a few years ago). The problem is that everything new is DDR4 now!
I bought a used Dell system with a i5 3570 CPU, and 6 GB of DDR3 RAM for $60. I suspect I will put the 16 GB of ram in there at some point, and buy a few very large SSD's (the Dell is a small form factor case), and use that system until it dies. Eventually prices on 1-2 TB SSD's will be in the sub $100 range, and I can put a few of them into the Dell, whereas I would be limited to space due to the physical size of hard drives.
Until that time...the Phenom II 720 rolls onward!
The strange thing is I have alot more money to work with now and can easily afford to buy a brand new top of the line system and just choose not to, compared to 20-25 years ago (where I was young and broke)--yet still upgraded constantly.