- Joined
- Apr 2, 2011
- Messages
- 2,852 (0.57/day)
I ran an x79 system for a little over a decade. The 3930k was great, but 2 SATAIII ports and a mess of SATAII ports is surprisingly limiting. Moreover the PCI-e limitations, lack of USB3.0 abundance, and general power consumption from the pro-sumer platform make its choice pretty foolish in any modern setting.
We now have games and software that take advantage of M.2 connection speeds. We have games that are ancient (Warframe) which finally require instruction sets which old hardware simply does not have. It's sad to say, but I don't have any nostalgia for computer hardware, because in 3 generations it's not worth it. I went from primarily SATA connections to M.2, 16 GB of RAM in 8 slots to 64 GB in 4, throughput is just silly comparatively, 6 cores that sometimes benefitted from hyperthreading to 8 cores with 16 threads that works without thought, higher clock speeds, lower power consumption, and a platform that cost me as much as my processor (not adjusted for inflation). I'm pretty happy, and I'm not ever buying decade hardware again....except maybe with GPUs. Those things are silly expensive at any reasonable performance, and when major retailers are still trying to sell off 580 cards in the 7000 series era it indicates how little generations consistently innovate for the money.
That said, the AMD-Intel war did everyone a favor by forcing innovation. It made platforms like x58 and x79 worth shedding, because the thing you get more than anything else was connectivity and features. You're welcome to forsake that, but as someone who bought the highest end they could afford, thinking it'd be a decade expense, what I can offer is that moving from SATA was transformative...and not having a 3+minute boot basically made the computer experience something completely different. That's for a regular user. The infrequent users I sometimes dealt with basically went from having a boot and time to get a cup of coffee to pressing the button and being physically surprised when the boot chime happened before they left the room. Sometime experience matters...and X79 to AM4 was a revelation.
We now have games and software that take advantage of M.2 connection speeds. We have games that are ancient (Warframe) which finally require instruction sets which old hardware simply does not have. It's sad to say, but I don't have any nostalgia for computer hardware, because in 3 generations it's not worth it. I went from primarily SATA connections to M.2, 16 GB of RAM in 8 slots to 64 GB in 4, throughput is just silly comparatively, 6 cores that sometimes benefitted from hyperthreading to 8 cores with 16 threads that works without thought, higher clock speeds, lower power consumption, and a platform that cost me as much as my processor (not adjusted for inflation). I'm pretty happy, and I'm not ever buying decade hardware again....except maybe with GPUs. Those things are silly expensive at any reasonable performance, and when major retailers are still trying to sell off 580 cards in the 7000 series era it indicates how little generations consistently innovate for the money.
That said, the AMD-Intel war did everyone a favor by forcing innovation. It made platforms like x58 and x79 worth shedding, because the thing you get more than anything else was connectivity and features. You're welcome to forsake that, but as someone who bought the highest end they could afford, thinking it'd be a decade expense, what I can offer is that moving from SATA was transformative...and not having a 3+minute boot basically made the computer experience something completely different. That's for a regular user. The infrequent users I sometimes dealt with basically went from having a boot and time to get a cup of coffee to pressing the button and being physically surprised when the boot chime happened before they left the room. Sometime experience matters...and X79 to AM4 was a revelation.
I'm aiming to OC it to 4.0 to 4.5GHz on air (Thermaltake Frio). The unlocked multiplier should make it quite easy to get there, we'll see.
