A New Lease of Life

Lounge EndeavourOS pub
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I’ve had an old box sitting around for a while gathering dust, I built it from scratch in 2015 - it’s more than capable, 4Ghz i7-6700K, 32GB DDR4, 512GB Samsung EVO SSD. For any other operating system, it’s effectively obsolete.

Popped in my EOS usb drive, clicked install, and a handful of minutes later, - maybe four!? I’m sitting at a login screen!? It literally took me longer to map my network shares and copy across my bash_profile and fstab from my main rig.

This is the reason right here, that I won’t install any other OS, or buy a Mac. Obsolescence (god that word is hard to spell) should be a decision made by the user, - I will always build my own kit and this gem of a machine still has another decade of useful life in it before components like the board capacitors start to fail. Until then, it’s going to sit quietly feeling useful! :wink:

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Same here.
Just last week revived my dad’s old PC: a 2-core celeron, 4Gb.

Put in an old laptop-SSD, installed EOS and went online within 10 minutes.

Very happy to be able to use this PC for browsing, mailing and some text editing.

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Nothing wrong with the i7-6700K. :wink:

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I have an i7-8086K 5.0 Ghz Intel Anniversary processor. I expect it to be around for a long time yet! :wink:

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i5 2500 here

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E-waste is a big thing for a while now, lots of good hardware being thrown away, or especially Microsoft with the Windows 11 hardware requirements, and now the Copilot+PC requirements just encourages lots of useful hardware to be thrown away. New products as well, Apple or otherwise, so many phones especially get switched while i keep mine until they break pretty much.

The processor of my old system was a i7-2600 from 2012 until 2020 when I switched to an AMD 3700X, and then in 2022 got an AMD 5700X as this was the last lineup for my socket type on the motherboard.

My first GPU I bought was an Nvidia 980Ti back in 2015 (This was my first fully built system myself rather than part built and part OEM) and I used that up until 2022 when I got an AMD Sapphire 6800XT GPU. And then the GPU price increase realisation hit my by that point compared to my first card in 2015.

However I am glad I went with AMD, back then I never knew I would ever go to Linux but it made my life easier. When I installed EOS I spent 15 minutes working out how to install AMD Drivers as I didn’t believe the first few sources saying you don’t need to and trying to work out how to check if they are installed or not and then realised AMD drivers come with Linux, as on Windows I was used to downloading and installing all drivers manually (I know windows update does it but I don’t trust it and it doesn’t always get it right). In the end I found Linux runs better on my hardware anyway so it’s going to last even longer than planned.

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My mom has a PC with Intel Core 2 Quad processor, or maybe it’s a lesser Core 2 Duo. In any case it’s old at this point. I think it has a Radeon HD 3870 GPU and a whopping 4 gigs of ram.

Might be interesting to try how EOS would run on it. :smiley:

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I had the i7 8700 K. Back then Intel CPU’s were really good.

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i don’t know all my computers specs but it was an $800 dollar computer (CHEAP) my dad got for me YEARS ago. it still runs like a dream. sleak as hell, snappy and fast. i love linux! purple peoples for ever! I do not plan on getting another computer for a while as my house needs fixing up more.

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I still have all my old parts too so I could build up a second PC with them with a purpose, or as spare parts if anything in my current PC breaks. I also repaired my Family Members PCs quite a few times too if they are out of warranty or maintenance such as replacing thermal paste on parts, saved them hundreds over time for simple maintenance stuff or replacing HDD with SSD. I would install Linux on them but I know I would become tech support all the time if I do that.

The 980Ti however was going to fail eventually as it started having issues but by this time I had moved on to photo editing and some games and other tasks it wasn’t strong enough to deal with.

For me though Linux has been great and got me interested in Computers again as I feel like I can explore and tinker and work it all out again like when I was a child with Windows XP.

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6700k with 32GB RAM is still a decent configuration even for current day windows. That PC still has life in it for a few years. That CPU is roughly equivalent to a Intel Core i5 1130G7 laptop CPU, which is still very usable.

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Sure, though my dad’s old computer is a Celeron N3050, launched Q1’15 [1].

CPU: dual core Intel Celeron N3050 (-MCP-) speed/min/max: 864/480/2160 MHz

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3,7Gi       2,4Gi       250Mi       716Mi       2,0Gi       1,3Gi

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/87257/intel-celeron-processor-n3050-2m-cache-up-to-2-16-ghz/specifications.html

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Yeah i replied to the wrong comment. It was meant as a reply for the initial comment. Unfortunately I don’t think the linked comment can be changed.

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No problem, @nate.

I did not know that the Celeron N3050 was as old as 9 years; great to know that EOS is running quite well on it.

Still, the 4 Gi memory is rather limited, so I did add a swap-file.

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It absolutely chews through normal day to day tasks, - the only difference I’ve found is for compiling code, where the 7800X3D just hammers it a little with raw speed and boost clocks. Either way, I’ve got two incredible machines. Any other OS and I would have one brand new rig, and one box going to e-waste. shudder

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I still own my very first laptop, an Acer Travelmate 800 Lci which I’ve bought in 2002, the first Centrino generation. Okay, I don’t use it anymore acutally… but once I revived it and threw Crunchbang on it and used it as a spotify client. Wwhich worked quite well for a while, in combination with pulse audio, even mixing the stream with other audio sources.

Anyway, I guess it’s not reasonable to throw EOS on it, unless it would be an headless install I guess :wink:

In my current upgrade progress, I’ve “practiced” the installation process and explored EOS at first on my last Macbook Pro 7,1 from 2010 and unless troubles to switch from nouveau to NVidia drivers it worked like a charm. Only current video codexes is a bit too much for the build in Geforce 320M, thus a lot of dropped frames. Otherwise it would be a useful desktop for light browsing the web and office uses.

But I’ll make use of the outdated Macbook, just for backup purposes. And to migrate dotfiles and such between the machines.

My actual desktop is a newly build ASRock Deskmate x300, even if it’s a AM4 platform, and only has an Ryzen 5 5600 in combination with an RX6600, it’s still plenty enough for some years to come.

And definitely a nice upgrade to my former HP Z600, which I’ve bought used (Dual Xeon X56700, 2,93Ghz , 24GB … Radeon Rx 480 with an patched 580 bios flash). I’ve choosen that workstation a few years back as it’s a popular Hackintosh platform as it shares a lot of features with the “last” good Mac Pro 5,1.

Anyway, running those two CPUs from 2010 of the Westmere-EP which are rated with 95 Watt TDP each is a bit inefficient nowadays. Still useable as a daily driver. And a space heater :smile:

From my point of view: We’ll merely see efficiency improvements in the next years, the times of huge performance gains and smaller die manufacturing processes each second year are long gone. We’re currently at 3nm. And it will take a few more years towards 1nm processes.

Some may argue that my choice to build a new system based on the old AM4 platform won’t provide a good upgrade path for the future. I’m totally aware of that but I’ve actually made my choices based on a budget and towards efficiency gains. And I don’t really need much more than a 1080p machine.

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Absolutely this, - if anything it’ll be more cores and threads. My 7800X3D will probably last for as long as the transistors hold out. I don’t play games at anything other than 1080p at 144Hz, and even then, rarely anything demanding. 5Ghz really is ridiculous when you think about that level of speed when we were running Mhz devices a few decades back.

Ironically, my old i7-6700k runs pretty cold, barely 48c under load. Whereas my 7800X3D hits 41c as a baseline, and high 70’s under load. Newer chips are designed to boost and run hot doing so, but that’s a whole other conversation around efficiency vs compute time to complete.

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Which isn’t really a issue I assume. My 5600 actually is only cooled by the boxed wrath spire cooler. And it’s 46°C at idle. While being configured with cTDP down at 45 Watt.
Spend the last days to find a good governor setting for my usage and had to come to the realization that full load with boost frequencies will definitely result in thermal throttling on all cores. Thus, for now, no boost clocks for me. Unless I’ll cram in a different cooler in the small case I’ve got (ASRock Deskmeet x300, miniITX, 6L). Thermal improvements will hopefully contribute to longevity.

Anyway, 28 watts of power draw at idle across the whole CPU package is quite nice.

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Absolutely nothing! ^^

My current gaming rig has an i5-6600K and it’s still going strong!

The green 1060 3GB is the one imposing some limits on me… :smile:

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I have the 6 GB beast in it’s day.

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