My primary desktop is a 3770K running Linux. That CPU's the unexpected beast. Just churning through what you throw at it with incredible speed even for today. I process RAW photos, encode some audio and develop high performance scientific software on it (testing it lowers my heating bills, somewhat).

I want to try one of the new Ryzen CPUs, but I have no reason to upgrade.

I’ve been doing big C++ builds (think gcc, LLVM-sized projects) on my Ryzen 9 5950X and I wouldn’t have it any other way. This thing saves me so much time every day. It’s so nice not to have to do remote builds to get a quick prototype.

The best part is that it was a drop in replacement for my 2700X. I already had a great Noctua air cooler so I was all set.

Ah, Ryzen 5000 and Threadripper 3000 series are absolute beasts, no doubt about it.

I want to work with Rust more and when I get to that point I'll likely start gathering money for a TR Pro but until then, and me mostly working with dynamical languages, even old-ish i7 CPUs are more than adequate.

Yeah, I'd like to upgrade my gaming system (4970k and a GTX1080ti) but past wanting to play at 4k and experience ray tracing there is almost no reason to do so.

Now, if the 3080 was actually available at MSRP I'd probably have upgraded, but that's at least a year away from happening.

IMO go big or go home in this case. For a gaming machine I'd aim for some of the Ryzen 5000's (likely even the 5700 is an overkill) and an RTX 3090 so I can play 3440x1440 @ 144FPS (or maybe even 4K @ 120FPS).

As it is, I almost have no reason to upgrade my gaming machine right now. Playing on a 21:9 wide display (2560x1080) and never go below 70-80 FPS in any game. Usually it's 100-120 FPS.

The problem with these cards is actually being able to get one. Even if you've got the $2k to spend for a 3090, good luck with finding stock.

True. Right now I could only buy an RTX 3090 for 3100 EUR (~3740 USD) and I am not willing to pay that much.

But I am happy to wait. Upgrading my gaming machine is a very low prio.

Yeah, I have two thinkpads -- one from 2010 and one from 2012. Both of them have enough grunt to get through most any task, the heaviest of which is compiling large codebases. One of them was my daily driver for eight years; I only upgraded to a Ryzen because I wanted MOAR COARS and more RAM.

It's funny how today's computers could theoretically handle a user's workload for decades yet Apple builds them to fall apart after four years. There was a Hackernews story recently about a guy faffing around with old 68k Macs from the late 80s, he said that those old Macs were rated by Apple to last for fifteen years. And yet they come from an era of much more rapid utility decay for computer hardware, when a computer would be utterly obsolete after just a few years.

I think you might be going to the other extreme just by a tiiiiiiiny bit. :D

It's true that a lot of people are just fine with a a 10-year old i5 or an i7. Hell, a lot of store owners and front-end offices grumble at an i3 CPU because it's still too powerful for the daily activities of the staff.

But when it comes to routinely compiling C / C++ / Rust then you need all the power and hardware innovation you can get.

This would be more convincing if I wasn't reading it on a 2013 Macbook. But yes, Big Sur is the last major update available and in a few years it's going to be obsolete.

TBH a 68040 mac would be useful in 1999.