The big exceptions are things like “apt get upgrade”, but both boxes bottleneck on starlink for that. Modern games and compilation are the other obvious things.
> Modern games and compilation are the other obvious things.
I mean if we exempt all of the CPU intensive things then speed of your CPU doesn’t matter
I don’t have a fast CPU for the low overhead things, though. I buy one because that speed up when I run commands or compile my code adds up when I’m doing 100 or 1000 little CPU intensive tasks during the day. A few seconds or minutes saved here and there adds up multiplied by 100 or 1000 times per day. Multiply that by 200 working days per year and the value of upgrading a CPU (after over a decade) is very high on the list of ways you can buy more time. I don’t care so much about something rendering in 1 frame instead of 2 frames, but when I type a command and have to wait idly for it to complete, that’s just lost time.
When the numbers are that far apart, there is definitely room to perceive a performance improvement.
2011 era hardware is dramatically slower than what’s available in 2025. I go back and use a machine that is less than 10 years old occasionally and it’s surprising how much less responsive it feels, even with a modern high speed SSD drive installed.
Some people just aren’t sensitive to slow systems. Honestly a great place to be because it’s much cheaper that way. However, there is definitely a speed difference between a 2011 system and a 2025 system.