What is the oldest PC you consider still useful?

[Radium_Angel]

Gaming aside...

daily usage tasks. What do you consider "too old" to be useful?

 

 

[Origami Cactus]

I would consider i7 920 still perfectly usable, and that is an 11 year old cpu.

AND IT IS A 4C/8T, intel was stuck on 4 cores for 9 years, wtf.

[Skiiwee29]

Depends on what you do.. My in-laws used a system with an Athlon x64 5600+ until last year when I forced them to upgrade. Technically it still worked 100% no issues. If it boots up and you can surf the web.. then its useful. 

[LukeNukem9]

1 minute ago, Radium_Angel said:

Gaming aside...

daily usage tasks. What do you consider "too old" to be useful?

 

 

Core 2 duos, 2GB of DDR2, 320GB Sata2 hard drive, a mobo with a floppy connecter. Thats my case.

But from a retrospective, a bangin' windows 98SE rig

[LukeNukem9]

1 minute ago, Origami Cactus said:

intel was stuck on 4 cores for 9 years

Yeah i wondered about y that is. Then 8th gen came along AND BOOM!

[Origami Cactus]

Just now, LukeTheCoder05 said:

Yeah i wondered about y that is. Then 8th gen came along AND BOOM!

then ryzen came with 8 cores, while i7 7700k had 4, and then intel was like holdup? and then they came out with 6 cores. I honestly belive that if ryzen had flopped then we would still be at 4c/8t at mainstream.

[flibberdipper]

If my XP rig (in my sig) had 4GB of RAM instead of the 512MB it currently does, that would still be pretty usable.

 

I draw the line at a single 1GHz or lesser P3 with a gig of RAM or less and pretty much any Radeon X1000/HD2000 class GPU.

[cluelessgenius]

always depends on the use case my parents have an old celeron something laptop which i put a ssd in and it runs perfectly fine for their bit of ebay, emails and skype. 

[.Apex.]

i'd consider anything after 2010 is still useful.

 

but worth it? probably not

[Fasauceome]

Anything before the core 2 era is too slow for basic tasks. The era when the Pentium was the best Intel had to offer, and the athlon was the best AMD had to offer.

[Guest]

Any 4 core Intel chip within the intel core i series and intel core 2 quads. 2 core 4 thread chips are also still usable.
On the AMD side I'd say AMD K10 chips with at least 4 cores. 


I think 2 core chips with bad ipc are unusable.

[WereCatf]

4 minutes ago, Origami Cactus said:

I would consider i7 920 still perfectly usable, and that is an 11 year old cpu.

AND IT IS A 4C/8T, intel was stuck on 4 cores for 9 years, wtf.

Yeah, I've got an i7 950 in the closet and it'd still make for a perfectly decent desktop.

[mxk]

If it can play youtube at standard resolutions, browse the internet easily, and do other tasks then it's still useful to me.

[SenKa]

Oldest usable CPU is Core 2 Duo imo. By that point Intel had finally dropped the Pentium 3 architecture (which was used from Pentium 3 -> Core Duo).

 

For gaming, I would cut it off at any quad core X58 compatible chip (Gen 1 Core i7/Xeon Equivalent).

[XR6]

Oldest usable CPU is a Pentium 4 HT. My NAS (dell dimension 3100) has one and it's fine for daily use (emails, web browsing, etc.).

With an SSD you don't really notice much difference between the Pentium and a Core 2 Duo. With a HDD it's definitely noticeable.

[jones177]

My old i7 2600k machine. I used it from 2011 to 2018. It started with a GTX 570 and ended up with a GTX 1080. It was retired because the motherboard was dieing.

It had no problem playing modern games at 1440p.

 

 

[GeoSquigg]

shoot i was using a core 2 duo up until about 4 months ago 

[Radium_Angel]

I have found if you set streaming video aside, then just about anything will still do the job, but the Internet, with all the HD streaming options, kinda killed off all that old single core hardware.

I have an old HP N40L running a dual core (such as it is) AMD of some form, and it'll do everything (online) just fine...at 100% CPU usage...

 

The interesting bit about 4c/8t, is what games *actively* take advantage of that? Not much of a gamer here, but I know until the latest revision of World of Tanks, it only used 1 core...

 

[Simonp1080]

Well the oldest pc I have that I consider useful is my Toshiba Satillite L300D from 2005

[Ithanul]

4 hours ago, LukeTheCoder05 said:

Core 2 duos, 2GB of DDR2, 320GB Sata2 hard drive, a mobo with a floppy connecter. Thats my case.

But from a retrospective, a bangin' windows 98SE rig

Hehehe, yep.  Big reason I agree.  Where I work, we still currently using Core 2 Duos (though, a refresh is finally incoming), paired with Samsung Pro SSDs with a custom built RHEL OS.  Decently snappy systems.

[Radium_Angel]

1 hour ago, Ithanul said:

Hehehe, yep.  Big reason I agree.  Where I work, we still currently using Core 2 Duos (though, a refresh is finally incoming), paired with Samsung Pro SSDs with a custom built RHEL OS.  Decently snappy systems.

By contrast we have core i7-6700k, 16GB DDR4 systems....

 

 

...coupled with 5400 RPM spinners.

Just shoot me

[NineEyeRon]

16 hours ago, Origami Cactus said:

I would consider i7 920 still perfectly usable, and that is an 11 year old cpu.

AND IT IS A 4C/8T, intel was stuck on 4 cores for 9 years, wtf.

If it had not suffered a cooling failure my i7 920 would still be the base of my gaming PC. It was running at 3.8 and had been stable from 2009-2018! I should have changed the AIO for an aircooler but I did not even consider that at the time. 

 

I did try but I just could not get that rig to boot after it was sprayed with AIO coolant... Even after drying for a few days, I do wish I had not given up on it so soon but lesson learnt there.

 

My parents late 2009 MacBook with an SSD in it runs beautifully and will easily be good for another 2-3 years.

[Pasi123]

For most things I'd be okay with something like a Core2 Duo E8400, 8GB RAM, dedicated graphics, Windows 7 or Linux.

But I could live with a Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz, at least 2GB RAM, dedicated graphics and some light Linux distro. With a PC like that I could browse the internet and watch 720p YouTube videos on VLC.

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

i5 2500 is the best intel has ever made and still so relevant.

worth costing me $50 to revive the dead mobo to keep it running

 

[BlockedTheShot]

my windows xp laptop with a intel core 2 duo and 945gm chipset(bear in mind i don't use it too much anymore). It's running windows xp so it can't run steam right out of the box(unless you install an older version and make tweaks so that it doesn't update). And it can browse the internet and create some word documents.

 

 

Probably fine if you don't care about battery life, weight, high performance tasks or hd resolution.

 

Honestly a laptop with arch linux and no gui, with w3m is still useful, as it can still browse the internet(albiet in a console)