Older Hardware Daily Driver

[TheAlmightyOS]

My gaming rig specs are, in my honest and unfortunately somewhat bias opinion, respectable. A Ryzen 3700X paired with a G.SKILL TridentZ 16GB 3200 kit in dual channel and accompanied by a EVGA 2070 Super on an ASRock x370 Taichi Motherboard. It plays the games I like (single player titles) at a smooth enough framerate at my preferred resolution (1920x1080). I do have a plan in the works to move up to a 5000 series (or should I just wait for 6000 at this point? Anyway) when they are more readily available with a mobo and ram upgrade to boot for some casual streaming. But then again I don't feel any real NEED to upgrade this machine. It works fine when I power it on to play some games.

This is not, however, my daily driver. It hasn't been for more than a month. Which, when I finally realized this a few days ago, came as a bit of a shock to me.  I am currently typing this from my thrown-together linux box from parts I had in the closet from previous builds. An AMD FX-8320 "Eight" core processor, Two kits of Corsair 8GB for a total of 16GB using up all four slots (unsure of the speed). This is on an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX mobo and topped off with an Gigabyte R9 280X. This is, by all specs, a vastly inferior system to my gaming rig yet I am finding myself preferring it.

 

Now I don't want to turn this into a Linux Vs Windows debate. I like Windows 10. I am not a linux advocate proclaiming that you need to dump 'windoze' right now and boot up the current popular linux distro. Hell, as a long time linux user I would advise against doing just that. Linux takes a good long while to get the hang of and no one should ever do a cold switch IMO (besides most of the popular distros are garbage *coughcoughUBUNTUcough*). Windows 10 is still my first choice for gaming and I doubt that will change anytime soon.

No, I am writing this more out of my surprise at just how well this system is running. This system is just shy of a decade old, most of the parts being bought in the first quarter of 2012 (besides the graphics card). But as far as basic desktop use goes (browsing, writing, watching videos) and can not detect a difference between this system and my gaming rig in responsiveness. Hell, the added graphical eyecandy seems to give this system a smoother feel to it than the obviously faster gaming rig. 

I know that if I slapped windows on this machine (or linux on the other) and ran comparable benchmarks, this system would handedly lose and by a severe margin. But with its ultra-quick boot (power on to desktop in less that five seconds) and snappy desktop, I feel as if I don't care.

 

Anyone else out there with old-hardware daily drivers that get more use than your top-of-the-line gaming rigs? Share your specs! 

[lgcas]

3 minutes ago, TheAlmightyOS said:

My gaming rig specs are, in my honest and unfortunately somewhat bias opinion, respectable. A Ryzen 3700X paired with a G.SKILL TridentZ 16GB 3200 kit in dual channel and accompanied by a EVGA 2070 Super on an ASRock x370 Taichi Motherboard. It plays the games I like (single player titles) at a smooth enough framerate at my preferred resolution (1920x1080). I do have a plan in the works to move up to a 5000 series (or should I just wait for 6000 at this point? Anyway) when they are more readily available with a mobo and ram upgrade to boot for some casual streaming. But then again I don't feel any real NEED to upgrade this machine. It works fine when I power it on to play some games.

This is not, however, my daily driver. It hasn't been for more than a month. Which, when I finally realized this a few days ago, came as a bit of a shock to me.  I am currently typing this from my thrown-together linux box from parts I had in the closet from previous builds. An AMD FX-8320 "Eight" core processor, Two kits of Corsair 8GB for a total of 16GB using up all four slots (unsure of the speed). This is on an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX mobo and topped off with an Gigabyte R9 280X. This is, by all specs, a vastly inferior system to my gaming rig yet I am finding myself preferring it.

 

Now I don't want to turn this into a Linux Vs Windows debate. I like Windows 10. I am not a linux advocate proclaiming that you need to dump 'windoze' right now and boot up the current popular linux distro. Hell, as a long time linux user I would advise against doing just that. Linux takes a good long while to get the hang of and no one should ever do a cold switch IMO (besides most of the popular distros are garbage *coughcoughUBUNTUcough*). Windows 10 is still my first choice for gaming and I doubt that will change anytime soon.

No, I am writing this more out of my surprise at just how well this system is running. This system is just shy of a decade old, most of the parts being bought in the first quarter of 2012 (besides the graphics card). But as far as basic desktop use goes (browsing, writing, watching videos) and can not detect a difference between this system and my gaming rig in responsiveness. Hell, the added graphical eyecandy seems to give this system a smoother feel to it than the obviously faster gaming rig. 

I know that if I slapped windows on this machine (or linux on the other) and ran comparable benchmarks, this system would handedly lose and by a severe margin. But with its ultra-quick boot (power on to desktop in less that five seconds) and snappy desktop, I feel as if I don't care.

 

Anyone else out there with old-hardware daily drivers out there that get more use than your top-of-the-line gaming rigs? Share your specs! 

I used to use a very meh A8 apu laptop for music production before I got my new pc just because my old pc was way too loud with a blower GPU. Was it better? No not really, the old pc used an 860k, but the reduced noise of just using a laptop made it worth it. However, for stuff like browsing, writing documents and such? Not much difference.

[Radium_Angel]

15 minutes ago, TheAlmightyOS said:

Anyone else out there with old-hardware daily drivers that get more use than your top-of-the-line gaming rigs? Share your specs! 

Twin E5-2643 v2 (Ivy Bridge) Xeons

64GB ECC Reg DDR# RAM

AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100 8GB Video Card

 

My Ryzen 5 2600 system gathers dust (and will be up for sale shortly)

[mahyar]

up until a few month ago a was driving a hp elitebook workstation 8560w

it had a second gen i7 (mobile) 4gb of ram and a quadro 1000m

i'd used it more but the screen started to fail and keyboard started to fall apart 

and a funny thing it had 4 dimm slots 

so although ddr3 it could be upgraded to 32gb 

[Drama Lama]

36 minutes ago, TheAlmightyOS said:

browsing

That’s almost the only thing a lot of computers have to do good to be usable as „ daily driver „ for many people 

today you can do almost anything and only use your webbrowser for it

[TheAlmightyOS]

1 minute ago, Drama Lama said:

That’s almost the only thing a lot of computers have to do good to be usable as „ daily driver „ for many people 

And I have an i3 laptop that fails at that task. "browsing" seems to be looked down on as a low-impact use case but it really isn't. Sure, it doesn't tax a system like gaming does, but you can FEEL the difference browsing on an older, slower system compared to a newer one. Not to mention many apps have been moved online such as office and communication suites and ticketing systems used for peoples work. So, yes, "browsing" is a very valid use case.