Aged like a fine wine (A hardware discussion)

[TimedPing]

Here some backstory before got the idea to start this thread (Skip to hyphen separator for the real talk)

Yesterday my friend who run a video production company ask me to help her to upgrade 8x HP Z840 Workstation Prebuilt with this "initial specs" and upgraded part:

• 2x Intel Xeon E5-2660v4 (14c 28t x2) not upgraded
• 4x 256GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD (HW RAID1) > 1x 512GB Samsung 970 Pro (Boot drive, via riser) + 4x 256GB Samsung 970 Pro (Windows 10 RAID0; Scratch disk via PCIe bifurb card)
• 8x 16GB Samsung 2400MT/s RDIMM (128GB) not upgraded
• Asus GTX 1080 Turbo 8GB > Zotac RTX 4060 Ti Twin Edge 16 GB (She really need those AV1 encoders apparently)
• 1125W HP PSU not upgraded
• 2.5GBe Intel i226v single ethernet to PCIe adapter add on

Sound ridiculous, right? So I asked her why she don't upgrade the whole system instead for almost the same cost for upgrading her system. Well, she replied "I don't like having the idea of upgrading whole system that's still runs well, and especially when the initial investment money already paid years before". Her answer snapped me.

---------------------------------------------------------

So here's the thing, I also running my primary PC and Server using old hardware, especially Intel 4th gen haswell era CPU, I also doesn't have problem with it. It's reliable, cheap, and moderately power efficient for old system. So the question become: Does computer part's already very matured that much? sure more modern system offer better performance and lower power consumption, but for most user, with some upgrade, their system is enough. and here's some old hardware I think already "good enough" for "Semi-modern" task we throw at it:

• 4/5th generation Intel haswell/broadwell, especially the formidable i7-4790K and her Xeon E5 sister Thx to chinese "X99 board". And also many motherboards in this generation support native NVMe boot without using additional bootloader like clover.
• Zen2-based CPU, especially Ryzen 5 3600/3600x
• NVidia Pascal series GPU, especially GTX 1070 8G, absolutely running anything in 1080p while having ridiculously cheap price in used market (thx for the generous VRAM NVidia, they learned something from GTX 970 fiasco)
• Legendary polaris RX 570/580 GPU, even without VP9 support it's still a good card for budget user in some part of the world that have expensive new hardware price (also cheap & powerful GPU for Hackintosh built)

Got any suggestion and your own experience with this hardware? tell it down below! And also is there's continuation of this "aged like a fine wine" hardware in the future? Like maybe for me will be 12th gen intel CPU, RTX 3060 12GB, etc. 

 

[CWALD]

I'm also running 4th gen in both my media center and my PFsense box. It is more then enough for lots of use cases. The media center also has a rx470 and I am planning to take it to the LTX WAN. There I plan not only to game on it but also take it to the CPU deliding booth. I don't expect much of a performance boost, I barely utilize it as is but it will be fun.  

 

That being said, it would be outperformed by a sub $500 system from mini's forum today. Its great to tinker and experiment with and if you have it laying around then there are things you can use it for. But I wouldn't put money into upgrading it and I would not use it in a professional environment.

 

As for your friend. Those CPUs have reached the end of service updates. If she is using them in a production environment and spending the money anyway, then she should definitely upgrade.

 

If the upgrade is about the same price as a new system with similar specs, why doesn't she sell the old systems as is to save some money or get even better workstations?

[thrasher_565]

HP Z840 is mostly porpiratry i would think? but ya no upgrades for that thing... meaning throwing a gpu at is will just bottle neck it.

 

[TimedPing]

4 hours ago, thrasher_565 said:

HP Z840 is mostly porpiratry i would think? but ya no upgrades for that thing... meaning throwing a gpu at is will just bottle neck it.

 

Yep, even the psu using their spaceship like design, slotted in in the chasis. Already upgraded it yesterday, and already told her so many times, but she insisted.

[TimedPing]

7 hours ago, CWALD said:

I'm also running 4th gen in both my media center and my PFsense box. It is more then enough for lots of use cases. The media center also has a rx470 and I am planning to take it to the LTX WAN. There I plan not only to game on it but also take it to the CPU deliding booth. I don't expect much of a performance boost, I barely utilize it as is but it will be fun.  

 

That being said, it would be outperformed by a sub $500 system from mini's forum today. Its great to tinker and experiment with and if you have it laying around then there are things you can use it for. But I wouldn't put money into upgrading it and I would not use it in a professional environment.

 

As for your friend. Those CPUs have reached the end of service updates. If she is using them in a production environment and spending the money anyway, then she should definitely upgrade.

 

If the upgrade is about the same price as a new system with similar specs, why doesn't she sell the old systems as is to save some money or get even better workstations?

IKR! even with limited upgrades option on mini PC, it's still a good system especially from the power consumption standpoint. About my friend, well I even offer her to trade in her system each for $370 + put $1000 extra (her upgrade cost per system), she got ridiculously more powerful sustem, she still insisted to just upgrade the old system. Well she's still my client professionally so I do it for her.

[8tg]

Outside of current gen gaming I mean damn, you can use some pretty ancient hardware all things considered to do quite a lot. Things have stagnated heavily.

I have used this 15 year old Q8200 to do 90% of what I would normally do with a newer system, the only limitation really is more demanding games.

This will still browse the internet in all forms fine, it’ll watch YouTube videos, it’ll handle basic photo and video editing, office tasks, media consumption, etc

The vega 56 is probably a little overkill but pair this with a 750ti or whatever and it’ll still do absolutely great.

 

Once you take away games or more demanding professional or hobbyist work, the hardware requirements for other everyday use are surprisingly low end. I have posted to this forum comfortably from a Pentium M circa 2003. 
Hardware in situations like that can make upgrades questionable, if what you already have gets the job done, why upgrade?

Well maybe you want it done faster, more efficiently, but if that doesn’t matter then you don’t need to upgrade.

[TimedPing]

4 hours ago, offweek said:

There was a thing posted on Mastodon recently of a Z80 running a modern 3D printer....

When raspberry pis cost like RTX 4090 you use her old relatives instead

[TimedPing]

5 hours ago, 8tg said:

Outside of current gen gaming I mean damn, you can use some pretty ancient hardware all things considered to do quite a lot. Things have stagnated heavily.

I have used this 15 year old Q8200 to do 90% of what I would normally do with a newer system, the only limitation really is more demanding games.

This will still browse the internet in all forms fine, it’ll watch YouTube videos, it’ll handle basic photo and video editing, office tasks, media consumption, etc

The vega 56 is probably a little overkill but pair this with a 750ti or whatever and it’ll still do absolutely great.

 

Once you take away games or more demanding professional or hobbyist work, the hardware requirements for other everyday use are surprisingly low end. I have posted to this forum comfortably from a Pentium M circa 2003. 
Hardware in situations like that can make upgrades questionable, if what you already have gets the job done, why upgrade?

Well maybe you want it done faster, more efficiently, but if that doesn’t matter then you don’t need to upgrade.

Well, pre-Nehalem era is a long stretch but hey, if it's work, why not

[Zodiark1593]

2 hours ago, TimedPing said:

Well, pre-Nehalem era is a long stretch but hey, if it's work, why not

Pre-Conroe is where I draw the line. Core 2 Duo can still flatten many current low-end phones (particularly the in-order ones running Cortex A53/A55s). Once we step back further to Netburst era though, we’re pretty much at the era of uselessness. (And tbh, Netburst was at that point for a very long time, pretty much as soon as C2D launched, the latter was that much better.)

[TimedPing]

8 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Pre-Conroe is where I draw the line. Core 2 Duo can still flatten many current low-end phones (particularly the in-order ones running Cortex A53/A55s). Once we step back further to Netburst era though, we’re pretty much at the era of uselessness. (And tbh, Netburst was at that point for a very long time, pretty much as soon as C2D launched, the latter was that much better.)

For me, even mobile conroe (known as Santa Rosa) is already the bare minimum for doing basic task. Meanwhile LGA-775 based netburst CPU is basically a room heater at this point, even at it's first launched many people consider it a waste of sand.

[TimedPing]

8 hours ago, 8tg said:

Outside of current gen gaming I mean damn, you can use some pretty ancient hardware all things considered to do quite a lot. Things have stagnated heavily.

I have used this 15 year old Q8200 to do 90% of what I would normally do with a newer system, the only limitation really is more demanding games.

This will still browse the internet in all forms fine, it’ll watch YouTube videos, it’ll handle basic photo and video editing, office tasks, media consumption, etc

The vega 56 is probably a little overkill but pair this with a 750ti or whatever and it’ll still do absolutely great.

 

Once you take away games or more demanding professional or hobbyist work, the hardware requirements for other everyday use are surprisingly low end. I have posted to this forum comfortably from a Pentium M circa 2003. 
Hardware in situations like that can make upgrades questionable, if what you already have gets the job done, why upgrade?

Well maybe you want it done faster, more efficiently, but if that doesn’t matter then you don’t need to upgrade.

Hold on, just realize you using Vega GPU paired with it, it's absolutely hilarious NGL. I've built my own "bottlenecked on purpose" system using Asrock P4VM890, Prescott based P4 Extreme Edition, and of course, GTX 780Ti . Running windows XP like a beast, especially thx to the GPU still supporting windows XP driver

[Zodiark1593]

1 hour ago, TimedPing said:

For me, even mobile conroe (known as Santa Rosa) is already the bare minimum for doing basic task. Meanwhile LGA-775 based netburst CPU is basically a room heater at this point, even at it's first launched many people consider it a waste of sand.

Yeah, Netburst era was pretty much “dark times”. They were never good, even at launch. There were some (Northwood) that could be considered “less bad”, but I’m fairly certain few, if anyone, ever held nostalgia for this gen, at least on the Intel side. Even as far back as 2008, I remember the college’s Pentium 4 machines (then only a few years old) as being pretty miserable to use. By comparison, my 8 year old desktop is still plenty usable. 
 

AMD was sitting pretty high in this time though. Athlon XP was pretty competent, and Athlon 64 really knocked it out of the park. Athlon X2 was the CPU to get, up until Conroe launched, relegating AMD to 2nd choice territory all the way until Ryzen. 

[Commodore256]

I mean, those still get the job done and they are new enough to support AVX2, but, buying used server grade doesn't make much sense today for somebody like us, even if it's good performance per dollar, electric prices are skyrocketing even in countries where it's the cheapest and there are also modern niceties of new CPUs in 2019, Youtuber "Byte my Bits" built a 30 drive NAS for plex transcoding and spent $4,800ish on everything that wasn't a hard drive, the server could only transcode 14 HD streams, but now the cheapest new 2 core intel CPU (N4505) can transcode 17 HD streams with Quicksinc.

[TimedPing]

7 hours ago, Commodore256 said:

I mean, those still get the job done and they are new enough to support AVX2, but, buying used server grade doesn't make much sense today for somebody like us, even if it's good performance per dollar, electric prices are skyrocketing even in countries where it's the cheapest and there are also modern niceties of new CPUs in 2019, Youtuber "Byte my Bits" built a 30 drive NAS for plex transcoding and spent $4,800ish on everything that wasn't a hard drive, the server could only transcode 14 HD streams, but now the cheapest new 2 core intel CPU (N4505) can transcode 17 HD streams with Quicksinc.

$4,800 spent without the hard drive? What card they're using for transcoding? Freaking RTX 4090? Need to watch this video first before further comment

[Commodore256]

9 hours ago, TimedPing said:

$4,800 spent without the hard drive? What card they're using for transcoding? Freaking RTX 4090? Need to watch this video first before further comment

No, it was a Quadro RTX 4000. The damn consumer GPUs had a transcode limit of 4 without Driver Hackery.
 

12:12 is where he talks about the non-HDD cost though he spent a few hundred on aesthetics.
 

 

[TimedPing]

2 minutes ago, Commodore256 said:

No, it was a Quadro RTX 4000. The damn consumer GPUs had a transcode limit of 4 without Driver Hackery.

oh so their doing nvidia money-grabbing official route, thats make sense, or just buy more powerful and cheaper ASIC card for that

[Commodore256]

You know of an H264/H265 ASIC? The only one I know of was made back when the Mac Pros were LGA 771 and it was designed for accelerating the encoding of a single h264 render to be a little faster than real time. This was made before AVX and as soon as AVX accelerated encoding came out, those things were worthless to a new mac.

[TimedPing]

1 minute ago, Commodore256 said:

You know of an H264/H265 ASIC? The only one I know of was made back when the Mac Pros were LGA 771 and it was designed for accelerating the encoding of a single h264 render to be a little faster than real time. This was made before AVX and as soon as AVX accelerated encoding came out, those things were worthless to a new mac.

Yep, I even use several of that card for my client build, well not all software worked out of the box, but the SDK they provide is pretty easy to follow, the performance for the price and power consumption is amazing even at lower scale deployment, here's the link for the company: https://netint.com/

Legal notice: I'm not in any circumstances is paid by, nor sponsored by NETINT Technologies

[Commodore256]

7 minutes ago, TimedPing said:

Yep, I even use several of that card for my client build, well not all software worked out of the box, but the SDK they provide is pretty easy to follow, the performance for the price and power consumption is amazing even at lower scale deployment, here's the link for the company: https://netint.com/

Legal notice: I'm not in any circumstances is paid by, nor sponsored by NETINT Technologies

In looking this up, AMD has a good solution too.

https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-4-6--amd-launches-first-5nm-asic-based-media-accelerat.html
 

Quote

with up to 32x 1080p60, 8x 4Kp60, or 4x 8Kp30 streams per card.

If it's 24fps you want accelerated, multiply that by 2.5


But something like that didn't really exist in 2019 and something like that is very overkill for a family media vault share. His current setup can transcode 18 4K streams
 

I think if one combined that AMD card with that i9 and was able to transcode like 40 4k streams using a 2gig line, you wouldn't want to go much beyond that anyway, I think the RIAA would descend like Locus. Though something like this would be cool if you wanted to roll your own twitch.


Anyway, we live in a time of where it's better to get something new than old that was high end when it was new. I mean, it made sense before Ryzen, it just doesn't now.

[TimedPing]

On 6/19/2023 at 12:34 AM, Commodore256 said:

In looking this up, AMD has a good solution too.

https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-4-6--amd-launches-first-5nm-asic-based-media-accelerat.html
 

The price is pretty expensive and not good for lower scale deployment

[cooky560]

I was playing games on a i7 4790k and a 980ti from 2015 all the way until 2020, worked great and honestly if it wasn't for motherboard failure I'd probably still be using it. 

[TimedPing]

21 minutes ago, cooky560 said:

I was playing games on a i7 4790k and a 980ti from 2015 all the way until 2020, worked great and honestly if it wasn't for motherboard failure I'd probably still be using it. 

Z87/97 board?

[cooky560]

2 minutes ago, TimedPing said:

Z87/97 board?

Z97, it's failure prompted me to upgrade, and it conveniently coincided with the release of the 3080, so I went for a whole new machine 

[TimedPing]

4 minutes ago, cooky560 said:

Z97, it's failure prompted me to upgrade, and it conveniently coincided with the release of the 3080, so I went for a whole new machine 

Good for you! I even cant move on from this generation, I've bought i9-12900 non K and Z690 motherboard 6 month ago, and it's still sitting in the shelf while I'm keep thinking my choice "why I bought it in the first place?".

[8tg]

 

You can go even further and further back depending on what you’re doing as well. If your use case is minimal, the hardware you can still be using is also pretty minimal.

This is a PC from around 2003 running lubuntu, it is still pretty fine for basic web browsing, office applications, music and even 720p movies: