Morning,

I built my system about ten years ago. It has an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor with 6 cores, uses a M4A87TD ASUSTek motherboard, and has 16 GB RAM installed. Along with a load of spinning rust. The OS is installed on a newish (~18 month old) SSD.

It's a media streamer in the main, and runs a few other services around the house. Also runs Virtualbox with a Win10 guest OS for when I need it.

I'm toying with upgrading, which I reckon would be a mainboard, CPU and RAM change out. Just wondering if it's worth it. Looking at the logs the CPU doesn't often load all six cores, so I'm not sure more cores will make a big difference. It doesn't look like single cores have got much faster.

Any comments on what performance uplift I might be missing? Faster RAM these days, or bus speeds?

Thanks,

Jeff.

I think that the only benefit you would see depending on load averages is power usage / cost. At that point it may not be worth it really unless you just have the disposable cash. I have an older Sandy Bridge based Xeon quad core server with 16gb of ecc ram. According to my Killawatt it runs me about 8 bucks a month under normal usage. For me to build a new machine would take 3-5 years to pay for itself.

Then again those 1090's (i had a 1055 at one point) pull a ton more power than my xeon i'm sure. It may pay for itself quicker than I'd think.

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I would turn off the computer when not in use.

Electricity is very expensive here. An idle HEDT costs $22/month.
Ed

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Is there anything you use it for that doesn't seem fast, or anything you don't meet the requirements for? Maybe video card could replacement if its 10 years old, especially if you play games with it... but sounds like your load average is fine so don't need faster cpu (unless you're regularly encoding video or compiling large pieces of software, etc), 16gb of memory seems fine for normal user unless you are running lots VMs or something excessive, in which case you'd probably already know you want more memory without posting here.

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The only point of an upgrade is if your computer can't do what you need it to. My desktop is less than 2 years old and has an AMD A6-9500 — less than half the power of your CPU — and 4 GB of RAM — but then I did order an office machine. As I said, does your system work? If so, save your money.

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Not unless you want to. I have a 2009 Dell Studio laptop with DuoCore CPU and 4GB RAM that runs Mint Cinnamon fine. Not as fast as my 2 year old laptop, but good for web, video and office type stuff. I just wouldn't run a VM or other modern intensive stuff.

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Thanks all,

About the only time I notice speed as an issue is in the guest OS when I’m running Virtualbox.

I suppose with what I’m hearing about Win11 and TPU I thought I might be pushed into an upgrade that way, but equally perhaps Oracle will sort out TPU emulation. Or I could shift emulator.

I think I’ll hold off just now and wait until something breaks!

It is really your call. As for me...

Guest VMs in VirtualBox. I got pretty (really) frustrated with their performance. That was the reason I upgraded from a Phenom II based system running Mint to a brand new Ryzen 1600 based system back when. I had to move to a flavor of Ubuntu (LXDE) at the time as Mint didn't support the new processor. The 32G DDR4 and SSDs made my VMs 'very' snappy in comparison. Almost like running bare-metal and several at same time!! I have since moved on to a 3900X (just because I could... no technical reason) and still happy. My OS is now KUbuntu 20.04 LTS. KDE has matured to point where I like it again. That said, for a budget build I'd stick with the current AMD Ryzen 3600 or 5600 if it was me.