I have a Gen1 Threadripper system. I have a mixed gaming, but mostly workstation workload. In modern, unoptimised games my GPU (rtx3000 product line) is already being CPU bottlenecked, but only slightly, 5-10%. And it has too little VRAM for properly accelerating my workstation tasks.
I’d like to upgrade my hardware with an AMD 1st gen DDR6 CPU (prob. 2027) and buy an according GPU in the same year. I’m planning a usage duration for at least 10 years and then probably same thing but with DDR8.
My priority is to have an excellent price/performance ratio. I only want to buy something new, if I know it will last me a long time.
How good is my plan at accomplishing my goal? I’d like some feedback please. How would you go about it?
Sounds like a good plan. Upgrade if you feel like it and have the dough. The best time is now and/or never.
Speed differences have become more theoretical with every new generation and “mandatory upgrades” have been decades apart lately. Unless win14 is injected into the brain I don’t see any changes to the current status quo.
Yup. I’m on my 2016 NUC. Next year is its 10th and i MAY upgrade. However, it’s still doing well. I’ll see what I can get out of it.
The final “Gate” so to speak, will end up being your motherboard.
At a certain point, your motherboard just won’t support a newer part and you’ll have upgraded all the existing parts as far as they can go.
My current rig that I’m still perfectly content with is just under ten years old. I’ve upgraded the Ram to as much as the motherboard will allow. I’ve upgraded the Video Card two or three times in that span, where it’s now running a 3060. While I still see a huge improvement with that, there’s no doubt that the video card is being throttled somewhat by the motherboard throughput limitations, but for I don’t mind. I’ve added extra cooling fans, replaced the drives with SSD and use the old metal spinners for extra storage.
It still runs plenty fast enough to do Blender (nothing complex, just airplane modelling and animation for xplane), video editing with DaVinci Resolve (as long as I use proxy clips and take it a little easy on the motion graphics), and most newer games (though of course not at ultra settings).
The last bottleneck that I’ll simply never be able to pass is the fact that the CPU socket will never support an octocore processor or higher. I can upgrade as much as I want, but it will never not be a quad-core.
For now that’s fine. But that’s the hard limit that I’ve given myself. Your mileage may vary.
My criteria for when to upgrade is simple: when it no longer runs the games I want to play at an acceptable framerate. I have a 30-series card, but I have yet to play a game where I had a problem with framerate, so I have no plans to upgrade. It wasn’t until I ran into a game where I was getting 20 FPS at minimum settings on my old GTX 960 that I decided it was time to upgrade.
One could probably say the same about workstation performance if it is taking too long to run and becoming a productivity bottleneck. For something like that, I think it comes down to an assessment of how much you will be spending versus what percentage reduction in processing time you will see out of the upgrade. If it is only a marginal improvement, maybe wait, but if it would be a substantial uplift, then it is probably a worthwhile return on investment.
Seems reasonable to me, although I might be lacking perspective since my latest hardware is already 6 years old.
In previous years, my criteria was to upgrade once the hardware was holding back my workflow and productivity. But with Moore’s Law coming to a plateau, I’ve upgraded my RAM, GPU, and SSD not because I have to, but just because I got an very good deal on them.
