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Core i5 is often still the best processor deal
Friday, April 9 2021
I've mentioned before how Moore's Law seems to have run out of gas. For example, Woodchuck, my main computer, is still powered by a Core i5-3570 from I bought in 2014 (7 years ago!). Back on July 15th of 2014, that processor had cost me $210, the motherboard had cost $150, and 16 GB of RAM had cost $78.50. If I look up a Core i5-3570, they still sell for more than $30 on eBay. And motherboards with that processor cost $150. And 16 GB of DDR RAM $61. So that $440 Newegg order would still be more $200 if I were to do it today, and that's buying used parts. A 50% loss of value in seven years is certainly not the Moore's Law of the early 2000s.
Now that I'm working in a Microsoft office, I need to have a Windows 10 box to do work on. Woodchuck still runs Windows 7, but I use Remote Desktop to connect to Wolverine, a desktop box running Windows 10 Pro. (I can't do this on my work-issued laptop, since it only runs Windows 10 Home, and so cannot be controlled by Remote Desktop — and none of the work-arounds work either.) But Wolverine is a Core 2 Quad of 2008 vintage, and is noticeably slower than Woodchuck (according to Passmark, it is little less than half as fast). Worse still, it uses DDR2 RAM, which makes expanding it beyond 8 GB unnecessarily expensive. 8 GB is normally plenty of RAM, but for some npm builds, it's not quite enough. So in recent weeks, I hatched a plan to somewhat modernize Wolverine. On eBay, I bought a motherboard with 4 GB of RAM that accepts DDR3 RAM and has a Core i5-2500 (from 2011) for $96.12. That processor is about 83.6% as fast as the seven year old one in Woodchuck and its motherboard can easily be expanded to 32 GB of RAM. That motherboard arrived today, and I soon had it installed in a desktop box I'd inherited from our old downhill neighbors in 2009 (well before they moved to the old folks' home). It turned out that I had a 2 GB stick of DDR3, so I expanded it to 6 GB while I wait for 16 GB more to arrive.
It was a little cooler today than it had been, but once the sun came out, conditions were nearly perfect. At some point, I switched from kratom tea to alcohol. Meanwhile, Gretchen said that she was having unpleasant side effects from the second shot of the Pfiser coronavirus vaccine. She wanted a "Tylenol" and was feeling so tired that she went off to bed. I spent most of the evening down in the greenhouse again. I have two bluetooth speakers there that I'd prefer to hear the audio from the greenhouse Chromebook through, but it's very rare that they just work. Sometimes the speaker I am trying to connect to has to be turned off and then on again. Sometimes the CHromebook has to be rebooted. This evening I had to do both.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210409 feedback
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