So I’m cleaning out my basement parts pile and am curious on where I should draw the line between scrapping, parting out, and using. (Especially now with slowdowns relating to Spectre and Meltdown.)
So, going by processor generation or socket how old is too old for you guys and girls?
For me right now I’m scrapping out the early dual core FX64’s and Pentium D’s, selling early core series, and using Sandy Bridge and up.
That seems reasonable to me. Since meltdown I am thinking about getting rid of even that and only keeping Haswell and newer.
Yeah, I really should upgrade my main rig from the trusty 2700k. Sad times, It’s served me well.
Really comes down to the application and the type of processor.
For example excluding the last say 3 years, all Pentium’s go to the tip.
Celerons don’t see the light of day.
Then I look at system power consumption. For a lot of my applications, I just use arm. Cheap, easy to work with and I can hide a cluster of raspberry pi B’s or $7 C.H.I.P’s in a draw somewhere.
I use Haswell i7 (though that may change due to recent instability caused by Intel’s windows update) as my main server, handles media processing, testing of my software and more. Basically it’s my NAS that also functions as an everything server from Minecraft servers to a socks proxy or whatever.
Then I have a Sandybridge i5 matched with a GTX 780 ti as the lounge media system. Mostly for playing Netflix on the TV or the odd game of rocket league, battleblocks or whatever.
Basically if it’s for a high powered situation, I use newer high performance processors, and for 24/7 systems doing automated tasks, cheap, old low powered systems, primarily arm.
I could be biased because my main rig still has an i5 760. But I would say anything to do with the name core2duo/quad. Unless you can get a cheap Xeon into those old platforms then it’s still good for the price. I am just now putting together a HTPC with a xeon X5460 LGA771 to 775 mod. This PC will do just fine.
My opinion is that if it has ISA bus, it’s worth keeping for retro. If it’s newer than that, but older than i3/i5/i7, it’s in the useless hardware category (more trouble than it is worth for anything but tinkering).
That means that all Pentium 4’s are crap (even Pentium 4 D)
An AMD FX might have some collectability due to the relative rarity.
Things like Pentium-M and Core (original, not core2) might be OK for winXP retro
Once you get into core2 you have 64bit and can run modern OS.
You reminded me, I need to work out where my core 2 quad CPU and board are. Lasted me a solid 8 years. I had one of the few boards that used ddr3, not ddr2.
Theres no reason it shouldnt continue to serve you or for that fact others… You can repurpose it to a small server… You could just let the rig do scientific distributed computing etc…
It depends on what your uses are, or what uses something can provide. I still have one last Core2Quad as a backup machine. It is similar in performance to my Haswell Celeron DD, but the old Quad uses too much electricity compared to performance for me to run it regularly.
I have a Braswell (Atom) based N3150 Celeron that I have been using with Motion and some cams. Currently I use 2 USB cams, and a Pi with NoIR Pi Cam set to broadcast on the network where the N3150 picks up the feed with Motion and can record events. That machine uses minimal energy and does the job perfectly fine. I have it hooked up to a network switch so I can tinker with other machines in my shed and all share the wifi connection of that machine since it runs 24/7.
I even have a broken netbook with an N450 Atom that I set up to mirror the data of the N3150 in case someone were to sabotage that machine. They would have to go past the cams and the data would be preserved and hidden elsewhere. Both machines use such a small amount of energy that I can power them from a single solar panel.
For learning or as a basic machine for someone who needs it you can make due with very little. Again, many things older than i-series processors just eat too much juice to justify running all the time, but even a Pentium 4 runs faster and has more I/O than an original Pi or Pi Zero. Slap Raspbian x86 on and you have a tool for learning Linux and more.
For most enthusiasts it doesn’t make sense to hang on to hardware more than a few years old. It will lose value after that and probably be quite a long time before it regains any significant value.
Anything before H55 is too old for me now.
I like to think I draw the line at the beginning of the core i series… but in reality, it comes down to budget. My server still runs core2quad, because it’s good enough for what I’m doing. If I were you, I’d be thinking almost entirely about power consumption. There are countless aging servers floating around the used market for pennies, yet the overkill processing power isn’t worth the required electricity.
Just glancing over old hardware with no projects in mind, i’d probably draw the line around 2010 and newer, then clean house when I decide what I’d want to do with it.
High end Core 2 quads and AMD X6 are where i draw the line for desktops unless it is and Atom system i have one and its near useless. Pull the drive and ram and toss that crap.
Laptops it’s anything below an i5 i wont take.
If it works its fine if you ask me. You need a Backup sure. But after that if it’s serving you and the house etc fine why replace it. It’s not an iphone that needs to be replaced every year to still work.
Nehalem for Intel and Bulldozer for AMD imo.
for me it depends on use, i use a thinkpad t61 featuring some core 2 duo and the Quadro NVS 140m as my main laptop.
The power of the system isn’t always what counts when you can just have an all around nice rig that you like,
Besides power… Its a matter of usage. I have a very old XPS celeron that is running fedora on a 64GB SSD, and it runs very well for what it does. My only other cutoff is probably core count (I mean, P4s almost don’t make sense to use now) and speed, but that really depends on the OS.
I will only use old stuff with an SSD, including the atom processor. Its otherwise very slow and unbearable in terms of booting. I’ve used camera setups on old core 2 duos. My mom’s machine is a q6600 with 8gb of ram and a SSD, still better than the lot of machines she uses at work.
Usage is the real question. I won’t even bother with Windows 7 for certain CPUs, even with an SSD. But I think old hardware still has a lot of viability.
Reading some of the comments people throwing out sandy bridge stuff makes me wanna cry. The school i attend has me doing computational physics problems on a core 2 duo with 4gb of ram… My last code took 2 weeks to run.
Oh snap… I usually do computational physics on a 500 core “machine” 
but at home I’m still rocking a core2quad toaster and to be honest, it is fine for what it is used for…
it seems a weirdly large amount of people still use the core 2 lineup.
This might just be that i am lucky and have just fallen upon a lot of core 2 computers though.