How old is too old?

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.

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Here’s my comprehensive list

CPU’s:
Keep:

  • Anything with i3/i5/i7 in the name
  • Any xeons that use a Socket 1366 or higher
  • Any AMD FX series CPU’s that have more than 4 cores (though this one may not be so good since a modern ryzen 3 will outperform an FX8320 in many cases)
  • Any AMD Opterons that use the same bulldozer/piledriver architecture as the above chips and have more than 4 cores

Pitch:

  • Anything with the name Pentium, Celeron, Core Solo/Duo/2
  • Anything that uses a socket 771/775 and older
  • Any AMD chips with the word Athlon, Duron or APU in the name(Ryzen excluded)
  • Any CPU that supports DDR2 or lower

GPU:
Keep:

  • Radeon GPU’s no older/lower than 6800/6900 series
  • Nvidia GPU’s no older/lower than GTX680 series

Pitch:

  • Radeon GPU’s Older/Lower than 6700 series
  • Nvidia GPU’s older/lower than GTX670 series
  • Any FirePro/Quadro made before 2011

Other stuff:

Cases:

  • can be reused i suppose, no real problems here apart from aesthetics and airflow

PSU:

  • Pitch anything lower than 450W or anything that doesnt have an 80+ rating

Ram:

  • Pitch DDR2 and lower, ECC and non-ECC

Mobo:

  • Pitch anything that accepts DDR2
  • Pitch anything with PCIe Gen 1
  • Pitch anything with socket 775 or lower
  • Pitch anything with Am3 or lower (AM3+ is excluded)
  • Pitch anything with an AGP slot
  • Pitch anything with IDE or Floppy headers

Storage:

  • Pitch sata hard drives lower than 500GB
  • Pitch any drives with IDE
  • Pitch 30/60/80GB SSD’s, theyre old and will probably fail soon
  • Pitch any CD/DVD drive with an IDE connector
  • Pitch CD drives in general
  • Pitch DVD ROM’s, keep only the DVD Burners
7 Likes

Pretty good / thorough list

For gpu on the radeons I wouldnt keep anything lower than 7850, nvidia would be anything below a 660, roughly equal to your list its just that I think I can get by at lower settings to make these cards viable.

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just pitch everything that doesn’t have 80+ rating.
450W is wayyy overkill for most pc’s and home servers.
You’d be lucky if you find a 200watt psu.

can’t find one for my own socket 1150 freenas with 4 disks.

hardware is getting more and more efficient.
Just look at the 80+ rating, not 450W+.

2 Likes

One person’s trash is another’s treasure… might be worthwhile to post what y’all are planning to literally throw away and waiting a week to see if a forum member could use it.

6 Likes

make it a thread.

EDIT: made it a thread

even if 450W is slightly overkill, it means that the PSU wont heat up a lot because of low power demands, you have tonnes of headroom for something more like a GPU, and overall you’ll get more efficiency from it. Typically extremely low and extremely high PSU usage are both inefficient power wise but 40-70% usage tends to produce the least amount of waste power.

Thats why i suggest pitching the old PSU’s. Also anything without 80+ rating is basically trash as well

I have a couple of IDE DVD-rom drives that read Gamecube and Wii disks, A 12 year old Mac Pro with 64Gb DDR2 ram, a CRT monitor that does 2560x1440@75Hz, some very old PC simm memory modules that work in Atari STe’s, IDE’s for PS2 network/HDD adapter…stuff like that
Age isn’t the only factor if the item is still useful in some way,
Not that most old PC stuff isn’t soulless garbage landfill fodder.

If you’ll are pitching socket 115x, or am3 or newing stuff, help a brother out. Send some that stuff my way.

which one?

We just got new 2018 hp office desktops.

They have 180W psu, but they are 80+ Platinum.

Pentium 4 were always crap. I hope you mean AMD Athlon FX, Bulldozers are pretty common

I’m one of those, I still keep my first PC running (an Abit VP6, dual pentium 3 Coppermine 1GHz, 2GB 133MHz SDRAM).
I would love to get older stuff or replacements for an HP Vectra 486.

But I agree with most people here, Pentium D/Pentium 4 are and always were junk even for retro gaming when there are better athlons or Pentium M/Core 2 Duos around.

Anything newer than 1st gen Allendale Core2Duo is very much useable for everyday or office use if you know what you’re doing with the software.

too old for me depends on what I’m doing. If I’m making a facebook machine for someone, a Core 2 machine from the side of the road is ok. Anything better than that and I start needing Sandy Bridge. 1366 xeons are nice and cheap but unless you have a 1366 rackmount server lying, Sandy Bridge in general is just much faster.

In terms of gaming workloads (which I put between casual use and workstation workloads), I use the following criteria:

Dual cores or higher: If it can run heavy emulators like CEMU without issues, it’s still useable.
Quad cores or higher: If it can run PUBG at decent framerates, it’s still useable.

With both of these, in my experience using anything older than Sandy Bridge has resulted in bad performance issues on the intel side. With CEMU and Dolphin emulators, from what I understand anything from AMD that isn’t based on the Zen architecture will choke because the emulators require very high IPC. If you have an i5-2400 or better you should be able to play pretty much any game that isn’t a botched, overpriced AAA title. I don’t know what special sauce Intel introduced with Sandy Bridge, but it’s managed to remain relevant far longer than anything else before it.

Monitors… I’m quite jaded. I love my 1440p AH-VA monitor, but I still consider any Trinitron CRT a better deal than any LCD of the same resolution. If I find one at a garage sale, I’ll probably buy it. I got a 19" Dell Trinitron at a yard sale for $10. I tried playing Ori and the Blind Forest on it and because the game’s rendering is tied to the refresh rate of the monitor, everything felt smoother, faster and more responsive. Going back to an LCD for that game was awful.

If you have an fx-9590 hold on to it.
If it is still shrink-wrapped don’t unwrap it

possible collectors item?

2 Likes

Updated my post.

Also 80+plat for office work, thats pretty impressive. Link to machine model?

If you ask the people running computers on a nuclear sub or a business. If it works dont mess with it.

It your a screaming hippy that wants to say your device is the most power efficient even though your old device was better TCO. Then spend the $$$ to brag.

If a device works then its good. Have to have a backup plan and a replacement plan. While it works but why replace it.

Power is cheap…ask crypto miners.

Should be worth mentioning that “works” and “does the job” are not the same thing. Whether something does the job is objective and can be measured. This is important when deciding when/if to upgrade.

Power is not cheap; at least not everywhere. This is an incorrect blanket statement.

Older hardware is more expensive to keep running; usually.

For example, my companies data center costs $1,000,000 each month in power. If new hardware comes out that will save on power and be less than the current allocated budget, then its worth upgrading.