It’s arguable whether it keeps up but it offers perfectly fine performance for pretty much whatever most people want to do, including a lot of gaming (with a proper GPU).

It does use considerable more power to do so — a few additional LED bulbs worth.

In general, processor performance has outpaced consumer needs for quite some time and most people could get along fine and performant with this 8 year old processor.

Citation: have and still use one, right next to my blown out 8700k system.

Can confirm, I have been using an old processor in my T430 for a couple years and it works great, even when compiling Rust projects. battery life is terrible, though. So I have a Pinebook Pro coming in, hopefully there are no ARM-related headaches but even with some large papercuts I think it will be an improvement for usability.

Indeed, Sandy Bridge i7-2600 is still more than enough for me (no gaming but crunching numbers frequently).

Probably one of the best investments in the past decade. I had a 2500K for 6 years and only sold it since I moved and didn't carry the old desktop with me. Performance-wise it was still going strong and left nothing to be desired. Definitely faster than the 2015 Macbook Pro I had been using since then - which is also not that bad as an everyday PC.

I'm still rocking the i7 920. It's still running perfectly fine. I throw a new gpu in it every couple of years and have never had performance problems.

I recently moved from a 920 to an 8700k.

The 920 will bottleneck GPUs as slow as a GTX970 in some titles (PUBG, Rage 2 for example).

Great chip and still plenty for development/daily use, but IMO past its prime for gaming.

I also had to have expansion cards for USB 3.1 and SATA 3 which was annoying. NVMe is out of the question :(

Gaming, sure, but just throwing an i7 away? Heck, my ham radio PC is a dual core duo.

Oh yeah I'm not advocating tossing them. There's lots of opportunities to repurpose a chip like that.

I just see lots of people saying things like "still daily driving an abacus!" as if there's been no progress on CPU development in the last 10 years, and that's just false. Progress has _slowed_, but a modern Ryzen or i-Series is quantifiably better than older gear.

And if you use the computer extensively and live in a country where electricity is expensive, you could also be paying for that inefficiency in your utility bill.

I have a desktop PC in the living room, with an i5-2400 + GTX1050TI - still runs all modern games in high settings at 1080p@60fps. Literally no idea why someone would throw out a 3xxx series CPU at this point, it's all fast enough for daily use.

Best machine in the house is an i3 540 running Ubuntu. I recently upgraded RAM to 12GB.

It is perfectly fine for my needs: mostly browsing, some video editing, and coding Perl.

Bla Bla bla. We have a ton of Westmere generations running everything from HPC workloads to kubernetes to desktop machines which are fine.

Even with the mitigations that chip is significantly faster than an athlon 200GE, without them it's more than twice as fast (in geekbench at least).

I bet it also uses much more than twice the power.

It's just the brand for their super low end stuff, similar to how Intel is still using the Pentium name.

I have an i7 3770k, overclocked to 4.4Ghz, it runs with no problem every workflow I need.

Newer processors have more cores for sure, but if we look at single-core performance there isn't so much difference, and my almost 8 years old overclocked i7 runs probably faster for a single threaded application than a new 16 core Ryzen.

Of course if we talk about multi threaded workflows a newer CPU is better.

Eh. My main desktop is a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz from 2005. I'm typing this comment on said machine right now.

It's running Kubuntu and I'm running the latest versions of everything on this -- Chrome, RStudio, etc. -- and it runs plenty fast. I have a Windows 10 computer at work with the latest i7 chip which feels slightly faster, but not that much.

Most software these days aren't CPU-bound but IO bound. I got the most performance boost upgrading to an SSD and upping the RAM to 8 GB.

If you run Linux, you can have a very comfortable experience running on hardware from yesteryears. Throwing out a perfectly good machine is a waste.