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Happy Sunday everyone. I am at a bit of a loss with how to go about potentially upgrading my desktop PC.
There is a well-established culture & system around upgrading phones every 2-3 years. Companies make it enticingly easy with trade-ins that reduce cost and waste. Same system exists for cars.
But not for PCs.
I have an HP Omen desktop that I bought for $1700 before tax in Nov 2020. It was on sale and had/s excellent specs: i7-10700K, RTX 3080, 32gb ram, 500gb SSD. I'm pretty sure it still sells for $1700+ today, at least in nominal dollars, which is bonkers for what should be fast depreciating. Aside from a few random blue screen of deaths maybe once a month, which I feel like is a feature at this point with any brand of PC, no complaints.
I don't game much, maybe a little bit of StarCraft 2 and RimWorld every now and then. So the graphics card was an overkill from the start and meant to be future-proof. The 3080 will easily suffice for at least another 2-3 years, I'm sure.
But I'm tempted by a new CPU. UserBenchmark suggests that a 13900K outperforms the 10700K by 33% on "effective speed", or 61% on single core speed. By the time the 14000 series comes out next year, perhaps it'll get to +50% effective speed and +80% single core. At some point, the $600 or however much the next-gen costs will be is worth it to me if my computer runs 50-80% faster depending on the application (for example, RimWorld is mainly CPU limited and has no multithreading.
But it seems cumbersome to upgrade the CPU. I could watch a bunch of YT to learn how to swap out the CPU myself, but I'd rather not, in case I mess something up. I have no passion for tinkering, so the time I spend learning and failing would be stressful and a waste of time. I also understand that not all motherboards support newer CPUs, and the 13900K also draws double the power than the 10700K, so I may need to get both a new MOBO and a new PSU. All that feels like a tremendous headache to me if I were to DIY.
Alternatively, I could wait until the desktop is dying after 2-3 years, and then I toss/recycle it for a new one. But this seems suboptimal too, given I value and am willing to pay for a faster processor, but that's all that I care about. I don't want or need a brand new PC.
The third option is to find a pro to upgrade the CPU (and possibly the MOBO and PSU). Microcenter seems to have a CPU installation service for $80 (plus a $40 "recommended diagnostic"). I could also take it into a local repair shop, which I tend to think of as somewhat seedy and serving computer illiterate people at a premium, but that's probably just undue prejudice.
What would you do if you were me? Suggestions and recommendations appreciated.
Building consumer desktops is more tedious and time consuming than it is a tremendous headache. If you can't figure out how to put together silicon LEGO then you're the perfect market for the local computer shop's services. They're not seedy but they are more or less charging an idiot tax. If your ego or wallet can't handle paying that then spend a few hours on /r/buildapc to figure it out.
Also it doesn't even sound like you have any reason to upgrade. Is any game you're playing not running at smooth 60fps?
Eh, idiot taxes are charged to everything. I don't think the world is better off if everyone changed their own oil, raised their own chicken, filed paper taxes, or drafted divorce paperwork.
I think my interest in upgrading the CPU is not dissimilar to people who buy the latest iPhone Pro Max Supreme every year. No one really needs that camera upgrade, but it's nice. And the out of pocket cost isn't too different either. To answer your question, there are a few applications that noticeably chugs due to CPU limitations. RimWorld (in late game) is one, and Excel (large data sets) another.
My RimWorld doubled in TPS going from a Ryzen 1700 to a 5600x. That felt nice, it meant I could play a single save game for like 30 hours before it became unbearably slow as opposed to 15 hours haha.
This is exactly what I'm talking about! I wish they had multithreading but people say that'd require the code be rewritten from scratch, so only recourse is to brute force it with better hardware.
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Specialization is of course good, but all the things you've listed (except changing oil) are much more complicated and take longer to learn than building a PC.
If you're so rich that you can call it a convenience tax rather than an idiot tax, then sure call it that instead. But if your time really is that valuable one wonders why you asked here in the first place.
Eh, Elon Musk still shitposts all day when his time is worth like a million an hour (if you divide his 189B net worth by the number of hours in 33 years between his age and when he turned 18, you get 0.65m per hour). I think we mortals should be allowed to complain about complexity even if we can afford to have a pro take care of it.
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