What's The Longest Time You've Gone Without Upgrading Your PC?

[Davisdd Pasdt]

I'm at 3 years

A question for anyone in the community.
What is the longest you have gone without upgrading your PC as a whole or without upgrading components?

Do you upgrading quarterly? Yearly? Every few years? Maybe you don't remember when

I'd say I upgrade something from one of my two rigs every few months. I'm really impatient when it comes to buying PC components.

 

[TennisGuy45]

I just went 5 years.

I use my rig for movie encoding and gaming primarily.

I like to do one "big" upgrade with higher end components less often vs a smaller/cheaper upgrade more often.

My i7-3770k & AMD 7950 did me well for 5 years and probably could have gone a bit longer but it did start to struggle in newer games even @1080p.

I wanted to move up to 4k resolution gaming plus decrease encoding times. The Ryzen 7 high core counts and massive pixel pushing power of the 1080ti offered the opportunity to do both.

Hopefully this build last me 5 years too. I could possibly foresee upgrading the gfx card sooner to get an even better 4k experience in ~2 years.

 

[NutmegState]

YMMV will vary depending on what you do with your PC.

If most of what you do is web based where you are reading websites, visiting Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch etc. then a mobile device is all you need be that a phone or tablet.

If you are high-end gamer e-sports competitor you may need to change to newer components more frequently

if you are doing something that is CPU or GPU intensive for example for video editing or photography meshing and or editing as well as some desktop publishing you may upgrade to save even 15min of processing.

If you are a software developer, you may have a single large PC with 64gb of RAM and multiple NICs for software development purposes locally before you do something up on the cloud.

IMHO, it is very much work load related when you upgrade. There is no universal timeframe.

I have an ancient laptop with Dual Core Due i5 which I keep in my workshop that use for YouTube or researching how to make a woodworking part. And, when not trying to find a tutorial and use it for Netflix streaming. Until it stops working, that will be fine.

On the other hand, I have an X99 MB based PC with 32gb RAM for software development and when not developing for gaming using a 970. That will soon get an upgrade to a 1070 and I will be upgrading to faster RAM as it was not available when I first built my desktop.

If I am just surfing the web from the couch, then it is a Samsung Tablet.

 

[Magnus Serrander]

I don't upgrade components. I buy a new laptop when needed. Right now I'm using a Surface 2 from 2013, and are planing on getting the new Surface Pro... So that will make it 4 yrs.
Phones are useless to do anything on, the screen is to small. But I usually upgrade phones every 3 yrs.

 

[Shalin Pather01]

A question for anyone in the community.
What is the longest you have gone without upgrading your PC as a whole or without upgrading components?

Do you upgrading quarterly? Yearly? Every few years? Maybe you don't remember when

I'd say I upgrade something from one of my two rigs every few months. I'm really impatient when it comes to buying PC components.

I still use a PC with a Core i5 2400 (Good ol' Sandy Bridge) and it still performs beautifully.

With my laptop, I use a Sandy Bridge processor as well (2450M) i.e. I haven't upgraded in 5 years and I'm still able to get beautiful performance out of the both of these PCs.

 

[mms-pc]

The longest period? I assembled my previous PC back in December 2007, and my most recent PC was assembled last October, so it's nearly 9 years. Back in the college days I upgraded my PC almost every year, the only power that drove me for upgrade was 3D gaming, I needed more powerful CPU and 3D display card, but ever since I purchased Xbox 360 back in 2006, I started to play almost all new games on it, not PC anymore, unless no Xbox360 version available.

The reason to take this long for upgrade not only for gaming, but also the ending support of Windows Vista, otherwise I would had considered keeping using my previous PC a bit longer.........

 

[mms-pc]

I don't upgrade components. I buy a new laptop when needed. Right now I'm using a Surface 2 from 2013, and are planing on getting the new Surface Pro... So that will make it 4 yrs.
Phones are useless to do anything on, the screen is to small. But I usually upgrade phones every 3 yrs.

Speaking of Surface 2, I myself own a Surface RT, recently I discover that Microsoft had ended the support of Marketplace for Windows 8.1 RT system, not only we can't install any x86-based software, and now we can't download any app from Marketplace, either, So this Surface RT/2 is legally dead......

 

[khaled22]

the most common thing id change first is Hdd (add/replace) and probably add more ram. At the moment although i dont play games very often i would like to replace my gtx660. its been almost 3 years since i bought this desktop. no need for a new one at the moment

 

[milkybuet]

Depends on what sort of upgrade. I upgraded my graphics card at 4 year mark, and by my estimate it'll be the only graphics upgrade on this PC. This PC will last another 2-3 years making a life cycle of 7-8 years. My 16GB memory will probably be fine. I didn't really need more storage, but a 750GB SSD for $100 was too good to pass up in last black friday.

 

[Keith White Jr]

Speaking of Surface 2, I myself own a Surface RT, recently I discover that Microsoft had ended the support of Marketplace for Windows 8.1 RT system, not only we can't install any x86-based software, and now we can't download any app from Marketplace, either, So this Surface RT/2 is legally dead......

I thought it was just my Surface 2. I'm glad I didnt do a hard-reset to fix the issue.

 

[L0n3N1nja]

Both of my desktops are 6 or 7 years old now, they've got Phenom II processors. I don't game like I did when I was younger, haven't done much of anything to stress the hardware. Would benefit greatly from installing SSDs but otherwise I use a Surface Pro 3 as my main machine and it performs well enough.

 

[IMissMyPsion]

Less often than before! It used to be that every new generation of component gave a significant boost. Within my first year of owning a PC I had upgraded it from 128MB to 256MB of RAM. I bought a big hard disk (40MB) so that lasted longer.
Windows typically NEEDED more power, graphics, RAM and memory every time it upgraded. The place to buy these was computer fairs which proliferated. They don't exist now.
My desktop was originally built 11 years ago, but has not been upgraded for 6 years. It sits there and is fired up occasionally to run backup from my laptop. Prior to that something would be upgraded every few months.
My laptop is a i7 2820QM Dell that is 5, but I upgraded one HDD to SSD 2 years ago, and the other from 500GB to 1TB a year ago. The number pad has recently broken keys for 7 8 and 9 but a replacement component is ridiculously expensive, so a new laptop beckons.

 

[Durahl]

Last time I upgraded a just a component was when the 1080Ti was released - Best decision ever.
Last time I did a full blown upgrade was about 2 years ago when I upgraded to a i7-5930K System.

I'm really wondering about when I'll be doing the next upgrade - The 1080Ti is feeling comfy in 4K and I'm not expecting great resolution strides in the near future that would get it out of it's comfort zone.

 

[DragoCubed]

I don't game. I don't upgrade my desktop PC. I do most of my work and play on my laptop

 

[midnightfrolic]

desktop: 10 years
laptop: 5-8years
smartphone: 2-4 years

Usually whenever it's no longer economical to fix or upgrade.

 

[Eric Tay]

I upgrade when it's too slow to run Star Citizen. LOL...

Seriously, I upgraded to AMD RX480 2 years ago and Core i7-4790 last year. I upgraded to a Samsung EVO 850 for my OS drive this year and am planning on upgrading my Application drive to a WD Black 2 TB to replace my Seagate Enterprise 2TB drive because it's too dam slow.

Moving into next year, I'm watching the situation between Intel and AMD. I will upgrade when both are on 10nm fab to gauge the single-core and multi-core performance of Star Citizen on Vulkan. Yes, I base my purchase on SC as my benchmark. This upgrade will be expensive due to my moving DDR4, new mobo and new CPU and possibly new PSU.