I built my PC back in 2019. I am still using the same CPU : i7 8700k. I have upgraded my GPU to an rtx 3070. I play only GPU heavy games in 4k usually with DLSS. I’m able to run most games in an acceptable framerate, 50-60fps. I would say my frame times could be better tho. I dont run any CPU heavy applications, but i have noticed that with these latest AAA games it takes forever to compile the shaders. My CPU is pretty outdated at this point, and I’m wondering if it would even be worth upgrading considering my use case and that I am mostly happy with my gaming performance. Oh and I run Linux if that makes a difference.
I went from a 7k i7 to a 12k a year and a half back. It was a massive difference overall. I got an AI machine and run Linux with no gaming. I’m not sure when the internet hardware went to the multi threaded thing but that was huge by comparison. I can pull 10gb in just a few minutes at most when it took around an hour on the old machine, same internet connection too and the same rather old OpenWRT router.
With 64gb of DDR5, 20 logic threads, and a 16GB GPU, I can run much larger quantized LLMs and diffusion models than most people get to play with. If I cared about AI stuff, I would definitely get a 24gb+ GPU, as many logical cores as I could reasonably afford, and as much of the fastest memory I can fit. No joke, and no skin in the shill space. I just wish I could run Flux cooler and faster for diffusion. And I would love to try out Command R and other even larger models, but I’m limited by total processors. Llama.cpp will split LLM loads between the CPU and GPU automatically, so yeah I’m turning all of this up to 11 regularly. Skip on Intel 13k-14k and the latest as junk. 12k on Intel is the last decent reliable hardware.