Shponglefan wrote on 2024-10-03, 22:32:In fairness to the OP, the 2000s was when PC specs started to get really confusing. […]
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dormcat wrote on 2024-10-03, 20:50:
IMHO OP has difficulties 1) deciding whether to build a system of 2005 or a system for 2005 games, and 2) telling apart components of old and new, budget or flagship, etc., otherwise wouldn't show distrust on C2D while praising AthlonXP. I'd guess the OP had few, if any, experience of buying separate components (MB, CPU, RAM, GPU, Sound, NIC, HDD, ODD, SSD, PSU, chassis......) and put them together into a complete system.
In fairness to the OP, the 2000s was when PC specs started to get really confusing.
The 90s were generally straight-forward. Processors used actual speeds to delineate models, faster processors were better, and there was a clearer progression in model numbers and performance.
But in the 2000s, model numbers became confusing and processor speed was no longer a reliable indicator of performance.
I can only imagine how confusing it could be trying to sift through all the different makes and models, especially if one didn't have previous experience building systems from that era.
I would say that it actually started in the late 1990s with the development of purpose-built new low-end parts.
Throughout the 1980s/1990s, the general trend was simple enough. One year's high-end thing became the next year's middle-end thing which became the next year's low-end thing, perhaps as part of a slightly lower end overall system. So for example, your 486DX2/66 in 1992 was a flagship system, and by mid-1995 it was a bargain basement new system. Same thing in, say, Macs - a 68040 was a flagship in late 1991, a 68040 stripped of its FPU was in the low-end machine on a ... simplified... motherboard in 1994/1995, etc.
By the late 1990s, that stopped being a thing - the Katmai PIII, for example, never reached low end status, instead Celerons became the low end thing. Same thing with video cards - you never got cheap GF3 Ti500s, you got cheap GF4 MXes.
By the time this fully settled in the late 2000s/early 2010s, computers (and key components like CPUs, GPUs, etc) became more like cars: a high-end one from today is better than a high-end one from five years ago, a low-end one from today is better than a low-end one from five years ago, etc, but comparing a low-end one today to a high-end one from five or ten years ago... is not straight forward at all.
This is especially true in laptops, too - it's very easy to find a low-end laptop that will perform worse than whatever laptop from 5-6 years earlier you're trying to replace. I've encouraged people who think their needs are low-end to get battery replacements for decent 4 year old laptops rather than get some new POS with eMMC storage, etc.
Also worth noting - some things just vanished. There were tons of quad core Sandy Bridge laptops; by Ivy Bridge/Haswell, the majority of the industry moved to the U-series chips which were only dual core. Not sure when mainstream business laptops started to have quad cores again...
And actually, good example of this - the CivVII system requirements were published today. Lowest system listed is an i3-10xxxx I believe. How does my i7-7700 with a much beefier GPU compare to that?! Who knows. I guess we'll find out when the game ships.
