Whats happened on the computing front, it wasn't all that long ago that I recall folk were looking for the kick arse AMD Ryzen CPU's towards the top end of the family, coupled with the fastest RAM modules and one of the very best graphics cards, top end MB's and either the very quietest fans for cooling and/or plenty of bling in the cases and internal lighting, oh yes and the meanest of power supplies. Now it seems that people are happy with ex corporation laptops that more than likely have been baked, running for hours on end, maybe left in cars even where the temperature could rival those found in saunas, and or possibly been clogged up insides with fluff and dust etc due to idiots using them on their laps, or even beds etc, without providing them with a hard flat surface to ensure adequate flow of cooling air both internally and also of course around the outside and beneath to wick away the heat build up
My laptops are both new, in warranty and are both Ryzens with 24Gb of RAM, Radeon graphics and 1TiB SSDs and they plug into my dock and instantly turn into a desktop with nice 4K monitor keyboard and mouse
Needed my desktop specifically for games, F360 and running virtualisation workloads. Prior to that I was using a solitary i5 T470. Demand for games and F360 has now declined and I do my compute remotely for perhaps £50 a year total for which it’s not worth spending on hardware for. My use case changed basically.
As for the old stuff at 3 years it’s probably less likely to drop dead than new ones from experience. There’s a very high early failure rate of laptops and desktops in <1 year.
Same here. My VR rig is literally the least expensive machine I could build with adequate power to get 90FPS in my Odyssey2 VR goggles. And because it was so expensive, I had to do it in pieces.
While I originally felt a bit the fool for spending the money on my liquid-cooled 2080Super GPU, it has allowed me to sidestep the whole RTX30x0 clusterfuck entirely for 2 years. I think I've actually gotten good value for my money considering, especially since I can easily hold out til there's ex-crypto 30x0s flooding the market, just like I bought my XxX Edition OC'd RX580.
Also... I said
for the fam... they don't need any more than a Lenovo corporate box. Neither do I most of the time, aside from playing on my VR rig.
mnem