When to leap?

[xplo]

So I’ve got an Ivy Bridge machine that still works alright, but it’s feeling a bit long in the tooth. Intel’s chip improvements have been pretty feeble, but eight years of feeble improvements add up, and I could certainly use more power (I do a lot of media processing among other things).

I was kinda thinking of waiting until around 2021 in hopes of moving to some 16-core, 10nm chip - plus DDR5, USB4, etc. There’s a lot of new standards looking like they will drop around the same time. But the newly-announced 10-core chips have grabbed my interest.

There’s also the question of whether Apple will stick with Intel at all, or whether Intel will actually deliver in 2021 (or anytime).

Supposing I only make one big upgrade for the next several years, what do you think - wait, or don’t?

 

[theruck]

wait not much happening in the CPU market yet and mobos being expensive

 

[kylec]

Right now I like the i9-9900KS for a hackintosh workstation. You want the iGPU in addition to whatever graphics card you select, as it's great for H.264 encoding. (There are other possibilities, but it's the route that Apple decided to optimize and enable.) X299 systems are really cool (only way to get decent PCI-e lanes), and the new Cascade Lake boards work now! But it's much more experimental.

If, after pricing it out, that type of system doesn't excite you, then yeah, maybe wait a while longer and get in with a newer socket.

 

[SFF-Edit]

I mean, if you wait until 2021 to get the new components, you still don't know how long you'll have to wait after that for Hackintosh support for all those new frameworks. For example, I'm gonna make up some stuff - let's say you get a cutting edge z670 MSI motherboard with a 12th gen processor (like I said, made up) - and you luck out and development on this chipset comes out very quickly. But the development is all based around a Gigabyte z670 motherboard that is actually quite different behind the scenes from your MSI (different internal clock, handles RAM differently, whatever). Or maybe your motherboard's chipset is working, but the ethernet requires a different set of drivers that haven't been figured out yet - or your built in audio isn't the right driver. So then you have to wait for everything to get worked out or be very proactive in figuring it out with the community - which could be cool.

But anyways, you get my point that it's hard to plan for a future build when there are so many unknowns. I mean, maybe Apple will abandon Intel's newer chips entirely and switch to AMD with backward compatibility to these current Intel chips that they still run.

That's my opinion and it might be dead wrong.

 

[macaron35]

my advice is always the same: buy a machine when you need it, not because you wait for the next gen to come, because otherwise you'll keep waiting and waiting

ram is always getting faster, so do processors, gpu are always more powerful, you cannot keep the pace

at some point, your actual machine when you build it, should hold for a while before it's obsolete, unless you are a gamer and looking for the highest performance

 

[xplo]

I mean, if you wait until 2021 to get the new components, you still don't know how long you'll have to wait after that for Hackintosh support ... let's say you get a cutting edge z670 MSI motherboard with a 12th gen processor (like I said, made up) - and you luck out and development on this chipset comes out very quickly. But the development is all based around a Gigabyte z670 motherboard

Right - well, I wouldn't buy components until I knew more about compatibility. So I might really be saying "2022". I'm aware.

my advice is always the same: buy a machine when you need it

And generally that's good advice. But in this case, it looks like Intel's been stagnating for a while, stuck on 14nm, and it sounds like they're trying to lower expectations and promising that 2021 will be much better. Well, there's a distinctly agrestic odor coming off of a claim like that, and if it were just Intel nonsense I'd pay it no mind - but with a lot of other standards slated to level up around the same time, I still think it might make sense to wait before dumping money into a whole new build.

But if I hear a chorus of "don't bother waiting, just upgrade", I'll consider it more seriously.

 

[SFF-Edit]

Right - well, I wouldn't buy components until I knew more about compatibility. So I might really be saying "2022". I'm aware.



And generally that's good advice. But in this case, it looks like Intel's been stagnating for a while, stuck on 14nm, and it sounds like they're trying to lower expectations and promising that 2021 will be much better. Well, there's a distinctly agrestic odor coming off of a claim like that, and if it were just Intel nonsense I'd pay it no mind - but with a lot of other standards slated to level up around the same time, I still think it might make sense to wait before dumping money into a whole new build.

But if I hear a chorus of "don't bother waiting, just upgrade", I'll consider it more seriously.

I'm making my first upgrade since 2008 right now. So I understand waiting to update. I like to get the most out of each thing I buy - especially computers. If you are prepared to wait until 2022, there is much better tech coming out in the next year. Over on the Hackintosh Discord I was given the advice to wait to do my build - next gen of Intel processors is coming out very soon and is going to have more cores and be cheaper than the current set - but I didn't because I actually need the computer now and I need it to run macOS.