We Downgraded our PCs to Prove You Don’t Need a New One

We know you probably WANT a new computer, but do you really NEED one? Odds are good that, for most people, a brand new rig is simply not necessary. To prove it, we swapped our writers' sick gaming rigs full of modern hardware like the latest CPUs and raytracing graphics cards, for something a tad more...quaint. Specifically, 6th gen machines from Dell and HP. Will they be able to protect their jobs and meet their deadlines, or will the lag of old hardware stop them in their tracks?

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
1:13 Requirements and Concerns
3:08 Welcome our new machines
3:40 What went well?
4:32 Power and GPUs
5:15 Networking
6:06 Compatibility Issues
8:46 Overall Experience
9:27 Conclusions

[msmit]

Exactly. I don't need an RTX 4090, I just want one.

[VincentAndre_HK]

Few years back, I got a colleague from supply chain complaining about her PC being too slow, she "needed a new one". I tried it, it was indeed very slow, I added a bit of RAM that I had laying around: better, but still slow. I removed one of her theming software: it was already back to usable. Next I changed the HDD for a SSD and re-install a fresh Windows. She genuinely thought she got a new PC...

A proper software management is as important as having the latest hardware.

[ravenandthestranger]

My work got rid of all their Optiplex 7010s... Took almost 10 minutes for them to boot up previously. I got ahold of one, increased the ram to 16GB, cleaned up the machine, new thermal paste, switched to an SSD, and added a wireless card and an RX6400.... Runs like a beast now... All in less than $200.

[CaptainRedHat]

I feel like most of the weird bugs people encountered were because they moved the drives from their current systems into the older ones. Windows doesn't exactly like having conflicting drivers installed. And I know that windows has the sysprep /generalize tool but in my experience from creating windows images, your image source machine should match the target hardware as close as possible. That's why in order to minimize the number of images they have to maintain, many companies only offer 3-4 system choices overall.

[peterharper]

At my old workplace, where I ended up building a load of the PCs, we generally just did round-robin upgrades. Those who needed more powerful systems got the newest stuff; their old system would then be given to those who needed a slightly lower power system, then THEIR machines went to the next tier... etc etc. Everyone got an upgrade, everyone was happy, and we minimised costs and downtime - the downward steps could be offset by some time so support/issues didn't gum up the works. Anything left at the end of the line, we generally destroyed the HDD and gave the rest to local groups who then recycled them/provided them to those who might need a PC but didn't have the resources - generally poorer families with kids in primary school, or pensioners who were being supported by local groups to get online. Old machines don't need to die, they just need to move down the line to where they fit best.

[Bihaz]

I'm a sysadmin at a small company and we just replaced our Lenovos E73 with i5 4th gen with Dells 7010 with i5 13500. Most of the users didn't notice any big difference and if the PSUs weren't starting to fail we could have easily kept the another two years without major issues. As a company, we use prebuilt PCs because of the readiness of driver packs for deployment, 5 years warranty and on-site hardware support, the ability to deploy driver updates with a dedicated tool and to avoid building 100 PCs from scratch. We're just two IT guys for 150 employees.

[Mattias]

I work IT for hospitals, we tend to rotate systems roughly every 5 years. For the most part, as long as the system has an SSD (even a cheaper one), the older 4-5 year systems still work just fine for 90% of tasks; most of them with 8gb of RAM. For "power users" like accountants who have multiple excel sheets open, these same systems with 16gb of RAM work well too. Most of our "heavy" applications like EMR apps are cloud based and we see more hardware usage from Microsoft Edge.

[c.l.]

The main reason businesses are getting rid of these PCs is because they usually don't have a TPM and thus can't be upgraded to Windows 11.

[thomashoups]

Honestly i've been working in IT for schools and Councils in the UK for 7 years and a lot of them are still running 6th gen I5/7. For basic office tasks, teams meetings and spreadsheets they are perfect. The internal networks and domains are the bottleneck most of the time. Dells warranty is brilliant as well. Log a support ticket and a guy is waiting at the office doors the next morning with all the parts to repair the PC. You cannot fault that.

[Creedness]

A new video next month - "I didn't need this upgrade"

[purple-cho]

I used to work alongside video editors, and I'm surprised to hear that everyone at LTT including the writers are working with the full resolution 4K footage. We used to have almost everyone working with lower resolution proxy footage, it was easier on the machines and the network, and at the end of the process there was some software special sauce which applied the same edit decisions to the full resolution footage too. I can only assume that the issues described here with scrubbing through footage would have been helped by using lower res proxy video!

[bara]

Used my old system with a 3770 for 10 years, and I'm confident they are overstating the startup speed issue.

[dragonknight]

I buy and refurb these exact type of computers to allow new not-for-profits to not have to worry about the usually high price of computers. They have their place.

[Blackwayken]

The urge to get yourself something new because It has been years

[jaroslavmrazek]

While i have a high end PC at home, i used a 10 year old i7 laptop at worked for 2 years and it was completely fine. Granted most of the work was Excel spreadsheets and SAP.

[BramVanroy]

That "why did you cut to me" was super well done. Love these kinds of scenes that make the reporting of LTT less boring than conventional channels.

[ArtifactSkyline]

We use a teired hardware model at work. For our general purpose shop floor machines we use machines that are 4 to 7 years old. Office users get 1 to 4 year old PCs and our power users get the latest and greatest.

Helps us to not constantly be spending money on the newest stuff and it means gear that is already paid for and is still usable can keep working for us.

[cmasupra]

At my last job (July 2019 to January 2024) as an embedded software developer, I was given a hand-me-down Dell Optiplex 790 from 2011 with an i5-2400 CPU and an ATI(!) Radeon 5450 GPU. One of the PC's previous users upgraded the RAM, and I doubled the number of GPUs so I could add a 3rd monitor.

The computer was perfectly fine for me for 3.5 years. It only became a problem during my last year there because I started working on multiple projects at the same time and thus had an excessive number of things open. Both RAM and CPU became bottlenecks at that point.

[nicksrandomness]

"Would require a monitor upgrade" ... No it requires a $8 adapter.

[RILDIGITAL]

Hardware doesn't need to be the latest and greatest to be functional and useful. As tech advances, it certainly does pay to recycle and repurpose older devices whenever possible.