[MichaelApproved]

"Will I ever outgrow my speed demon of a computer? At this point it's hard for me to see how. Even at my peak usage, my processor never goes above 10 percent capacity, and most of the time I'm using just 1 or 2 percent. I'm confident this rig will last me at least five years, and probably more."

The SSD in the machine will probably need to be replaced.

It would be nice to know how much ram he had in the new vs old machine. I bet the SSD + more RAM was probably where most of the performance gain came from. He might have seen similar performance gain by just upgrading those two components.

[gbhn]

Yes, I think for browser-heavy computing (the author mentioned opening hundreds of tabs) a ton of ram and a fast ssd cache are doing a a lot more than a fast cpu (and indeed, the author reports the cpu is usually operating at 1 or 2 %). CPUs today are so fast and cache-sensitive that hard drives basically amount to off-site backup. Unless you have a lot of ram, they'll just starve and idle in I/O for most end-user types of compute loads.

[mkramlich]

"Will I ever outgrow my speed demon of a computer? At this point it's hard for me to see how. Even at my peak usage, my processor never goes above 10 percent capacity, and most of the time I'm using just 1 or 2 percent. I'm confident this rig will last me at least five years, and probably more."

-- Bill Gates, 1985

[jodrellblank]

The SSD in the machine will probably need to be replaced.

Why? Here's an article estimating a 50 year lifetime for current SSDs based on writing at max speed 24x7, and claiming that the "it will wear out quickly" myth no longer applies.

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html