The Phenom II X4 955 has 1 week to live & had the longest lifespan of any CPU. It has more sentimental value because it ran for 8 years. There weren't any major improvements until the last year. The best Macs in 2016 were just as slow.

Before that was a dual 2.4Ghz Opteron which lasted 5 years & had 8GB of RAM. The brief 8GB configuration was actually more than the last 8 years.  Before that was briefly a dual 1.4Ghz Athlon which came after a longer stint with a dual 933Mhz Pentium III. The Pentium III was actually faster than the Athlon but the lion was ignorant & endured years of pain with the Athlon.  The RAM before Opteron was probably 1-2GB.


Before that was the dual 550Mhz Celeron & the one that started it all, the Cyrix PR200, with 64MB & 32MB.

The Phenom II grew to thrash & thrash when running any modern programs.  Hard to believe the lion kingdom went as long as it did on 4GB of RAM.  Today, it's unthinkable.  It was surprising to see modern video editing programs requiring 64GB of RAM to render 1080p.  They apparently cache a lot more.  They might store complete copies of the assets in RAM with a seekable codec.  Cinelerra always ran comfortably with 4GB of RAM.

The $800 to upgrade the 8 year old CPU is a bit more than the $400 it took 8 years ago. The upgrade would be only the CPU, motherboard, & RAM. The problem is $400 today wouldn't buy an upgrade at all.  Nothing becomes obsolete as fast as it once did.

To be sure, a new graphics card, hard drive, & keyboard trickled in over the last year, spreading out $400 of the cost.  The 10 year old monitor is a love/hate situation.  It's the same resolution any newer monitor would run at, since nothing would be legible at a higher resolution.  It's scratched & the colors are horrible by modern standards.  It's much dimmer than 10 years ago, but usable.  The old monitor was originally too bright.  A new monitor would do nothing but use less power & have better color.  The old one cost an insane amount by any standards, but that made it hard to justify replacing after 10 years.





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