Posted January 13, 2016
markrichardb: With a 7 year old system you can expect more issues to pop up soon. The power supply may be next if it hasn't been replaced already.markrichardb: Keep in mind this is always the case with the PC. Waiting on new technology is like watching your mother playing Frogger. She’s just indecisively waiting by the side of the road hoping the cars will stop.
It's more a question of whether, if this is a quick fix via GPU replacement with a cheap card to keep it ticking over, it is worth waiting for this new Nvidia tech I've heard about (Pascal), or to just get a new top-end machine now, as I want my PCs to last - my first one went for 9 years, this one just passed 7 years, I don't really want to be replacing again in 4-5 years time. My current PC was built at the end of the Core 2 architecture (I could have chosen from the at-the-time brand new Core i processors but decided not to based on price and performance) and I've been very pleased with how well it has performed and lasted, and a hardware failure at 7 years isn't bad going. Of course, I knew that my upgrade path was pretty much non-existent, as my motherboard is socket 775 and DDR2 RAM and the new Core i processors were on a different socket whilst RAM was moving to DDR3.
So if I get a new top-end PC built to replace my current one, what kind of lifespan could be expected? Would the upcoming Nvidia tech (Pascal) result in enough of a performance increase to make machines need to be replaced even earlier?