You guys thinking ATX is a standard has me laughing my head off. On those motherboards we had 6 bus 'standards', 6 video card 'standards' (AGP, AGP 2X, AGP 4X, ...), 6+ disk 'standards' (IDE, EIDE, PATA, SATA-1,2,3, M.2, PCI, and the list goes on). the biggest joke is that CPUs are not even 50% faster in the last 10 years and yet we are still fooled into buying entirely new systems every two or three years by the Int…
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the biggest joke is that CPUs are not even 50% faster in the last 10 years2009 high-end/enthusiast desktop CPU: Intel Core i7-975
2019 high-end/enthusiast desktop CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K
Single-thread performance has doubled. And the i9 has double the number of threads. And uses less energy.
> and yet we are still fooled into buying entirely new systems every two or three years by the Intel-Microsoft-Dell-Motherboard Cabal.
The point is that you do not need to buy an entirely new systems every two or three years (and I personally know few people that do), but can comfortably upgrade parts. CPU upgrade compatibility has sometimes been annoyingly short, but most of time you can easily extend the lifetime of a system by buying a former high-end CPU for cheap, and for other pieces compatibility is way longer. SATA drives from 10 years ago still work with modern PCs if they survived (or your PC from 10 years ago you still use because "CPUs haven't become faster" can be upgraded with a SATA or PCIe SSD, which it can't fully utilize, but it'll work and make a difference. PCIe cards always have been compatible between versions, you had the choice between AGP and PCIe for quite a while (when that switch happened, like 15 years ago?), and technically can still buy boards with PCI ports today (although that's a market niche).