The right socket bought me a second computer for the price of a CPU. I built on AM4 with a Ryzen 7 2700 in 2018. In 2021 a BIOS update let a Ryzen 9 5900X drop into the same board: 12 cores instead of 8, with no new board, RAM or case. Since then it’s gained an RTX 3080 Ti, 64 GB of RAM and 6 TB of SSDs, and it’s still the machine I’m typing this on.
We’ve run machines for 15 years on the same few principles.
Spend on what you can’t change
This assumes some budget to play with. On a tight budget, get the board and RAM speed right and save on everything else: the case, the PSU, the cooler, the hard disk.
You can’t change these without throwing away money or time:
- Motherboard. The biggest mistake you can make. It sets the CPU socket, RAM speed, PCIe generation, M.2 slots and ports for the life of the machine.
- Case and power supply. Get a case with sensible, redundant airflow that’s easy to clean. The PSU should run without its fan spinning up in daily use and have enough SATA power cables.
- Socket and RAM speed. Pick a socket with faster chips still to come, so the CPU can be upgraded. You can add RAM sticks later; you can’t make them faster.
- I/O. A fast network card, or at least an Intel one, spare PCIe lanes and current-generation slots.
Gigabit LAN and PCIe over AGP once looked like extravagances. They’re what kept our machines useful. Once a 10 gigabit card is $15 and today’s top CPU is cheap on eBay, a board with modern PCIe and spare lanes is the difference between a second wind and a new build. The same goes for the socket: a later chip on the same board can stretch your RAM, PSU and case for another couple of years.
Don’t buy what you can add later
Anything that isn’t needed for today’s workload and can be added any time, wait. That’s especially true of silicon: RAM, SSDs and CPUs get cheaper every year. More RAM capacity, more SATA storage, a better graphics card and better cooling can all come later, as long as you left sockets, bays and headroom for them.
Buy quality in high volume
- Sweet-spot parts. Pay a slight quality premium on a high-volume part. Capacitors blowing after five years on budget boards is a thing. I lean to the big board makers’ durable lines.
- Popular parts. They get better drivers, firmware and support for longer, and spares are easy to find. First-generation Ryzen had weird issues that the second generation solved; a refined generation is worth waiting for.
- Check SSD write endurance. Cheap QLC drives can slow to below hard-disk speed during a long copy, which hurts in a restore. For write-heavy work, the price gap to better flash is small.
Look after it
Keep it well ventilated and free of dust, and re-paste the CPU after about seven years. A glass side panel is useful here: you can check the fans and the dust at a glance. I turn the RGB off.
Give old machines a second job
My home servers are 1-litre mini PCs.
A refurbished ex-corporate business laptop from eBay is faster, better built and longer lasting than a new laptop at the same price. It just won’t be new.