# Buy hardware for longevity

> How to buy PCs and home servers that stay useful for ten years or more, by spending on the things you can't upgrade and skipping the things you can.

Source: https://ali.id.au/blog/buy-hardware-for-longevity/ (last edited 2026-10-16)

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.