Tetrium wrote:

I do see lots of people mentioning CPU as a reason for any particular rig being retro or not, but to me it's more about the memo […]
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I do see lots of people mentioning CPU as a reason for any particular rig being retro or not, but to me it's more about the memory.

I mentioned it before, but as a daily rig for someone who actually prefers to do more then just a single thing on his PC, the 16GB maximum amount an AM3 motherboard can actually support is already a limiting factor.

Take into account that when s7 was new, most people had like 4MB or 8MB RAM? But 64MB works just fine on these boards and these will do 128MB most of the time (uncached but still).

I don't see myself or many people I know use a PC which is Core-something and 4GB RAM. It's possible, but it's not really realistic and for many people will end up being kinda frustrating even.

Older systems that can still run new games don't make that rig not-retro imo. In the end a rig is more than just a CPU 😜

My C2Q rig supports upto 16GB RAM, but I'm using it right now with 4GB since I'm still using Windows 7 32bit as my OS. Only thing that makes me feel like I'don't have enough memory until now is Crysis 3 (all because of that frakking Origin client by the way, when you shut down Origin after launching Crysis 3 it's still ok). What I do with my machine is... playing games (older kind, newest ones are Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3), basic photo and video editing (not that hard core, family things mostly), office things, personal databases, keeping archives, internet, watching movies, Lightweight CAD, preparing my daughter's school projects...probably that's all. But I frequently do 2-3 of the above things at the same time whenever possible.

Could you please give me some examples of daily computers use which renders 16 GB as a limiting factor (apart from the latest games)? I'm not being sarcastic, I really want to hear.

In my Media / TV PC I had 4 GB of memory for a long time. I think it's a Sandy Bridge Pentium. I only upgraded it to 8 GB because I got some memory with some parts, but I can't say I noticed a difference 😀

I feel that 8 GB is plenty, maybe not for gaming, but for everyday computing. My main video editing / work machine had 8 GB, again, I only upgraded because I got spare RAM with some purchases.

I have found that if you have a bunch of browser tabs open, especially if the browser itself has been running for a long time, it tends to snarf an inordinate amount of RAM. This seems to be the case for both Chrome and Firefox; I can't say I've really used recent IE or Edge enough to see if that does it, too. With 8GB, I find things getting swapped out fairly often, while with 16GB, I hardly ever see paging. But even then, I think it's really only with 4GB or less that I see enough swapping to be seriously annoying.

If you don't keep many high-memory tabs open, or if you reboot frequently, this might not come up.

It is like with consoles, it kinda depends on how old are you. PS1 is kinda borderline for me. Pentium 4s and up are not retro nostalgia for me but may be for a youngster.

PIIs are nostalgic for me cause that's when I began fixing stuff, but may not be for someone older than me.

I'm going with a no on 775/771 being either old school or retro.

Retro has to mean that it's not currently sold/wasn't sold for a long period *and* ideally it's required to run the old software. So, old consoles, and games that work best on older PC hardware.

Old school is doing an activity using less modern processes, i.e. playing music using vinyl or tape instead of an MP3. If you're using a 775 system to play MP3s, it's not old school.

Also, my main system (until I shortly finish building the new one) is a highly upgraded 775 system 😜. It was getting too slow for virtualisation activities, though, especially due to the limit of 8GB memory, and motherboard limitations.

Socket 775 is a great platform! This is my 775 Xeon setup: