If you always just throw more money, more people and more time at a problem - you are never forced to think.

This is what I say to myself every day as I use a desktop from 2013 with an i7 4770S CPU. It has drawbacks and limitations, I have had to find ways to work around those.

I had stopped using that desktop in favour of an M1 air . It has now been a month that I moved back to the desktop. I’m curious to know how long the switch is going to take.

One thing is for sure, I’m not going back to macOS. Linux is amazingingly powerful and easy to use these days. Linux also makes me feel that I actually own my hardware and I’m not just renting it from Apple.

In more detail concerning the i7 4770S

It’s actually a really capable CPU, especially given that it’s 12 years old. The issues are:

  1. The embedded graphics are limiting, I only have one monitor but it’s 4K @ 60hz and it seems to stretch the CPU.
  2. RAM is DDR3 which is pretty slow.
  3. Although I could use one of the PCI slots to house an NVME drive, it’s not possible to boot from it. That means that I’m stuck having my OS on a SATA drive.

All of this make sore a good but not excellent experience.
I have optimized my setup in a few ways.

  1. Use the browser as little as possible. Rendering pages on this hardware will take about 0.5s faster than modern hardware - it pulls on the GPU quite hard. My most used applications are: thunderbird (I can’t get myself to use terminal email) and the terminal for my notes and running scripts.
  2. Run a graphics light environment, I’m running xubuntu. I find XFCE a powerful, extensible light DE. It’s amazing, use it.

What is insane is that I have not found any graphics cards for cheap which could give me the graphics pull of a raspberry pi 5! If you know of one I can can get for less than 35 USD: camachorod/at/gmail.com

I think that there is simply no market for this type of GPU.