Hey, recently I’ve been browsing r/thinkpad alot and have been a part of the ThinkPad craze. I’ve noticed that lots of people, especially on that subreddit, still use Dual-Core CPUs, and deem them as more than capable, or enough.
I’ve been in the US for almost 5 years now, but I used to live in Brazil back in 2019. I’ve never owned a laptop with a quad-core CPU if I’m not mistaken, and I don’t think I’ve ever had more than 8GB of RAM (except on a Desktop) before moving here. I’ve grown accustomed to having a decent laptop, and desktop while living here, as well as a up-to-date phone, etc.
I’m curious to know what are people’s thought on older CPUs and usability of older hardware. I currently own a laptop with an i7 6th gen, which is Dual-Core and 8gbs and it really doesn’t get any attention, be it for watching youtube or doing online, browser-related study or just reddit browsing.
I couldn’t really picture myself using anything that doesn’t have 16GB Ram, and 4 cores, and preferably not freezing or having slowdowns, but after considering moving back to Brasil, and knowing the situation, especially for tech, since everything is harder to obtain and wayy more expensive, I’ve started question myself how many people are still using dual-core systems, that are happy with it and don’t see anything wrong with that.
I’d like to give the old X1 Carbon 4th gen another try and see how much my view could change. I know hardware has been getting a little cheaper in some ways and quad-core and higher CPUs have been popular for a few years, but I’m not sure that it’s still accessible to everyone as I’d like to think.
Thanks in advance!
I replaced my gaming laptop some time ago with an ultrabook that has an i3 10110U. The lightest task I use the laptop for is browsing the web. The heaviest task is using it as a real-time effect processor for my guitar. Dual core CPUs are still perfectly viable, depending on individual needs.
usable? Sure
Would i want to use one? Not when i could find a dirt cheap quad core (or better) used laptop.
It’s not a dual core but I just upgraded my grandfather from a Phenom II X4 925 (2.8GHz) to a Phenom II X6 1055T (2.8GHz turbo to 3.3GHz). Even he noticed the performance boost. The system already had an SSD but it boots faster and loads programs and web pages faster. All he does is craigslist, Facebook marketplace, and a few other sites. So I’d say the extra cores help these days.
For light usage (web browsing, word docs, email,etc) modern dualcores are more than enough
I have a duo core laptop with a 7th gen intel CPU. Speed is fine for what I do with it, but I’m considering upgrading because the battery life is awful and lenovo messed up the thunderbolt so they get corrupted after a couple years.
I have a dual-core Haswell laptop (i5-4200U, Dell Latitude) with an SSD and 8GB of RAM and it still works fine for basic web browsing, programming assignments, watching videos at 720p and 1080p, etc. I’ve tried it with both Linux Mint 21 and Windows 10 and it’s totally usable on each. The only thing I’ve noticed as a “problem” is that some heavy websites will take a couple extra seconds to render in the content, such as Youtube when scrolling through the main page.
My laptop is a Lenovo 12-inch Thinkpad X270. It was only bought last year because I desperately needed a laptop and didn’t have much money for it. The CPU is a Core i5-6300U, 8 GB of RAM, two 256 GB SSDs and the FHD touchscreen. At home it is connected to a Lenovo Ultra Dock and a 29" widescreen. Ubuntu / Windows 10 dual boot.
I’m using one for watching videos, mails, studying and coding (just basic webdev stuff). The apps I’m mostly using right now besides the usual stuff are Pro Tools, IntelliJ IDEA and Webstorm, so not just super light stuff, I’d say. The fans are pretty much always running, which doesn’t really bother me. For watching videos…Anything beyond 1080p gets choppy.
Ubuntu generally feels a bit more responsive than Windows, but Windows is perfectly usable IMO.
Is it perfect? No. I’d rather have a current gen Lifebook if I had the choice. But it’s definitely not as bad and unusable as I’ve read in other posts. I might have to upgrade eventually, but at this point in time I see little reason to get anything better.
I got a Lenovo T460 with 8GB and i5 6300U 2C4T for my mother and it’s still perfectly fine for web browsing and youtube 1080p
I have an 8th gen intel i3 laptop and it does fine for light browsing and media consumption. But I’m a heavy browser (lots of tabs, never ending reddit with images and videos expanded etc.) and it becomes sluggish before too long.
If it has Hyperthreading then you can still boot up any game. If it doesn’t, it’s still good enough for web browsing, and other basic stuff.
I’m currently using a Dell Inspiron 15 5555 for college. (Visual Studio 2022, VSCode, Microsoft Office and a bit of light gaming (Geometry Dash, Minecraft, Terraria, ADOFAI and others)) It works surprisingly well. The only problem is the battery and the fact that I could have gotten something better for the price but i was in a hurry. It uses a I5 6200u, 12GB of LPDDR3 (idk why the guy who sold it put that), a 500GB SSD and it even supports Windows Hello
My father still daily drives a Compaq Presario which must be around 17 yo. Mostly a Linux machine, because W10 maxes the Core 2 T5500 (iirc) out just idling.
Dual-cores are starting to struggle with more modern software that assumes a lot of cores and processes. Back when dual-core was introduced there was much more of a leaning towards multi-threading which is often better on older machines.
These older machines have lower disk I/O too so modern programmers assume faster standards and can be sloppier through complacency.
Both of these things are forgotten when people analyze Linux distros and the like by focusing primarily on RAM.
I have a MacBook Air 15 M2, and a piece of shit expensive Dell Inspiron. I have a couple of desktops with pretty high-end CPUs and GPUs too.
But I also have a 2012 Thinkpad X220, that I use quite a lot. It cost me $75 plus another $100 for upgrades. It’s great for Linux on-the-go. Decent battery life (much better than the 2020 Dell), fast enough, small, and cheap enough to not have to worry about it getting stolen.
I have a early 2015 MacBook Pro I use for college at home I have a nice gaming rig but the mac is the only laptop I have and it’s a dual core i5 and it’s more than fine for some tasks I might need to remote into my home pc like using any kinda of vm that’s isn’t Linux or Android studio but for light programming in vs code is more than fine the 8gb of ram hurt it more than the dual core cpu.