Which of your high-end hardware has lasted the longest?

Depends what you mean by 'high-end', as I have very little in the way of genuine high-end hardware:
  • I have two cases which are over 20 years old (including a Chieftec Dragon which were quite popular on this forum at the time, I did have to drill out the HDD cage bracket however to fit a RTX3090).
  • I'm still using some 20m ethernet cables that were first installed in my student house last millennium, Cat5 but they work fine at Gbit speed, although the rj45 clips have snapped off which means it's a bit too easy to accidentally dislodge the cable!
  • Our kitchen PC that's used for video streaming is a 3570k setup that's over 10 years old. It has a 60GB OCZ SSD which was quite 'flash' (no pun intended) at the time and is even older than the CPU.
  • My son's laptop is an old 2014 ultrabook. Aside from the fact the screen has some 'bleed' (due to him being careless with it) it still holds up very well for general office usage, video streaming etc.
  • When working from home my wife sometimes uses my old Logitech G15 keyboard simply because it has USB ports, I'm not sure exactly how old it is but I remember having it before we moved in together in 2006. I still miss the volume jog wheel but it does look a bit comical nowadays with minimalist setups being commonplace and then there's this giant keyboard with a bunch of extra macro keys down the left side, flip out screen etc. It's like a 120% keyboard in a world of TKL and 60% keyboards!
 
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I have a EVGA GTX 660 2GB that's what 12-13 years old and was 2nd hand to me and lives in a tv based sff build and still rocking, bit of either fan bearing noise/coil wine - not sure which haha but it gets used daily and was gifted to me as a temp measure whilst I built a new rig, so probably has had many owners before it! Pretty impressed with that.
Other than that my 2008 mid first gen 'unibody' macbook pro still loves life, as does my 2012 mid mac mini/macbook pro of the same year/hardware...
Some Aiwi speakers from my first ever bought from my own money stereo, must be over nearly 30 years old now...
Creative 2.1 and 5.1 amp/speakers from 20+ years ago still mint/thump/clear...
 
I am still using an overclocked bundle i bought from overclockers in 2013. I have 1070ti graphics card in it and I can still play most games at 60fps on an ultra widescreen monitor which does me since I'm a casual gamer and not really bothered.
its the following:

£300.66 x 1 - "Quasar 240i" Intel Core i5 4670K @ 4.4GHz Overclocked Haswell Gaming PC Bundle
£66.66 x 1 - Samsung 120GB SSD 840 SATA 6Gbs Basic - (MZ-7TD120BW)
£41.66 x 1 - Akasa Raptor Gaming Case - Black
£54.16 x 1 - XFX Pro 650W Core Edition '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply

It was fairly high end at the time and I have never saw a reason to upgrade and I am only starting to think about it now since my pc is 10 years old.

Look at the prices though!

When did desktop PC prices go mental?

I got a motherboard, i5 cpu and 8gb ram overclocked plus the rest for less than £500. A modern equivalent would be £2k.

Call me an old fart but something has gone wrong somewhere! Wages have barely increased since 2013 but pc's cost 5 x as much!
 
Dell U2412M, a 1200p IPS monitor that I got back in 2011, it's still going but over the past few years it developed yellowing and backlighting issues that worsens with each year, eventually it'll get too much and I'll have to retire it, but it functions wonderfully as a 2nd monitor in vertical mode.
 
BUDFORCE said:
Not technically PC hardware, but when I'm not using headphones I run my PC sound through and old Panasonic stereo system that has a really good sound.

I bought it when I was 17, I'm very nearly 40.
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Same. My pc’s have always run sound through Audiolab pre and power amplifiers. These things were built in the 80s and still sound amazing.
 
Until a month or so ago I was still using most of a pre-overclocked i7 920 bundle from 2009 (asides from ram) as a primary PC.
Next up would be the P183 case which is about 6 months newer, which I see no reason to change.
After that a Xonar DX sound card. Not particularly high end. I've had to stop using it for microphone input but output is still spot on.
 
rumple9 said:
Psu's degrade over time. Don't they have a max life of 5 years or something?
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Depends on quality of components and usage, heat, load. A decent quality PSU that you buy now, with a 10 year warranty should be capable of 15-20 years. Bargain PSUs with crap parts might only last 2. I have a Seasonic S12-600 (original version), it still works fine in a light gaming PC and is 15+ years old.
 
My GTX1080 is still being used to play games in my daughter's pc. Still plays most stuff at decent enough detail at 1440p. It was bought new at release and has never skipped a beat
 
I think a lot of guys here who got the silly price GTX 480 will have that as one of their longest. It was a particularly silly price, and it was a silly card, with a silly cooler and silly power consumption, but those were silly times.

:edit: saying that, I really don't remember the market and whether it was outperformed fast in the hardware churn of old... Oh well.
 
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Enermax 550W Platinum PSU; got 10 years out of that and it's now enjoying a well deserved retirement. I dont remember when I got it, but around the time of the 2500K I reckon.
 
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Okay, the Enermax is older than I thought, I bought it in 2008 as part of my pre RGB i7 920 build. It's still working perfectly fine 15 years later but swapped it out as my current PC is pushing it to 80-90% load. Its back in its original box as a useable spare. Moral of this story is overpay a bit and get a good PSU, they'll last. I've got a Seasonic now, so hopefully that'll be good for another decade.
 
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