And neither RDR2 nor GTAV are the same games they were at launch. That's a whole lot of updates and, these days, game requirements increase as the game ages, provided it is still being actively maintained.
My parents computer still runs on a third gen intel i5. Threw an ssd in it and got windows 11 running against its will. Power efficiency could be better, but works just fine!
As a 40 year old and child of the 80's-90's it's pretty wild to me how long CPU's last now. We haven't seen much of an increase in clock speeds since like 2006, so at this point anything that's 4 cores with decent cache speeds are lasting significant amounts of time. Your hardware used to go obsolete literally ever 2-3 years. Like...REALLY obsolete too. Build a PC in lets say... 2001 or 2002 that's going to only be a single core that's maybe 1.5GHz. 3 years later and you're building machines that are 3.6GHz. And just a couple years after THAT you're starting to weigh whether you should upgrade from your dual cores to quad. The amount of money that PC enthusiasts used to have to blow every few years to stay relevant was actually insane lol. Being able to now use 15 year old hardware that works fine with modern software is kind of amazing.
41 here and isnt that true ! in the 90s it felt like you got a pc and 1 year later it was wildly old of date! my 486 was old dated but still used it till the mid 90s as i was a kid couldnt afford a new pc. got a amd k2 400 build in 97 then i built a gaming pc in 2003 i think had a p4 2.8 with hyperthreading 512mbs ram and a amd gpu think it was an xt 7600 ( memory is bad so probaly wrong on specs xD) mental to think that a pc today could last 10 to 15 years!
I bought a prebuilt with Celeron 466MHz in 1999, upgraded it to Pentium 3 800MHz a couple years later, and kept using it until *2008* :). When I built myself a Core 2 Duo e8400 w/ 8800GT at that point, it was definitely an eye opening experience. First game (pack) I bought - The Orange Box.
my 486 was a 486 sx 33 with 4 mb ram a 220mb hdd and a 1 mb svga trident card it had both a 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppy disk drive i upgraded it later to drop the 5.25 for a cd rom drive and went to 32mb ram could play doom and duke nuke em 3d so i didnt care xD.
This is 14 years old now? Bro where has the time gone, I was 9 when this processor came out and I'm turning 23 next month. I'm going to cry, maybe that important surgeon that really needed that graphics card can make me look younger again.
G'day @sharkpawsz, To make you feel young, my Birthday is the day after next Month... & I was older than you are now (23) + the age you were at release (9) added together when i5-2400 was released
My ghetto rig (one of three rigs I've built and own) uses an i7-3770, 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 RAM, an AMD RX 5500 (4GB GDDR6) graphics card, and in a generic LGA1155 motherboard. Runs XB1/PS4 era games damn good for peanuts. Fallout 4 GOTY? Batman Arkham Knight? Doom Eternal? All run great on it. Those old 2nd gen and 3rd gen i7s hold up great.
What a spectacularly shit game. Looks bad, runs even worse, the story is hideous and the characters are not just unlikeable, but you want to see them die violent deaths. And to top it off, when I installed it, I had to spend hours on fixing EA's broken slop, it would let you save the game and then it'd be corrupted upon trying to load it. In fact, I spent more time fixing the stuff that made it unplayable than I did playing the game before I erased all traces of it off my drives.
Those who still are/were rocking an 8000 series FX chip 8-10-ish years later and who compared the performance of the FX to the thing 99% of people recommended back then, the i5, then the FX wins this comparison, especially with newer titles which utilize 4+ cores AND especially if you were creating content aka rendering etc.. FX was far better than its public image and kind of ahead of its time. I've had a 9590 that someone gave to me for 50 bucks (lmao) - I ran this until 2021, had no issues with it whatsoever. I then sold it on ebay for 140 bucks to a collector 😅
@@MarcosCodas The channel RA Tech did a video on this years ago. The title is "FX-8350 vs i5-3470 - Here's What Other Reviewers Don't Tell You About AMD FX". Send it to him :)
It seems like each time I watch a new video of yours, it reminds me of my time doing QA testing at Intel. Although this time around, it was when I was doing testing for Intel's ill-fated WiDi product (Intel Wireless Display) in 2013, which died a pretty quick death a few years later. It was the mention of "Sandy Bridge" that brought back these memories, although it would have been a different iteration of that processor than the one you're talking about now. Ah, those were the days. Not quite as exciting or ground-breaking as when I was testing the very earliest 3D graphics cards WAY back in 1996-1997. We had no idea what kind of revolution in gaming we were about to unleash! We just knew that it made playing Quake look better.
best part about sandy bridge is they don't use thermal paste under the IHS, unlike a lot of the processors that came after them. the paste dries out on everything
Ran my entire college work on Sandybridge, an i7 2670QM, it was good to me and I still have it, completely functional, bought even a battery for the old guy, helps me check things around the house, and play with an Arduino and program SD cards for raspberry.
2670QM is a solid workhorse that doesn't want to die. I have mine since 2012 , maxed our RAM , put SATA III SSD and works really good and if laptop came with dedicated GPU , you can call it the best purchase ever made. Only if it could allow to install more RAM than 8GB and can live many more years , even as a daily driver for not so heavy tasks.
One generation newer, but similar story here. My Thinkpad T530 was upgraded (years and years ago) from some lowly dualcore i5 to an i7 3610QM quadcore, 16GB DDR3, a 256GB mSATA SSD + 1TB HDD, and I replaced the eye cancer 1600x900 LCD with a 1920x1080 one. So long as you don't do anything that needs 3D graphics grunt, It's surprisingly easy to forget that you're sitting in front of a 12 year old machine. Perfectly cromulent for everyday stuff. In CPU benchmarks it even managed to keep up with a friends early Ryzen (2500U) Thinkpad ... albeit at 3x the power consumption lol
I love how some of these older processors can still hold their own in 2025. I have a similar cpu - a Core i5 3570 which, despite being unsupported, runs Windows 11 and many modern games flawlessly. Thanks for a great, interesting video. 👍
Nah.. I run a 4570, 16g ddr3, and a 1060. Lack of hyperthreading is blatently obvious when considering Windows, and the gpu never hits 100%. I feel the sentiment though
Ah, the "good old days" of Intel. In 2012 I got 2 Dell XPS Studios (circa 2010) from a gaming dev company that was switching to iOS dev, FOR FREE cause they were going to E-waste em and I knew someone that worked there. Cost me a tank of gas to go get em (around 200 miles round trip). They ran Core i7-920s. I only had to upgrade from the one I kept in 2023 when the Mobo started to fail. RAM slot went bad. I listed the system for free on Marketplace and someone took it cause "it'll be an upgrade to what I'm using", lol. Told the guy "well just avoid using RAM in this channel here and yeah, should be fine". Never heard back from him so I assume he's still using it today :D
This reminds me of the claims I heard about the Pentium Gold G5400. Forums made it seem like it was _Celeron-level_ bad, but I've loaded a bunch of emulators on it and it plays games as good as the original consoles using only the iGPU. Even PS1 and Dreamcast games don't stutter at all. For having been pulled from a dumpster, and having over 27k games now installed... all loaded on a machine roughly the size of an original Xbox One, I can't really complain given how well it holds up: the G5400 is no speed demon, but it utilizes the power it has rather well, like the 2400. I even gifted one of these PCs for Christmas (I found 7 total) as a _turn-key_ setup complete with 24" FHD monitor, keyboard, mouse and gamepad for a total budget of $45. (That included a 500GB SN570 NVMe, 16GB DDR4 2666, and Windows 11 Pro, preinstalled.) Glad to see people are still showing love for Sandy Bridge, tho; it's the perfect representation of _old, not obsolete._
This is one timely video. As a matter of fact, this week I am assembling a new home server to replace my own sandy bridge i7-2600 machine. It's been a reliable system for over a decade, but has run out of expansion options for me.
Honestly for people who want to try the tux side of things, a lot of pre 8th gen chips will become budget gold mine once windows 10 is out of support Editing this as people are fighting below it: I know you can get around windows 11 install requirements with Rufus, I know you can use tiny 11 and that they're anti cheat issues on not windows. I was literally just trying to say hey these will probably be cheaper when windows drops offical support for the hardware and that it's supported by distros still. Please stop arguing in this thread
@@Shaggy_Prime Honestly, it's just easier to slap one of the easier, headache free distros on it than deal with Windows headaches. I just slapped Mint (First time using it, but I wasn't going to mess around with non-free driver shenanigans while at work for Debian) on an old XPS with a lovely screen and it seems to be running fairly well.
@@EbonySaints What about installing windows is hard? You slap the win11 iso onto a flash drive with Rufus, which lets you disable the install requirements, and it just works™.
It's really endearing to me how a modern piece of engineering marvel like a processor that can do more calculations than humans have ever done in a few moments costs less than 10 pences.
The machine I'm typing this on right now has an i5-2400 running Linux. It's been my daily drive for longer than I can remember and although I have a new Ryzen 5600G system sitting on the shelf waiting to replace it, the damned thing just keeps working so well I haven't gotten around to it.
I had a i7 2700k that would overclock like a BEAST!! We had a water cooler on it and a 750 watt Corsair TX power supply. I bought a Rx 580 to pair with it and the motherboard would NOT recognize the card no matter what I did. We had to update the bios and it ended up destroying the overclocking ability on that platform. You could still manage to overclock the chip, just not near as high. I think we gave it away just with in the last year or so to someone who wanted to play Witcher 3 on a PC. The chip went up to 5.1 Ghz before the update and would only hit like 4.7 Ghz after. It was sad, however the kid that got it never missed the performance.. he didn't know it was there in the first place. 😂
Sandybridge will be talked about for a lot longer than people think. I was still using an i7-2600 up until about two years ago when i got a free set up to cannibalize for parts including an i7-4790, so i gave my friend a build with the 2600 and an R9-280 (Nimez drivers) with 16gb ddr3 etc. still serves her well. My HTPC in the den is an i7-2600s with 16gb ddr3, a Yeston 640sp RX550 (its basically an RX555/550x, based on the RX560D) 4gb and a 4th WD Blue HDD hooked up to a 4k panel and it chugs along with modern games even if they get turned down to 720p with the case of Space Marine 2. Hell, i had the i5 2400 running in a lil backup rig i made with all salvaged parts i would have on hand in a gaming room i provide for the local fan convention up til last week when i upgraded it with a free i5-2500, evened out the ram to 16gb, and added a Toshiba 128gb SSD (it also has a 950 gtx with a frankensteined cooler that runs only on power and ground, as well as a 1tb HDD and a removable drive bay). That thing as well runs rather well, and i may do a video on that build as well. But as others have said, once Windows 10 gets kyboshed for support, a LOT will be going to some form of Linux Distro and these things still shine there, especially with no need for the Spectre patch etc. Im actually thinking of dual booting with Ubuntu Cinnamon at first to try out.
Thinkpad of mine still using i5-2520M and running it was to this day. Ssd so small (msata port) with easy cpu and ram upgrade no wonder people love this era of intel generation of thinkpad.
My r9 390 was my stepping stone inbetween my first gtx 770 and my current rtx 3060ti. I bought my r9 390 for a budget build for cheap ($50) a couple years ago and I also handed it down to a friend when I got my 3060ti. The r9 390 was a beast with 8gb of vram and such a huge bus (512 bits iirc) it handled every game I threw at it in 1080p at highest settings with high frame rate but overall I noticed too much artifacting/graphic glitches in a few of my favorite games and no direct x 12 support for the newest games so I got my 3060ti instead and no more issues like that.
@@hypnostone20 my i5 3330 (purchased as a pre build in 2014) paired with a r7 240 did the job pretty well util my motherboard preseted problems a few months ago. sadly now my r7 is not sending video signal, due to some bendings i did o the processor slot (motherboard already presenting problems before that, so not a huge lost) . now i only need to buy a new motherboard, because everything else still working (ram, gpu, processor, 2 psus etc...). it was my secondary pc, and im still want to use that way XD
The 2500K , 2600K , and 2700K, are still fun OverClockers ! They are cheap, but it is hard to find, an GOOD LGA 1155 motherboard, for them ! X99 is also still fun to tinker with ! But those are very hard and very expensive to get !
I have an I7 2600 running in my OP vista machine with an 1155 E3 Xeon running windows 11 as my main garage computer. Sandy and Ivy bridge really are decent budget systems and with the E3 xeons you can effectively get a cheap I7 that will happily chug along all day.
A few years ago at my father's work HP SFF computers were changed to newer ones. Fortunately, those HP PCs could be bougth, so i thougth it would be a good chance to get one for my TV( yes, I use a computer, because i can watch everyting, read everything, etc from my bed, it is really comfortable with a wireless mouse) and that computer has an i5 2400. It is really a good cpu as you said, it can handle basic task without problem. I love it. I usually watch your videos on that too, but not this time. It's kind of ironic :D I also have an i5 3570k. It's crazy how well these cpus kept up over the years. With 2600k or 3770k you can put a decent gpu next to it, and you can play most of the games out today, if you don't mind some compromises here and there.
The first laptop I bought used for schoolwork was a ThinkPad T430s with a dual core sandybridge i7 and it really served me well for quite a few years. Nowadays it's a bit sluggish (due to being a dual core) but it's still great for web browsing. My first real PC was a used HP workstation with a sandybridge-era six core Xeon and that thing was amazing.
"Old games don't run very well on Windows 57, so you have to buy an ancient 'Intel' processor from that era if you want to run Crysis or Dark Souls. Hmm? Skyrim? Nah, just buy the new port for the Nintendo Quantum Switch, it's almost exactly the same."
I had this exact CPU in my first "modern" desktop in 2011. Alongside a Radeon HD 6870. Played Witcher 2 and Amalur and Grid and so forth very nicely indeed.
Must be a sign ive literally just threw a 2400 into a dell optiplex i got today, it had a i3 dual core in it and the 2400 was in the collection of cpu's i have 😊 gotta love a free upgrade and now it will be a linux machine when i put a ssd in it and it can then go to someone in need
I built my brother an i5 2500k system back in the day. It was an MSI Itx motherboard if I remember correctly. He moved over to an Apple Mac and listed most of the components on eBay. He gave me the case and PSU, and then I repurposed them.
Still own my I5 2300, haven't used it for years but can't bring myself to get rid of it. Might turn it into an emulation box for a family member. Amazing CPU.
I was literally still using the i7-2600K up until fall last year. Really had no trouble with it at all. Paired with the trusty GTX1060 6GB, it was one beast of an ancient war horse. Only very, very recently did SOME new games start truly struggling on said system, and the reason ended up being something few people even talk about: the these days slooow PCI-E 2.0 port in which the GPU resided. Found some decade old posts that claimed that no game would need PCI 3.0 or even the assumed 4.0 in ages... then HD2 dropped.
I have multiple sandy bridge machines at home and its still fantastic. I have a toshiba that i upgraded from a Pentium B950 to the i7-2630m, a thinkpad T420 that i upgraded to an i7-2620qm, and a 40 pound hp envy desktop with an i7-3930k liquid cooled. That bad boy plays modern games very well still, when my main rig was down.
This CPU, along with a GT 1030 (DDR5) in a sff pc ran home theatre and emulation duties for years until it died not long ago. You are accurate in saying that these things keep chugging on. Edit: I'm shocked that Cyberpunk can run on this CPU, regardless of GPU
I bought one of these Sandy Bridge i5 back when they where still new and remember getting a super good deal on them. I've shuffled around using a Mac, just my work computer and now a small minipc running A Ryzen7 laptop chip and...the Sandy Bridge one is still in use with my parents, running Win 10 and latest software. With an SSD it's a perfect entry level pc, just as you mention. I might give them this minipc I have if Win10's end of support deadline does indeed transpire, but I'll probably hang on to that PC... most of the games I play in any case should be handled with no problems by that system.
This was my old CPU from 2012-2018, it was a surprisingly good CPU that held up surprisingly well until I went up to first gen Ryzen (Then a 5600X). Surprising results here, good to see it can still hold its own. That PC I had with it in was my first decent PC I ever had and so for that reason, the i5 2400 will hold a special place in my heart.
When I sold PCs in like 2018-2020 I would buy the i5 2310 or 2320 for dirt cheap from CEX for budget builds to flip, they where like 50% cheaper on CEX then a 2400 which gave me that extra profit for me while I wasn't employed
Ive got many gaming pcs in this house (its a house full of gamers from 5 year olds to 55 year olds, literally!) Several of these pcs are sandybridge architecture. One inn particular is an i7 2600K on a ali express ITX motherboard, 16 gb DDR3 and an 8gb RX 6600. The pc is just great! I also have an i5 2500k pc with GTX 1660 Super and a media centre pc with i5 2330 with on board graphics.
My daily runner is the 2nd gen i7, so the 4 core/8 thread variant of this chip. While it is a long way behind todays chips, as this vid shows - it is still more than usable. By that I mean, I have yet to come across anything apps or games I use that has actually felt slow. It is wild to still be using the same computer (with a newer GPU and RAM upgrade) 12-13 years later and STILL feel like it has many years left in it. I suspect this will be the first computer I will run until it just dies dramatically one day.
This hasn't been enlightening, mainly because of the little story I'll share below, but as always, very enjoyable video fella. You've had a real knack for making these videos using that soothing voice and including the lovely music you always pick for the background 🙂 The Sandy Bridge intel processors are truly wonderful in the realms of 'bang for buck', the Core i3's and i7's also. A while back - I think during that Covid rubbish - I built an SFX pc with an i5-2500 and a GT1030 GDDR5 variant with 8GB DDR3 RAM. All off Ebay for about £80. Case and power supply were the most expensive parts (Silverstone SUGO-BB, and a Corsair SF450 modular PSU). It ran every modern game I threw at it with a variety of medium settings at 1080p, and older games it would be even better. Anyway, recently, I was having some minor but very annoying and long winded issues with my main computer after a budget upgrade, so I used the SFX pc to play some games with a friend. I put the GTX 1060 6GB from my main computer in there but I think the i5-2500 was bottlenecking the 1060 a little in Darktide because it would stutter ever so often, even with most settings on low. It ran MW5 Mercenaries alright though, barely changed any settings compared to my main pc. Bare in mind now, Darktide and MW5 were released about a decade after the i5-2500 was released. Just goes to show how well put together they are. And IF developers actually optimize their games, as you proved with RDR2, it can even run those just fine. The value of them is insane. 50p for a piece of silicone that can run most modern games... Suffice to say, they're bloody awesome CPU's! 🙂😄
my partner is still rocking my good ol hand me down i7 2700k system from years ago, shes got 16gb of ram with it and a gtx 780ti so driver support is non existent but it runs what she wants to play, those cpu's are still decent!
My old 2600K managed to get to 5GHz flat for some benchmark runs and a CPU-Z validation, though the temps were absolutely beyond good and evil at that point lol. Daily drove it at 4.6GHz with a lot less vcore and thus MUCH cooler. The fact that Sandy Bridge still had soldered IHSes helped _a lot_ vs Ivy bridge with the degrading thermal paste between the IHS and the Die as a cost saving measure
@@Knaeckebrotsaege I managed 5.1Ghz on my 2600K, but the voltage was, maybe acceptable for daily driving, maybe a bit to high. It is stable in stress tests maybe for just gaming you could get away with a lower. voltage. 5Ghz was doable with fairly good Voltages. I also managed 5.2Ghz on my 2500k, but it did require high voltages, but I am honestly impressed how good sandybridge is, still is, not was, it is still very good.
G'day BBO, I really liked the video, another use is these intel 2000/3000 still make BRILLIANT "1st PC for kids" who are looking to play RoBlox & Minecraft with their friends. While C2 Duo + some Quad CPUs are still plentiful & cheap down here in Australia LGA775 Motherboards have started to become hard to find & more expensive especially if you want something better than a basic M-ATX with 2 phase VRM, so LGA775 are now more for those in the Retro Community specifically wanting them.
videos like these, as well as how well my laptops (which are old af) run Windows 10 and most games make me feel like the only reason Windows 11 had such higher requirements, as in, asks for new af CPUs and motherboards, is because older Intel processors (and even some AMD ones) still run most stuff up until now. But companies wanna sell more stuff...
i used one of these as my daily till pretty recently-i finally upgraded to an open box system with an 11500. It was pretty shocking how much better the new one is- I was missing a lot of performance but didnt really realize it till i switched (not so much for me for gaming, but running a bunch of programs is night and day). that 2400 will always have a place in my heart though
Hey I had one of these about 8 years ago, sold it for $50. No hyperthreading tho, only 4 threads. It was ok for the time, but the motherboards are worth 100x the chips.
I own a ThinkPad T420 that runs on an i5-2410M Ivy Bridge with ThrottleStop because BD PROCHOT doesn't work anymore. Edited a 2nd place-winning video on CapCut, played Roblox on absolute minimum quality and did my various assignments on it. Absolutely still usable, if you know what you'll get and comfortable doing little tweaks. Now I'm vibing with my ThinkPad E495 running on a Ryzen 5 3500U, but I'll never forget what my T420 done for me 🫡
It is amazing, that CPUs from that era (2011-2012) are still worth using even to this day. But graphics cards from that era (GeForce GTX 500, 600 and 700 series) are unfortunatrly obsolete. Recenlty I got HP EliteDesk 8300 CMT with Core i5 3470 and 16GB DDR3 RAM. I added just for experiment, Intel ARC A750 8GB, and 1600W PSU (why not😂), PSU adapter, and the PC still goes nicely, through modern day.
Sandy Bridge is legendary , still running a 3960x with a titan x maxwell rig feels as fast as my ryzen 7 5800x of course i run windows 7 ultimate on the 3960x rig sometimes nonintrusive operating systems make older hardware age a lot more gracefully
my linux pc runs this cpu. even today ifs still great. i upgraded to ram from 4 to 8 gigs and threw in an ssd and the computer runs linux mint like a dream. not sluggish at all.
Always entertaining. I wonder did you have water physics and other cpu intensive settings turned down lowest in rdr2? Or crowd density and anything volumetric in cyberpunk? Just capping the frames at a reasonable target might really smooth things out. Wouldn't mind seeing how it performs in civ5/6 and indie titles like rimworld that are largely cpu dependent. And geez, under a pound haha.
I had a i5-2400 overck at 3.7ghz all core ( z77 mobo) for years with a 7870XT, served me really well. Still using this machine as htpc with i7-2600k/16GB ram/GTX 960. I think 1155 socket is fine as long as you arent a 3A gamer or needing the power for productivity. The i5 is far from useless, but i would buy a cheap xeon E3-1230v2( or 1240v2 if price is close) to replace it.
i think about it this way (im only 7 mins in and you may have made this point) imagine using a 14 year old cpu to do modern things in any other era it wouldnt happen as the 80s -15 nope the 90s same even up to the 2010s ! it shows how rapid growth was and how its sorta slowing down.
It would be interesting to test one of the higher clocked 1155 Xeon 8-threaded CPUs. Additionally, installing a PCIe to NVMe M.2 SSD for game storage should aid in loading more efficiently.
I picked up a free pc with a 2nd gen i3 from work a few years ago as they were chucking it in the skip, fitted a i5 2400 that cost me £35 and an ssd and still works well today.
This makes me really curious how the 4th gen i5's are doing now. My first experience with pc gaming was putting a rx570 in a pc i pulled out of my parents computer room with a i5 4600.
If you ask me, the i5 2400 is the true face of Sandy Bridge. There will be some games that will make this CPU feel insufficient though. But then again, there are also a lot of popular games today that will run just fine - Fortnite being one of them.
For me it will always be the 2500k and 2600k, I knew the 2500k was legendary and had super high hopes for it, and it still surpassed them.. I think it has at least 5 good more years left. Although starfield is a bit rough but all low settings with frame gen and probably a 45fps cap will keep it in the race.
@@erwark they really did, I got the 2500k to 5.2Ghz and the 2600K to 5.1Ghz. The 2600k still runs any game decently, and the 2500k still can but you might need to cap fps at 45 or something. Uncapped the frame timing will be all over the place in games like starfield.
Fun fact too~ if it’s a K series version you can OVERCLOCK it still even if it’s a “poo poo” prebuilt office pc. And these things won’t even overheat overclocked. It’s insane.
Wow this is such a trip back.. i remember back in 2012 i was looking at CPU's and seeing the i5 2400 and 2500k and wanted to upgrade. back in the day i had a Core 2 Duo E8400 with a GTS 450.. talk about early 2010's PC gaming lol. I never ended up doing any upgrades unfortunately and i kept that pc up until 2017.. im grateful that nowdays i have my dream pc something i couldnt do as a teenager.
Banger of a video. It is absolutely wild how well the early "i" series processors hold up today, and how you can still build acceptable gaming machines out of them! Unfortunately unless you're willing to settle for an OEM board, you're kinda stuck by and large in terms of budget.
I've used an i5-3330 for a brief time until the May of 2023. My younger brother handed it down to me, he upgraded to a Ryzen 5 3600X upon my recommendation a year before. That i5-3330 performed similarly to an i5-2400, and it definitely was an upgrade from my C2Q Q9400 which I bought dirt cheap when there was still life left in LGA 775. I gave it away for free to a friend who was scammed with a crappy 1155 system with an i3-2100 and an HD 7770 last year. That 3330 went for years without a single thermal paste change and without much cleaning, playing thousands of hours of TF2 and the like, and I reckon it's still going on whenever the guy's kid is playing FS19. Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge still probably has 3-4 years left in it for budget builders. Truly indestructible little processors.
My sandy/ivy bridge with radeon gpu laptop still won't die. Still fine for yt and vid playback, but gaming on it is impossible. One of the goat architecture for sure.
I still have my old 2500K sitting around with 32gb of ram for when I need a server or something. I replaced it with a nice Ryzen after 10 years of service but It still felt fine when I replaced it. I mostly did it because when I bought it I figured my next CPU upgrade would be when 8 core processors came around as that's where it felt like things were going 14 years ago. It sadly took way to long for 8 core CPUs to finally come out and with how Intel kept their CPU upgrades so boring my 2500k lasted far longer than I ever thought possible. Kind of glad I got the last CPU with a soldered IHS and not one of the later ones which had basic thermal paste between the die and IHS. Though if I had the magic of hindsight I wish I bought the i7 2700k as multi-threading really allowed that CPU to keep up even today. Especially if you can get a 5ghz overclock on it. Sandy bridge was all about getting big overclocks on basically every CPU.
i ran an i7-2600k for 10 years without issue, even OC'ing to 4.8GHz. The only reason i had to upgrade was that some newer games and applications required the AVX2 instruction set extensions to get good performance. other than that, it was still very much holding its own and handled anything i could throw at it!
There is a small mistake with the CPU technical specs. The i5 2400 wasn't a 95 W TDP CPU, it's a 65 W CPU. The 95 W ones were the "K" parts: i5 2500K, i7 2600K and i7 2700K
I have watched you for years and I did not ever imagine you're going to review one of my early cpu that I have used through the years. I am honored. even though it's pointless, I can game on it
Ma was still running i5 2400 desktop and just TODAY I upgraded her to i7 4720hq laptop, just because it's more compact. Same performance chip. Daily use is still ok. Weird to think that if you are in 2010, PCs from 2000 were absolutely unusable.
When I was in college i bought a laptop with a i5 2520m cpu in 2016. It lasted all the 5 years while I was there and then some more. Finally I upgraded it with an Hp with Ryzen 5300u. Such good cpus
I just resurrected one of these systems to set up on my TV. Got it for free from my local computer store, it was going to be scrap metal with the rest. Added storage, ram, and my old 1650 from a previous system. The i5-2330 that it came with could handle gaming alright, but I found the i7-3700 to replace it to have hyperthreading, and added a pcie card to add usb 3.0 functionality, and it's been a great little tower! Learned a lot in the setup process and tweaking to get it all ship-shape.
Sandy Bridge was amazing, had a 2600K for a time until the 4790K came out. The worst about them were always the coolers with their push-pins. I worked in IT at that time and I hated them. 2 out of 10 times they went in as intended. The other 8 times the same thing happened as it did to you in the video. If they didn't have had heat spreaders, we would have killed countless CPUs because of cracked CPU-dies.
I have an i5 2450m laptop I bought from a mate about 5 years ago, it still works as a laptop perfectly. It runs left for dead 2 at 30 fps and is only limited by the hd3000 igpu. it also plays minecraft with optifine and a couple other games too. it used to be a bit sluggish to play those .io games on the internet with frame drops. However, I disabled the hardware security exploit work arounds (I'm on linux but I think its still possible on windows) and now its buttery smooth there too.
Not Sandybridge but I'm still daily driving a twin Ivybridge workstation. Not quite worthless yet but a very long way from the $3500 each wholesale price quoted on Intel's website.
I was running an i7-2600k for a while and just recently upgraded. Even today, it still holds itself up on a lot of things. Only downsides is that it uses PCIe 2.0, only 4 cores 8 threads, and DDR3 is almost out of the question now.
the pcie 2.0 is the issue with this platform, as soon as you go to pcie 3.0+ it's a big difference, I had both a 3570K (@ 4.2 all core) and 3770K (@ 4.5 all core) and later a X79 Xeon E5-1680 v2 (8 Ivy Bridge cores @ 4.4) running for a very long time, basically until Ryzen came around and finally buried them.
@pepperfish_ I agree with you 100% there, they are very dependable still, could probably run some basic game servers on them still. Thinking of doing that myself with the i7
@@Cathal_Marsh If you still want to use it in an environment that it's still capable in try linux. I use Manjaro cinammon and freeBSD on my X79s and have a home minecraft server running 24/7. For a server or NAS the only thing you really need is lots of ram (16GB+) and a stable power efficient cpu, gaming on Linux is best with an AMD GPU, good luck have fun.
All my computers are 1155 socket, 1 is running with i7 3770, second one Xeon E3-1240 v2 and i gave one to my mom that has the legendary i5 2500K. All paired with Sapphire RX 5xx series graphics card.
In our uni we have mountains of i7-2600 optiplex' still operating. And for the most the only reason for them starting to go out is that the IT will soon fully switch to win11. At some point there was like a cube of 3x3x3 of them at the ewaste dump, fantastic time for us scavengers lol
I got a few machines containing gen2 intel i5/i7 for free over the years, an i5 2500 cpu chip given to me from a friend, a m91p thinkcentre sff with an i5 2400, a gigabyte motherboard with a i3 2100 on it, a dell xps 8300 with an i7 2600 just left abandon at my void deck. It's been like this for quite awhile now. People just chucking out gen2 intel machines and parts for cheap or free. Their great for Batocera usage lol. An establishment local to me recently started gutting out gen8-9 Lenovo V530s intel machines due to contract expiring, I'm probably going to pick some of the gutted machines lol.
One thing not mentioned in the video is that the i5-2400 only supports RAM up to DDR3-1333. A better choice for this socket would be the Xeon E3-1225 V2, which is what I'm still using. It allows me to run LV DDR3-1866 (PC3-14900) The Xeon 1225 has 8mb of L3 and is a 77w cpu vs the i5 at 95w
I still use one of them in the form of an HP rp5800 (retail point of sale system) someone wanted to junk. It has 8GB, a 1050TI in it and it is running Linux Mint, and i just cannot junk it since its actually doing everything just fine. Its been running 24/7 on idle in my un-insulated garage over the winter here in Norway and it just works. A fleet of 3220Ts i repurposed at an NGO and they are perfectly fine with Mint as a public browsing computer. I did not really do any gaming on it, but now i certainly want to try and i might buy an extra stick of memory for it. I really do love that you make a point of that a lot of us might not need as much as we think we need.
i'm glad i ran across your video and channel, i am still using on a i5 2320 and a 1050ti (so close to the system you tested). Guild wars 2 which is a direct x 9 game plays fine BUT trying to play world of warcraft is now not doable anymore when you get around more than 20 players lol, so im finally gonna retire this faithful girl. . Thanks for testing older stuff like this!
"For Rockstars latest and greatest"
This RDR2 will be 7 this year. Insane you can still say this.
When one game prints as much money as GTA V, I guess one can be a little more selective
Can't wait gta 6 this year
And neither RDR2 nor GTAV are the same games they were at launch. That's a whole lot of updates and, these days, game requirements increase as the game ages, provided it is still being actively maintained.
@@Maximus20778 Unless it gets delayed for 2026 😂
@@podrumkaleto5042 for pc it will if not 2027, 2025 release date was for the consoles
My parents computer still runs on a third gen intel i5. Threw an ssd in it and got windows 11 running against its will. Power efficiency could be better, but works just fine!
I'm concerned MS will disable W11 for unsupported systems one of these days.
@@jorge69696 If they do,the LTSC for IoT version will still work fine on it because that version has no requirements against old hardware
if third gen is 3000 series, then I use one, and windows says I cannot upgrade to 11. A win from windows, rare sight
@@XTCMatrix you can use rufus to bypass those things
I got a first gen i3 I'm going to put windows 11 on and soon going to upgrade it to a i7
As a 40 year old and child of the 80's-90's it's pretty wild to me how long CPU's last now. We haven't seen much of an increase in clock speeds since like 2006, so at this point anything that's 4 cores with decent cache speeds are lasting significant amounts of time. Your hardware used to go obsolete literally ever 2-3 years. Like...REALLY obsolete too. Build a PC in lets say... 2001 or 2002 that's going to only be a single core that's maybe 1.5GHz. 3 years later and you're building machines that are 3.6GHz. And just a couple years after THAT you're starting to weigh whether you should upgrade from your dual cores to quad.
The amount of money that PC enthusiasts used to have to blow every few years to stay relevant was actually insane lol. Being able to now use 15 year old hardware that works fine with modern software is kind of amazing.
41 here and isnt that true ! in the 90s it felt like you got a pc and 1 year later it was wildly old of date! my 486 was old dated but still used it till the mid 90s as i was a kid couldnt afford a new pc. got a amd k2 400 build in 97 then i built a gaming pc in 2003 i think had a p4 2.8 with hyperthreading 512mbs ram and a amd gpu think it was an xt 7600 ( memory is bad so probaly wrong on specs xD) mental to think that a pc today could last 10 to 15 years!
I bought a prebuilt with Celeron 466MHz in 1999, upgraded it to Pentium 3 800MHz a couple years later, and kept using it until *2008* :).
When I built myself a Core 2 Duo e8400 w/ 8800GT at that point, it was definitely an eye opening experience. First game (pack) I bought - The Orange Box.
@ bro orange box sale sometime early in steams life was just the best got so many games for 30 quid!
my 486 was a 486 sx 33 with 4 mb ram a 220mb hdd and a 1 mb svga trident card it had both a 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppy disk drive i upgraded it later to drop the 5.25 for a cd rom drive and went to 32mb ram could play doom and duke nuke em 3d so i didnt care xD.
my father still uses my first computer... from 2010': an AMD APU A8-3800 quad core 2.4ghz. obviously with ram and ssd upgrades
“A decade and a half later” we are getting old bois , i will miss those times🫡
I miss those times too,i was in highschool when 2nd and 3rd gen Intel CPUs were top notch. Having at least an i5 system back then was a dream
Want to feel young again? I ran a 486SX25 during High School :P
We are, I have a cpu from 2009, it will soon be able to legally drive a car here.
@@catriona_drummond 386DX40 here... ouch
This is 14 years old now? Bro where has the time gone, I was 9 when this processor came out and I'm turning 23 next month. I'm going to cry, maybe that important surgeon that really needed that graphics card can make me look younger again.
G'day @sharkpawsz,
To make you feel young, my Birthday is the day after next Month...
& I was older than you are now (23) + the age you were at release (9) added together when i5-2400 was released
Why do i recognize your profile picture.....
😊🙏
i had an i5 2500k as my first gaming PC CPU and I still own that PC to this day, though I haven't used it in many years
@OreoLatexKing suspicious
My ghetto rig (one of three rigs I've built and own) uses an i7-3770, 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 RAM, an AMD RX 5500 (4GB GDDR6) graphics card, and in a generic LGA1155 motherboard. Runs XB1/PS4 era games damn good for peanuts. Fallout 4 GOTY? Batman Arkham Knight? Doom Eternal? All run great on it. Those old 2nd gen and 3rd gen i7s hold up great.
Im pretty sure it runs everything up until 2017 at least. But devs arent doing their jobs anymore, 12core x99 cpu should be enough for 1000 npcs
I have an old Optiplex 990 that's held together with hopes and prayers and has a full ATX power supply sticking out of it.
I mean hey, it runs great!
Please can you help me out with the mobo
Legend says the Dragon Age shaders are still being compiled
Runs the only Dragon Age that matters very well!
I’ve heard that takes a while even on new systems.
@@EvilTurkeySlices yeah some times i think it might server thing then a your computer thing. though i am not sure how that works in the first place
It's the universe telling you to skip the new Dragon Age and just play Origins or Inquisition. This machine could probably even max the latter.
What a spectacularly shit game. Looks bad, runs even worse, the story is hideous and the characters are not just unlikeable, but you want to see them die violent deaths.
And to top it off, when I installed it, I had to spend hours on fixing EA's broken slop, it would let you save the game and then it'd be corrupted upon trying to load it. In fact, I spent more time fixing the stuff that made it unplayable than I did playing the game before I erased all traces of it off my drives.
Fun video idea. "AMD FX 8350 vs Intel i5 3470 - 13 years later"
I would assume the fx8350 does a lot better.
second this
Those who still are/were rocking an 8000 series FX chip 8-10-ish years later and who compared the performance of the FX to the thing 99% of people recommended back then, the i5, then the FX wins this comparison, especially with newer titles which utilize 4+ cores AND especially if you were creating content aka rendering etc..
FX was far better than its public image and kind of ahead of its time. I've had a 9590 that someone gave to me for 50 bucks (lmao) - I ran this until 2021, had no issues with it whatsoever. I then sold it on ebay for 140 bucks to a collector
😅
Haha my friend had a 3470 for the longest time. He'd love to see this.
@@MarcosCodas The channel RA Tech did a video on this years ago.
The title is "FX-8350 vs i5-3470 - Here's What Other Reviewers Don't Tell You About AMD FX".
Send it to him :)
breaking the cooler with a pencil gave me some nostalgia
I remember someone doing this at my school
It seems like each time I watch a new video of yours, it reminds me of my time doing QA testing at Intel. Although this time around, it was when I was doing testing for Intel's ill-fated WiDi product (Intel Wireless Display) in 2013, which died a pretty quick death a few years later. It was the mention of "Sandy Bridge" that brought back these memories, although it would have been a different iteration of that processor than the one you're talking about now. Ah, those were the days. Not quite as exciting or ground-breaking as when I was testing the very earliest 3D graphics cards WAY back in 1996-1997. We had no idea what kind of revolution in gaming we were about to unleash! We just knew that it made playing Quake look better.
best part about sandy bridge is they don't use thermal paste under the IHS, unlike a lot of the processors that came after them. the paste dries out on everything
You're right, after checking it it's actually soldered on the die itself. One crazy example of how literally they don't make things like they used to.
@@bowo3482 Intel returned to solder under IHS since 2018 with Coffee Lake refresh (9th gen)
Ran my entire college work on Sandybridge, an i7 2670QM, it was good to me and I still have it, completely functional, bought even a battery for the old guy, helps me check things around the house, and play with an Arduino and program SD cards for raspberry.
I have an i7 2670QM in an Itx industrial motherboard. It's pretty awesome for a HTPC I have it paired with a GTX 1650.
2670QM is a solid workhorse that doesn't want to die. I have mine since 2012 , maxed our RAM , put SATA III SSD and works really good and if laptop came with dedicated GPU , you can call it the best purchase ever made. Only if it could allow to install more RAM than 8GB and can live many more years , even as a daily driver for not so heavy tasks.
One generation newer, but similar story here. My Thinkpad T530 was upgraded (years and years ago) from some lowly dualcore i5 to an i7 3610QM quadcore, 16GB DDR3, a 256GB mSATA SSD + 1TB HDD, and I replaced the eye cancer 1600x900 LCD with a 1920x1080 one. So long as you don't do anything that needs 3D graphics grunt, It's surprisingly easy to forget that you're sitting in front of a 12 year old machine. Perfectly cromulent for everyday stuff. In CPU benchmarks it even managed to keep up with a friends early Ryzen (2500U) Thinkpad ... albeit at 3x the power consumption lol
@@s0men00bb2670QM can support 16GB ram. I have 16GB running and recognised in my old Sony Vaio VLPC22Z1E.
I'm still using a 2540m on my ThinkPad
The era might be worthless but this video won't be
I love how some of these older processors can still hold their own in 2025. I have a similar cpu - a Core i5 3570 which, despite being unsupported, runs Windows 11 and many modern games flawlessly. Thanks for a great, interesting video. 👍
Nah.. I run a 4570, 16g ddr3, and a 1060. Lack of hyperthreading is blatently obvious when considering Windows, and the gpu never hits 100%.
I feel the sentiment though
These videos are like crack for millennial nerds like me. Would love to see the footage you spoke of earlier about the 10 year old PC!
Ah, the "good old days" of Intel. In 2012 I got 2 Dell XPS Studios (circa 2010) from a gaming dev company that was switching to iOS dev, FOR FREE cause they were going to E-waste em and I knew someone that worked there. Cost me a tank of gas to go get em (around 200 miles round trip). They ran Core i7-920s. I only had to upgrade from the one I kept in 2023 when the Mobo started to fail. RAM slot went bad. I listed the system for free on Marketplace and someone took it cause "it'll be an upgrade to what I'm using", lol. Told the guy "well just avoid using RAM in this channel here and yeah, should be fine". Never heard back from him so I assume he's still using it today :D
This reminds me of the claims I heard about the Pentium Gold G5400.
Forums made it seem like it was _Celeron-level_ bad, but I've loaded a bunch of emulators on it and it plays games as good as the original consoles using only the iGPU.
Even PS1 and Dreamcast games don't stutter at all. For having been pulled from a dumpster, and having over 27k games now installed... all loaded on a machine roughly the size of an original Xbox One, I can't really complain given how well it holds up: the G5400 is no speed demon, but it utilizes the power it has rather well, like the 2400.
I even gifted one of these PCs for Christmas (I found 7 total) as a _turn-key_ setup complete with 24" FHD monitor, keyboard, mouse and gamepad for a total budget of $45.
(That included a 500GB SN570 NVMe, 16GB DDR4 2666, and Windows 11 Pro, preinstalled.)
Glad to see people are still showing love for Sandy Bridge, tho; it's the perfect representation of _old, not obsolete._
This is one timely video. As a matter of fact, this week I am assembling a new home server to replace my own sandy bridge i7-2600 machine. It's been a reliable system for over a decade, but has run out of expansion options for me.
Honestly for people who want to try the tux side of things, a lot of pre 8th gen chips will become budget gold mine once windows 10 is out of support
Editing this as people are fighting below it:
I know you can get around windows 11 install requirements with Rufus, I know you can use tiny 11 and that they're anti cheat issues on not windows.
I was literally just trying to say hey these will probably be cheaper when windows drops offical support for the hardware and that it's supported by distros still.
Please stop arguing in this thread
Then you just put TINY 11 on system like that🤷
@@Shaggy_Prime Honestly, it's just easier to slap one of the easier, headache free distros on it than deal with Windows headaches. I just slapped Mint (First time using it, but I wasn't going to mess around with non-free driver shenanigans while at work for Debian) on an old XPS with a lovely screen and it seems to be running fairly well.
Tbf you can just install windows 11 through Rufus
on linux its probably even better since you can easily disable hardware security vulnerability work around and get an extra 5% performance at least
@@EbonySaints What about installing windows is hard? You slap the win11 iso onto a flash drive with Rufus, which lets you disable the install requirements, and it just works™.
It's really endearing to me how a modern piece of engineering marvel like a processor that can do more calculations than humans have ever done in a few moments costs less than 10 pences.
The machine I'm typing this on right now has an i5-2400 running Linux. It's been my daily drive for longer than I can remember and although I have a new Ryzen 5600G system sitting on the shelf waiting to replace it, the damned thing just keeps working so well I haven't gotten around to it.
Actually insane performance for this old CPU
I had a i7 2700k that would overclock like a BEAST!! We had a water cooler on it and a 750 watt Corsair TX power supply. I bought a Rx 580 to pair with it and the motherboard would NOT recognize the card no matter what I did. We had to update the bios and it ended up destroying the overclocking ability on that platform. You could still manage to overclock the chip, just not near as high. I think we gave it away just with in the last year or so to someone who wanted to play Witcher 3 on a PC. The chip went up to 5.1 Ghz before the update and would only hit like 4.7 Ghz after. It was sad, however the kid that got it never missed the performance.. he didn't know it was there in the first place. 😂
Oh man, that must have been a huge bummer! A bios update killing some of an awesome overclock 😞
Sandybridge will be talked about for a lot longer than people think. I was still using an i7-2600 up until about two years ago when i got a free set up to cannibalize for parts including an i7-4790, so i gave my friend a build with the 2600 and an R9-280 (Nimez drivers) with 16gb ddr3 etc. still serves her well. My HTPC in the den is an i7-2600s with 16gb ddr3, a Yeston 640sp RX550 (its basically an RX555/550x, based on the RX560D) 4gb and a 4th WD Blue HDD hooked up to a 4k panel and it chugs along with modern games even if they get turned down to 720p with the case of Space Marine 2. Hell, i had the i5 2400 running in a lil backup rig i made with all salvaged parts i would have on hand in a gaming room i provide for the local fan convention up til last week when i upgraded it with a free i5-2500, evened out the ram to 16gb, and added a Toshiba 128gb SSD (it also has a 950 gtx with a frankensteined cooler that runs only on power and ground, as well as a 1tb HDD and a removable drive bay). That thing as well runs rather well, and i may do a video on that build as well. But as others have said, once Windows 10 gets kyboshed for support, a LOT will be going to some form of Linux Distro and these things still shine there, especially with no need for the Spectre patch etc. Im actually thinking of dual booting with Ubuntu Cinnamon at first to try out.
Thinkpad of mine still using i5-2520M and running it was to this day. Ssd so small (msata port) with easy cpu and ram upgrade no wonder people love this era of intel generation of thinkpad.
My r9 390 was my stepping stone inbetween my first gtx 770 and my current rtx 3060ti. I bought my r9 390 for a budget build for cheap ($50) a couple years ago and I also handed it down to a friend when I got my 3060ti. The r9 390 was a beast with 8gb of vram and such a huge bus (512 bits iirc) it handled every game I threw at it in 1080p at highest settings with high frame rate but overall I noticed too much artifacting/graphic glitches in a few of my favorite games and no direct x 12 support for the newest games so I got my 3060ti instead and no more issues like that.
@ im hoping my next card is RTX, i am still slumming it on a 1060 gtx 3gb.
@@hypnostone20 my i5 3330 (purchased as a pre build in 2014) paired with a r7 240 did the job pretty well util my motherboard preseted problems a few months ago. sadly now my r7 is not sending video signal, due to some bendings i did o the processor slot (motherboard already presenting problems before that, so not a huge lost) . now i only need to buy a new motherboard, because everything else still working (ram, gpu, processor, 2 psus etc...). it was my secondary pc, and im still want to use that way XD
The 2500K , 2600K , and 2700K, are still fun OverClockers ! They are cheap, but it is hard to find, an GOOD LGA 1155 motherboard, for them !
X99 is also still fun to tinker with ! But those are very hard and very expensive to get !
I have an I7 2600 running in my OP vista machine with an 1155 E3 Xeon running windows 11 as my main garage computer. Sandy and Ivy bridge really are decent budget systems and with the E3 xeons you can effectively get a cheap I7 that will happily chug along all day.
A few years ago at my father's work HP SFF computers were changed to newer ones. Fortunately, those HP PCs could be bougth, so i thougth it would be a good chance to get one for my TV( yes, I use a computer, because i can watch everyting, read everything, etc from my bed, it is really comfortable with a wireless mouse) and that computer has an i5 2400. It is really a good cpu as you said, it can handle basic task without problem. I love it. I usually watch your videos on that too, but not this time. It's kind of ironic :D I also have an i5 3570k. It's crazy how well these cpus kept up over the years. With 2600k or 3770k you can put a decent gpu next to it, and you can play most of the games out today, if you don't mind some compromises here and there.
The first laptop I bought used for schoolwork was a ThinkPad T430s with a dual core sandybridge i7 and it really served me well for quite a few years. Nowadays it's a bit sluggish (due to being a dual core) but it's still great for web browsing. My first real PC was a used HP workstation with a sandybridge-era six core Xeon and that thing was amazing.
It’s not the final era for sandy bridge. There’s a few more. The budget retro era, and then the expensive retro era.
"Old games don't run very well on Windows 57, so you have to buy an ancient 'Intel' processor from that era if you want to run Crysis or Dark Souls. Hmm? Skyrim? Nah, just buy the new port for the Nintendo Quantum Switch, it's almost exactly the same."
@@Gabu_ nintento quantum switch lmaooo
I had this exact CPU in my first "modern" desktop in 2011. Alongside a Radeon HD 6870.
Played Witcher 2 and Amalur and Grid and so forth very nicely indeed.
Must be a sign ive literally just threw a 2400 into a dell optiplex i got today, it had a i3 dual core in it and the 2400 was in the collection of cpu's i have 😊 gotta love a free upgrade and now it will be a linux machine when i put a ssd in it and it can then go to someone in need
I built my brother an i5 2500k system back in the day. It was an MSI Itx motherboard if I remember correctly. He moved over to an Apple Mac and listed most of the components on eBay. He gave me the case and PSU, and then I repurposed them.
Still own my I5 2300, haven't used it for years but can't bring myself to get rid of it. Might turn it into an emulation box for a family member. Amazing CPU.
I was literally still using the i7-2600K up until fall last year.
Really had no trouble with it at all. Paired with the trusty GTX1060 6GB, it was one beast of an ancient war horse.
Only very, very recently did SOME new games start truly struggling on said system, and the reason ended up being something few people even talk about:
the these days slooow PCI-E 2.0 port in which the GPU resided. Found some decade old posts that claimed that no game would need PCI 3.0 or even the assumed 4.0 in ages... then HD2 dropped.
I have multiple sandy bridge machines at home and its still fantastic. I have a toshiba that i upgraded from a Pentium B950 to the i7-2630m, a thinkpad T420 that i upgraded to an i7-2620qm, and a 40 pound hp envy desktop with an i7-3930k liquid cooled. That bad boy plays modern games very well still, when my main rig was down.
This CPU, along with a GT 1030 (DDR5) in a sff pc ran home theatre and emulation duties for years until it died not long ago. You are accurate in saying that these things keep chugging on.
Edit: I'm shocked that Cyberpunk can run on this CPU, regardless of GPU
intel : "ah.. the good old days when we were at top.. feels like yesterday"
I bought one of these Sandy Bridge i5 back when they where still new and remember getting a super good deal on them. I've shuffled around using a Mac, just my work computer and now a small minipc running A Ryzen7 laptop chip and...the Sandy Bridge one is still in use with my parents, running Win 10 and latest software. With an SSD it's a perfect entry level pc, just as you mention. I might give them this minipc I have if Win10's end of support deadline does indeed transpire, but I'll probably hang on to that PC... most of the games I play in any case should be handled with no problems by that system.
Yep it is still more cpu than most people actually need
3 years ago I recovered a discarded i3 Ivy Bridge SFF system. Add some more used ddr3 memory and it's my home theater PC to this day.
This was my old CPU from 2012-2018, it was a surprisingly good CPU that held up surprisingly well until I went up to first gen Ryzen (Then a 5600X). Surprising results here, good to see it can still hold its own. That PC I had with it in was my first decent PC I ever had and so for that reason, the i5 2400 will hold a special place in my heart.
When I sold PCs in like 2018-2020 I would buy the i5 2310 or 2320 for dirt cheap from CEX for budget builds to flip, they where like 50% cheaper on CEX then a 2400 which gave me that extra profit for me while I wasn't employed
Ive got many gaming pcs in this house (its a house full of gamers from 5 year olds to 55 year olds, literally!) Several of these pcs are sandybridge architecture. One inn particular is an i7 2600K on a ali express ITX motherboard, 16 gb DDR3 and an 8gb RX 6600. The pc is just great!
I also have an i5 2500k pc with GTX 1660 Super and a media centre pc with i5 2330 with on board graphics.
Watching you on a i5-2400s
The very 1st CPU I ever purchased. Love your vids
My daily runner is the 2nd gen i7, so the 4 core/8 thread variant of this chip. While it is a long way behind todays chips, as this vid shows - it is still more than usable. By that I mean, I have yet to come across anything apps or games I use that has actually felt slow. It is wild to still be using the same computer (with a newer GPU and RAM upgrade) 12-13 years later and STILL feel like it has many years left in it. I suspect this will be the first computer I will run until it just dies dramatically one day.
This hasn't been enlightening, mainly because of the little story I'll share below, but as always, very enjoyable video fella. You've had a real knack for making these videos using that soothing voice and including the lovely music you always pick for the background 🙂
The Sandy Bridge intel processors are truly wonderful in the realms of 'bang for buck', the Core i3's and i7's also.
A while back - I think during that Covid rubbish - I built an SFX pc with an i5-2500 and a GT1030 GDDR5 variant with 8GB DDR3 RAM. All off Ebay for about £80.
Case and power supply were the most expensive parts (Silverstone SUGO-BB, and a Corsair SF450 modular PSU). It ran every modern game I threw at it with a variety of medium settings at 1080p, and older games it would be even better.
Anyway, recently, I was having some minor but very annoying and long winded issues with my main computer after a budget upgrade, so I used the SFX pc to play some games with a friend. I put the GTX 1060 6GB from my main computer in there but I think the i5-2500 was bottlenecking the 1060 a little in Darktide because it would stutter ever so often, even with most settings on low. It ran MW5 Mercenaries alright though, barely changed any settings compared to my main pc.
Bare in mind now, Darktide and MW5 were released about a decade after the i5-2500 was released. Just goes to show how well put together they are. And IF developers actually optimize their games, as you proved with RDR2, it can even run those just fine. The value of them is insane. 50p for a piece of silicone that can run most modern games... Suffice to say, they're bloody awesome CPU's! 🙂😄
my partner is still rocking my good ol hand me down i7 2700k system from years ago, shes got 16gb of ram with it and a gtx 780ti so driver support is non existent but it runs what she wants to play, those cpu's are still decent!
Pairing it with a AMD gpu could increase performance too since they put less load on the cpu, and overclocking, that will also help.
Stock or OC ? I used a 2600k with an improved cooler at 4.6ghz for quite a while and that was noticeably better than stock.
Yeah, the K series running like 25-30% overclocks is the reason Sandy Bridge was legendary.
My old 2600K managed to get to 5GHz flat for some benchmark runs and a CPU-Z validation, though the temps were absolutely beyond good and evil at that point lol. Daily drove it at 4.6GHz with a lot less vcore and thus MUCH cooler. The fact that Sandy Bridge still had soldered IHSes helped _a lot_ vs Ivy bridge with the degrading thermal paste between the IHS and the Die as a cost saving measure
@@Knaeckebrotsaege I managed 5.1Ghz on my 2600K, but the voltage was, maybe acceptable for daily driving, maybe a bit to high. It is stable in stress tests maybe for just gaming you could get away with a lower. voltage.
5Ghz was doable with fairly good Voltages. I also managed 5.2Ghz on my 2500k, but it did require high voltages, but I am honestly impressed how good sandybridge is, still is, not was, it is still very good.
G'day BBO,
I really liked the video, another use is these intel 2000/3000 still make BRILLIANT "1st PC for kids" who are looking to play RoBlox & Minecraft with their friends.
While C2 Duo + some Quad CPUs are still plentiful & cheap down here in Australia LGA775 Motherboards have started to become hard to find & more expensive especially if you want something better than a basic M-ATX with 2 phase VRM, so LGA775 are now more for those in the Retro Community specifically wanting them.
I just hooked up my 2500k a month or two ago looking for some old files and I was surprised at how fast it still felt.
videos like these, as well as how well my laptops (which are old af) run Windows 10 and most games make me feel like the only reason Windows 11 had such higher requirements, as in, asks for new af CPUs and motherboards, is because older Intel processors (and even some AMD ones) still run most stuff up until now. But companies wanna sell more stuff...
i used one of these as my daily till pretty recently-i finally upgraded to an open box system with an 11500. It was pretty shocking how much better the new one is- I was missing a lot of performance but didnt really realize it till i switched (not so much for me for gaming, but running a bunch of programs is night and day). that 2400 will always have a place in my heart though
Hey I had one of these about 8 years ago, sold it for $50. No hyperthreading tho, only 4 threads. It was ok for the time, but the motherboards are worth 100x the chips.
Our highschool was using some i5-2400 computers until 1 week ago when they brought some new AIO's with i5-14500t. What an upgrade!
I own a ThinkPad T420 that runs on an i5-2410M Ivy Bridge with ThrottleStop because BD PROCHOT doesn't work anymore. Edited a 2nd place-winning video on CapCut, played Roblox on absolute minimum quality and did my various assignments on it. Absolutely still usable, if you know what you'll get and comfortable doing little tweaks. Now I'm vibing with my ThinkPad E495 running on a Ryzen 5 3500U, but I'll never forget what my T420 done for me 🫡
I still use an i5-2500 in the office PC. Runs decently.
That's crazy. Imagine trying to use a 14 year old chip 14 years ago. It has held up remarkably honestly
that CPU sill has more raw power than many entry-level mobile processors sold today
It is amazing, that CPUs from that era (2011-2012) are still worth using even to this day. But graphics cards from that era (GeForce GTX 500, 600 and 700 series) are unfortunatrly obsolete. Recenlty I got HP EliteDesk 8300 CMT with Core i5 3470 and 16GB DDR3 RAM. I added just for experiment, Intel ARC A750 8GB, and 1600W PSU (why not😂), PSU adapter, and the PC still goes nicely, through modern day.
Sandy Bridge is legendary , still running a 3960x with a titan x maxwell rig feels as fast as my ryzen 7 5800x of course i run windows 7 ultimate on the 3960x rig sometimes nonintrusive operating systems make older hardware age a lot more gracefully
my linux pc runs this cpu. even today ifs still great. i upgraded to ram from 4 to 8 gigs and threw in an ssd and the computer runs linux mint like a dream. not sluggish at all.
Always entertaining. I wonder did you have water physics and other cpu intensive settings turned down lowest in rdr2? Or crowd density and anything volumetric in cyberpunk? Just capping the frames at a reasonable target might really smooth things out. Wouldn't mind seeing how it performs in civ5/6 and indie titles like rimworld that are largely cpu dependent. And geez, under a pound haha.
I bought a 17 2600 rig in 2016 and had lots of fun with a 1060 3gb. Still runs tons of games.Now on the new Sandybridge the 13 12100.
I remember when these were new. I feel old.
I had a i5-2400 overck at 3.7ghz all core ( z77 mobo) for years with a 7870XT, served me really well. Still using this machine as htpc with i7-2600k/16GB ram/GTX 960. I think 1155 socket is fine as long as you arent a 3A gamer or needing the power for productivity. The i5 is far from useless, but i would buy a cheap xeon E3-1230v2( or 1240v2 if price is close) to replace it.
i think about it this way (im only 7 mins in and you may have made this point) imagine using a 14 year old cpu to do modern things in any other era it wouldnt happen as the 80s -15 nope the 90s same even up to the 2010s ! it shows how rapid growth was and how its sorta slowing down.
It would be interesting to test one of the higher clocked 1155 Xeon 8-threaded CPUs. Additionally, installing a PCIe to NVMe M.2 SSD for game storage should aid in loading more efficiently.
I picked up a free pc with a 2nd gen i3 from work a few years ago as they were chucking it in the skip, fitted a i5 2400 that cost me £35 and an ssd and still works well today.
This makes me really curious how the 4th gen i5's are doing now. My first experience with pc gaming was putting a rx570 in a pc i pulled out of my parents computer room with a i5 4600.
If you ask me, the i5 2400 is the true face of Sandy Bridge. There will be some games that will make this CPU feel insufficient though. But then again, there are also a lot of popular games today that will run just fine - Fortnite being one of them.
For me it will always be the 2500k and 2600k, I knew the 2500k was legendary and had super high hopes for it, and it still surpassed them.. I think it has at least 5 good more years left. Although starfield is a bit rough but all low settings with frame gen and probably a 45fps cap will keep it in the race.
@Lynnfield3440this. They were legends because they overclocked like monsters with no effort.
@@erwark they really did, I got the 2500k to 5.2Ghz and the 2600K to 5.1Ghz.
The 2600k still runs any game decently, and the 2500k still can but you might need to cap fps at 45 or something. Uncapped the frame timing will be all over the place in games like starfield.
Fun fact too~ if it’s a K series version you can OVERCLOCK it still even if it’s a “poo poo” prebuilt office pc.
And these things won’t even overheat overclocked. It’s insane.
Saludos desde México. I always enjoy your videos bro
Dat Kotor cantina/Pazaak background music is so soothing.
Wow this is such a trip back.. i remember back in 2012 i was looking at CPU's and seeing the i5 2400 and 2500k and wanted to upgrade. back in the day i had a Core 2 Duo E8400 with a GTS 450.. talk about early 2010's PC gaming lol. I never ended up doing any upgrades unfortunately and i kept that pc up until 2017.. im grateful that nowdays i have my dream pc something i couldnt do as a teenager.
I got an AMD Phenom II 1100T and GTS 450 back then. They were fantastic for Crysis at 768p. I miss when low end graphics cards kicked butt.
Banger of a video. It is absolutely wild how well the early "i" series processors hold up today, and how you can still build acceptable gaming machines out of them! Unfortunately unless you're willing to settle for an OEM board, you're kinda stuck by and large in terms of budget.
Man, that Knights of the Old Republic music in the background at the beginning of the video!
I've used an i5-3330 for a brief time until the May of 2023. My younger brother handed it down to me, he upgraded to a Ryzen 5 3600X upon my recommendation a year before. That i5-3330 performed similarly to an i5-2400, and it definitely was an upgrade from my C2Q Q9400 which I bought dirt cheap when there was still life left in LGA 775. I gave it away for free to a friend who was scammed with a crappy 1155 system with an i3-2100 and an HD 7770 last year.
That 3330 went for years without a single thermal paste change and without much cleaning, playing thousands of hours of TF2 and the like, and I reckon it's still going on whenever the guy's kid is playing FS19. Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge still probably has 3-4 years left in it for budget builders. Truly indestructible little processors.
My sandy/ivy bridge with radeon gpu laptop still won't die. Still fine for yt and vid playback, but gaming on it is impossible. One of the goat architecture for sure.
Thats crazy how that CPU runs cyberpunk. My School computers had sandy bridge CPUs.
I still have my old 2500K sitting around with 32gb of ram for when I need a server or something. I replaced it with a nice Ryzen after 10 years of service but It still felt fine when I replaced it. I mostly did it because when I bought it I figured my next CPU upgrade would be when 8 core processors came around as that's where it felt like things were going 14 years ago. It sadly took way to long for 8 core CPUs to finally come out and with how Intel kept their CPU upgrades so boring my 2500k lasted far longer than I ever thought possible. Kind of glad I got the last CPU with a soldered IHS and not one of the later ones which had basic thermal paste between the die and IHS. Though if I had the magic of hindsight I wish I bought the i7 2700k as multi-threading really allowed that CPU to keep up even today. Especially if you can get a 5ghz overclock on it. Sandy bridge was all about getting big overclocks on basically every CPU.
i ran an i7-2600k for 10 years without issue, even OC'ing to 4.8GHz. The only reason i had to upgrade was that some newer games and applications required the AVX2 instruction set extensions to get good performance. other than that, it was still very much holding its own and handled anything i could throw at it!
There is a small mistake with the CPU technical specs. The i5 2400 wasn't a 95 W TDP CPU, it's a 65 W CPU. The 95 W ones were the "K" parts: i5 2500K, i7 2600K and i7 2700K
I have watched you for years and I did not ever imagine you're going to review one of my early cpu that I have used through the years. I am honored. even though it's pointless, I can game on it
Ma was still running i5 2400 desktop and just TODAY I upgraded her to i7 4720hq laptop, just because it's more compact. Same performance chip.
Daily use is still ok. Weird to think that if you are in 2010, PCs from 2000 were absolutely unusable.
Great video as always!
When I was in college i bought a laptop with a i5 2520m cpu in 2016. It lasted all the 5 years while I was there and then some more. Finally I upgraded it with an Hp with Ryzen 5300u. Such good cpus
I'm still using a nearly 15 year old Dell Latitude with an i7-2640m. Only 2 cores, but still runs great.
I just resurrected one of these systems to set up on my TV. Got it for free from my local computer store, it was going to be scrap metal with the rest. Added storage, ram, and my old 1650 from a previous system. The i5-2330 that it came with could handle gaming alright, but I found the i7-3700 to replace it to have hyperthreading, and added a pcie card to add usb 3.0 functionality, and it's been a great little tower! Learned a lot in the setup process and tweaking to get it all ship-shape.
Sandy Bridge was amazing, had a 2600K for a time until the 4790K came out. The worst about them were always the coolers with their push-pins. I worked in IT at that time and I hated them. 2 out of 10 times they went in as intended. The other 8 times the same thing happened as it did to you in the video. If they didn't have had heat spreaders, we would have killed countless CPUs because of cracked CPU-dies.
I have an i5 2450m laptop I bought from a mate about 5 years ago, it still works as a laptop perfectly. It runs left for dead 2 at 30 fps and is only limited by the hd3000 igpu. it also plays minecraft with optifine and a couple other games too. it used to be a bit sluggish to play those .io games on the internet with frame drops. However, I disabled the hardware security exploit work arounds (I'm on linux but I think its still possible on windows) and now its buttery smooth there too.
Those 1155 mb can be a bit pricey in the US and the OEM most of then have proprietary connections so getting adapters brings the cost back up.
Not Sandybridge but I'm still daily driving a twin Ivybridge workstation. Not quite worthless yet but a very long way from the $3500 each wholesale price quoted on Intel's website.
I was running an i7-2600k for a while and just recently upgraded. Even today, it still holds itself up on a lot of things. Only downsides is that it uses PCIe 2.0, only 4 cores 8 threads, and DDR3 is almost out of the question now.
the pcie 2.0 is the issue with this platform, as soon as you go to pcie 3.0+ it's a big difference, I had both a 3570K (@ 4.2 all core) and 3770K (@ 4.5 all core) and later a X79 Xeon E5-1680 v2 (8 Ivy Bridge cores @ 4.4) running for a very long time, basically until Ryzen came around and finally buried them.
@pepperfish_ I agree with you 100% there, they are very dependable still, could probably run some basic game servers on them still. Thinking of doing that myself with the i7
@@Cathal_Marsh If you still want to use it in an environment that it's still capable in try linux. I use Manjaro cinammon and freeBSD on my X79s and have a home minecraft server running 24/7. For a server or NAS the only thing you really need is lots of ram (16GB+) and a stable power efficient cpu, gaming on Linux is best with an AMD GPU, good luck have fun.
All my computers are 1155 socket, 1 is running with i7 3770, second one Xeon E3-1240 v2 and i gave one to my mom that has the legendary i5 2500K. All paired with Sapphire RX 5xx series graphics card.
In our uni we have mountains of i7-2600 optiplex' still operating. And for the most the only reason for them starting to go out is that the IT will soon fully switch to win11. At some point there was like a cube of 3x3x3 of them at the ewaste dump, fantastic time for us scavengers lol
I think disabling Spectre and Meltdown software mitigations gains some more CPU performance with this era of CPUs
I got a few machines containing gen2 intel i5/i7 for free over the years, an i5 2500 cpu chip given to me from a friend, a m91p thinkcentre sff with an i5 2400, a gigabyte motherboard with a i3 2100 on it, a dell xps 8300 with an i7 2600 just left abandon at my void deck. It's been like this for quite awhile now. People just chucking out gen2 intel machines and parts for cheap or free. Their great for Batocera usage lol.
An establishment local to me recently started gutting out gen8-9 Lenovo V530s intel machines due to contract expiring, I'm probably going to pick some of the gutted machines lol.
One thing not mentioned in the video is that the i5-2400 only supports RAM up to DDR3-1333.
A better choice for this socket would be the Xeon E3-1225 V2, which is what I'm still using.
It allows me to run LV DDR3-1866 (PC3-14900)
The Xeon 1225 has 8mb of L3 and is a 77w cpu vs the i5 at 95w
I still use one of them in the form of an HP rp5800 (retail point of sale system) someone wanted to junk. It has 8GB, a 1050TI in it and it is running Linux Mint, and i just cannot junk it since its actually doing everything just fine. Its been running 24/7 on idle in my un-insulated garage over the winter here in Norway and it just works. A fleet of 3220Ts i repurposed at an NGO and they are perfectly fine with Mint as a public browsing computer.
I did not really do any gaming on it, but now i certainly want to try and i might buy an extra stick of memory for it. I really do love that you make a point of that a lot of us might not need as much as we think we need.
Had an i5 2320 for almost a decade.
that thing kept my pc alive from 2015 till april of 2024
such a beast of a CPU
i'm glad i ran across your video and channel, i am still using on a i5 2320 and a 1050ti (so close to the system you tested). Guild wars 2 which is a direct x 9 game plays fine BUT trying to play world of warcraft is now not doable anymore when you get around more than 20 players lol, so im finally gonna retire this faithful girl. . Thanks for testing older stuff like this!