I typically build a new one every 5 years, what I consider to be the next evolutionary jump in processing power. Then I just repurpose the old pc for other tasks. My current one is a 7700k.

When I first started with all this back in FS2 days I was replacing PC's every 2 years to go with a new release of MS flight sim up until FSX was released.

Since FSX was released 11 years ago I have only replaced my PC twice, once a year after it first came out and again 3 years ago, goes to show that with every new release of Flight Sim people would upgrade their machines, it was a driver for progress once upon a time, now it has become a niche market

8 year old rig. Got a heart transplant with a GPU gtx 780 upgrade 2 years ago.

the i5 2500k cpu (OC to 4.8ghz and gradually pulled back to 4.4 ghz) has degraded over time mainly because of constant power blackouts in Bangkok and didn't occur to me to get a battery back up

Since I will be staying with FSX SE for at least another 2 years I decided to buy a battery back up and a brand new i5 2500k cpu on ebay and OC back to 4.8ghz, a  $260 upgrade

This machine still eats up FSX SE !!

wont be upgrading until something breaks or 2 years whichever first

My research on google shows that a rig can last technically for ever however for gaming obviously not practical

On average every three years.  Current one is about 3 1/2 years but coping well and doing the job well.

I've bee doing this for a long time and, as many have also noticed, Windows updates tend to slow a system down over time.   I usually do a full disk wipe and new Windows installation after a couple of years to keep the PC fresh.

I think this is down to motherboards when they upgrade to support new hardware and fast throughput speeds, how long before DDR 5 memory supported motherboards show up.

The latest CPU`s are not well optimised on the present motherboards testers think you should wait till they are optimised.

Ray Fry.

The last update I had was in 2015 for the i7 4970K

Before that it was 2011 for the GTX580

Interesting, my i7 4770K is approaching 4 years in a few months, and I have found little reason to overhaul the complete system. In fact, I just started what I consider a mid life update going from a superclocked GTX 770 to a GTX 1070. The other major update I am considering is SSD as 4 years ago the price of SSDs was exorbitant. Today they are still expensive but 2 x 1TB drives are within the realm of possibilities. I bought in at 16GB of memory and I have yet to see the need to go 32GB, especially considering the current cost of 4 matched sticks of 8GB DDR3 1600 memory. 

The real clincher right now is more of a watch on what software is going to do. P3Dv4 is still very much tied to a single core with multiple threads loafing along. With 8 threads available I normally get 1 maxed out at 100% and the other 7 at 30%. Since I am currently stable at 4.3 Ghz and I can probably expect 4.8Ghz out of an i7 7700k. It makes little sense to overhaul the system for a 500Mhz increase. Until LM changes the core code of P3D for better optimization of multithreaded processors and we see 8 threads with 75% or greater utilization then I am just happy to sit where I am at until my machine goes boom. 

Well my last move was instigated by purchasing X-Plane 11 which is about the same CPU and GPU intensity, so that "forced" me to update the graphics card to a GTX 1070, the 970 was fine for X-Plane 10,but the 3,5GB trick Nvidia used was just not enough for X-Plane 11, hence the upgrade. This should keep me happy for a few years. (touch wood).

 

My current i7 rig is almost exactly 2 years old. Overclocked to 4.8Ghz, I have similar assessments to KenG. My bottleneck is really the sim software at this point.

Recently, upgraded from GTX970 to GTX1070 as prep for P3Dv4 and DCS updates.

Expecting to get 4-5 years more out of it.

Oddly enough, my sim rig gets replaced more often than not because my development rig breaks down, just as it did a few weeks ago with a complete and total failure of the main HD and subsequent loss of several decades of archived emails (truly no great loss).

So, I bought a new computer to become my sim machine, and 'demoted' my old sim machine to my development desk. I've been doing this for the last six replacements. The older machines are still running (after repairs) and serve as backup systems, as well as distributed archive machines.

One of my 'old computers' is dedicated to running rig control for my amateur radio shack's equipment.

My current machine is about 5 years old now.  Going to upgrade in the fall and I did upgrade the video card to a GTX980 about 2 years ago.  If I think back I have been involved in flight sim for close to 20 years and have purchased or built 4 machines....soon to be 5, so they last about 4 years for me.  I just hope the next one is a good as my Sandy Bridge!

20 hours ago, odourboy said:

How do your wives handle the PC purchases? :-)

Oh that's easy, you buy them something of equal or greater value ... the down side is that I have to double my budget for PC expenditures ... just kidding, my wife earns good money and is very independent and we don't try to control each other's budgets/spending.  With that said, she only has one purchase restriction ... I can't buy a motorcycle (I used to ride motorcycles since age 12, but stopped around age 42 due to the advent of texting while driving and my risk of death increased significantly) ... it's the only restriction, so I can live with that.

My upgrade process is driven more by "Does the current new CPU/GPU/Motherboard/RAM/HD make a significant difference?" and is NOT time based.  Typically I aim for a 20% increase in performance over my existing ... if that isn't happening, then I wait for the next round of "new" CPU/GPU etc.  

That's for my main FS PC, I have 4 desktop computers operational at any given point in time using a variety of hardware, main FS PC, networked PC (FSCommander, HiFi, EFB, etc.), video/audio workstation, and "work at home" PC.  As my yearly budget permits (I actually do have one believe it or not), I may add one more PC dedicated to 4K video capture as I'm getting somewhat frustrated with nVidia's 4K capture quality (at night) and surround sound support.

Cheers, Rob.

I'm still using the 3960x GTX680 Dell with the Intel Rapid Storage bootable RAID 10 array - four 2T drives = 4Tb C:\. With two drives per stripe doubles queue depth which increases performance significantly and mirrored so that it has redundancy. Had a drive fail a few weeks ago, simply pulled out the old drive, unpacked and inserted a new drive (£55) and the array rebuilt itself while I continued working. OK so it's not quite as fast as recent SSDs but back when it was new it was as fast or faster than some SSDs.

I'll get a new one when it becomes a problem, maybe before then, there's some nice looking hardware appearing.

Look out for new PCs having RAID support. Windows can RAID drives but you need Intel RST for bootable arrays.

I buy the latest and greatest PC I can afford for ( Budget is always about US$2500 ) and that PC will last me about 4 - 5 years. Then the cycle repeats.