In the lab: a pair of historical systems to broaden our frame of reference
TR's test labs are awash in the latest and greatest CPUs and graphics cards, but our ability to provide a frame of reference past Sandy Bridge CPUs is a little fuzzy. My P965 Express motherboard fell to a botched firmware update years ago, and I had stretched that Core 2 Duo E6400-powered system out for the better part of seven years before I hopped on board the Haswell train. Plenty of stuff happened in the intervening time, of course, and holdout enthusiasts with chips from the Nehalem era might want to see how their hardware is holding up.
Problem is, chips from that era are cheap, but contemporary motherboards still demand a pretty penny-often hundreds of dollars. It's hard to justify spending real money on those historical platforms out of curiosity alone. TR BBQ host and ...