Should I be concerned about using older hardware?

Ask Fedora
1

I recently had a situation where both VLC and Strawberry were crashing. My son tracked it down to an “illegal instruction” and then solved the problem by removing libheif-freeworld.

But that is the first time I have ever seen anything like that. I get it. My hardware is not exactly new. The Phenom II X6 CPU that I am using is something like 16 years old. The motherboard is an AM3+ board so I could at least upgrade to a Piledriver FX-8310 CPU. That would get me some newer instruction sets and a bit more speed. Although honestly my Phenom II X6 1055T is plenty fast for what I do and I have it slightly overclocked and I usually run it by using the “Ondemand” setting. So that is really not much of an issue. Going to the Piledriver would maybe get me a 20% speed boost at times in multithreaded applications, although in single threaded applications I probably would not see much of a difference. My other computer is a much faster later generation AMD processor with 8 cores and multithreading. I use that one at night. Right now I am creating this thread on the older computer…

Yeah I am just worried that in the future I might start to see more issues with the older CPU. But I do appreciate the fact that Fedora can run such a vast array of different hardware.

Specifically the FX-8310 would have these instruction sets. I am not really a gamer so none of that would apply…

Screenshot at 2026-10-01 15-07-11
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2

At least it isn’t like Windblows where my current hardware would not even run on the latest version of their virus. Yeah I am not a fan of Microsoft and their bloatware nonsense.

3

well, the definition of old varies vastly depending on who you ask, in my personal opinion, hardware is old after 10 years of use

the problem with hardware that is old is not the hardware itself, is the parts you use to put the machine together as a whole

when you build a pc, the things that often die first is ram and the motherboard, followed by the psu, if psu dies in a certain way, it will kill parts when it ides, and you might end with nothing, sometimes the motherboard will kill cpu and ram, so you can save gpu, storage, psu, the rest to a ewaste recovery facility should go

if you still operate a hard disk, well, i no longer operate any daily, only old ones on external usb enclosures for work, and backup related uses, but plug, use, unplug and store, i cant stand the noise and they do eat alot of power

one of the parts that tends to die last is the cpu, a cpu surviving 20 years of operation is common

that is strictly talking about hardware, capacitors, chips, motors

the side you mention about old phenoms not having instructionsets, some bulldozer and later fx cpus are in a similar boat, kernels if you dont have certain instructionset will just annoy you down the road, games will not load or complain about this or that instruction missing but should just work in general like you report now

the real problem with old phenoms and fx chips is power consumption vs performance offered so if you can, i would try to just sell the ram, cpu, motherboard and migrate to a newer ryzen

the oldest operating pc i have has a ryzen r3 2200g, in 2028 should be a decade old and it beats any fx easily including a fx8350, double the performance per core or multicore and i cant even remember if a cpu that came in 2026 doesnt have almost the same instructionset than this one has, difference must be minimal now

i personally like to squeeze a hardware until it explodes, it is my monetary investment, i dont want it to just be a waste of money, but on the cpu, a fx is now well over 12 years old and the only advantage i would see with it is that you already have ram and motherboard, but a old mobo, as i said, well…

am4 right now is the escape platform, ddr4 ram is not yet absurd expensive thanks to ai, the cpus are abundant and motherboards are great with lots of features, any b450 or a520 should serve you great for another decade and a half, add to it a amd apu with 6 cores,16gbs of ram and you will be set for another 15 years or more

4

I too have an AM3+ board with an AMD Phenom™ II X6 1055T (6) @ 2.80 GHz. Debian 13 is running on it as a server mostly. No problem whatsoever. Boots a lot faster than Fedora on a Ryzen 5600GT.

Why do you consider the Piledriver FX-8310 CPU instead of the FX-8370 ? I’m curious about your choice.

5

LOL. I already have a newer computer. So I don’t need to ditch the older computer. I am going to use it until I can not use it anymore. The Phenom II X6 was already an upgrade from a Phenom II X4. So I had to get a newer (used) motherboard and a different CPU. That was frankly a very simple and easy upgrade.

As I said previously I am not a gamer so that is not even an issue. I browse, I stream internet radio or I listen to music files. Not a lot more than that. To me a computer is just a box and if it does what I want then that is just fine with me. This is the first time I have had any issue like this with an “illegal instruction”…

And BTW, the TDP of my CPU is only 95 watts so it runs nice and cool and that is a bonus.

6

Very simple. TDP. I don’t need anything as fast as an FX-8370. And it is a 125 watt TDP CPU. The performance of the FX-8310 would be plenty for me with a TDP of only 95 watts…

It’s not always about having the CPU that is the fastest. There are other things to consider. Running a lower TDP CPU should generate less heat and also that should mean that the motherboard will last longer. My Phenom II X6 1055T runs around 20C or less. That is awesome. My newer computer runs at 30C or more depending on how I choose to run it. Generally I only run the newer CPU at 3.2 GHz, even though it could boost to more than 4 GHz. It is a Ryzen 7 2700X…

7

tdp is a nice way to tell you that you dont know how much power the thing uses, you measure that with a kill awatt and it will be a measurement of all the pc, the cpu alone, measure how much is using is quite hard to do, if you do measurements the machine at idle should be using around 40 watts and under load should go over 120 watts, if that matters in your particular case

tdp at best can tell you the minimum heatsink you can put on it to keep it cool, and that barely means something these days, back in the phenom days was sort of the same, people were already concerned with heat and noise

yes, run it until it explodes, it is a way to do things i have done, i try not to do it on pcs, because i am a pc technician and i love to do upgrades, builds and keep the machines running the best i can

i used to say that i can live with any cpu, but once i started using ryzen, i dont want anything less, if my experience using a pc can be better, i will try to get just that, the old am3 socket can go to a ewaste in my opinion, or perhaps make it a power hungry router i would end replacing later for the power consumption and peace of mind, but yes, keep using it till you cant, might live another 5 years, you might replace it in a month, who knows?

8

Each to his own I guess. I have both computers hooked up to a KVM switch so they share a keyboard and monitor and also the computer speakers. So if the old one were to go down all I have to do is hit the switch and I am back in business with the new one. That is priceless. That already happened once when my SSD on the older computer took a dump. So I just started using the new one until I could get a new SSD. It was at that point that I upgraded from the Phenom II X4 with an AM3 board to a Phenom II X6 on an AM3+ board. And that also allows me to go to Piledriver if necessary. Also that allowed me to not have to buy new RAM because I already had some very nice Crucial DDR3…

So that is exactly why I was asking the question about the instruction sets. This isn’t about hardware issues at all. It is more about the hardware being able to run the software. And I asked because I recently got that “illegal instruction” error although it does seem like there was already an issue with Fedora and that libheif-freeworld library.

9

This is from System Monitor on the new computer…

Screenshot at 2026-10-01 21-30-21
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10

being a so old cpu, it is about instructionset and hardware in itself, how long you can keep pushing it and dealing with its limitations(while hardware not just die)

the problems will increase over time, because developers will start cutting support for certain instructionsets and request others, like when 32 bit support was cut and people got upset for not being able to use 25 years old cpus anymore with a modern distro

yes, ram these days is not cheap, but it is ddr3, we are like a year away from getting ddr6 on desktop pcs, at some point one lets go, one has to learn to let go

yes, one ends up doing what is best for their particular situation, ideally find the path with less resistance

https://www.xda-developers.com/linux-is-now-adopting-a-cpu-requirement-windows-already-demands-but-dont-worry-its-not-tpm-20/

11

If you always want the latest greatest in the computer world then you better be willing to toss out your computer and get a new one on a yearly basis. Also you better be prepared to spend thousands of dollars every single year. That is definitely not me. I drive a 1999 car with over 300K miles on it and it still runs great. My older computer being 16 years old is not a big deal to me. If it works it works. And I tend to really take care of my stuff…

When the time comes that I need to do an upgrade I will. And the beauty of doing things like that is the fact that the other people who have given in to the upgrade fever will be selling off their older still good stuff at bargain prices. That is always a win.

Recently I had to deal with the fact that the Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti video card that I am using in both computers is no longer supported by the latest graphics card driver in Fedora. Not a big deal. My son figured it all out when he upgraded both of my computers from Fedora 43 to Fedora 44. If the GTX 1050 Ti takes a dump then I will upgrade. But so far that card is doing just fine in both computers…

12

I just read that article and it mentioned kernels not running on an i486. Which is hilarious because before I got an upgraded computer back in 2008 with a Phenom II X2 545 CPU on an AM3 motherboard I was actually running an i486 with 32 Meg of RAM. I think that the graphics card had a total of 2 Meg of video RAM… It had three hard drives in it and was also running three different operating systems. It was running Windows 3.11, OS/2 Warp and Slackware Linux. My son even figured out how to get a USB card to work with it, even though USB was not around when that computer came out. I kept that i486 for a while but eventually it got recycled… Quite a big jump from that to the Phenom II X4…

13

well, the pc masterace at some point was about upgrading each 6 months, but as i said, 10 years is fine, if your budget allows it, of course

in my personal opinion what maters the most is have a working pc, if you have a plan b, you are in the best spot

my plan a is my gaming pc with the best parts i have right now, my plan b is my old ryzen, my plan c is a old am1 cpu i have disassembled, it is slow, but it is ready to be put to work, with its glorious 8 gbs of ddr3

sounds ideal to run win 98 :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

my first pc, that i bought and build was a amd duron with 128mbs of ram and a recycled hard disk and a old ati gpu, but i had installed windows 95 on a similar pc to that one you mention, i remember using those 2mbs gpus that barely could reach 1024x768 resolution at 16bits color, trident display adapters lol, not a gpu in reality

i know alot of people who will do most of their tasks on a smartphone now, but i cant write a letter on a tablet or smartphone comfortably, i need a pc, and for me, that is the most important, have a working pc at hand when i need it

14

I never liked Windows 95 and frankly Windows 98 wasn’t a whole lot different than 95… I think my son had a computer that ran XP for a while. I skipped all of those and when I finally upgraded from the old 486, I went straight to Windows 7. After Windows 7 I started dabbling in Linux. I don’t remember if I ever had an Ubuntu system. I think maybe I did. Then Linux Mint and finally Fedora. My son steered me to Fedora and I am quite happy with it now.

As far as so called “smart” phones go, they sure seem to make people stupid. I don’t do a lot with mine besides phone calls and texts. I don’t run a lot of apps either. I use it for Google Maps sometimes. That is handy. But when I want to do anything more than that it is on a PC… Just like you with that…

15

That is very interesting. I still have a 386DX33 with 290MB HDD and 4MB of RAM. With 2 floppy drives. No CD or DVD reader. MS-DOS with enhanced 4DOS and Slackware Linux (started with loadlin). No communication with the outside world yet other than the null modem serial cable until the very lazy vendor on Ebay decides to finally ship that ISA ethernet card I purchased more than a week ago.

Adding an ISA USB card would be ideal.

I keep this computer because I developped a lot of ISA cards back in that time like an eprom programmer, a stereo sound card well before the Soundblaster came out, a complete 2 trace oscilloscope, a caller id display (years before modems understood what caller id is). I even added mouse support to QB45. ISA was very straightforward for development: Data bus, Address bus, Control lines.

16

Reading this thread made me regret throwing out some old hardware parts, now everything “retro” costs an arm and a leg.

But back on topic: yes, software will eventually only target v3 and above CPUs (see Microarchitecture levels). It could have been v4 (with AVX512) but Intel shot themselves in the foot with that one. v2 is on its way out.

Examples:

  • Athlon 64/Phenom/FM1 APUs are v1, as well as Intel’s Prescott (socket 478) and all CPUs that go on socket 775
  • All Intel CPUs between Nehalem and Ivy Bridge are v2; Haswell and above are all v3 as a baseline
  • All AM3+ Bulldozer CPUs are v2 (no AVX2/BMI1 etc.)
  • FM2+ CPUs are nearly all v2, except for Excavator (Athlon X4 835/845) which is v3
  • All AM4 Ryzens are v3
  • Zen 4 and above (Ryzen 7000) is v4
17

I can’t tell you exactly how my son figured out how to do this but he did. We found a USB card at a place that sold a bunch of old computer hardware. Somehow he manipulated some software into recognizing the card and making it work. He is really a computer genius. But as I said, I have no idea how he actually did it or if he would even remember. It’s been a while… A long while…

18

I guess my plan is just going to be wait and see. If the time comes then the computer will get upgraded to hardware that is newer but still way behind the curve. The next upgrade would have to be to a DDR4 board so that would add some more expense to the equation. The last upgrade was rather inexpensive…

The good thing is that as people get tired of their current hardware a lot of it just ends up on Ebay being sold for less. So a good way to snag some good stuff for cheap. Although my last build had mostly brand new stuff in it. I did use some DDR4 RAM that my son gifted to me…

19

No problemo. I found that card on Ebay. I run DOS 7.1 so it will recognize FAT32 partitions as well as FAT16. I have the driver already for the config.sys. Thanks anyways!

20

Yeah I asked my son if he remembered what he did and he said he had no idea. Let me know if it works when you get it. That would be very cool.