Ivy Bridge 2011 PCs are still useful today

Posted on by David Craddock

In our house, seperate to my main PC (see the tab above) we still have two Ivy Bridge-based PCs:

Conny’s PC

  • i7-3770K
  • 16GB DDR3 RAM
  • Nvidea Radeon 970 Graphics Card
  • 250 GB SSD
  • Windows 10

My wife uses this as her main PC, and plays quite a few games with it. For a CPU and motherboard that I put together in 2011 or so, I am quite amazed it still runs adequetely! It runs the games she wants to play, the most graphically intensive being Deadpool, but it will also cope with Borderlands 2, Skyrim Special Edition, Shadow Warrior 2, and others. She is not interested in the top graphics games, but it runs just fine.

My Second PC

I have a computer that I use for my own programming and tech hobby projects. It used to be a top of the range workstation 2011 and I got it in a hardware disposal sale at Arm Ltd for only £400 in 2019. This is quite the deal, as it included a lisence for Windows 10 (normally costs £100 on its own).

  • Intel Xeon E5 2650 v2 8 CPU cores @ 2.60GHz
  • 32.0GB DDR3 RAM
  • 2048MB ATI AMD Radeon R9 200
  • 250GB SSD
  • 3TB HD
  • Windows 10

I don’t need a powerful graphics card as I don’t game on it, and the Radeon R9 3200 supports my 2560x1440px monitor so it is more than adequete. I have installed VMWare on it and am looking to spin up some virtual machines as servers, and have them running in the background while I am browsing. I could assign several cores and quite a lot of the RAM and not really notice a difference with the light work I do when using the computer.

I am just amazed at how much you can do with these old high-end CPUS. The performance delta between these Ivy Bridge 2011 CPUs today’s processors really isn’t that large, and they are so cheap these days. This following video shows just how cheap you can build one of these setups, and how powerful they are even today:


The only situation where these processors don’t really work hugely well is in applications which emphasise single-core performance – I tried to use my second PC as an Ableton Live machine, and a lot of audio plugins I wanted to use were not optimised for multi-core processors, just single-core, so that didn’t work well.

Published by David Craddock