These 4 ancient CPUs refuse to become obsolete, even in 2026

Published Sep 27, 2026, 7:30 AM EDT Ismar is a Senior Author at How-To Geek. He previously worked as a writer, editor, and general manager at a content agency before joining the team in 2023. He began his writing career in 2021 after completing a BA in English Language and Literature. Beyond How-To Geek, Ismar has contributed to Red Stag Fulfillment and Authority Hacker. He has also worked on various SEO projects to help clients improve their search visibility. Ismar has been around Windows PCs since the age of three, so friends and family naturally chose him as the resident tech support. His projects often involve tinkering, such as disassembling mechanical keyboards and gaming mice to mod his beloved gear. He also enjoys pushing hardware to the max through overclocking while staying on a reasonable budget. An avid gamer, Ismar has logged thousands of hours across various genres, including first-person shooters, RPGs, racing games, and roguelites. When he is not at his desk, he is probably exploring other people’s phones to discover their quirks and features or experimenting with the latest AI tools. In his free time, Ismar enjoys spending time with his wife, working out at the gym, playing guitar and bass, cooking gourmet meals, and traveling. Above all else, he’s a proud cat owner. We tend to spend a lot of time chasing the latest and greatest in PC hardware. Each new generation of CPUs promises a new architecture, more cores, and higher clock speeds, which ultimately result in better performance. But a processor that's been out for a few years doesn't automatically become obsolete when newer hardware comes along. Depending on what you use your PC for, a CPU that came out a decade ago could be all you need. Whether it's gaming, video editing, juggling heavy workloads, or even running a homelab, these four processors prove that old hardware can still be great. The Ryzen 5 3600 refuses to retire from budget gaming PCs Six Zen 2 cores still get it done It's easy to forget just how old AMD's Zen 2 architecture is because AM4 is still alive and well today, with the current memory shortage making its cheap DDR4 ecosystem even more appealing. But the AMD Ryzen 3000 Series is no spring chicken. It was released way back in July 2019, which makes it a full 7 years old. It's three full generations behind, which makes it ancient, at least by enthusiast standards. However, despite its relative old age, this 6-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 3600 still holds up remarkably well for a chip its age. It supports DDR4 RAM, which is considerably cheaper than DDR5 right now, and it has PCIe Gen 4.0, making it easier to pair with the latest budget graphics cards with a limited number of PCIe lanes. While you can't easily find a new Ryzen 5 3600, the great thing about this specific model is that it was hugely popular for years. It was an affordable and fairly powerful CPU at release, which made it a popular choice for everyone from light desktop users to video editors and gamers. You can regularly find this chip for around $50 to $80 on the used market, and I've seen some eBay listings go as low as $50, which is an absolute steal for a chip that still feels relatively modern. Recent sold eBay listings show the Ryzen 5 3600 going for $50 and around $80, depending on the listing and whether a cooler is included. It's not a bad price if you just want a basic Windows 11 machine or a cheap gaming machine. Its successor, the Ryzen 5 5600, is still an immensely popular chip people buy today. It's faster across most workloads, but it also costs considerably more. If you're on a tight budget and just want to build a 1080p gaming machine or general-purpose desktop, it's hard to beat the Ryzen 5 3600. Plus, buying into AM4 gives you an excellent upgrade path down the line. The Core i7-8700K still has enough muscle for serious work and multitasking More than a mediocre gaming chip Credit: Ismar Hrnjicevic / How-To Geek Intel released the 8th-generation Coffee Lake chips as a direct response to AMD Ryzen's first generation in 2017, which brought a higher core count and hyper-threading to the masses. Intel finally bumped up the core count across the board, drastically improving multi-threaded performance in the process. Although the Intel Core i7-8700K is 9 years old now, it's still a formidable 6-core/12-thread beast. Those 12 threads are a massive step-up compared to Intel chips from just a year or two before. They're especially important when you move away from gaming, as tasks like video rendering, transcoding, compression, and various other heavy workloads can make full use of the extra threads. They also give the chip plenty of breathing room when multitasking, running numerous Chrome tabs, background apps, and other tasks simultaneously. It's worth pointing out that it meets Windows 11's minimum requirements, so it's still a legitimate pick for a Windows machine. And if you can live with its high idle power draw and already have the chip at hand, you could turn it into a pretty formidable server. Aside from the core and thread count, it has a fairly respectable clock speed as well. It boasts a 4.7GHz maximum boost clock, and if you got good silicon, it can be overclocked to 5GHz with the right cooler and a voltage bump. Despite being a bit older and running hotter, it can actually outperform the Ryzen 5 3600 in some gaming benchmarks while slightly falling behind in productivity, which speaks volumes about its performance and longevity. The Core i7-4790K can still play modern games and do desktop work with the right compromises Haswell isn't going anywhere Credit: Ismar Hrnjicevic / How-To Geek The Intel Core i7-4790K is a legendary high-end chip from Intel's enthusiast-oriented "Devil's Canyon" Haswell lineup that came out when Intel was the dominant brand in the CPU market, all the way back in 2014. Despite being a whopping 12 years old, this 4-core/8-thread chip with a 4.4GHz boost clock and 88W TDP somehow still holds its ground in modern machines. While it lacks some modern instruction sets like AVX-512, it does support AVX2 and SSE4.2, which helped it age better than some of AMD's chips from the same era. It's no video editing monster, but you can probably make do with it. It also supports Intel Quick Sync, which can drastically accelerate compatible video transcoding workloads. Surprisingly, it can still run some games too, especially if you give it a mild overclock (which the 4790K can easily handle with the right cooling). Paired with the NVIDIA RTX 2060 Super, it can run games like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Battlefield 6 at around 60–70 FPS, which puts it firmly in "playable" territory. That being said, its quad-core design and ancient DDR3 memory are major limitations in more demanding titles, where stuttering can become an issue. A recent test of an overclocked 4790K and RTX 2060 Super hit around 60–70 FPS in these games at 1080p, although the 1% lows were often considerably lower. Unfortunately, the i7-4790K doesn't officially support Windows 11, and while you could sideload it, Linux makes much more sense. It'll free up resources, and when paired with an older AMD card with 16 PCIe lanes (to avoid a potential bandwidth bottleneck), such as the RX 5700 XT, it can make for a half-decent gaming rig. Now, I'm not saying that you should go out and pick up a used i7-4790K when the Ryzen 5 3600 is a much better affordable pick, but if you already own this chip, you could potentially squeeze another few years out of it. The Xeon E5-2670 gives homelabbers eight cores for the price of a coffee Cheap enterprise horsepower Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek Intel's often-overlooked Xeon server chips have been the budget PC builder's secret weapon for many years. They tend to have more cores and threads than contemporary consumer models, but relatively low clock speeds that can hurt gaming and regular desktop performance. This brings me to today's star of the show, the Xeon E5-2670 (v1). It's an 8-core/16-thread Sandy Bridge CPU from 2012 with a 115W TDP and an admittedly pretty low 3.3GHz maximum boost clock. You can readily find this chip for around $5–$10 on Facebook Marketplace and eBay, which means you're literally paying less than a dollar per thread. Despite being an old server chip, it can actually run some modern games at a respectable FPS with the right graphics card, though it is a bottleneck for many of them. But I think the best place to put this Xeon chip to work is a homelab. It won't wow you with its performance, but thanks to having so many cores and DDR3 RAM being so cheap, it can handle a bunch of self-hosted apps without a problem. That being said, it's still a very old chip with relatively high power consumption that'll cost more to run over a year than to buy, so it might not be the best solution for a server that runs 24/7. Old doesn't always have to mean obsolete Depending on what you use your PC for, an old CPU can still make perfect sense. The Ryzen 5 3600 and i7-8700K are undoubtedly old chips, but they remain modern and powerful enough that you can reasonably justify using them in a Windows 11 machine today, while the i7-4790K and Xeon E5-2670 are surprisingly capable pieces of legacy hardware for a secondary gaming machine or server. So, if you've got one of these chips lying around, maybe now is the time to give it a new purpose.