I grew up upper-middle class and have largely the same philosophy. Always thought my friends’ parents were idiots for buying these gas guzzling Ford/Chevy monstrosities just to haul around 1-2 kids and a dog on occasion. Regular salaried people spending/financing more than half their annual income every few years on cars they don’t need just to keep up with the Joneses who don’t really care in the first place.

I don’t skimp on quality when I buy something, but I only buy what I actually need and if something serves its purpose, I hold onto it for as long as it works. My wife and I do very well now, but aside from living in a fairly nice neighborhood with great public schools and amenities, you wouldn’t think it from the cars we drive and the way we dress.

My hot take is that this is practically irrelevant for the vast majority of desktop users, even hobbyists. Unless you have an absolute rats’ nest of cables inside the case or you are overclocking the chip close to its thermal limits, your chip should run just fine with a small form factor heatsink/fan, which an older, non-enthusiast case should have no problem fitting. As one data point, I’m cooling my CPU with a Noctua NH-D15 inside my Antec Three Hundred. A somewhat tight fit? Maybe, but certainly no performance issues.

Yeah, I’m not sure what would make a case obsolete other than not physically fitting your hardware. I’m using a janky mid-2000s Antec case to hold my i7-9700k / RTX 2070 build with no problems (although I fully expect to need a bigger case for any future GPU upgrades).

Considering the source, this is only news because it’s not a Tesla.

deleted by creator