I have two LARGE Xeon systems of this era that I used to use when I was heavily involved with Kubernetes and needed to build out a home lab. One is 2x Xeon w/ 256 GB of ram, and one is 1x Xeon w/ 512GB of ram. Both are slow as dogs, and both of them take up at least 150+ watts with only one power supply. My 12th gen Intel Nuc is so, so much faster and efficient. I'm recycling the Xeon systems.
Likes it
> Even something as simple as alt-tabbing lagged for seconds on an overpowered machine. This may not be KDE's fault; I tracked these kinds of issues down to some bad tunable defaults. I came up with this: ----
cat /etc/sysctl.d/50-usb-responsiveness.conf
#
# Attempt to keep large USB transfers from locking the system (kswapd0)
#
vm.swappiness = 1
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5
vm.dirty_ratio = 5
vm.extfrag_threshold = 1000
vm.compaction_proactiveness = 0
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 200
# FIXME? 64K too big?
vm.page-cluster = 16
----
I have fast everything, NVMe SSD onboard and others in Thunderbolt 4 enclosures and 32GB of RAM on my 12th-Gen i7 with 20 (6+14) cores; there should have been no reason for any stuttering and/or Alt-Tab slowness while doing large file copies and finally got fed up, did some research and experimentation and use the above and it's not happened since. YMMV, but it's worth a try. (Oh, and on-topic, I've had to try Wayland (vs. X11) on my KDE desktop 'cause it seems to handle switching monitors when I go from home to work better; jury's still out if I'm keeping it)
Likes it
Graphics cards are already dead for me (as a causual gamer). I recently bought a used notebook with a 12th Gen Intel Core processor and it can run an impressive list of games.
Doesn’t like it
> search bar that can finally find files properly like back in Windows 7 I don’t think that quality is ever coming back. No matter what, they’re going to be connecting to bing for the top results / ads, so you’ll always have a bunch of latency and will never get back to Win 7 levels of local only performance. It’s sad and the AI, which is mostly useless based on my experience, is going to suck up even more CPU cycles and add even more latency. For me, it takes 5 seconds for the start search to respond on first use. My 12th gen i5 with NVMe storage and Win 11 literally runs worse than my 4th gen i7 with a first gen SSD and Win 7. Microsoft has usurped a decade of computing gains and spent them on ads and tracking. Don’t expect anything that benefits the user in the near future.
Doesn’t like it
I went Intel 12th gen and I have buyer’s remorse. My next upgrade I’ll go back to AMD. Every 12th gen I’ve touched has little stuttering issues. Last week I was playing around with laptops at the store with 13th gen and they also get random stuttering issues too. A lot of people have said to me they don’t get any issues but going into a store and opening up YouTube with a 4k video and moving the mouse it stops and then continues. The AMD laptops don’t do this at all.